Dollar Bin Massacre

Romance Special continued: Garrett's top romantic movies

2012-02-11T12:21:00.000-08:00

You've read about Spike Marlowe's favorite romantic movies, and here are mine, some traditional, some unorthodox, but all, in my opinion, the best.

1. Vertigo

The sexiest Hitchcock movie. A film that's intense and nuanced at the same time with no simple explanations or easy solutions for any of its characters. Jimmy Stewart losing his mind is a beautiful thing. Kim Novak driving him to distraction is an even more beautiful thing. It's a film that poses questions that are important to answer in any relationship. Questions about whether we can actually love someone or we can only love the self they project and if the self we project can break a lover's heart and our own heart alike. If you haven't seen this, you're losing out on a great, tragic romance.

2.Say Anything

Lloyd Dobler (Jon Cusack)is a likable but shiftless slacker. Diane (Ione Skye) is the valedictorian. Their relationship is a teen movie cliche, but there's a lot more to it. Say Anything is about two young people discovering life and love and what they find out isn't what you'd expect and isn't what other romantic comedies would tell you. Say Anything is about how there is no outright solution to life, how the answers and the values instilled in you aren't necessarily the be-all and end-all. It's ending, a sort of riff on that of The Graduate conveys how relationships take you to scary places, how growing up brings you to scary places, but together a couple can survive them. In a genre that thrives on everything being just so, this is a movie that stays romantic but tells it like it is in regards to life's uncertainties.

3.The Abominable Dr. Phibes

You're probably going to think I've gone out of my fucking mind. This violent cult curiosity and horror masterwork seems an unlikely choice for one of the most romantic movies. This is a movie about real devotion. A mute beauty's devotion to her misshapen master. A man's devotion to his dead wife. There's nothing more romantic than avenging your loved one's death in ludicrous, gory ways like having them devoured by locusts and exsanguinating them completely. Every time I see this movie, it makes me wish that I could buy vendetta insurance so anybody who accidentally kills someone I love will have to face my impractical steampunky vengeance.

4. Bringing Up Baby

One of the great screwball romantic comedies. Cary Grant is a paleontologist. Katherine Hepburn is a nuisance. They seem like an unlikely couple. In fact, as charming and sweet as Hepburn's character is, Grant would have to be out of his mind to fall for her. But somehow in spite of everything, these two end up together, having survived a ridiculous ordeal and seen the best and the worst in each other. And that's one of the things that love is really about. It might have been a prototype for a lot of stupid and cliche romantic comedies in the future, but it's message, its entertainment value and you know...a fucking leopard make it one of the best and most entertaining romances.

My Least Favorite

And here are two movies that I don't recommend bringing anywhere near your special romantic evening. These two nasty pieces of work from great directors leave me with a bad taste in my mouth and an ache in my heart.

1.Matchpoint

Is there anything more erotic than watching a sociopathic dick get away with murdering an innocent young woman? Murder can be sensual. Murder can be an exciting transgressive meeting of Eros and Thanatos. Or it can be disgustingly banal and sad, the sort of shit that's "ripped from the headlines". This movie is about as erotic as sitting on a hot steampipe and watching this movie, it feels like Woody Allen's parents made him sit naked on this very steampipe. This is not a sultry noir full of Scarlett Johannsen sex. This is about an awful person who does awful things and ends up killing to maintain a life of respectability. If this film gets your heart or your hardon aflutter then you might want to consider committing yourself.

2.Talk to Her

Ah, Almodovar. A master of bad romance. Until seeing Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down! I hated this director like I hate broccoli and fascism. And I hate broccoli and fascism. The reason I developed this hatred was Talk to Her, a harrowing film about a man who is in love with a matador in a coma. Makes you want to rush out and buy it right now, huh? Sounds like an exciting, sexy time. It isn't. It seems to say that the ideal relationship paradigm is nonparticipation. Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down! is a claustrophobic romance as well, but not nearly so claustrophobic as Talk to Her and has the charm of Antonio Banderas to keep it afloat. Talk to Her does not. By the end of the film, I felt like I was about to fall into a coma, or would be better off being in one.

If you'd like to further make use of my expertise in the arts of romance,you can order a custom sonnet from me. Tell me the name of your loved one and two things about them and for only five dollars, you can get your own one of a kind sonnet. FIND OUT MORE

Romance Special featuring Spike Marlowe, author of Placenta of Love.

2012-02-11T10:48:00.000-08:00

Wow. 4 Months. This post is certainly a prompt one. We waited and waited for Jordan Krall to watch The Manipulator and he never did. Then some stuff came up. Yeah. We just flat out dropped the ball. Hopefully, this will not be the case in the future. More Dollarbin Massacre and everyone will finally get their fucking jetpack. Be prepared. Anyway, it's February and it's time for romance. And cold weather. And candy. And amusing ads for used car dealerships featuring nonactors dressed as Abraham Lincoln. And for Dollarbin Massacre to discuss romance in the cinema. To help us out, we have with us sultry adventuress, street performer and author Spike Marlowe, author of Placenta of Love, a weird and excellent romance involving a robot pirate, a spankloving cat, an amusement park on Venus and a giant placenta. It's one of the finest Bizarro books ever written and it would be a great idea to buy it now. It's full of romance, laughter, pathos and poetry. Buy it HERE if you're into romance and weirdness and eccentric genius.

I asked Spike to tell us about her four favorite romantic films and two least favorite romantic films. And she did. Cause that's the kind of Bizarro adventuress and street performer she is. And here's her response:

My Four Favorite, and Two Not-So-Favorite, Romantic Erotic Films, or How to Get the Lovin’ on this Valentine’s Day

What makes a movie romantic and erotic varies from person-to-person. Some people think gore and death are romantic and erotic, while others swear by those movies Cinemax used to show late Friday nights in the 90s.

Me? I like lots of sexy, implied erotica. Sure, I like to watch, but I like to imagine even more, especially when the characters and world lie on the fringes or go completely over the edge of our reality.

Favorites:

La Belle et La Bête (1946). Sure this film is essentially the classic French fairytale, which in itself is quite romantic and erotic, but what really makes Jean Cocteau’s version of “Beauty and the Beast” are the delicious bizarre, creepy details throughout Beast’s castle: disembodied, bare arms holding lit candelabras; live carvings and statues that breathe smoke and watch the characters; gorgeous décor, including gauzy curtains and a room that looks more like the Garden of Eden than a bed chamber. Growls and screams throughout the night.

And then there’s the beast himself. The beast is not maybe-sorta-dangerous. No, menacing and powerful -- the beast IS bad-ass. And Belle? Once she moves into the beast’s castle, and she and the beast have their hawt power exchange (“May I watch?” “You are the Master.” “No, you are.”), she’s even more of a bad-ass.
And this is before you think about what goes on behind the closed doors.

King Kong (1933). While we’re talking about beauty and the beast and bad-ass characters, let’s chat about King Kong, one of the hawtest, sexiest, most romantic and incredibly erotic movies ever made. Ever.

Just for starters, what’s more romantic and erotic than setting sail to exotic, mysterious locales, when adventures you can’t even imagine are waiting for you? And then there’s the men. King Kong is full of strong, determined men. And then there’s Ann Darrow. Gorgeous, strong, determined, and incredibly sexy in her flowing, gauzy gowns. Who wouldn’t get hot, watching her stand on the ship’s deck, as the sea breeze blows through her hair and shifts the sheer fabric of her dress?

But best of all is Kong, and his innate, animalistic desire to possess Ann Darrow.
Can you see it? Ann Darrow, in her white, sinuous gown, has been tied up by the inhabitants of the mysterious island as a sacrifice to satiate Kong’s lusts. And then Kong comes to her, revealing his massive canines. And then Kong takes Ann, holding her gently in his mighty hand, and disappears into the jungle. Kong fights a T-Rex, and giant snake, and a pterodactyl when they show too much interest in Ann Darrow. And then, the beastly, mighty Kong -- always gentle with his intended -- strokes Ann, exploring her body and her dress… Until she’s retrieved by Jack, the guy Ann thinks she belongs with. (She’s wrong. I’m telling you – SHE BELONGS WITH KONG!)

Of course, we know how the story tragically ends. But we also know this: “It was the beauty that killed the beast.”
*swoon*

Lili (1953). Just beneath the charming, innocent surface, of both the title character and the film, is the intense, erotic juxtaposition between naivety and desire.

Lili is set against the background of the Cabaret de Paris, a carnival where Lily, a young girl with no family or prospects, finds work, first as a waitress and then as a live performer in the carnival’s puppet show.

Though the scenes where Lily desires the magician, imagining herself as a sexy, adult woman, are lovely and sensual, the story’s true erotic heart lies in the relationship between Lily, the puppets she performs with and the carnival’s puppeteer, Paul.
Paul the puppeteer also owns the Cabaret de Paris, and he’s a man with a difficult past. Though he is immediately drawn to Lili, he pushes her away because of this past. Because of how he treats her, Lili has no use for Paul, though she’s in love with the puppets he operates: Carrot Top the boy puppet, Renardo the fox, Marguerite the dancer and Golo the Giant.

Once innocent Lily learns the sometimes harsh realities of love, sex and desire, she decides to flee the carnival. However, the puppets come to her as live, full-sized creatures; Lily dances with them in a gorgeous, magical sequence. They reveal that each of them is a piece of Paul the puppeteer, and that, by loving them, truly Lily loves him, as well. Lily returns to the carnival, and falls into Paul’s arms.
Delicious.

Labyrinth (1986). I see you. You’re laughing, aren’t you. You shouldn’t.
I first saw Labyrinth at the cheap theater in my hometown of Provo, Utah. It was a double feature matinee with Short Circuit, another romantic and erotic film.
This film stirred me in a way no film had stirred me before, and only partially because of David Bowie’s tight pants.

The settings are lush, Sarah is beautiful and wears gorgeous, sensual clothing. The characters are fantastically created. And then there’s the Goblin King.

Oh, Goblin King. With your long, spiky hair and sexy makeup. With your cloak and black leather gloves and pirate shirt and boots and crystal contact juggling ball. Your self-confidence and strength. And how you expose yourself and become weak, purely because of a beautiful young girl.
Dear reader, how can you not find the ball scene romantic and sexy? How can you not find the final scene where Sarah overcomes the Goblin King lovely and erotic?
Go and watch it, and tell me that the struggle for power between Sarah and the Goblin King doesn’t have you biting at the bit.

Least Favorites:

Hansel and Gretel (An Opera Fantasy) (1954). You think it’s a children’s film. You think it a gorgeous stop motion animated classic of a classic opera.
Sure Hansel and Gretel (An Opera Fantasy) is those things, but it’s also a story about a love triangle between a witch, and a brother and sister.
And sure the setting is lush and gorgeous. And sure Rosina Rubylips is a witch who has got it going on. Sure, the love story between Hansel and Gretel is sweet and romantic. Sure the coming of the Sandman and restoration of the children is romantic. And sure that striptease Rosina does for Gretel is hardcore erotic. And there’s some pretty good BDSM between Rubylips and Hansel.

What keeps this movie from being a romantic, erotic favorite?

The main characters.
Hansel and Gretel are beyond annoying. They are the epitome of what’s wrong in children’s film. They’re whining, twee and obnoxious. Saccharine and entitled.
Now, if the Rosina had finally stuffed Hansel and Gretel full of raisins and almonds, and THEN eaten them all up? That could have been a good romantic, erotic film with a satisfying ending.

The Saragossa Manuscript (1965). I love this movie. I love this movie hardcore. This movie is full of romantic and erotic elements: gorgeous women, sexy men, strange setting and weird events. Charged music. Gorgeous costumes. You can feel the romance and the eroticism seeping through the DVD sleeve.
So what’s my gripe?
This movie is all promise and no fulfillment. It’s all tease and no follow through.

But Spike, you say, I thought you liked to use your imagination.
It’s true – I do. And The Saragossa Manuscript doesn’t let me use my imagination to create romantic, erotic content based on this movie. It seems each time a character is going to find love and romance, a yummy night full of erotic delights, all the promise is cut off by conniving and manipulating ghosts. Or maybe not ghosts. It’s hard to say.
Still, watch the movie. Watch it several times just to ensure you catch all the weirdness this movie embraces. As long as you’re not looking for hawt, Valentine’s Day fun, it’s a great film.

Spike Marlowe everyone. Buy Placenta of Love. Buy the Kindle version too. And then you can participate in the fan fiction contest.

But that's not all for the romance special. There's more romance to come later today. Find out what my favorite romantic films are. Find out about Leza's favorite romantic films. Find out just how much fun mayhem can be visited on a porno set and how you or your lover can be the proud owner of a personalized Petrarchan sonnet! It's gonna be VERY sensual.

Leza on The Manipulator

2011-10-11T18:01:00.000-07:00

Who is THE MANIPULATOR?

Is Mickey Rooney THE MANIPULATOR? The invisible voice of a filmmaker on a mission, a puppetmaster to his kidnap victim and chosen star? Or is it an industry that chews up a spits people out when they have outgrown their cuteness? Who is the man behind the curtain, really?

As his character B.J. Lang says, “Fear is the universal disease.” His hapless hostage must play Roxanne to his Cyrano de Begerac. He uses any means necessary to get the reaction he needs from his starlet. He coddles and terrorizes and feeds her appleasauce and water when she screams in hunger. Most of the time, though, as a viewer you must be his hostage to strange rambling rantings and conversations involving an entire film crew, all voiced by his truly.

Just as Cyrano was the invisible voice of another man, BJ’s victim must speak the lines her crazed kidnapper feeds her, take after take, till he gets what he wants. This is an experience I’m sure a man who began his film career at the ripe old age of four , is not entirely unfamiliar with. A man who is in the Guinness world book of records for longest running film career spanning 86 years. This is the irony laid upon irony in this misanthropic little oevre by one time director turned television writer, Yabo Yablonsly.

Most of it takes place in a warehouse outfitted with prominent stage lights and props and a dressing room. One particularly surrealistic sequence involves the woman attempting to escape and running through a butcher shop hall, with endless pig carcasses hanging from the sides, where she then stumbles upon a small gathering of suited players happily delivering a symphony.

There is a twisted logic to all this. Yet, it is hard to truly care, and has definitely made me permanently creeped out by Mickey Rooney, especially after his soliloquy about how he used to do Marilyn Monroe’s makeup and how she’d say he was not putting makeup on HER eyes, they were OUR eyes that TWINKLED for the cameras. This, while knowing that Marilyn spoke of getting hit on by Mickey Rooney while she was a young starlet and being thoroughly creeped out. You and me both Marilyn.
This is the living nightmare of a man who has seen his best days flitter by, and, with his captive, attempts the challenge of recreating the magic that once was… or not.

If you want a nightmare, you’ve found it in demented Mickey Rooney in this saga of horrors. You shall see the glories of orgies with Mickey Rooney’s phantom adorers, with mysterious baby present, cartoonish makeup on obese vampiric revelrers, a stroke inducing strobe sequence, and to top it all, Mickey Rooney in whorish makeup and dancing frenetically in sped up sequences, singing Chattanooga Choo Choo with demonic glee.

What is truly incredible about this film is the complete lack of plot and forward motion of any sort. Every positive action is negated by a regression. The ending does not disappoint on this front.

Terror is a Man Named Mickey Rooney

2011-10-11T14:40:00.000-07:00

I'm glad to finally be able to return to you. No really good excuse for making you wait this long, but we'll be sure to get back in the groove so you won't have to wait so long for next time. One reason it took so long to get going again was that Leza and I couldn't find a movie weird and disturbing enough to relaunch the site. There was one, but it was too awful to even consider. In the past, we'd talked about it, but Jordan "misplaced" it repeatedly. Yeah, sure. "Misplaced." To avoid its gutwrenching unpleasantness. Not that we'd blame him. Because this movie is one bad mother starring one of the scariest actors in film history.

Who? Bette Davis? Peter Lorre? Zac Efron? Worse. A combination of the three molded into a single unholy fright machine. I am of course referring to hellish imp Mickey Rooney, a man who creates more terror before breakfast than Rob Zombie has in his entire career. Does this mean we're going to review Silent Night, Deadly Night 5? You fucking wish we were going to review Silent Night, Deadly Night 5. So do we. But we can't do. It's October. It's almost Halloween time, and if we don't present the kind of mortal terror and strangeness that makes your testicles ascend, then we're wasting your time. We're going to discuss 1971's The Manipulator. It's a doozy. If you drop acid and watch it, Mickey Rooney will crawl out of your television and whisper into your ear the exact time and date of your death. The Manipulator is a movie about Mickey Rooney making his own damn movie all by himself, like Robert Rodriguez. If Robert Rodriguez completely lost his goddamn mind.

Mickey Rooney plays BJ Lang, a cameraman during Hollywood's glory days, discarded and displaced by time, like Mickey Rooney. BJ is a one man crew for a movie in his own mind, or multiple movies in his own mind, or perhaps even a Hollywood in his own mind. Rendered powerless by age and a changing business, he seeks to reclaim this power, to live a past he wished he had and to stand around a makeshift soundstage acting like a raving lunatic. Mickey Rooney talking himself in multiple voices would be terrifying enough. Mickey Rooney eating Fruit Loops and reading the paper would be terrifying enough. But he does more. He has kidnapped an actress, played by Luana Anders, tied her to a chair and is forcing her to make this movie with him.

Her every move is dictated by a mad man, her every word and action must be chosen to avoid transgressing against a set of imaginary rules. She has been thrust into a chaotic mirror universe, an embodiment of all the worst things about the Hollywood delusion machine. She must feign compliance, respect, appreciation and even to a degree, love to survive.

That's pretty damn creepy. And Lang talking to himself is pretty damn creepy. When he puts on lipstick and eyeshadow and tells anecdotes about doing makeup for Marilyn Monroe, the creepiness gets worse. When you see glimpses into his warped imagination, involving nightmare Hollywood parties that look like a New Year's Eve in Hell hosted by Ken Russell, then you start to get the full impact. Or perhaps it's when Rooney puts on a swashbuckler costume and a fake nose and romances her as a far less than serviceable Cyrano. This is a bad situation.

And when you factor in the meaning of this mess, the rage and despair and truth of his performance, the significance of his character playing a man who gets no respect for being a puppeteer to the beautiful people, the disgust factor goes over the top. The surrealistic bile of Lynch's Mulholland Drive lurks under the surface of this and Rooney, lashing out against a system that stunted his potential and left him by the wayside, The Manipulator becomes an unwatchable vortex of chaos and artistic frustration, rotten to its core with dark truths, awkward performances and unnecessary weirdness. Mickey Rooney is good in this part. Too damn good.

An honest, scary, grotesquerie that I would wholeheartedly recommend not seeing. There's nothing more icky than badness with moments of uncomfortable insight.

Corrections, Retractions and Apologies

2011-08-22T10:47:00.000-07:00

I feel some things need to be cleared up and some apologies need to be made:

1.) Rockula is in fact awesome. I apologize for previous Rockula bashing. There was no excuse for that. Bo Diddley, Thomas Dolby and strange, sexually threatening undulations from Toni Basil should have made this a beloved vampire cult classic and not a butt of an elitist joke. Watch Rockula. I cannot say how sorry I am to have misled so many of you.

2.) Suicide Girls Must Die was never watched again. By anyone. This is why there was no entry on it. You try watching that crap. If you want us to watch it again and review it, you can Paypal us 5.99, which is what we paid for that pile of horse shit.

3.) Mykle Hansen, who so generously offered his time to help us with the Rudy Vallee werebear conundrum last year put out a new book last November. Buy it.

4.) Jordan Krall has a new book out. Buy it.

5.) In June, I put out a new book. Buy it.

6.) I would like to apologize for our lack of coverage in regards to The Manipulator with Mickey Rooney. Jordan and Leza are very, very weak. I know you want The Manipulator news here and now. And I'm tempted to give it to you myself. I swear that if Jordan and Leza do not watch The Manipulator, I will do a lengthy solo post.

7.) Why did we forget to write about Santa Claus Conquers the Martians? We were drunk, I guess. It did not stop us on previous occasions, but this time, it got us. Thank you Kirk and Nicole for providing 8 months of entertainment for Dollarbin Massacre fans.

8.) Halloween 3 still sucks. And I'm sorry for that.

Suicide Girls Must Die

2011-04-01T12:00:00.000-07:00

Last year, or two years ago, or something I don't care to look up, the Suicide Girls made a film. Leza will discuss this later. But for right now, I'd like to say that Suicide Girls Must Die is the worst film to have Must Die in the title. Frankenstein Must Die? Pretty good. John Tucker Must Die? Awful. But not this awful. Suicide Girls Must Die is loaded with topless tattooed girls and I don't care. The movie is three quarters finished and I'm already writing a one star review. Because I don't care. Whoever directed Suicide Girls Must Die must die. Suicide Girls Must Die is about a bunch of Suicide Girls who go to Maine and have troubles. Some of them disappear in a boring fashion. Others remain. This is just as boring. Somehow Suicide Girls Must Die has made Maine less interesting. All of this is particularly puzzling because the makers of this film had a cabin and a multitude of cute young poseurs willing to take off their clothes. It does not take a rocket scientist to cover these girls in karo syrup and make them run through the woods crying. This is the least I would have asked for. This might be among my 100 Least Favorite Films Ever. Yes, definitely is. The next film to grievously disappoint me is going to have to work pretty hard after this one.

Nicole Cushing on Santa Claus Conquers the Martians

2010-12-18T17:24:00.000-08:00

I am happy to have Nicole Cushing here with us contributing a piece. Nicole is the author of a story that holds it own among greats like Carlton Mellick III and Neil Gaiman in the recent John Skipp edited Werewolves and Shapeshifters anthology and of the New Bizarro Author Series book How to Eat Fried Furries that has been attracting a lot of attention and deserves all of it. She also bested me in sheer weirdness at this year's Ultimate Bizarro Showdown. I thought I could do offputting emotional terrorism but Nicole, as the Bionic Cow Pope, converted a lot of heathens that day. Here is her amazing, indepth sociopolitical analysis of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.

The Martians Have A Dirty Bomb, And It's Name is Droppo by Nicole Cushing

In my book, How To Eat Fried Furries,one tale describes a mafia plot to assassinate Santa Claus. So you'll excuse the fact that I yawned at the comparatively-nonviolent kidnapping peril Saint Nick faces at the hands of Martian terrorists.
Truth be told, I yawned throughout the whole thing. I've seen this film before, in its incarnation as an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. But this time, in the spirit of the Dollar Bin Massacre, I watched the unaltered version of the film I'd purchased from a genuine Dollar Bin about a year ago. And, yes, I lived to tell the tale (never before have Joel and the bots been so missed).
But, hey...it's all too easy to take a look at this film and point out its flaws. The continuity errors (sometimes the Martians are green-skinned, other times they appear Caucasian). Use of military stock footage that even Ed Wood might declare gratuitous padding. Martians who look like bush-league rasslers wearing helmets adorned with spare parts from a 1962 Hoover vacuum cleaner.
But I come not to condemn this film, but to praise it. Yes, you read correctly. Praise it.
Maybe it only looks dreadful, superficially. What if we scratch the surface? Look a the subtext. Friends...I come to you today prepared to re-write the history of film criticism by announcing the discovery of an entire new interpretation of Santa Claus Versus The Martians; an interpretation based on an appreciation for a deep, hiterto-ungrasped symbolism.
Moreover, I proffer this thesis: Santa Claus Versus The Martians is not only a film rich in symbolism, but it also is a magic film; influenced by the Ghost of Nostradamus, which foretells the outcome of Iran's grab for nuclear weapons.
Think I'm psychotic? Funny. The five-trunked topiary elephant said the same thing. In Portugese. But before you label me “mad” or even “a little strange”...consider the merits of my argument.
To whit – consider the players...
The Earth children (Betty and Billy Foster) who enjoy material abundance, television, and freedom of thought because they have Santa Claus. Symbolically, these are the Americans and/or the state of Israel.
Santa Claus, who flies through the sky in a sleigh rumored to run on rocket fuel, who delivers material abundance to those who bessech his favor. Who lives in a frozen, desolate wasteland of eternal (read: “nuclear”) winter. Symbolically, Santa represents nuclear weapons.
The Martians, who look “different” and are dressed all alike, must (according to dominant cultural norms and prejudices in the U.S.) represent foreigners. But not just any foreigners. The hard-liners in Martian society (Voldar) as well as the non-hardline, devoutly religious (Chochem) wear facial hair, while more-or-less secular moderates (Kimar) are clean-shaven.
Therefore, the Martians are symbolically, the Islamic Republic of Iran, circa 2010. Given this interpretation of the film, what can we predict about the future?
Well, we know that there will be a Martian (Iranian) grab for Western (Earth) nuclear secrets (Santa). We know that, in fact, the Martians will obtain Santa, and reverse-engineer their own, slightly bastardized version, Droppo (a dirty bomb). However, we also know that, in the end, the Iranian hardliners will be toppled by a coalition of pro-Western forces (Billy & Betty) and Iranian moderates (Kimar) who employ a surgical air strike (barrage of bubbles, ping-pong balls, and model airplanes) to effect a regime change. Droppo (the dirty bomb) stays on Mars, but only under the “benevolent”, pro-Western (read: corrupt puppet) dictator Kimar (second coming of the Shah).
And now everyone has nuclear weapons! How's that for a happy ending, kids!

Bizarro author Kirk Jones on Santa Claus Conquers the Martians

2010-12-17T20:00:00.000-08:00

Kirk Jones is a writer in Eraserhead Press' New Bizarro Author Series. He is the author of the book Uncle Sam's Carnival of Copulating Inanimals, a book, which halfway through it, I can tell you is one of the freshest, most innovative damn books you'll ever read. You could wait for Santa to bring it to you, or, if you've been really bad this year (and I know you have, you sassy little thing) you can buy it HERE

Here is what he has to say about Santa Claus Conquers the Martians:

Only one thing can definitively be said about Santa Claus Conquers the Martians is that it is a movie. Whether it is a good or bad movie, that is a subjective matter. Here's my take on it:

Lines are uttered with the finesse of a cat clumsily scattering kitty litter over its shit in an open-topped box, in that more misses than hits the spot. In the vein of this simile, the dialogue leaves you with a foul taste in your mouth that resonates in the mind for hours afterwards. In that respect, the movie is memorable.
To quote the leader of Mars in the film, Kimar, "it goes deeper than that."
The ingenuity featured in this piece parallels that which must have been required to cultivate frozen ice in Antarctica. An example: the martian months, rather than conventional earth months, are reconstrued.

Elder: what time of year is it now?
Kimar: It is the middle of Septober.

Septober, which I can only assume is the time of year preceded by Nosober, a month in which martians, plied with rum and eggnog, decide to dedicate a considerable budget to terrible movies that feature multiple words spliced together to create a semblance of what martian language would sound like.
I should say movies that feature one word spliced together, because Septober is about where the unique linguistic and cultural attributes of Mars end. Strangely enough, though the Martians speak as if advanced millennia beyond the peon-like earthlings, they derive all terminology from the English language. Perhaps Im being earth-centric, however. But seriously, Septober is about as far as it goes in terms of drawing linguistic distinction between the martians and the earth dwellers. What's worse, their "advanced" spacecrafts look like toilet paper rolls glued to a Styrofoam plate.
With enough stock footage of airplanes to choke a horse, a slapstick martian that reminds me of the bastard child of Bob Denver and Gomer Pyle, a Santa Claus who can't decide quite how to render his "ho ho ho's" and martians that look like they have a ridgeback horse dildo attached to their helmets, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians is . . . a movie

Hang up that Mistletoe, Soon You'll Hear Ho Ho Ho

2010-12-12T18:47:00.000-08:00

Hello, Dollarbin Masochists! I've spent the last five months disemboweling sparkly emomonsters with a chainsaw so that you can enjoy the holidays. Where's my fuckin' parade? They're impossible to catch! They bounce through the treetops, they need only the slightest amount of cloud cover to endure the sun! Ingrates. Now that I've fought the minions of the Mormon AIDSmonger to a standstill, we can talk about something important: Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. If you haven't seen this gem , you're missing out on one of those wonderful hybrids of miracle and disaster that come together to form a true camp classic. Discussing this film will be Nicole Cushing, Author of How to Eat Fried Furries, Kirk Jones author of Uncle Sam's Carnival of Copulating Inanimals, Jordan Krall, author of a baffling defense of Tom Atkins and Leza, author of...Dollarbin Massacre. Also me, but I'll be bitching about He-Man mostly. And maybe Alf. Prepare for a holiday roundup of thoughtprovoking takes on the film that made a generation of children believe you can sleep in the woods with a light jacket in the middle of December with no consequences but fun intergalactic hijinks.

Ten things you should watch instead of Twilight

2010-07-08T14:32:00.000-07:00

Okay, I flat out suck, people. It's hot, I'm feeling lazy and stressed and I'm about six days late posting an article that was my idea to begin with. I apologize, fellow Dollarbin Masochists for my indolence. Here are my ten alternatives to Twilight.

Top Three Vampire Movies

Horror of Dracula

I will not apologize for the glut of Hammer films on my lists. Dollarbin Massacre is committed to cultural diversity. If you look at the sampling of shit that’s been reviewed here, you’ll see that we’re pretty openminded. So, where are the Asian vampires, where is Rockula, Love at First Bite, The Halloween That Almost Wasn’t or (INSERT KITSCHY VAMPIRE TREASURE HERE)? Somewhere the fuck else, that’s where. I take vampires pretty seriously. They are a serious and nasty threat to our wellbeing and strongwilled, smokingjacketed heroes need to take up their stakes and crucifixes to put an end to the undead menace. The moment I knew this was so was at the age of five or six when I first saw Christopher Lee in Dracula Has Risen from the Grave.

I remembered Dracula Has Risen from the Grave pretty loosely over the years, but there were images from it that stayed with me for some time, bodies in a churchbell, glowing red eyes and one tall, thin badass predator who will not take no for an answer. Dracula Has Risen From the Grave had quite an impression on me. Dracula was awesome. Dracula was something to be feared.

Weeks later, I saw an earlier Hammer Dracula that gave me another new lease on the world and a new perspective on the character. I cannot say enough how much I love Christopher Lee’s portrayal of Dracula. He is not a suave gentleman , he is a bloodthirsty barbarian, the man that Stoker said claimed to be a descendant of Attilla the Hun with pride. A hell of a supervillain. It would take a real hero to cross swords with somebody like that. It would take a wirey nerd who wore exquisite smoking jackets and jumped on the furniture. Horror of Dracula is amazing because it reminds us of something important. There are ruthless bastards with big fangs out there and they want to ruin everything, they want to take away our loved ones and poison the world with their malice. And it doesn’t matter if you’re the biggest nerd or fancypants on the planet, if you’ve got knowledge, drive and heart, you can stand up to it.

Mark of the Vampire

This movie has a lot of strikes against it. A lot of the acting is needlessly over-the-top, some of the set pieces are confusing, the dialogue is stunted and the less said about this movie’s absurd plot, the better. The central conceit of Mark of the Vampire is a truly idiotic one and the resolution of the film’s mysteries makes even less sense than an actual vampire attack would. So why is this masterclass in bad writing one of my top three vampire movies?

Three answers: history, atmosphere and Bela Lugosi. There are better Lugosi performances. Better by far. In The Black Cat, The Raven, Murders at the Rue Morgue, Son of Frankenstein and Island of Lost Souls, we see Bela’s best work, oozing with pain, torment and madness as well as malice. But those movies aren’t what people think of first when they think of Lugosi. They think of vampires and they think of somebody who defined horror acting. When we see Lugosi in this movie, we see a vampire, an angel of cold hunger, a haunting moving tableau from our collective Jungian haunted house. He barely appears, he barely says a word but Lugosi is more vampiric than he ever was as Dracula.

It would be a travesty of me to forget to mention the great Carroll Borland. Morticia, Ingrid Pitt, Elvira, that Goth cashier at the grocery store who you find yourself shyly staring at, admiring her dark clothes and neopagan jewelry...all of them owe a little something to Carroll Borland. She matches Lugosi, she makes him up his game and she proves a perfect complement to his role. She’s amazing to watch. And so is Mark of the Vampire.

The Vampire Lovers

Since I’ve breached the subject of great vampiresses, I must bring up this movie. Every time I watch this movie I find myself thinking “damn, I really don’t watch this enough.” If you have seen this, you know what I mean. This is not the first movie you reach for when you decide to watch a vampire movie or the first one you think of, but it’s a great one and it screams for your attention and asks you with sweet succubus whispers “why don’t you watch me more?”

Why not? Because this movie is too rich of a delight to take in often. Although each time you see it, it wants you to enjoy it more frequently, it is a bloodsoaked dessert, a rich plate of enchanted crackfudge that will own your soul. Its leads are gorgeous, its costumes both period and timeless and its visuals frequently surreal and haunting. There is lesbianism, there is blood, dancing with Hecate and Kali. Le Belle Dame Sans Merci shall have you in thrall. Ingrid Pitt is a sinister siren of the highest and the tender naifs she seduces exude a wideeyed vulnerability that seems to be coquettishly mocking the viewer. It’s sexy, it’s rich, it’s just about too much, it enslaves and captivates the senses. All you can do is succumb.

Honorable Mention

Black Sabbath

Mario Bava’s classic makes honorable mention solely on the technicality that only the second of the film’s three segments is about a vampire. But what a vampire it is! In Bava’s adaptation of the story the Family of the Wurdalak, Boris Karloff plays a patriarch coming home from hunting a traditional Slavic monster as one of them. In my opinion, he makes one of the scariest vampires on film. Incest, blasphemy and raw inhumanity fill his haunting words. If you want to see the true nature of the folkloric vampire, watch Black Sabbath and see the hungry revenant in its natural state.

Salem’s Lot

The childhood trauma train hath pulled into the station. I slept with a crucifix under my pillow for a week because of this movie. The German Expressionist inspired vampire makeup of this movie is very impressive, embodying the concept of vampirism as a plague. Salem’s Lot combines the talents of Stephen King and Tobe Hooper, coming together on their common ground and that common ground is America. Nobody captures the violence of the American psyche like Tobe Hooper and nobody does smalltown horror like Stephen King. It’s a match made in Hell and Salem’s Lot takes you right there.

The Wolfman

I was thinking I might find something to replace this because it’s also on Leza’s list. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I had to include this movie, no matter how many other times it might get mentioned. Like Horror of Dracula, this movie has a special place in my heart for personal reasons. My grandfather suffered from bipolar disorder. About as severe as it got. The kind of bipolar that enslaved Lord Byron and Virginia Woolf, a disease that turned a man into something else, as inescapable as old age, fate, death taxes. And I knew it was hereditary. When I saw Lon Chaney Jr. as The Wolfman, I saw a kindred spirit, a man who through no fault of his own was doomed to lose control. I looked at him and I saw somebody who knew that every person’s a monster and every monster’s a person. I would be a liar if I said that this movie made it easy to deal with living with a person with a crippling mental illness and growing up with the same sickness (though thankfully less severe), but at least I knew somebody understood. The Wolfman is a beautiful movie about human nature and living with one’s inner darkness and it’s moving to see Claude Rains and Evelyn Ankers remaining faithful to this beast until the end, letting love conquer fear. A movie that captures the things we find running through the primeval forest of the psyche like few others can.

Curse of the Werewolf

Curse of the Werewolf is in some ways very similar to The Wolfman. Tragedy, confrontations with the beast within, a strange gothic landscape that feels oddly timeless. While it lurks the magnetism of Lon Chaney Jr., the anguish and concern of Claude Rains or the beatific tenderness of Evelyn Ankers, this movie has a lot going for it, enough to be in my top three even with similarities to a blatantly superior film. What Curse of the Werewolf has going for it that The Wolfman lacks is an edge that you could say Hammer films had over most Universal monster movies and that’s intensity. Certain Universal efforts like The Black Cat and The Raven can match Hammer in perverse subtext but these aren’t really spoken of in the same breath as The Wolfman and the Frankenstein and Dracula efforts. You might think that the only edge a werewolf movie made by Hammer would have over Universal would be the potential for bloodletting, which is something werewolves do in spades. But it’s not just gore.

Curse of the Werewolf begins with a palace maid raped by a lycanthropic drifter. Which is a little much for Universal. Not long after, we see that the bastard child of this union has been tearing up goats. That’s some intensity. Larry Talbot’s curse is bad and not altogether his fault, but Curse of the Werewolf takes it up a notch, to a meaner kind of predestination, a story of a young man that never gets a fair shake at innocence. The child grows up to be Oliver Reed. And we get an unpleasant upgrade from Larry Talbot. You take Larry Talbot’s pain and you heap rage, madness and a hint that this man dying inside that might just take everybody else with him. Larry Talbot shows it sucks to be a werewolf, Oliver Reed hints that it might suck to be human, too.

Monster On Campus

This is not a werewolf movie in the strictest sense of the word, but it’s about everything a werewolf movie is about, a man getting bitten by something and then entering a state of devolution, ending up cursed and unable to control his actions. The cool thing about Monster on Campus for me is how it’s a bridge between two different ages of Universal horror. Universal studios horror didn’t die at the end of Dracula. It stayed strong in the atomic age, as evidenced by Jack Arnold’s classic The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Like Creature, Monster on Campus is also a Jack Arnold movie, also concerns the missing link between modern and primitive man and is also great. The dialogue is cheesy and the characterization a little weak, but it makes a good statement about mankind confronted with its darkside and the caveman monster is very werewolf like.

Another cool thing about this movie is a pop culture connection that might be a coincidence or it might have been a very cool nod to an underappreciate sci fi gem. The scientist turned caveman hero of Monster on Campus is named Donald Blake, which is also the secret identity of Thor from the Marvel comics. Could it have been that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby saw this movie and subconsciously spotted a connection between their hero, a modern man that had become one with something ancient and deadly that would leave his life spinning out of control is it a weird coincidence? Possibly the latter. Either way, it’s a cool piece of geeklore.

Honorable Mentions

Werewolf vs. The Vampire Women
I’m putting this movie as my honorable mention because I’ve only seen a couple of Paul Naschy werewolf movies and this is my favorite of them. The gothic atmosphere and the makeup are almost comically intense, Naschy’s deadly serious disposition and often unwarranted angst made him an awesome camp actor who just plain brought it in the role of Waldemar Daninsky. He was just really cool.

Track of the Moonbeast

Even for an MST3K movie, this is bad, from its terrible opening during which a pretty straightforward practical joke involving hiding behind a mask is explained to death to its performance by brand x countryfried folkie Frank Larrabee. But, there are things to like about this too. Just as Monster on Campus hearkens back to Gothic themes with its atomic age werewolf story, so too Track of the Moonbeast, made in the 70s, hearken back to Jack Arnold’s and Ed Wood’s films and the idea of a weredinosaur, poorly executed though it might have been is great for your inner ten year old.

Twilight is Stoopid, y'all.

2010-07-05T11:15:00.000-07:00

JORDAN KRALL'S TAKE ON THE WHOLE TWILIGHT THING....

So I read the first TWILIGHT BOOK.

See, one of my students wanted to read it and so I had to read it WITH him. It was beyond my control. Now, it was pretty much crap. But it was for 14 year old girls so I can give it a pass... sort of. If that's how it was, being a book just for teen girls, well, okay. But this Twilight thing has become a phenomenon for no reason. Adult women are drooling all over Edward and Jacob (but of course, that's totally okay even though the characters are under 18. Those women aren't deviants. They aren't lusting after Miley Cyrus, after all).

I don't get it.

But I tried. I watched some of the first movie and had to turn it off in stunned anger and confusion. I hate movies that try so hard to force you to feel some sort of emotion like those "tear jerkers" I hate to watch but my wife can't get enough of. Romantic movies do this all the time. Twilight is worse because they are playing with millions of teenage minds, giving them the fantasy of having two "hot" guys after them. It's the fantasy of every sad, unattractive girl with no personality.

I would have preferred they end the series with it all being Bella's dream. She wakes up and realizes she's still unpopular and that no boy would come close to her with a ten-foot pool. Then an ugly vampire pops into her room, tells Bella her poetry sucks and then drains her of her blood. Then an even uglier werewolf comes in and ravages her, telling Bella those fake goth bands she listens to suck. Then the werewolf kills her while singing Bela Lugosi's Dead.

Where was I? Oh yeah. Here's some movies that are better than Twilight.

1.) DRACULA (1931) Two words: Bela Legosi.

2.) HORROR OF DRACULA (1958). Three words: Christopher Fuckin’ Lee

3.) SON OF DRACULA (1943). Four words: Lon Fuckin’ Chaney Jr.

4.) DRACULA’S DAUGHTER (1936). Five words: Gloria Smokin’ Fuckin’ Hot Holden

5.) THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA (1974) Six words: Shit! Dracula Has Fuckin’ Biological Weapons!

There’s more of course.
THE LOST BOYS with the brilliant performances by the two Coreys.
NEAR DARK with one of the greatest vampire set pieces set to a Cramps song ever.

What else is better than Twilight? Hmm.. how about EVERY FUCKING VAMPIRE FLICK MADE BY BOTH UNIVERSAL AND HAMMER STUDIOS? Yes, even DRACULA AD 1972.

If I talk about this any longer I’m going to start getting pissed. Edward from Twilight has the facial structure of a circus freak and Jacob looks as dumb as the dumbest rock. Girls find those two wankers attractive? That’s a sad generation, I’ll tell you. If I was into dudes, I’d take elderly Christopher Lee over those two ass-clowns.

And werewolves? Pass over TWILIGHT and move onto SILVER BULLET with Corey Haim or any of the UNIVERSAL wolfman flicks. Hell, I’d even suggest THE HOWLING II which even has the aforementioned Christopher Lee as well as some gratuitous boob-shots of Sybil Danning.

So there's my two cents. I guess you can criticize me for not getting through the whole film or watching the other ones. So what? At least I can say I didn't waste my time. If you've watched these movies, let me ask you something. Do you KNOW we have a limited time on this earth?

Fucking Twilight. Why the hell am I even discussing this? Garret, what the hell did you get me into?

When Vampires Had Balls by Nick Cato

2010-07-02T20:21:00.000-07:00

When Vampires had BALLS by Nick Cato

When Dracula (Christopher Lee) managed to con a Catholic Priest to help him do his bidding in 1968's DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE (not to mention threatening he'd also marry his niece), my young mind was alerted to the fact that vampires--while cool--aren't the "nicest" creatures out there. After all, they live on human blood, they live to fulfill their own darkest desires, as they are basically MONSTERS. The Dracula portrayed by Christopher Lee was a classy, intelligent gent who was always a hit with the ladies...but at heart he was the embodiment of evil. His cape was blacker than death. It didn't sparkle. He had BALLS.

The confused young title character of George A. Romero's MARTIN (1977) didn't sparkle, either. Convinced he's a vampire with a lust for blood, Martin (played with wonderful gloom by John Amplas) makes his own set of metal fangs, and being a nerd with limited seduction skills, uses an old-school razor blade to open his victim's veins. He lives and dies (in one of the goriest stakings ever filmed) as a true vampire. A vampire that had BALLS.
Female vampires have balls, too. Take for example Jean Rollin's FASCINATION (1979), where 2 lesbo vamps lure people into their blood drinking cult at an isolated mansion. Sure, they seduce everyone who come within their grasp and parade around nekkid, but they're not lovey-dubby multiplex skanks: they're high-class, gothic MONSTERS bent on doing what vamps do best...feed on grade-A plasma. Elizabeth and Eva (played by Franca Mai and the amazing Brigette Lahaie) may be a couple of hotties (especially under Rollins' killer cinematography), but like venus fly traps, their beauty is only a front. They're vampires with BALLS who don't sparkle.

And if you want to see how a vampire with BALLS can ruin your honeymoon, check out the 1962 Italian classic SLAUGHTER OF THE VAMPIRES. Dieter Eppler's portrayal of the blood-crazed vampire may be a bit campy by today's standards, but he wasn't afraid to ruin what should have been one poor couple's happiest time as newlyweds. As a bonus, our main vampire is killed by a piece of iron fence and turns to gray ash. Even in death this monstrous womanizer didn't sparkle...because he was a V A M P I R E.
With BALLS.
Okay...time to go hand some of these DVDs out in front of my local multiplex...

LEZA'S TOP THREE VAMPIRE AND WEREWOLF MOVIES

2010-07-02T16:29:00.000-07:00

VAMPIRES

VAMPYR-1932-THEODOR DREYER

This movie has incredible atmosphere. I know that word gets thrown around a lot. But in this case it is palatable. Remember the cursed videotape in The Ring? Vampyr is that movie, in the flesh.
When you watch this movie, you enter a surrealistic vacuum, where the ordinary passage of time and the traditional rules of causality have little relevance. This film is so masterfully shot that it is easy to forget that a person was behind the camera, despite the innovative, artful angles and the best shadow play outside of a German expressionist movie. This film sucks you in. The thick atmosphere of Gothic gloom and claustrophobia, of dislocation and irreality is unshakeable, even hours after a viewing. It sticks with you. It nags you with feelings of unrest and existential malaise.
The only thing I can recall affecting me in a similar way was Robert W. Chambers collection of short stories entitled The King in Yellow, and certain H.P. Lovecraft passages.
It is the unnameable horror of something that is alien and yet horribly familiar. It is the atmosphere of unrest. David Lynch's Eraserhead also manages to pull off this sort of cacophony of distress quite masterfully. But Vampyr has something Eraserhead does not. True, unshakable, gut freezing eeriness. It is a true original and it is infinitely re-viewable since its one of those movies that seems to reshuffle itself every time you see it.

SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE-E.ELIAS MEHIGE-2000

This movie has an interesting concept that actually works. John Malkovich plays F. W. Murnau, the director who will stop at nothing to make his masterpiece, Nosferatu. He does not even shrink from hiring a real vampire to bring authenticity to his film. Who cares if his staff is in danger, the film must be completed. Willem Dafoe plays Max Schreck, the creepiest vampire I have ever seen. He's ugly, he's a creep, and he doesn’t try to hide it.
I love this film because of the parallels it draws between the obsession of the artist, the drug addict and, of course, the vampire. The power struggle between director and vampire is ironic and intense, as is Murnau's deadly struggle with heroin addiction and his drive to make this film no matter who or what is destroyed along the way. This film is truly inspiring and chilling as well as beautifully shot, with great reverence for its source material. Re-created shots from Nosferatu are especially rewarding and pitch perfect.

THE KISS OF THE VAMPIRE-DON SHARP-1963

This film is like The Rocky Horror Picture Show meets Eyes Wide Shut, in 1963 Hammer style, of course.
A young couple, on their honeymoon end up shacking up at a near abandoned motel, when they run out of petrol, which just happens to be next door to a wealthy family of vampires who take advantage of the cartoonishly proper and naive young couple. They are seduced by the seemingly elegant family, who wine and dine them till they manage to separate the two and take the woman for themselves and leave the poor man, confused, utterly disoriented, and hung over after being plowed down with champagne.
This film is elegant, deliciously satirical, sadistically twisted and genuinely eerie. The costumes and sets are rich confections of velvet and spirals(respectively), the nights are foggy and moonlit, the encounters with the blood-drinkers, brutal. This is classic Hammer at its best.
“It often happens in life that the most beautiful things are made from the most unpromising of materials.” The patriarch vampire bitterly notes when giving the guests a tour of his home, mourning his existence inside its metaphorical coffin.
Their seduction of Marianne is soulless and clinically choreographed, using the son as bait. They take advantage of the fact that the newlyweds are so young and uncertain of themselves and each other.
Professor Zimmer (Clifford Evans) plays the only nemesis of this powerful vampire clan. After his own daughter was claimed by them, he tirelessly watches and does what he can to put back down their newly risen vampire ladies. Tormented by his pain, he's often drunk, and the townspeople assume him to be a lost cause. With such an uncertain adversary and such a perfect pair of vampire bait walking blissfully unaware into their doom, the air of hopelessness is powerful throughout much of the film, adding to the palpable fear and claustrophobia. The inn itself is haunted by the memory of the innkeeper's lost daughter. Another victim of the vampires. It is mentioned how they own the land and there is very little anyone can do against them.
These vampires are able to go about during the day, but only if it is overcast. Mercifully, they do not “sparkle”.

HONORABLE MENTION

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN-TOMAS ALFREDSON-2008
This haunting and gritty gem set in Stockholm really breaks the traditional mold. The vampire, in this case, is a 12 year old girl, Eli, who is more alone than any girl could be. She meets a boy her age, Oskar, who has been bullied and is becoming increasingly alienated. They slowly warm up to each other and form a touching bond that is challenged by his discovery of her true monstrous nature. This story resonates and is shot beautifully in the barren wintry landscape of the city.

30 DAYS OF NIGHT-DAVID SLADE-2007
This was an innovative and refreshing treatment of vampires set in a natural state of perpetual night, in Alaska. The movie had a cool noir vibe and was very stylishly shot. I was also very happy with the look and the brutality of these tough vampires. They seemed somehow more primal, more like something out of our folkloric or mythic past. I loved the artwork in the comic as well, and was pleasantly surprised at how closely the director came to capturing that vibe and look despite the lack of Ben Templesmith's extraordinary artwork.

WEREWOLVES

THE WOLF MAN-GEORGE WAGGONER-1942

This will always be the quintessential werewolf film to me. The moody cinematography is impeccable. But I think its greatest power lies in the achingly human portrayal of a man losing the battle with the beast within by the lumbering, awkward, and always lovable Lon Chaney Jr. as Larry Talbot, the returning estranged son and new heir to the Talbot estate, as a result of the tragic and accidental death of his brother.
Estrangement, a big theme for monsters of all kinds, is established right off, as son a father attempt to patch up after years of absence. You get the feeling, though, that Larry Talbot is never going to fit in anywhere. He is a man followed by shadows he can never shake. Yet he is charming, especially in his moments of supreme awkwardness, as in his first meeting with Gwen(Evelyn Ankers). He is about as subtle as the wolf in Little Red riding Hood in his attempts to seduce her. She is annoyed, affronted, but yet is amused, even a bit seduced, despite herself. Even when he confesses to her, later that night, that he has been peeping at her through her bedroom window with a telescope, she doesn't tell him to get lost, despite the fact that she's engaged.
There is a great air of sadness to this film. A pervasive gloom that is not heavy handed, but it is heavyhearted and somehow almost elemental. This is about a man, alone with his curse. There is no cure and he must face his beast and try his best to not harm those he loves. He must face the judgments of the ignorant and ill informed townspeople, he must hide his pain even though it consumes him. And he must exist in a state he barely understands the nature of.
Lon Chaney embodies the noble qualities of wolves as well as the monstrous. His instinct to protect his own is, in fact, what leads him to being bitten by Bela, the werewolf fortuneteller played by Bela Lugosi. He has an honest and loving heart that he practically wears on his sleeve. Perhaps this is his biggest mistake, but yet it is also his salvation, not for his life, but for his soul. He can't win, though, he's screwed no matter what. As Gwen's fiancee observes: “There is something very tragic about that man.” I think we can all identify with someone who is not entirely beast or man, good or bad, just all too human, cursed and blessed whether we like it or not. Screw Jacob and Edward, Larry Talbot is the original tragic heartthrob.

WOLF-MIKE NICHOLS-1994

I appreciate the freshness and honesty with which Mike Nichols tackles the idea of a man turning into a werewolf within a sociological context. When the office politics of a major publishing house cause aging editor in chief Will Randall (Jack Nicholson) to get kicked to the curb in lieu of his much more dishonest and cutthroat protegee Stewart Swinton(James Spader), followed by the discovery that his wife has been sleeping with Stewart, it kicks off a hell of a midlife crisis, and brings out strength and rage he never knew he had, as his whole life spirals out of control.
The bite of the wolf is not entirely a curse for Will. In fact, it enables him to see past the illusions that had barred his success against his backstabbing colleagues in the past. No longer self-doubting, he goes after what he wants. He is essentially quite human, and in fact, the “curse” of the wolf has a humanizing effect upon him. When the animal begins to take him over, he realizes how numb and false he and everyone else around him had become, in a way, this film is about how much socialization robs us of our raw humanity. Initially, Will is a man who plays by the rules(even if they make no sense), a man who debases himself as a matter of course. When the wolf begins to take hold, Will begins to grow a pair, much to everyone's surprise.
Mike Nichols biting social satire is something to sink you teeth into. But inevitably, with the good and the noble also come the darker aspects of the beast trailing close behind. The predator, the murderer inside struggles for dominance also as the light (Will)and dark(Stewart) personifications of the wolf struggle against each other for the woman they both desire(Michelle Pfieiffer). The nature of the man colors the nature of the beast.

CAT PEOPLE-JACQUES TOURNEUR-1942

Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon) is a perfectly nice Serbian girl. All she wants is a normal life, but that is not to be. Descendant from a race of evil cat people she can keep her murderous instincts bottled up, but not forever. Trouble comes to her life when she falls in love with a nice young gentleman named Oliver Reed (Kent Smith). She is terrified that passion will bring out the beast that has for so long remained dormant.
Her only comfort is her regular visits to to local zoo, where she stares at the black panther for hours, sometimes sketching him, sometimes just watching. Most animals are terrified of her, but the panther doesn't complain.
At the end of his rope, her new husband sends her to a psychiatrist. Unfortunately, he is more interested in her as a specimen and parrots her husbands words, that it is all in her head. He is also developing a fetishistic obsession with her to boot.
When she sees her husband eating out with his friend, Alice, she snaps. In a spiraling series of events that lead to her own demise, the beast takes hold till the bitter end.
This tragic story about a misunderstood woman at war with her dark side will always be one of relevance, just as evocative and powerful today as it was in 1942. It is an atmospheric and haunting psychological and spiritual exploration of the dark side of the moon we carry within.

HONORABLE MENTION

WEREWOLF OF LONDON-STEWARD WALKER-1935
Despite the cheesy werewolf makeup I find this to be so classy and haunting that I forgive it for that. I like the focus on the moon flower, who's quest leads Dr. Glendon(Henry Hull) to being bitten, and which he then grows with the aid of artificial light. This is the ultimate civilized man succumbing to his obsessions and coming unraveled, owing perhaps more to Jekyll and Hyde and even Victor Frankenstein, than anything having to do with lycanthropy.

THE COMPANY OF WOLVES-NEIL JORDAN-1994
Though heavy-handed and overly decadent I still find this to be a delicious feast for the eyes. Angela Carter's dark retelling of the Red Riding Hood myth is exciting, irreverent, and thick with dark fairy tale atmosphere.

Dollarbin Massacre Guide to Vampires and Werewolves: Introduction

2010-07-02T15:19:00.001-07:00

Wow! It seems like another Twilight movie is upon us. And you know what that means: millions of braindead cultural naifs will get a good glimpse into what vampires and werewolves aren't. And some of you out there, who are parents, friends or homosexual partners with these naifs will be subjected to stunted dialogue, sparkling, hairless waxed chests and monsters less threatening than those on Sesame Street. But, you are not powerless. You have duct tape. You have DVD players. You have rope. And you can not only enjoy yourself but you can educate these poor dipshits regarding monster culture if you show your loved one you care by restraining them and subjecting them to the Dollarbin Massacre crew's favorite vampire and werewolf movies. Helping us help your bound,gagged loved one will be Nick Cato, author of Don of the Dead and host of Lair of the Yak. So keep your eyes on Dollarbin Massacre over the next few days and you'll find out what our favorite vampire and werewolf films are.

Still better than the Twilight series.

By the way, Dollarbin Masochist Jordan Krall has been nominated for the Wonderland Book Award, the award for excellence in Bizarro fiction for his book Fistful of Feet. Congratulations, Jordan!

Eric Mays might have some kind of weird marsupial fetish

2010-06-30T13:23:00.000-07:00

One day, with no provocation at all, author Eric Mays of Naked Metamorphosis and The Authors Speak series of interviews sent me a review of supersonic turkey Kangaroo Jack. As supersonic turkeys go, this one could kick the shit out of The Giant Claw, both the movie and the giant claw itself, whatever that thing is supposed to be. This after I told him "we review good movies here, dammit!" I just don't understand this guy. First, he besmirches the good name of Vincent Price and Lionel Atwill and now this. It's just unsettling.

Here it is: Kangaroo Jack reviewed by Eric Mays

Australia has given us some mighty big personalities and some mighty big films. Paul Hogan, Russell Crowe, Mel Gibson, and Hugh Jackman are all larger than life examples of the rustic Australian breed. Films like “Gallipoli” and “Mad Max” tackle vengeance and courage. But the island continent may not be able to handle its largest star. Or, what should be the resounding champ.

On the surface it may be mocked as a family friendly piece of tripe. But, like onions, parfaits, and the Earth itself, it has layers. This is more than just a clichéd kiddie flick. This is, by far, one of the most original masterpieces ever shot on film. And it should be recognized in the annals as such.

“Kangaroo Jack” is based on an urban legend about two kids from Boston hitting a kangaroo while vacationing in the outback. After hitting the marsupial with their Land Rover, they dressed it up in a Red Sox jacket and snapped photographs of it. Obviously, the kangaroo was not deceased, merely unconscious, and it hopped into the Aussie wild, still adorning the Sox jacket.

That’s a just a very one dimensional story. It would take a true writing genius to transform an urban legend into such a notable classic. Enter one Steve Bing, writer of Missing in Action 2 and an episode of “Married with Children” entitled “Desperately Seeking Miss October”. Mr. Bing is a comic genius capable of truly great things. He takes the simple concept and transforms it into a comedic masterpiece featuring the mafia, two hapless guys, and the aforementioned ‘roo.

Headlined by Jerry O’Connell (who has not been in better form since “Stand By Me”) and Anthony Anderson (who also displays the comic timing that rivals Groucho Marx), “Kangaroo Jack” deals with the horrors that befall two individuals when they get caught up in the mob. Charlie and Louis have a “job” to do for Mr. “Sal” Maggio (Oscar-winner Christopher Walken, rekindling the chops that brought him that award for “The Deer Hunter”). That job? Deliver 50,000 dollars to Australia.

However, that $50,000 is swiped by a rogue kangaroo, as you may have expected. By trading the Red Sox jacket for $50,000, screenwriter Steve Bing has placed us in a higher stakes game of intrigue that movies lack these days.

And producer Jerry Bruckheimer has taken the concept (which may sound somewhat recycled) and brought in the absolute best. 3-time Oscar winner Dyan Cannon, soon-to-be Oscar nominee Michael Shannon (nominated in 2008 for “Revolutionary Road”), and director David McNally, of the overlooked and underrated “Coyote Ugly” (seriously, where was Piper Perabo’s and John Goodman’s Oscar nom?). And after the success of “Snow Dogs”, Bruckheimer makes a bold choice in using CGI to make the kangaroo talks. A risk? Perhaps. But it pays in dividends.

It seems troubling to say that all this movie lacks is the appropriate audience, but it’s that good. The movie is filled with gems that more contemporary films lack. Take for instance this line from Anthony Anderson: “We’re just having a very intimate, non-gay moment”. Hilarity! Or Jerry O’Connell’s matter-of-fact way of stating the obvious, while adding a sense of dread, when he declares: “I just got my ass kicked by a marsupial.”

Sure, it seems like this is appropriate for the pre-pubescent set. Think what you will. That age group gets things that others could only dream of. If you watch – really watch – then you’ll find depth, intelligence, and the best use of “Rapper’s Delight” ever used in film. “Kangaroo Jack” should be recognized as the “Citizen Kane” of kangaroo films.

4.5 stars out of 5

P.S
Congratulations, Eric on being the sole entrant and winner of the Legumeman Books Kangaroo Jackstravaganza. Enjoy your prizes. In retrospect, perhaps if I had called it the Kangaroo Jackoff it would have had more interest. Hindsight's 20/20 I guess.

Does it Suck: the Spirit REBUTTAL

2010-05-19T13:33:00.000-07:00

I love Frank Miller. I even like some of his recent work (TDKSA is really good as a cyberpunk story with capes, but I agree that All-Star was a bad idea). All his stuff up to Sin City was the cutting edge of its time and now sits as part of the comicverse canon. Miller brings a very specific style to the table, so I guess I enjoy that style even when it's not executed perfectly. The Spirit isn't executed very well at all, but if you already like Miller's style (and you have to be VERY lame not to), you're already on board.

Miller has a vague background in film, and his comics have always had a cinematic quality. But the Spirit is the first time he's been in total control. I think he wanted to create a real homage to Eisner and the comic book medium in general. Say what you want about him, but Frank Miller knows the history and mechanics of the comic medium like the back of his hand. That might have worked against him, because what he made was a movie that’s exactly like a comic. That’s the only problem with it. It drags on when you try to watch it all at once, but taken apart, the segments are actually pretty good. Comics are about bursts of story in serialized segments, keeping the reader interested enough to wait for the next episode. But like I said, that's the problem. The movie fails to deliver a strong overarching narrative because it acts too much like a comic strip. But the cinematography is great and the scenes all work as individual parts of a greater whole. It's just that that whole doesn't come together very well as a movie. It doesn't work as a narrative arc. It works in small bursts of flashy style.

What we wind up seeing is a lot of really cool looking scenes that would've worked really well as a serialized web series. Instead it's all mashed together as a movie. C'est la vie. You still get disposable clone stooges, slapstick Loony Tunes-like violence, ancient artifacts with Indiana Jones-ish powers, huge guns, macho guys, hot chicks, and Samuel L Jackson dressed up as a cowboy, a pimp, a nazi, AND a samurai. It’s a modern mixture of all those weird comics that Frank Miller must have read when he was a kid. It's not true to Eisner's original vision of the Spirit, but it's updated. Miller's stuff always seems to exist in weird worlds that are a mixture of several eras. And yes, the acting is terrible. Everyone's hamming it up, either intentionally or not. But they're working with Frank Miller's trademark noirish dialogue and snarky turns of phrase, so I think that's forgivable. It serves the overall style.

And one more thing. You can't have a Spirit movie without femme fatales like Eva Mendes, Scarlett Johansen, or the chick “Castle”. And as hot and sexy and dangerous as these girls are, the movie has a family-friendly vibe that’s only there so it will appeal to a larger audience. Look, i understand this. Making movies is a business, after all. But "family friendly" works against Miller’s custom style. What makes his work great is that it’s bleak and gritty and NEVER pulls punches. In fact, if the Spirit had included more boobies and gore and cursing, we could’ve had our first grindhouse superhero movie.

Does it suck? No. The visual style of this movie is too good to just throw it away. And the strange mixture of styles makes it unique, even among Miller's other movies. Maybe Frank Miller's getting old. I hope not. He still owes us a good sequel to Sin City.

Does it Suck:The Spirit

2010-05-19T10:29:00.000-07:00

Does everybody remember back when Frank Miller was awesome? I was like 6, but I've read the output from that time and he sure was awesome. Introducing Elektra, adding much needed grit to Daredevil and Batman, creating Sin City. Frank Miller was great, a man, a master of Neonoir. If 1986 Frank Miller were to direct a film version of Will Eisner's The Spirit, superhero movies in the 80s and 90s wouldn't have been such braindead lowbudget affairs. 1986 Frank Miller would have made people think twice about offering Tim Burton Batman...instead of making people think twice about letting Frank Miller make a movie as they did when The Spirit came out. This is a Spirit movie by the Frank Miller that brought us Dark Knight Strikes Back and All Star Batman and Robin. A Frank Miller that has lost his fucking mind.
The Spirit is a "movie" "adaptation" of the great Will Eisner's COMIC (all in caps because it's that great of a COMIC) about a bluesuited vigilante (in the movie his suit is not blue) who can't stop falling for the wrong dames and solves crimes of a surprisingly gritty nature. Sometimes there were stories where The Spirit didn't even appear, intriguing contemporary fables that were well ahead of their time. The Spirit's lead Gabriel Macht makes me wish Miller had adapted one of these. If The Spirit COMIC didn't need The Spirit, why does a movie of The Spirit? When God was rolling up Gabriel Macht for the great Dungeons and Dragons game called life, he got a 3 for Charisma. Gabriel Macht is as charsimatic as...anybody who gets what having 3 Charisma means and why it makes you uncharismatic. Gabriel Macht is horrendously dull. A better choice might have been anybody people have heard of.
Samuel L. Jackson plays the villain, The Octopus, who wears white gloves, has a huge cache of weapons and hates The Spirit because he does. Samuel L. Jackson is not bad in this, but he's pretty damn awkward. As awkward as Gabriel Macht? No. Gabriel Macht is as awkward as your third grade teacher catching you masturbating...at her husband's funeral. And her husband is the King of England. And also your dad. And you're masturbating to a picture of her. Gabriel Macht sucks. Samuel L. Jackson's okay, I guess. Better than the shitty, shitty Gabriel Macht.
Assisting Samuel L. Jackson is a who's who of fine ladies that can't act. Meaning Scarlett Johannsen and Salma Hayek. At least I think Salma Hayek's assisting him. I don't really know where she came from or what the hell she's up to, like Jack Nance's character in Dune...or anybody in Dune if you haven't read the book. I would add Eva Mendes to this list but for the fact that Eva Mendes is not even remotely fine and she only assists him sometimes since she's a femme fatale and she has trouble choosing sides. These actresses do their best-which is awful.
The Spirit should be a fun Neonoir cartoon that's a great homage to a comics legend. Instead, this movie makes me think that Frank Miller must be grateful that Will Eisner is probably in Heaven so that his revenant won't track down Frank Miller and strangle him to death. So, guest contributor David W. Barbee: Does it Suck?

HOLLYWOOD CHAINSAW HOOKERS- Crazy-Ass Bitches, Tits and Chainsaw Mayhem

2010-05-16T20:44:00.000-07:00

Sharon Stone once was quoted in a book called Vamps as saying "If you have a vagina and a point of view, that's a deadly combination." Megan Fox seconds that with the brain bleeding assertion that breasts are "smart bombs", you just need to locate your target, aim and shoot, turning boys brains to mush, in the recent chick horror flick Jennifer's Body. It sounds stupid, but unfortunately (for guys) it's all too true. In fact, in a recent scientific study at the University of Valencia in Spain, it was proven that a certain hormone (Cortisol) that is released when a man is alone with a beautiful woman for about five minutes is shown to have connections to heart disease. The hormone floods stronger if the man perceives the woman to be "out of his league". Ouch! Love hurts!

The horror film genre is replete with women paying the price for being, well, women, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, fucking the wrong guy, running naked up the wrong fucking stairs with their tits flapping all over the place like giant glistening knife targets. Doe-eyed lambs to the slaughter.

Fred Olen Ray's 1988 cult grindhouse classic Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers is a refreshing inversion of this common predicament. In this case it is men who fall prey to a cult of psychotic bloodlusty chainsaw-wielding lunatics who masquerade as hookers simply 'cause they know guys are suckers for a great set of tits and the promise of something more.

Hell hath no fury like these whorish harpies. Welcome to Hollywood, California; home of crazy cults and crazy damn broads. Jayne Mansfield, Church of Satan anyone? Frances Farmer, eat your heart out. You never seen crazy like these bitches. They are dedicated to their cause. After all, those ancient Egyptian god's ain't gonna feed themselves, you know!

Now these hookers have soul! They're no golddigging trollops, or desperate, teary-eyed teen runaways who will do anything for a bit of smack, turning tricks to survive. These girls are on a mission, and they're committed. They know guys need a little Tender Fucking Care.

This is a great raunchy burlesque show of a movie, replete with dirty puns, lame gags, and lots of blood splattered T&A. This is the kind of movie that you watch in the back of a tent in the bad side of town after the nudie show. It owes much to the brilliant transgressive abandon of Herschell Gordon Lewis and to nonsensical camp gold in the tradition of lovable pervert and misanthrope Ed Wood.

The format is noir. The delivery is bad minstrel show and porn-caliber acting (off, but enthusiastic). All the chicks in this movie give amazing jaw dropping performances. Michelle McLean as the head maneater Mercedes, is a heartless vicious bitch with a great rack. She plays her part to the hilt, with great camp cartoon villainess vamp glee. Esther Elise as her accomplice, Lisa also plays the camp diva villainess card to the hilt. Linnea Quigley is adorable and hilariously spunky as the supposedly ditzy teenage runaway, Samantha Kelso, the cause for our humble narrator and private eye, Jack Chandler, getting sucked in to this bizarre vortex of perversion and manslaughter.

Nothing is quite what it seems, and by the time you have arrived at the grand finale you will feel like you have been drugged and woke up at one fucked up party. You'll swear you'll never accept a drink from a suspiciously excited chick with a great rack, named Mercedes, who assures you with deadpan emphasis that she's gonna fuck your brains out and that she's a real scream, once you get to know her(wink, wink). Watch out for those crazy broads, they'll tear your fucking heart out and eat it with some salt and pepper (or chop you up into little pieces for their gods, take you pick, you'll taste delicious to them either way).

Overseeing this band of wild ladies of the mean LA streets is Gunnar Hansen, (legendary as maniac juggernaut Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre)who plays the part of their lofty-minded cult leader with deadpan straight face, resulting in great camp ironic perfection.

Laugh your ass off hilarious, bizarre and deliciously tasteless, this movie is sure to please the sassmouthed pervert in us all. But don't say I didn't warn you, if you watch this movie on drugs you will feel twice as stoned as you really are and before you know it you'll be tied up and at the mercy of a band of crazy-ass broads with great racks! Keep a tight hold on those family jewels and don't let anyone called Mercedes buy you any drinks with names like "The Screaming Orgasm", tempting as this might sound.

Lucio Fulci's New York Ripper:Who Gets Stuck With All the Bad Luck?

2010-05-16T16:16:00.000-07:00

Subject A:Howard the Duck

A duck caught in a world that he did not create. Irascible, frustrated, a citizen of the most warped and chaotic corner of the Marvel Universe, in a situation he has little control over.

Subject B: Daffy Duck

A petulant, sarcastic, hapless individual, tormented by hunters, rabbits and martians. Trapped in a cartoon, one time manipulated by an insane animator who turned out to be none other than his rabbit nemesis. Irascible, frustrated, a citizen of a universe so looney it's part of its name, in a situation he has no control over.

Subject C: Donald Duck

A pantsless cuckold and a cauldron of seething rage. He is mad at this girlfriend, at his nephews, at local chipmunks, at his mentally challenged anthropoid dog friend. Irascible, frustrated, an angry man in a place where anger is either comical or the province of villains.

Why, you might ask, am I providing you with half-assed psychological profiles of cartoon ducks? It seems weird even for me. Well, I'm doing this because people that watch Lucio Fulci's New York Ripper might think that the killer's tendency to talk like a cartoon duck is weird and stupid. They might think Fulci is being weird for weird's sake or creepy for creepy's sake and while it's weird and it's creepy, it makes perfect sense. Okay, maybe my standards for "perfect sense" have atrophied over the years but the cartoon duck thing still works artistically. It's a valid metaphor. Really. New York Ripper is a gory police procedural/giallo about a guy that commits egregiously violent acts on women and taunts the police by talking like a duck and it makes sense for him to do so, not just in the context of the plot but in the context of artistic choices.

If it doesn't impress that somebody pulled this off, I'd like to see what kind of cinematic voodoo earns your respect. Anyway, New York Ripper begins in broad daylight, like many Fulci movies do. Lucio Fulci seems to have a vendetta against people going out during the day. You'll get stabbed, you'll get raped, you'll get eaten by a zombie on a boat. Get a job as a third shift Speedway clerk, it's the only way you'll be safe. An old man is walking his golden retriever near the Brooklyn Bridge. It is a sweet scene, one you know is not going to last. The movie proves you right when the dog finds a rotted hand.

When we get to the police precinct, we meet the cop investigating the severed hand found by dog case. When anybody finds a severed hand, it's serious business but when it's an adorable dog, the cops jump to action interviewing the murder victim's insufferable landlady in true police procedural fashion. It's unsettling that a severed hand is involved in this because Lieutenant Williams, the man in charge of the case, does not seem much like a real cop, he seems like a TV cop. His every line of dialogue feels fake and transparent down to his weird "I don't want people to find out that deep down I care about things" demeanor.

First time I watched this, I was left wondering why it was that this grisly murder was being solved by such a flat protagonist, such a cop show caricature. Second time I watched it, I asked a different question. Why is it we trivialized and sanitized murder for so long in our police procedurals and cop shows? Before the disgusting forensics show trend that now dominates the genre, cop shows depicted how we wanted crime to be, we wanted it to be smooth, we wanted it to be gore free and we wanted it to happen well outside our backyards. The police procedural was safe place for us, a refuge...like cartoons. Whether the fake cop show veneer is that way on purpose or unintentionally, Fulci has put shards of glass in a great American comfort food. Did you ever see an episode of Kojak where a woman was ripped open on a ferry?

When the ferry murder occurs, it becomes very clear that we're in a New York where even in broad daylight gruesome and immoral things are happening and nobody is safe. The police procedural has been transplanted into the New York of Driller Killer and Ms.45 and when Lucio Fulci's working in Ferrara country, we're going to witness some epically fucked up shit. A trenchcoated woman watches a live sex show as a creepy bastard watches her watching it, taking in her masturbatory ecstasy and voyeuristic thrill. The woman in the show goes from degrading herself on stage to being alone in the dark, is grabbed the sketchy guy, is stabbed brutally with a broken bottle and is killed. Fulci seems to be saying that humiliation and degradation lead to death. It is obvious that misogyny breeds killers but not so obvious that the loss of women's dignity will lead often to the loss of their lives. When we take away dignity, we create violence.

Which brings me to the duck. The killer quacks and talks like a cartoon as he is killing and after the murders, calls Lieutenant Williams while speaking in his duck voice. It seems silly and offputting for the sake of being offputting, but as I said there's a reason for it in the plot and a reason for the artistic choice. All the cartoon ducks I mentioned face a lack of dignity, a lack of restraint and a lack of capacity to deal with their chaotic surroundings. In a New York where everybody shows signs of perversion (Williams makes time with a prostitute, the arrogant bastard psychologist that helps him on the case buys a gay porno magazine, probably a huge deal in an Italian movie from 1982) with poverty and hyperstimulation everywhere things are worse than in the Disney, Marvel or Warner Brothers worlds, there are all the frustrations but none of the safety and warmth and none of the censorship. Donald Duck would no doubt have a criminal record in early 80s New York, as would Daffy and even Howard (and Howard knows Spiderman). The killings are not simple Freudian murders but motivated by a kind of poetic psychology as we tend to see in gialli. The world is absurd and unfair and filthy and he has to vent his frustration somehow.

Female sexuality is something we've always sought to control and moderate. If it gets out of hand, it can be perceived as intimidating, wild and a source of disorder and a way of squandering a powerful gift of which men are in awe. The New York of New York Ripper is choked in sexual kudzu and thus is an aberration, one that is particularly painful for a man like the murderer in New York Ripper. The intricacies of his motivation are so novel that I don't wish to spoil them, based in part in the out of control sexuality around him but, as I said it's not that simple.

New York Ripper is a film to be experienced, not to be described, which is why I find myself a bit inarticulate in discussing its plot points and breaking down its scenes and more comfortable talking about theme and atmosphere The sexuality and the gore and the strangeness make it a giallo every bit as fascinating as Argento's best but possessing a wholly unique atmosphere combining grindhouse sleaze with copshow cliche.

BRAIN MATTER JACKPOT: On David Schwartz’s "Las Vegas Bloodbath"

2010-05-15T19:05:00.000-07:00

LAS VEGAS BLOODBATH
A Schwartz Kirby Mayhugh Dalton Production © 1989

Special Appearance by Tina Prunty and the Beautiful Lady Oil Wrestlers.

Allow me to defend my defense of the movie LAS VEGAS BLOODBATH.

Unlike my argument for HALLOWEEN 3: SEASON OF THE WITCH, I do not think that LVBB is a great film. It’s not even a good film. Hell, I might go as far as to say it’s not even a film at all.

It’s shot-on-video and from the 1980s. If you have any idea what I’m talking about, well then…..you know what I’m talking about. Lower your standards, grab a friend, and crack open the vodka.

It took me about a year to watch this movie. But wait… here I am talking about it, suggesting that you give the movie a chance. Let me explain.

When I popped this DVD in, I spent about ten minutes in awe. LAS VEGAS BLOODBATH tore my brain out with grainy claws and squeezed it through a cheap slot machine. Ching, ching, ching. Brain matter jackpot.

The first scene is of our anti-hero (played by Ari Levin who went on to star in nothing else but he did produce one episode of TAXICAB CONFESSIONS) talking on the phone. He looks like a cross between Lurch, Greg Brady, and Ronald McDonald without the clown make-up. In other words, he’s pretty handsome in a creepy manager-of-a-fast-food-restaurant sort of way. For the remainder of this review, I’ll be referring to the guy as Ari and not his character’s name (Sam Butler). Why? I don’t know.

It’s obvious there was no script. Instead, the director gave Ari a rough outline of what to say and then pressed RECORD. This is pretty consistent throughout LAS VEGAS BLOODBATH. I guess you sort of have to respect the director for that. He’s anything if not consistent. Besides, why waste the paper?

So Ari leaves the office and goes home driving the red sports car he bought for his pregnant wife… only to find his wife in bed with a really ugly cop (or security guard, I can’t remember). We also find out this ugly cop is a Speedo man. It’s all pretty disgusting. Ari even sniffs the guy’s shoes. Don’t ask.

Anyway, so Ari walks in on his wife’s infidelity and shoots them both with the cop’s gun. This is aided by badly timed gunshots courtesy of an inept sound editor. Who am I kidding? Sound editor? That’s like saying this movie had an advertising campaign.

Ari completely fucking loses his marbles and leaves. He drives around the Las Vegas strip in broad daylight, batshit fucking crazy, talking to himself about how all women are alike, they don’t deserve to live, blah blah blah.

Then Ari finds a hooker. Hallelujah. So it begins. Holy shit.

This “actress” is the stiffest I’ve ever seen so she may very well be a real hooker. Good for Ari. Anyway, he’s driving her around and some guy in another car gives them the finger. Now, it’s obvious that some jackass saw the “film crew” in the car and decided it’d be funny to yell something. Anyway, our fearless cast decides to not let the fourth wall be broken and so they roll with it and the hooker asks what the guy’s problem was. Ari’s response is “I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t like daytime whores!”

How do you respond to something like that? The answer is: you don’t.

The hooker ignores it. You’d think she’d get the hint. Ari is acting so goddamn creepy, strange, and aggressive, even the most desperate prostitute would have bailed out by now. How many red flags do you need before you realize that Mr. Ari Levin is bad news?

I can’t leave that “daytime whores” line alone. It’s brilliant. I’m sure Ari made it up on the spot or maybe the director/cameraman/producer/writer in the backseat told him to say it… but whatever. Doesn’t matter. It’s one of my all time favorite movie lines. My best friend and I still quote it from time to time. It’s one of those lines that, after hearing it, you cannot forget. You don’t want to forget. Daytime whores. Daytime whores. You want to know why your boss didn’t give you that raise? Maybe he doesn’t like daytime whores. Wanna know why your boyfriend didn’t call you back? He doesn’t like daytime whores. Daytime whores.

So it’s 11 minutes and 50 seconds in and I just had to stop it. I had to wait until my friend and I could watch it together. It was something you just cannot watch alone. It’s like a wedding. You need a partner or else it’s a pointless endeavor.

Fast forward a year later. He and I get to watch the rest of LAS VEGAS BLOODBATH.

Okay, so if you are still with me up to this point, kudos. But I’ll be honest with you. The first half is pretty brutal. It’s like a tooth extraction in slow motion.

Ari takes our hooker behind a motel in broad daylight and ties her up. The weird thing is, she lets him do it. This fucker is beyond creepy yet this whore is just too damn trusting.

Just when she thinks he’s a nice guy, he pulls out his wife’s decapitated head and says, “I’ll make you a deal. You give me head and I’ll give YOU head.”

And he kills our poor prostitute. I’m not really spoiling anything. Everyone knows he’s going to do it except for that whore.

Ari goes on a little killing spree and then he stumbles upon our other main characters, the most boring group of women ever assembled for any movie. We, the viewer, are subjected to the worst baby shower ever. It’s a disgusting scene of women eating donuts, drinking milk, playing cards, and spewing out inane chit-chat. They also model some bathing suits. I never knew women in bikinis could be so erection-shattering. All this goes on while Ari lurks outside.

This scene is where most people would turn the movie off and understandably so. It’s fucking boring. It’s made worse by the fact that it was recorded on VHS. It’s sort of like watching a stranger’s home videos from 1989. But with fewer camera angles and less zooming.

Twenty minutes into this party (yes, I said 20 MINUTES), they turn on the TV to watch themselves. So we’re treated to the cheapest sports show ever: the so-called Beautiful Lady Oil Wrestlers (or as the TV calls them: The Ladies of B.L.O.W. which translates to The Ladies of Beautiful Ladies Oil Wrestlers). This could potentially be sexy but it’s anything but. To call these ladies oil wrestlers is an insult to wrestlers everywhere. It’s also an insult to ladies not to mention oil.

Then the party gets REAL exciting because the pizza comes. And so the girls…they eat the pizza. We hear every disgusting chew, every lip smack. Anyone with a food fetish will love this shit. I didn’t.

Stay with me…Stay with me…

Because then Ari comes in. Fucking finally! I never thought I’d be so happy to see that Lurch-looking motherfucker.

Now the real pain begins, Danny Boy.

The rest of the movie is some of the most over-the-top misogynistic violence I’ve seen in an 80s flick. What he does to the pregnant woman…. Shit. You will just have to rent this movie for yourself. My jaw dropped. I never knew Ari had it in him. One hint: the walls are covered in what looks like white paper. It’s one poor set piece after another but in a strange mind-numbing way, it works.

At 77 minutes LAS VEGAS BLOODBATH is pretty short. I guess the director wasn’t that much of a sadist. (Unfortunately I think it’s an edited version because I saw a scene somewhere on the internet which Ari shoots some guy’s fingers off and that wasn’t in my copy. Honestly, though, if this movie was any longer…. Let’s just not think about it.)

In closing, I’m sort of defending LAS VEGAS BLOODBATH but not for the same reasons why I defend movies like HALLOWEEN 3 and THE KARATE KID PART 3. This movie is just so uneven and contains scenes that are pretty surprising that it’s worth a look. The 20+ minute baby shower scene is an exercise in endurance. Sometimes I wonder if the director did it on purpose… to weed out the weak minds that would shut the movie off at that point. (If you could sit through THIS SHIT, then you can sit through ANYTHING). If so, it’s a sick kind of genius. Okay, not really but I’d have to respect his sadism.

LAS VEGAS BLOODBATH is a badly made movie even for one shot on video. Just compare it to the pretty well-made SOV flick VIDEO VIOLENCE to see what I’m talking about.

Should you see this movie? Yeah, probably. You should probably get a root canal, too.

Does it Suck? BATTLEFIELD EARTH (Krall's Answer)

2010-05-05T13:31:00.000-07:00

What if I asked you to watch BATTLEFIELD EARTH? Would you do it? No, of course not. Why? Because you'd know I was joking. Well, guess what?

Kevin Shamel didn't know Garrett Cook was joking and because of that, Kevin actually spent 118 minutes of his life watching this piece of shit.

Hey, Kevin, guess what? Garrett Cook is dressed up at Ashton Kutcher and is going to run into your room any minute. Wait for it……waaaaait for it……

Does It Suck- Guest Author Kevin Shamel on Battlefield Earth

2010-05-05T10:54:00.001-07:00

Alien Travoltalogues or, How to Wreck Real Pulp Fiction or, I Still Like Battlefield Earth, Even Though I Can’t Tell You Why

Let’s take a look at L. Ron Hubbard. Now pulp fiction. Now L. Ron Hubbard. Pulp. L. Ron. Pulp. L. Ron. Pulp. L. Ron. Scientology.

Oops. How did THAT get in there?

That is exactly the only real problem with the movie, Battlefield Earth. Well, that and the platform boots and dreadlocks. And big rubbery werewolf hands. And man-animals flying jet fighters so damned well after no real training. All right. Mostly, it’s the Travoltalogues that really do it. Which brings us back to pulp fiction.

Now, I’m okay with Travolta. He was funny in Welcome Back Kotter. There’s these parts on the soundtrack to Pulp Fiction where he talks about French Big Macs that tells me that some good music is coming up. I like that.

I didn’t really like how he took over Battlefield Earth. This movie is constantly being called the worst movie ever. People blame L. Ron Hubbard. People blame the poor guy who wrote the screenplay. People even blame Scientology. I say blame Travolta. I especially say that since I just read an article by the guy who wrote the screenplay, J.D. Shapiro, and that’s what he says to do. Screenwriter Apologizes

The story of Battlefield Earth is pretty cool. I read it when I was a teenager. It’s about a typical young dude a thousand years from now named Jonnie Goodboy Tyler (but in the movie he’s just Jonnie and he’s somehow far less important than the alien played by Travolta). His tribe of barely surviving humans live in the mountains, barely surviving. Our hero lives near enough to the evil jerks who conquered the Earth called the Psychlos and when he goes adventuring, he’s captured by them.

The aliens came generations before, and most humans are dead. Most of the planet is abandoned. All cities have been in ruin for a thousand years. The Psychlos have a big dome encasing Denver pumped full of their atmosphere so as to remain comfy while their human slaves build them a nice place to live. The Psychlos are there to mine gold and other riches. But they can’t send radioactive stuff to their planet, which is in a different universe, and therefore has different elements. Their air reacts violently with radioactive materials.

Jonnie ends up being a personal slave of one wicked alien named Terl (played generously by Travolta), learns all about Psychlos and other aliens and then he manipulates the evil jerk into helping him learn how to destroy the Psychlos and free the humans. The book is pure entertainment. With some stuff about how psychiatry is stupid, because it was written by L. Ron Hubbard. But it’s a great story of the old pulp science fiction style, and the movie could have stayed in that set and really, really rocked.

It did not, of course. It went with slow motion running and shooting, dreadlocks, bad teeth, and gimmicky camera angles.

As it is, knowing the whole story, I still like the movie.

It’s big budget. It’s got decent looking spacecraft, the planet Psychlo looks cool floating all purply in space. The weapons and the FX surrounding them are rad. The scenery is almost pretty realistic sometimes.

The platform boots suck. But the aliens are supposed to be really tall, so I forgave that. It was harder to forgive the big rubbery werewolf hands, but when Travolta’s hairy fingers weren’t wobbling around while he gave some speech about nothing in grandiose, fake alien drunkenness, I could almost forget they were gloves. Travolta’s wife’s alien head was a bit rubbery looking, too. Thankfully, her wolf hands were normal sized. And gloved.

The movie was pretty silly as far as time passage and its effects on things. The fact that books weren’t dust after a thousand years, and that machines like flight simulators worked and there was electricity everywhere the plotting humans went (in the week they had to prepare to take over Denver from their alien overlords and destroy an entire planet) was sorta silly. In the book, there was much more to do to get into Fort Knox than open a door. And it was pretty hard getting planes working again, if I recall.

I’m supposed to be defending this movie, I know. It’s a difficult. It’s probably a bit like trying to defend Scientology to a Protestant who’s seen a documentary about it produced by a curious Mormon who went undercover for a billion years with the SeaOrg. I like the movie, despite knowing there’s more to it than it even says.

Okay. So if you can get past the ridiculousness of the Travoltalogues, the skipping-over of important details for those diatribes, the silliness of savages flying around F-15s after a few days in an ancient flight simulator, and the fact that the movie ends (pretty ridiculously) long before the book ended, and only hinted at what the book went on to say, it’s a pretty fun movie to watch by yourself late at night eating a stash of candy and drinking rootbeer while you’re really, really stoned.

Damn. Why do I like this movie?

Read the book.- Kevin Shamel

Does it Suck: Battlefield Earth

2010-05-05T10:18:00.001-07:00

What can I say about Karl Freund's Mad Love? First of all, I can say that it's one of my favorite horror films, one of ten or so movies that I would call perfect horror films. When I saw Mad Love, it was a revelation of the power and beauty of a genre and a vision of raw potential. I was spellbound, surprised and at times, frightened, which does not happen all that often, particularly when watching vintage horror. While I love it, there are usually not things present that actually scare me. I watch vintage horror to journey into a dark, smoky, mysterious place, to sort of walk among the dead. The necropolis is not usually somewhere I go to be frightened, but at times I'm surprised and Mad Love was one of those times.

Mad Love begins at a Grand Guignol play, like vintage horror itself, it's stagey, it's histrionic and for a contemporary viewer it's tame, but there's something truly unsavory about this play. It elicits a little chill. Until you see Peter Lorre's Doctor Gogol watching the show, handkerchief in hand. He's bald, he's perverse and he's obsessed with the movie's heroine, the play's lead actress, Yvonne (portrayed by Frances Drake). The chill gets bigger. There aren't many actors that do "just plain wrong" like Peter Lorre and in Mad Love, he's at the top of his game. And here, I will make an "Eaten Alive is better than TCM in some ways" style declaration of gleeful horror geek blasphemy: he's better in Mad Love than he is in M. He is obsessed with Yvonne, maddened that she's leaving the show to get married and is not afraid of invading her personal and sexual space. The only person that finds him creepier than she does is the viewer. He even goes so far as to purchase a wax statue of her for company.

A desperate tortured, sexually obsessed lunatic who believes that the world owes him for healing people, Gogol is a deep and complex villain, repulsive and sympathetic all at once. When Yvonne's husband, pianist Stephen Orlac (played with a surprising lack of over-the-top bluster by Colin Clive) has his hands mangled in a train crash, Yvonne has to go to her obsessed fan for help, appealing to the kindness in his nature and his love for her. The tortured doctor agrees, giving Stephen the hands of an executed criminal, which he exploits later. I don't want to spoil the plot of this rollercoaster of the macabre too much, but it turns into a story about perverse creativity. Doctor Gogol turns from sexual deviant to mad artgod, the creator of a monster, the animator in his twisted mind of Yvonne's statue with whom he falls in love. The film reflects on the power of horror, of art and of the twisted imagination in a nightmarish climax. Mad Love is brilliant. I recommend it to everyone.

Battlefield Earth, however, fucking blows. I recommend it to nobody. Martiniloving former Sweathog and author of Rotten Little Animals Kevin Shamel likes Battlefield Earth. Buy his books so he will get more money, with which he can buy DVDs of good movies. Kevin Shamel: Battlefield Earth. Does it suck?

Scythes, Shotguns, Whores, and Crocodiles: The Face of Insanity in Tobe Hooper’s EATEN ALIVE

2010-05-03T03:10:00.000-07:00

Garrett's and Leza's eloquent tributes to EATEN ALIVE are difficult acts to follow so please try to tolerate my scattershot appreciation for this film.

Okay, you Texas Chainsaw fanboy freaks, listen up and prepare to put me on your “to-be-chainsawed” list.

In many ways, EATEN ALIVE is better than TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE.

Holy shit. Did I really just say that?

Yeah, I did.

I’m not downplaying the influence of TCM or saying it’s not a great film. It is. But from an entertainment point of view, EATEN ALIVE delivers more bang for your buck, more mentally unstable creepiness, and more layers of perversity.

What TCM has going for it was its grittiness. It has a raw quality that makes you feel as if you might be watching real footage. EATEN ALIVE is similar yet it goes to the next level, reaching an almost supernatural quality of claustrophobic insanity until the movie ends and you are left in a state of curdled shock. There are no happy endings in Tobe Hooper’s world.

It starts off with a shot of the full moon accompanied by the opening credits and synth music that sounds like it was performed by lazy (but demented) circus monkeys. And just in case you’re wondering: Yes, there is a monkey in this film.

The star of this flick is Neville Brand, a veteran television actor, plays the role of whore-hating Judd who runs the Starlight Hotel. He throws himself into this role until you think he’s just about to burst. The movie wouldn’t have worked without him and thanks to Hooper’s direction, we have a film that’s pretty close to being a 70s masterpiece of horror.

We get a pretty close glimpse into Judd’s insanity, better than most horror movies give us. Brand’s scenes are so intense that it makes me think that it had originally been intended as a character study. Then maybe Hooper said, “Fuck it, let’s add a crocodile,” and chaos ensued.

Another star of this movie is Robert Englund (best known for his performance in 1975’s SLASHED DREAMS) in the role of Buck. He makes famous the line, “My name’s Buck….etc” which was stolen, uh, I mean, borrowed by Quentin Tarantino in Kill Bill. Anyway, it’s Englund at his finest.

The character of Miss Hattie is unintentionally creepy, dressed like some sort of mummified blackjack dealer. Just imagine one of those creepy old ladies who always want to give you some hard candy out of her purse and end up handing you one that was wrapped up in a used tissue. That’s the kind of chill she sends down my spine. I also thought it would turn out that she was a man in drag by the end of the movie. Much to my confusion, that wasn’t the case.

Anyway.

What holds EATEN ALIVE back from being a masterpiece are some of the interior scenes. A few of them (especially those in the whorehouse and police station) just look too cheap even for a low budget Hooper movie.

The best scenes are those outside Judd’s dilapidated hotel. The crazed discordant lighting and the overabundance of fog seem to be taken from a Mario Bava movie albeit one that was filmed on the cheap. When combined with the fucked-up synth soundtrack, things get unnerving to say the least especially when Judd’s chasing people with a giant scythe or feeding them to his crocodile.

I truly believe that this film does not get the appreciation it deserves and has been overshadowed by TCM which, though a great movie, lacks the vision of EATEN ALIVE.

Judd is a much more intriguing character than any of the clan from the first TCM. His insanity is real and three-dimensional. Even though we don’t necessarily relate to him, we do feel a level of sympathy. People might say that this detracts from Judd’s ability to scare us but that’s not the case. It allows us to feel tension on both ends. We want to tell the hopeless victims to get the hell out of the Starlight Hotel but we are also directing our concern to Judd until we find ourselves quietly talking to the television, “Come on, Judd, don’t do it. Don’t do it, this time, man, come on! You can control yourself!”

Oh and yeah, Judd feeds people to his pet crocodile. That’s probably what people remember most about this movie. I’m not going to lie to you: the crocodile looks pretty fake but come on, you have to respect Hooper’s integrity. He wanted do include a man-eating crocodile and by God he did it. He’d revisit similar themes in a movie he made more than 20 years later, 2000’s CROCODILE, a straight-to-video disappointment.

Though it lacks the realism of TCM, this movie is perfect example of horror that can be both creepy and fun. Sure, it’s as sloppy as a whorehouse floor but therein lies its charm and if you can’t appreciate that, well, then you should be fed to a horny crocodile.

Eaten Alive-Tobe Hooper's Twisted Fable of Savagery-Leza

2010-05-02T22:46:00.000-07:00

A little girl risks being murdered by a man with a scythe and eaten by a crocodile just because she runs after her little fluffy white dog, Snoopy, who was just a tad too inquisitive for his own good.
A teenage runaway with a mass of golden curls that halo her young face, her soft lips, her frightened big blue eyes gets turned out into the wilderness of a backwoods little southern town, for not being sexually compliant.

This isn't Grimm's fairy tales. We are not in Russia or Transylvania. This is the American South, not so long ago.

A deranged war veteran runs a motel, and exists primarily in his own little corner of hell, with his monkey(who dies about 15 minutes into the movie) and his crocodile who ate his leg and he says will never die, is older than anything, and came all the way from Africa.

This town has much to offer. It's got a brothel called Miss Hattie's, run by Miss Hattie(Carolyn Jones aka. Morticia from tv's The Addams Family) the Starlight Motel, run by Judd, the vet with the crocodile who talks to himself and can't seem to go without killing someone for more than five minutes(especially them purty sinful girls), then there's the dive bar where everyone hangs out, and there's the perfunctory police station.

This is the world you enter when you watch Tobe Hooper's unsung masterpiece of mayhem and madness. It is a labyrinth where the center is a devouring man-eating crocodile. There is no safe haven. The most pleasant place, all things considered, is probably the whorehouse.
This perpetual hellscape is lit garishly and vibrantly in various shades of red, blue and green. At no moment does it seem like things have gone back to reality. The atmosphere is unhinged, claustrophobic, savage and primal throughout. Background noise is composed of a jungle sound wall of bestial grunts and calls, interspersed with unsettling dislocation at seemingly random junctures. Mournful country songs fill the air.

After a chilling and haunting shot of a very full moon, the film shifts to a closeup of a metallic sun on the silver belt buckle being unsnapped by the infamous Buck(Robert Englund). The first word you hear are "Name's Buck and I'm rarin' to fuck!", belted out eagerly. Next you see the frightened recipient of these words and advances. She looks lost, terrified and helpless. She wants to just get it over with. He assures her, he's in no rush, he's paid for a full hour. He wants to try something a little different and tells her to get on her knees. Once she realizes what he wants she struggles and begs him not to. He continues to try to force himself upon her, till her frantic screams attract the attention of the madam. Miss Hattie is really annoyed. Not with Buck(who is her best client) but with the girl. She apologizes to Buck and offers his two of her best ladies for free. The girl, she berates for her ungratefulness for her charity and calls her a slut because she won't work. She turns her away in utter disgust. This sets the moral precedent for the rest of the film.

Any feeling of initial relief you might feel for this girl, who has narrowly escaped a life of degradation and prostitution, is washed away the minute she sets out on her way to the Starlight Motel. She wades through what looks like a rampant jungle and, as she comes upon the brokendown sign to the Starlight Motel, you begin to see there is really no way out of this shithole town. She barely lasts five minutes in Judd's company. Once he realizes where she's coming from, his desires become inflamed, which in turn, sparks his rage, and she's dead and fed to the crocodile before you know it.

The next guests are dysfunctional family. A desperate mother(Marilyn Burns aka. survivor of TCM and world champion screamer) trying to keep them all together, a husband who seems stoned on something and is ranting nonsense and barking like a dog as their little girl cries her eyes out all night about her dog who gets eaten by the crocodile that lives in the swamp surrounding the motel almost the moment they arrive. Mother and daughter are both in agony and fighting for their life throughout most of the film. Mother is trying to break free, stripped down to her white underwear and tied to her bed, mouth taped shut with duct tape, and her daughter is crawling around under the motel, trying to hide from Judd and eventually the crocodile.

Next comes the sister of the teenage runaway, with her father. Being the only characters who seem at all normal, they seem strange and out of place. Almost like cardboard cutouts among a demented band of cirque de soleil rejects. Judd is truly nervous for the first time, and, reminiscent of Norman Bates being confronted by Marion's boyfriend, awkwardly avoids too much verbal exchange and eye contact with the distraught father of the young woman he's just murdered and fed to his croc after fondling.

Father and daughter resolve to go to the police station, which also seems rather absurd and useless in this town. Sure enough, you find the police chief is chummy with Miss Hattie, and, even though he's annoyed by the trouble Buck stirs up around him, treats him more like a drunken buddy than a threat to anyone's safety.

You feel like you are literally underground in this world of perpetual night and artificial light. It reminds me more of The Funhouse than TCM in its atmosphere, which is colorful, oddly humorous, permeated by the feelings that you have stepped onto the wrong side of the tracks. You have entered the realm of the freaks, the social regects, the perverts and the madmen. They all coexist in a sort of harmony that you will never understand. A brotherhood of depravity. They survive like animals, knowing that in this world, you either eat or you will be eaten alive no matter how pretty, innocent, pure, or noble you might be.

Cult Classic: Garrett Cook on Tobe Hooper's Eaten Alive

2010-05-02T20:46:00.000-07:00

So last night I watched the reprehensible Vacancy, a film that I think is aptly named because of its aweinspiring emptiness. All I could think while watching Vacancy, as I thought while watching Slashed Dreams, as I thought while watching Leza watch House of Wax was how much better Hooper's Eaten Alive is. In certain ways, I think it might even be better than Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Funhouse. It's not that it's particularly coherent in its plot or structure or it's full of amazing performances or it wears its ideas on its sleeve, in fact it's kind of the opposite. Eaten Alive is primordial cinematic ooze, a cauldron of unrefined genius that is ugly and naturalistic in a way that few things are.

Eaten Alive begins with Robert Englund, in a superbly creepy and funny turn as Buck, a redneck lothario who is "raring to fuck" about to anally punish a poor runaway prostitute. She refuses, gets kicked out and has to stay the night at the Starlight Hotel, a rundown pit of a place run by the clearly insane Judd, a deranged veteran who keeps a crocodile as a pet. Judd recognizes her as a prostitute for the nearby brothel and kills her, feeding her to the crocodile. Funny that it's not the life of sin that leads to her getting killed, but her decision NOT to lead a life of sin. It's all at once an homage to Psycho's famous reversal of protagonists and a harsh lesson about life in Tobe Hooper's America.

This sets the tone for the movie. It reminds us that we do not live in a world of heroes and villains but in one that simultaneously more complex and simpler, more nuanced and more elemental. In the world of Eaten Alive, you see things that you're not supposed to see when you sit down to watch a movie. You aren't supposed to see a woman punished for leaving a life of prostitution (hell, it seems like she's punished for not wanting anal, ladies take note) you're not supposed to see an adorable dog eaten by a crocodile, a sheriff being generally civil to a madam played by a beloved television icon (Carolyn Jones) or the same sheriff letting Robert Englund buy drinks for an underage girl and take her out of the bar obviously for sex, you're not supposed to see the terminally ill father of this poor runaway killed with a scythe. From watching Eaten Alive, you almost think you're simply not supposed to see Eaten Alive.

Eaten Alive says things about America that even the most jaded of us don't want to hear. Basically, Eaten Alive says that America is a place where whorehouses struggle with death cults and ethics vanish if we travel just a few miles out of our way. Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a shocking movie but at its heart, it's still a traditional Red Ridinghood narrative. Eaten Alive is crueler than that. The character we spend most of our time with in Eaten Alive exists in a cocoon of traditionalism and backwardness, further even than the Sawyer family of the TCM films. The Sawyers are mourning a lost way of life and trying to eat. Judd has taken the primitivism further. The crocodile is not a pet but a god, the excuse for every bad thing he does, a thing to worship to fear and to feed, to harvest souls for. The leap between simple cannibalism and creation of a redneck death god is a pretty big one and a pretty shocking one.

Quite a statement to make about the American landscape. Our jingoism, our fears, our inability to communicate our feelings and our attachment to our violent past render us stunted and backward, as the Tao Te Ching would say "companions of death". Our desire to make life simple can make life disgusting and brutal, something we see in all the best redneck horror, but best pointed out in the character of Judd, a pathetic loser with a religious dedication to the scaly abomination that took his leg, because it's powerful because it's old, enduring, dependable and able to show the interlopers what's what.

Typically in the arts, when we're presented with a bad example, we're presented with a good one, every Goofus does after all have a Gallant. Is it the sheriff with his politeness and "go with the flow" attitude? Is it the runaway's father who gets killed? Is it Marilyn Burns who is tied to the bed for most of the movie? The crying little girl who crawls under the place to escape the crocodile? Who do we turn to? In Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Hooper seems to suggest that fortitude is the only virtue we can count on and need to live by. In Eaten Alive, he might be saying the same thing, that the most we can hope for is to overcome life's shit and understand we live in a predatory nation that would have no problem chomping us up like so many adorable dogs. There are no heroes in the face of the surrogate reaper, only brave victims.

To me, great horror is about revealing to people something that hurts them to the very core. Eaten Alive does that, with its views on America, human nature and life. It makes me stop and wonder what I can do to prove the person who made these statements wrong and how we can make a world where these things aren't true and IF we can make a world where these things aren't true. For this reason, Eaten Alive is ugly, scary and brilliant, genuinely unsettling. I love it and would recommend it to anybody seeking to explore the redneck horror genre or to expose the American South as the perverted brothel and swamprat death cauldron that it is. Also, maybe it will make your significant other think twice about anal sex. I hope someday Eaten Alive is considered the equal to TCM because it's a whole lot scarier and a lot less simple, which is an important thing for it to be, since we sure as hell don't want to be like Judd.

House of Wax ,2005 Remake- Does not Suck

2010-04-28T16:37:00.000-07:00

I gotta be honest. I did not expect to like House of Wax when I first saw it. The only reason I rented it was because of the prospect of seeing Paris Hilton get maimed. If not truly chilling, at least I could get a good laugh out of it and enjoy some run-of-the-mill teen exploitation. I was beyond surprised by the intensely visceral visual quality, the fabulous and truly eerie wax sets and the tragic backstory that parallels the love-hate relationship between twins Carly and Nick, who are on a trip with their friends to go to a sports game.

This film is truly delicious camp gold. It works because even though many aspects are part of a familiar formula, it is beautifully shot and it is executed with true emotional sincerity. The interactions between the group of friends are, for the most part, fairly genuine. Even Paris Hilton, who is numb and stiff as a board, seems to have somewhat of a pulse. She is, at least, willing to contribute to gags at her own expense and milk her less than sterling reputation. Every time you see her through Dalton's digital camcorder(especially while making out in neon green nightvision) you can't help thinking about the porn tapes. She even has a pseudo strip scene to a terrible rap song, while her boyfriend, Blake, gets revved up to get busy with her. I think this is my favourite scene with her, aside from her death scene which is also priceless and hilarious. I've gotta say, she's far more believable as a corpse than live person.

I would say that the Dark Castle House of Wax is an engaging remake. I know there's no Lionel Atwill, no Vincent Price (one of the evil twin's names is Vincent, though) and regrettably, instead of the disarmingly beautiful and alluring Fay Wray, we've got "If it looks like a ho, acts like a ho" Paris Hilton, queen of amateur porn and reality tv. She's no scream queen, to be sure, but nevertheless, she brings a certain level of hyperreality to this film by virtue of being a reality star celebrity. Suddenly, when you see her through the digital camcorder lense, it is metacinematic and oddly surreal. Paris is someone we all feel we know to a certain degree, even if we don't. It's the weird dichotomy of someone who seems so fake and false and yet allows an audience a voyeuristic intimacy that you can only get with reality and amateur porn stars. She's disgustingly close, yet forever intangible (mostly due to her lack of substance)

In the tradition of its predecessors, wax here, is a symbolic substance, both equating uncontrollable emotions and its artificial means of containment. Solid wax is the veneer that coats decomposing bodies and rotting flesh, pain and shattered dreams. Melting wax is passion taking hold of the senses. Wax is mudlike, fleshlike, it glows and yet it is opaque. Wax is the substance that most reselmbles the soft glow and pliability of human skin. And just so you know, all the wax in this film is real. It is incredible to see it being molded over still living bodies and at various stages of solidity. It drips, it bends, it cracks, all the textures run into eachother in the great finale.

This whole movie is about veneers and the nature of what we see. The House of Wax is really made entirely of wax. The wax in the film is all real. The consentual reality of story anf actors is a willing illusion we engage in as viewers. The wax people in the town look real and actually are real dead people(live actors) encased in wax. Wax figures have the uncanny quality of not really looking dead or alive.

In the original 1933 Mistery of the wax Museum, there is a very disturbing and erotic scene, far ahead of its time, with Fay Wray, bound, on her back, being showered with hot wax, while she screams and strugles to no avail. It is impossible for one not to think, in this context, that the hot dripping, spraying wax does not resemble another white substance often seen sprayed at women in certain types of 'films'. Much hotter, I've gotta say, than the Paris Hilton blow job or sex tape.

As a lead, Elisha Cuthbert is a very lively presence. She fights tooth and nail while being bound, maimed and even having her lips glued shut with superglue. She kicks ass and looks great doing it. The little town is definitelly very creepy and abandoned looking. It is like a mosoleum with electricity. Never mind that a house made entirely of wax could probably not survive in the sun or perpetually lit candles within, it looks freakin awesome, especially at the bottom level where there are faces coming out of the walls and it seems like something out of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but in wax.

I had alot of fun with this movie. It is genuinely creepy, it moves along at a good pace, it takes its time to build atmosphere, so that by the time all the shit starts going down you are definitely weirded out and geared up for the mayham. I cannot believe some of the trully disgusting images of decayed corpses at various stages and once again, the wax effects, which are beautiful, cinematic, trippy and terrifying. It's definitelly an experience worth having.

I can't believe I'm about to say this, but...

2010-04-28T09:58:00.000-07:00

...Paris Hilton is one of the things that makes this film (yes, I called a movie a film in that snobby esoteric way) great cheese. And, it's one of the reasons I adore it. All you haters can suck it! House of Wax 2005 is better than the original classic.

"Oh no he didn't!" you might be saying.

Oh yes, I did.

Sorry I'm talking like this, but anytime I think about something featuring a performance by Paris Hilton my IQ drops. Whatev.

But there in lies the genius of this film. If you go into a horror film with your brain full, you're going to end up sorely disappointed. You just have to check your expectations at the door. You have to suspend disbelief. If you do that, you open up your mind to what's genuinely good, bad, and so bad it's good within the horror genre. The casting of Paris Hilton is both genius and wryly funny, and that's just one element that House of Wax '05 has going for it. People decry the film for featuring the heiress. She's not that bad of an actress (I mean, she faked it on that video, right?) and even if she isn't she's the perfect mold for the horror movie - there's always the dumb blonde nympho you just know is going to get slaughtered. And who better to slaughter than Paris Hilton? (Okay, Perez Hilton would have worked, too). But from minute one, you're awaiting that to happen...as it does in every horror film. It's perfection. You know that caricature character in every horror film. You know she's going to bite it, just like you know the black guy's going to die-off first.

But besides that little slice, there's so much more cooking here. For example, the cast is a quality horror film cast. Elisha Cuthbert is a nice diversion from the Tara Reid-wannabes that were clogging the horror flicks of this time. And yes, the film is nowhere near as classy as the original. It's different, decidedly eerier and creepier - it's no easy task to make a town with no pay phones spooky in this age of cell phones...but they do it. I'm sorry to our redneck readers, but rednecks are creepy as fuck. I know that "Deliverence" does not apply to the redneck or hillbilly nation as a whole, but small, Southern-fired towns scare the piss out of me.

Regardless of what you think - and that's the problem - House of Wax exists as high-grade camp, but still offers a few scares and paranoia. But let's not forget...Paris Hilton fucking bites it. And really, wouldn't that improve every horror film?

Does It Suck: House of Wax (2005)

2010-04-28T08:35:00.000-07:00

After suffering through Slashed Dreams, I was glad to get back to work on my passion project, the wax museum I run with old friends Vincent Price and Lionel Atwill. This wax museum was a place of tolerance and goodness, one where people were welcome regardless of how strange, how perverted or who sad they might have seemed to the outside world. There was free ice cream for the children and an intricately made wax giant monster zoo with actual size wax replicas of King Kong and other horror fauna. We were raising money to fight a form cancer that only occurred in particularly adorable puppies. Yes, the wax museum was a place of goodness and light where vintage horror appreciation would pave the way for a better future. Or so we thought.

Yesterday, Leza came in holding a chihuahua. Jordan was standing beside her with a gas can and next to them was guest contributor, Eric Mays author of Naked Metamorphosis and creator of the Authors Speak interview series.

"I come from the boss lady," Leza said.

This made no sense to me.

"What the fuck are you talking about? Did you buy expired box wine again?"

Lionel entered, head hanging. He was wearing his "Wax Sculptoff to End Domestic Violence" t-shirt.

"Garrett, I'm sorry," he said, "Vincent and I..."

Lionel was interrupted by the arrival of an excited Vincent.

"Hey guys! I just realized that we could put inner city gang members to work sculpting wax figures and it would increase their self esteem!" He turned white as a sheet when he saw the three visitors. "Uh oh."

I glared at my partners.

"What is this about, guys?"

Lionel sighed.

"Well, you remember how last week I lent all my money to John Barrymore?"

"Yeah, and?"

Vincent placed a hand on my shoulder.

"I'm sorry, Garrett, but a wax museum has overhead, particularly one with a snow leopard AIDS prevention lab."

"We sold our shares to Paris Hilton," said Lionel. He was starting to cry.

"But I thought we were turning a profit!"

"We are," said Lionel, face in hands, "but Paris Hilton doesn't understand math."

"Yeah," said Eric Mays, "so that's why we're burning your pretty little wax museum to the ground!"

Jordan highfived him. It was the evilest high five I had ever seen.

"Leza, you've got to stop this!" I begged her.

"I didn't like the original," she replied, "and the Vincent Price one couldn't be that great."

The thugs dumped out the gas can, laughing on their way out and dropping a lit match. My wax museum, my partners and the hope for HIV positive snow leopards went up in flames. I was hideously scarred, forced to wear a wax impression of my face, but I was live and bound and determined to get Paris Hilton for what she had done to me and vintage horror.

House of Wax (2005) is a travesty. Turning a turn of the century gothic classic into another brand x piece of redneck horror is sickening. It's akin to making The Man Who Laughs into a straight-to-video American Pie sequel. The plot makes barely any sense, the notion of a wax town surviving the elements for so long confuses the fuck out of me, and oh yeah, Paris Hilton is involved. Does anything about this make it sound like an even remotely good idea? Will there be a Doctor X remake set at a naughty sorority house and starring Kim Kardashian in the Fay Wray role...well, that might be kind of sexy. Forget I said that. Paris fucking Hilton, playing a part originated for Fay Wray...it's gross. 2005 was a bad enough year for Fay Wray with charisma challenged Kidman clone Naomi Watts taking over her part, causing the infamous Watts Riots. Hilton believes she is the iconic sex symbol blondes of all time and stealing the spotlight from Fay Wray shows just how deeply set this delusion is.

Paris thinks this because she does something that this generation of filmmakers and filmgoers does often: she patronizes the past. "It occurred before me and I am awesome, so therefore it must be inferior". Filmmakers and some misguided horror fans think that because the pacing is slower and because the films are pre-gore vintage horror is impossible for this generation to relate to. Madness, perversity and a feeling of otherness are universal and films like Mystery of the Wax Museum, Phantom of the Opera, The Black Cat, The Raven and Doctor X are some of the finest vehicles for these themes. We of the 21st century are the ugly Americans of the space time continuum, thinking "our century right or wrong" and threatening the 1930s with beatings if they try to creep into our homogeneous historical neighborhood. Nonsensical assemblyline garbage like House of Wax hurt our ability to relate to and understand our cinematic past. Not to mention, letting Paris Hilton act. She doesn't even give a convincing blowjob.

So I ask you, Dollarbin Massacre contributors: House of Wax (2005), does it suck?

Slashed Dreams-Leave Your Brain at the Door

2010-04-25T19:35:00.000-07:00

James Polakof is the Leni Riefenstahl of hippie propaganda. His opus, Slashed Dreams (previously titled even more oddly: Sunburst. WTF!) is a chilling glimpse into an addled and twisted mind (probably damaged by years of negligent liquid acid consumption like the infamous and lovable (not really) Marlboro College Film Teacher and independent filmmaker Jay Craven).
Nothing could be more unsettling, and to top it all, an ancient and creepy Rudy Vallee, who is some kinda schitzophrenic candy fanatic is the only voice of forewarning to two guilless teens on their visionquest to the mountains.
What could be sadder, what could be worse...

...To be raped after you finally make love for the first time in your life (with your bestest friend ever, no less), to be told to just get over it by your absentminded hippie buddy(the tragically miscast Robert Englund) , who you thought was the hippest cat ever 'cause he left your lame-ass school to go live in the mountains in a wood cabin, as he offers you some fucking tea and bitches about his itchy leg(he had a run in with some poisoned oak, poor baby). Oh, fuck me gently with a chansaw! ( please do, it might relieve the boredom)
This movie is torture. It makes you want to cut yourself or step on baby bunnies just to relieve the gut wrenching sensation of your mind turning to goo.

I've had my suspicions about Garrett's sanity(suspicions, come on, who's leg am I trying to pull here), but Jordan Krall really seemed like a cool guy. When Garrett told me he wanted to see this movie next, I wondered to myself who had the biggest brain tumor of the two.
Garrett has been trying to get me to see this stupid movie ever since he gave up on making me watch The Manipulator(I'm probably gonna have to watch it now anyway, since we have this site, though, dammit!). He kept saying how cool it was that Robert Englund is this chill hippie guy who counsels this girl who gets raped. How it's so ironic and strange. He was like "It's like if I Spit on Your Grave was an after school special."

Not really sure what he meant by that, and not really caring, I refused to watch it repeatedly until Jordan Krall decided it might be neat to review this shit pile of a movie. Thanks Jordan. I owe ya one.

If you like lengthy hiking montages to ear bleeding muzak and no plot you'll love this movie. If you think Freddy Krueger is lame, you'll love this movie. If you like fake hippie dialogue, you'll love it too. If you think that fucking someone you love will inevitably lead to rape, you'll love this movie. The list of uninteresting features is long, and I could go on, but I am already bored about being bored about this movie. So I will be brief and brutally honest.

Leza's Official Summary of Slashed Dreams:

Butterface girl frolics naked in lake (don't get too excited, you can't see shit even though it's broad daylight and I'm pretty sure she actually is naked), makes flaccid love to okay-looking guy, gets briefly and halfheartedly raped and slapped around by an ornery-looking, self-obsessed chatterbox, gets some comfrey and pep talk from an absentminded hippie douche and then some amateurish ax weilding transpires.

I want my fucking 74 minutes back! I swear to God, I am not watching this freakin movie again. Even if Jordan Krall threatens me at knifepoint while shoving licorice nips down my throat!

The Bear Necessities

2010-04-25T16:37:00.000-07:00

"Wow," I thought at Best Buy two years ago,"Chilling Classics has A Bucket of Blood, Driller Killer and Bad Taste. Some other cool shit too, it seems."
"I hope this doesn't have as many shitty things on it as Drive-in Classics," said Leza in the check-out line.
"There's a lot of good stuff on Drive-in Classics."
"I guess you're right," said Leza.
When we got home, I eagerly opened up the new box of weirdass cinematic treasures. Over time I would find about twenty six of these to be kinda watchable. At that moment, however, Slashed Dreams caught my eye.
"Hey, there's a rape revenge thing with Robert Englund," I said.
"That sounds really unplesaant," said Leza. So we watched Bad Taste instead. But of course, the next time I was home alone, I had to check out Slashed Dreams. I thought perhaps my brain would come oozing out of my ears. What the hell? Preppy college students going to visit their hippy friend? This is the film? I was pretty pissed off. I got over my disappointment to try and show it to Leza. We didn't watch it. Not until a couple weeks ago. I laughed my ass off, Leza fell asleep. But not before telling me she hated me for this.
When I told Leza that Jordan had suggested Slashed Dreams, she was a little bit irate, but, I argued, it was certainly strange and offputting and we shouldn't just review movies that we think are super cool. And this was as far from a movie we thought was supercool as we could get. But then, I noticed something. When the protagonists of the film prepare to visit their friend on the mountain, they go to a general store. At the general store, they encounter Francoamerican singing sensation Rudy Vallee. Suspicious, sketchy, eager to sell them a knife or make them eat gross candy...this man was awfully sketchy in that Lynchian kind of way in which a person is horrifying that doesn't need to be horrifying. He acts like the gatekeeper of a whole new realm of menace, the man who warns them a la Crazy Ralph from Friday the 13th, that they are about to leave their whitebread world and enter a realm of terror. They should have bought that knife. They should have taken more candy. They should have followed the rules.
. A few minutes after the college kids start traveling up the mountain, the scariest thing in the film occurs. They are menaced by a bear. The bear seems innocent and cute, but at the same time, he wants to get in their way, to deprive them of their lifeforce. I had to wonder what this bear symbolized, until suddenly, it struck me, the bear was Rudy Vallee. And he had taken their snacks since they were not willing to take his or to stand up for themselves with the knife he offered to sell them. I thought perhaps this might be a bit critical of their bear protocol, so I had to consult my friend Bizarro author and bear expert Mykle Hansen, author of The Rampaging Fuckers of Everything on the Crazy Shitting Planet of the Vomit Atmosphere. I asked him five questions and here is how he responded:

1. If a bear wants your snacks, should you relinquish them or should you fight for them?

You should definitely fight for them if you are in a horror film. If you are in a
sensitive romantic date film, you should just hand over the snacks, allowing
your eyes to meet the bear's briefly, furtively, exchanging unspoken promises.
If you are in a film about being raped, you should close your eyes, bend over
and think of Werner Herzog.

2. What do you do if the bear doesn't like your snacks?

Sometimes bears are picky eaters. It helps to arrange the snacks in
an eye-pleasing manner, perhaps on a "Smøegma" bamboo-veneer serving
platter from Ikea, or, alternately, a log. Also, be aware that some
bears have food sensitivities. For instance, urban black bears
may prefer rotten food, whereas the polar bear only eats animals that
scream and thrash about when bitten. If the bear "turns up its nose" at your
snack offerings, try not to take it personally. You might consider
letting the bear rape you instead, as a way to reduce awkwardness.

3.What if the bear is actually singing sensation Rudy Vallee?

First, determine whether you are dealing with an immature
Rudy Vallee "cub" or with a full-grown adult. The former can
be discouraged with a sharp whack across the snout with a
tenor saxophone. The latter will not be discouraged by anything
smaller than a baritone.

4.Could Rudy Vallee play saxophone in bear form?

It is a widely-held misconception that bears cannot play the
saxophone. Circus animal trainers have in fact taught these clever,
versatile creatures a panoply of legitimate job skills including
woodwind and brass instruments, piano, tympani, unicycle,
swordfighting, balancing on a ball, dancing in a tutu, and raping
and dismembering a circus animal trainer.

5.Do you think Rudy Vallee controls his transformation like Apache Chief or a Viking berserker can? Or is it some kind of curse?

Excellent question! As you know, Rudy Vallee is a man of
many moods -- many of them documented in his breakthrough
1947 album "The Many Moods of Rudy Vallee." In fact,
moodiness was a cornerstone of Vallee's unique "crooning" style.
If one of Rudy's moods is a transmogrifying-into-a-rapist-bear
mood, or even a morphing-into-a-towering-robotic-saxophone-
and-humping-the-Pompidou-Center mood, can he be blamed?
Certain modern phrenologists define all "moods" to be mild forms
of mental illness, a disease to be cured by pills with names like
"Friendlax" or "Mediocra"; call me old fashioned, but I prefer to
be swept away in the moment. So I cried during the trailer for
the Karate Kid remake -- does that make me "sick" or
"dangerous" or a "lycanthropic sex-beast?" Sure, okay, I may
have raped one or two children afterwards, but it's not like I do
that every day. I may have "moods," but they don't control me.
Besides, all Girl Scouts are sluts.

But anyway, I guess the honest answer is "yes and no."

So, you see? Mykle Hansen, author of Eyeheart Everything cottons to this theory and we all know from the world of academia that if you can quote somebody on something it becomes empirically true. It's a moment of sheer terror as the heroes see the price for violating the covenant with the bear. They stumble blindly, traumatized by the loss of snacks and then there's some unpleasantness with a local frenchman and Robert Englund offers them tea. So, if you want to see dreams slashed by the talons of nature's vengeance, see Slashed Dreams.

Or don't, because I'm completely bullshitting you. This is the dullest movie ever made. Even if Rudy Vallee had shapeshifting powers, he wouldn't use them for this movie. The only thing you can get out of this is a halfassed rape scene, a couple halfassed nude scenes and a halfassed hatchet attack, which I didn't even think was possible. And then there's a halfassed epiphany after Robert Englund comforts the halfassed heroine of this halfassed movie over tea. I'm just lucky that I got over watching this movie with a cup of herbal tea and a little help from my friends.

Robert Englund, Rape Counselor (SLASHED DREAMS, 1975)

2010-04-25T15:42:00.000-07:00

Remember the trick that Tarantino used in DEATH PROOF where the original title of the movie is sloppily covered by a new one? Well, SLASHED DREAMS uses the same trick but in this case, it’s a sincere attempt to cash in on Robert Englund’s success 9 years later in A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. The distributors must have thought to themselves, “Hey… we have this movie sitting around and even though it has NOTHING to do with slashing or dreams, it does have Robert Englund. We can make some cash on this motherfucker.”

So they changed the title from SUNBURST (which is a weird fucking title to begin with) to SLASHED DREAMS and so cue the sappy 70s music complete with annoying female vocals.

And what we get is a movie that is pretty much the opposite of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET.

On the bright side, Peter Hooten is in it. Who’s Peter Hooten? He not only starred in the original THE INGLORIOUS BASTARDS but also the DR. STRANGE tv movie from 1978. He’s like a cross between Billy Zane and Thomas Ian Griffith (who played Terry Silver in the KARATE KID PART III) but with curly hair.

Having been made in that great year that is 1975, SLASHED DREAMS relies on heavy themes like “purpose” and “roots” and “nature” and the “meaning of life” …all that pseudo hippie crap. Robert Englund plays a guy who dropped out of college to live in a shack in the woods. For most of the movie we only hear ABOUT him. Having a look at the college he dropped out of (the University of Lame?), that was a wise decision. What an embarrassing time capsule of college life in the mid 70s.

I’ve watched this three times. Why? Well, the first time I watched it, it was out of pure curiosity. The second time was so I could pretend that it was really Billy Zane in the movie in Peter Hooten’s role. The third time I pretended that it was really Thomas Ian Griffith in the role and that he taught Cobra Kai karate to Robert Englund so he can fight bears.

Back to the “movie”… look out for the stoned hippie at the Shell Gas Station eighteen minutes into the film. It may seem like a unnecessary shot but in fact, the director is giving us something to think about. What that is, I’m not sure but I know it’s there. I can just FEEL it.

So what the hell is the movie about? Peter Hooten takes his girl into the woods to look for their friend played by Robert Englund so they could see how he’s doing because, like I said, he dropped out of college to, you know, “find himself” or some shit.

That’s it. That’s the fucking premise. On the way they meet a creepy general store own played by the famous Rudy Vallee who you might remember from the brilliant 1947 epic THE SINS OF HAROLD DIDDLEBOCK (Criterion Edition due out in 2011). Valle also not only runs the general store but he sings musical numbers to invisible guests in the back room. Oh, and he also acts like a really fucking creepy candyman who insists Peter Hooten and his girl have some licorice nips. “Let them melt gently in your mouth,” he says right before giving them a knife.

Oh, and how can I forget. There’s a bear. A real bear. I would’ve preferred a guy in a bear suit but hey, they tried. Nothing really happens so it’s sort of anticlimactic but I guess if you can rent a bear for a few hours, you might as well put it in.

Then there’s lots of frolicking, “nature is great” shit while terrible music plays on the soundtrack. It’s mind-numbing but for some reason, it makes me feel all sweet and safe inside as if my organs turned into cotton candy and licorice nips.

Not too long after all that frolicking come the obligatory backwoods hicks. Really, the hicks, this cinematic threat, are just two guys who look like they just stepped out of any 60s-70s biker flick.

Then there’s the rape. Yeah, those scumbags rape the chick. I know what you’re thinking: Where the fuck is Robert Englund? Shouldn’t he jump in to save the day with his knife-fingers? Nah. He’s not there yet.

We have to wait for nearly and hour and then finally: ROBERT ENGLUND!

And so, in his really shitty nature shack, Englund counsels the girl. The botton line to his counseling boiling down to, “You gotta let go of the itch, forget about the scratchin’”

He tries to get a girl to accept her rape as fate, learn from it, blah blah blah. At the time, I’m sure it made a whole lot of sense but in hindsight, considering everything Robert Englund has done and the trauma that getting raped would bring, it’s a true WTF moment.

In case you’re wondering, yes, there is a half-assed revenge scene. Peter Hooten goes after the hicks who raped his girl but with pretty pathetic results. It boils down to a mud-covered tie and the hicks get to walk away. Big deal, right?

A big mistake of the “filmmakers’ is not exploiting the backwoods concept. Where are the cannibals? Where are the psycho slashers? Shit, they dropped the ball on this one.

Anyway, I started writing this blog entry thinking I might just defend this as a good movie to watch while having some beers but now I’m actually getting angry at it. This is pure lazy film-making even for 1975. I would have liked if they kept the title as SUNBURST and then have the movie end in some sort of apocalyptic explosion, the sun burning the earth, leaving only Robert Englund and his shack to survive. And maybe the bear. Yeah, definitely the bear.

Cat in the Brain-It's Gonna Eat you Alive!

2010-04-23T21:07:00.000-07:00

Orgasm, death, dissolution!
Know you now why her eyes
so fearfully glaze, beholding
Terrors and infamies
Like Filthy flowers unfolding?
Laughter widowed of ease,
Agony barred from sadness,
Death defeated of peace,

Is she not madness?

-Aleister Crowley. Diary of a Drug Fiend

In this fragment, Crowley speaks of the horror and deadly hunger that plagues the heroin addict. Cat in the Brain is Lucio Fulci's tongue in cheek cry of tortured agony.
It is a film within a film and it is his nightmare come true. It's the moment Dr. Frankenstein realizes he's really fucked. It is Alice, trapped in Wonderland because she can't wake up from something she's no longer sure is just a dream of even her own dream anymore. It's the moment when you realize that the dead end job you are still at is your fucking life and you walk over to the open window, gaze down to the street, and wonder if you are high enough up to actually kill yourself and not just end up with broken limbs.
For any creator of horror art, it is a daily realization; these are not brain farts, meaningless dreams, paranoid absurdities, this is your brain and you are stuck with it for better or worse.
This film is about a man who is a director. The man and the filmmaker are enmeshed, but they are not one and the same by any means. This is about a man who likes his job, sure, but he wants to be able to leave it on the set, like any normal human being. He wants to be able to go and eat a nice juicy rare steak on his lunch break,without seeing human flesh being ground up and chopped when he looks at it!
This film poses an interesting problem for the audience to grapple with as best they can, as they endure a visual onslaught of sex, violence, gore and derangement, with little breathing room between chopped limbs, women being slapped and violated, eyes being gouged, and so on.
Are you sick for liking this?
The character, Fulci, is asking himself if his fevered imaginings are driving him mad and could he really be capable of murder and rape?
The horror here is the very need for horror. As a viewer and a director, the eye likes what it sees, the libido is aroused, the senses all stimulated at once. At the end of a good horror movie you feel satisfied. You have been filled, sated, for now... The Id hungers for more and it must be fed. But what if, like the plant in Little Shop of Horrors, will simply not be sated, what if it eats everything you love and destroys your life? Where do you draw the line?
Is this why girls always fall for assholes who hit them, cheat on them, or just plain ignore them, and why so many alcoholics and drug addicts just can't stop no matter how badly they want to, as they watch their life fall apart and everything and everyone they love being destroyed along with themselves? What's a little pain, a lifelong hangover, a broken home, for a pulse quickening experience that reminds you you are still alive.
The horror director is constantly interacting with these forces that pull us down that spinning vortex of exess, madness and monstrous hungers. Call it what you like; the Id, the Shadow, The Unconsciouss, the beast within, it is alive and well always. It can be fed or starved, coddled or disciplined, repressed or let loose, but it is here to stay.
I don't know every person's individual reason for enjoying horror films, I'm sure there are many and variant, but I know mine. I am convinced that if we ignore our inner beast, darkness, whatever, it is bound to come out and bite us in the ass sooner or later. It's just a matter of time, but you can't hide, because its inside you, it may seem alien, but don't be fooled. It is always watching, and when the moment is right, it will jump out and tear right through your brain. It is a scavanger as well as a hunter and it will find its nourishment where it can find it.
I love the horror medium for its courage to harness demons, to accept into its heart the chilling horror and raging savage beauty of existence, understanding they are not mutualy exclusive. There is a reason sex and violence go so great together. A cynic might say, well, it gets asses in the seats. There's no arguing that. Fulci tells his therapist, sure, he could make romances, but he wants to sell tickets! There's no denying it, and there's no point, really.
Horror can be therapeutic, cathartic, inspiring, even healing. If you sit through this movie till the end, you'll know what I mean.
The nightmares need a place to live, I'd rather it be the movie screen anyday.

Cult Classic: Garrett Cook on Lucio Fulci's Cat in the Brain

2010-04-23T19:33:00.000-07:00

Jordan Krall's Halloween 3 review brought to you by Brawny. And by Tom Atkins, who gave everyone in New Jersey $1,000 to think his moustache is cool.

Tonight, Leza and I are going to give you a double dose of Dollar Bin Massacre commentary. As if Jordan's rollicking defense of the ponderous Irish bashing glory that is Halloween 3 wasn't enough, we're also going to talk about a real movie. Well, maybe it's a real movie. Maybe it's the realest movie you'll ever see. A lot of you might think that honor goes to the brilliant Slashed Dreams, but we're saving that for Sunday. Mo, I'm talking about Lucio Fulci's Cat in the Brain. Amazon, IMDB and some film blogs weren't particularly kind to this movie and a lot of people don't know what to make of it. So, what else is new when it comes to a work of Italian horror? Even Argento and Bava's best movies are divisive. (With the probable exceptions of Suspiria and Maschera del Demonio.) This one has a lot going for it, though. It's not often when you see a movie juggle literal and figurative guts and brains so well.

When I first saw Dario Argento's Opera, I was floored. First of all, its title is one of the more interest double entendre I've seen. Not only does it describe the setting of the film, but it's subject.

"Umm...so, does Caddyshack," you say. If you say this I'm assuming you do not know that "opera" is Italian for work as well. If you did know that, I'm sorry for patronizing you like that. Also, you get a virtual cookie for being so perceptive. This double entendre reveals that it is not just about the opera, but about filmmaking and Argento' s body of work. The film examines voyeurism the nature of observing and the nature of directing and it does it very well. It's very good metahorror. When the killer says "I can take you any time I want" and you know it's Argento talking, it's an experience.

But in watching Opera, you get the feeling that Argento hasn't opened up all that much. He's given you some of his insights into gore, directing and perception but you don't walk away with quite enough in my opinion. Lucio Fulci' s Cat in the Brain takes things further. Just as Fulci goes further to test the boundaries of good tastes with the gore and sexuality in his movies, so too does he go further into himself in Cat in the Brain.

The protagonist of Cat in the Brain is Fulci himself, a director becoming unhinged as his works creeps into his day to day life. There's nothing exceptionally special about the plot of this movie. It's pretty derivative (though if you watch this movie, take note that it predates Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness). A mad psychologist uses hypnotism to make an artist think he's committing horrible crimes. Pretty sloppy. You can make an argument that it's basically Mad Love (without the love). The artist tormented by his work is a pretty old chestnut too.

So, what makes Cat in the Brain so special? It's the depth to which Fulci goes to show you his world and his neuroses. There is no respite from horror. From the sound of a man cutting logs outside his window to a plate of steak tartar, he is haunted, reminded that he has made a covenant with the dark side of human nature and it cannot be broken, no matter how much he longs to escape it. Cat in the Brain goes further than asking if art shapes how one perceives reality, it asks if the artist can truly be a part of rational reality or is his imagination inescapable?

The mad psychologist of the film, Professor Egon Schwarz (a name that calls to mind painter Egon Schiele and the dark side of the psyche, his last name, after all meaning black) seems to think so. He sees Fulci's hallucinations and the intrusion of his imagination as something to exploit. He intends to use Fulci's art as a means of exploring his own perversions through murder. Can we blame him? Aren't we exploring these very perversions watching this psycho psychologist butcher people or Fulci experience his gory delusions? He acts like a true B horror movie villain, not hearkening back to the traditional giallo killer, but further, to Christopher Lee, and god help him and us, Bela Lugosi. He looks straight at the camera, revealing his plans out loud, he fights with his shrew of a wife like Vincent Price in House on Haunted Hill. This vintage horror cliche reminds us that we are just watching a movie, even while it is very real for Fulci.

Fulci's hallucinations are things of stock footage, mannequin parts, fake blood, awkward acting and poorly made eyeballs to us and yet to the director this is real, this is serious, his work, his world and his heart, an important thing to think about when looking at any work of art but doubly so for Cat in the Brain. While some think that the creation of gore and horror is the work of a callous person, this film argues that it is a sensitivity to the dark and frightening nature of the world around an artist that draws him into horror.

Cat in the Brain is a film about how there is something in us that wants to claw its way out, and with its intelligent meditations on the genre and the people that work in it, it succeeds in letting the cat out of the bag about the inner workings of a bizarre cult genius.

If you do not like Halloween 3: Season of the Witch, you are probably a Communist.

2010-04-23T17:08:00.000-07:00

People will no doubt bitch about there being no Michael Myers in this movie. Boo-hoo, cry yourself a fucking river, you babies. Put on a diaper and shit yourself while sucking on your John Carpenter pacifier. So your boyfriend Michael Myers is not in the movie: GET OVER IT, geeks.

Anyway.

Tom Atkins, star of such excellent cinematic masterpieces as Night of the Creeps and The Fog, is at the height of his acting prowess here. He plays Dan Challis, an alcoholic doctor who is a hit with the ladies much to the dismay of his ex-wife played by the always-lovely Nancy Loomis.

What makes this film one of the most fucking brilliant of the 1980s is its bat-shit crazy concept. Think about it: An old Irish warlock stealing one of the stones from Stonehenge (with the help of his druid automatons) so he could chips pieces off it, put those pieces into Halloween masks, and sell them to children so their heads are crushed in a shower of blood and insects.

That’s brilliance incarnate, people.

Another spot of brilliance is that the previously mentioned druid automatons put on gloves before they murder as if the police could possibly get their fingerprints and trace them back to Santa Mira, California, home of Silver Shamrock Novelties.

And that brings me to Silver Shamrock Novelties. Is this not a social statement on how a powerful company can take over a town? (example: Walmart) Director Tommy Lee Wallace wasn’t just giving us an entertaining homage to Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He was warning us about the dangers of mass production, greedy children, and indulgent parents. The town of Santa Mira is an empty shell of a town thanks to the business but apparently they owe a lot to Silver Shamrock Novelties. You know, big businesses pump a lot of money into the economy so how dare you criticize the curfews and the surveillance cameras?

The “witch” (warlock?) of the movie is Conal Cochran. What makes him such a creepy villain is how fucking calm he is. He doesn’t run around like a maniac. In fact, his grandfatherly personality makes me wish he was MY grandfather. He’s a charming motherfucker. That’s another social statement: the smooth businessman infiltrating society in order to fulfill his own self-serving agenda. Evil? That guy? No way, he’s fucking sweet as pie. He might as well be Andy Griffith.

Another thing I like about this movie is the hospital. Tom Atkins is a doctor in one of the most empty hospitals I’ve seen outside of an actual abandoned hospital. That makes for a pretty spooky setting…maybe not spooky enough for my pal Garrett but, shit, Garrett ain’t afraid of nothing so how can he be the judge of that?

It’s an entertaining flick. Is the plot flawless? No, of course not. But considering the set-up, the plot pretty much bumps along the way you'd expect but with some slight twists and turns that make it pretty interesting. Which brings us to the ending.

The ending is brilliantly nihilistic. One of the best endings OF ALL TIME. It’s every parent’s worst nightmare: something seemingly harmless you buy your kid turns out to be the very thing that kills them. TERRIFYING.

So all your Halloween 3 haters need to take the silver spoon out of your asses and appreciate a somewhat campy but still creepy 80s horror movie.

Does It Suck: Halloween 3:Season of the Witch

2010-04-21T14:36:00.000-07:00

So, John Carpenter is rolling around in bitches and money one day and he decides another Halloween movie is in order. Because he needs to fill his bitch chamber to the ceiling with bitches I guess. But people apparently have had enough of Michael Myers and the avatar of whoopass that is Doctor Sam Loomis. If Sam Loomis and Upstate Man from Savage Weekend got in a fight, Upstate Man would be as helpless as some city boy who needs help to blow his nose. So, he went to writer director Tommy Wallace, who had a huge task ahead of him. "What do people care about?" he asked himself, "What scares them?" Halloween masks that make their head explode, that's what. I can't tell you how many times I was about to put on a Halloween mask and hesitated because I was concerned that it would destroy my head. Fuck apples with razorblades in 'em, the real Halloween killer has been revealed. And besides, who better to stick it to then the corrupt Halloween mask industry, the lobby that has been pulling the strings on Washington fatcats for generations. Next, he needed actors of Pleasence and Curtis level charisma. Obviously, the man to get was Tom "Rusty" Atkins. Fresh off his success as the lumberjack on Brawny paper towels, he was the ideal choice. His mustache even volunteered to doctor the script a little. For a leading lady, he choxse Stacey Nelkin. After her perfomance in Going Ape, it's easy to see why. This was all just a terrible idea. Offending the Halloween mask lobby and tarnishing Brawny's wholesome image made this a movie worth hating. Instead of watching Halloween 3:Season of the Witch, why not watch George Romero's Season of the Witch? Or listen to Donovan's Season of the Witch? Or use the Magic:the Gathering card Season of the Witch from the early expansion The Dark? It will destroy all untapped creatures that didn't attack this turn, which is pretty sweet. Why would anybody like this movie? Why would Jordan Krall, author of Piecemeal June, Squidpulp Blues and Fistful of Feet align himself with this sack of crap? Jordan Krall, I ask you of Halloween 3 "does it suck?"

Savage Weekend - Leza

2010-04-18T20:20:00.000-07:00

He doesn't need much... a little land, a little property, maybe a little wife. We can all learn something from Upstate Man. He's simple, maybe he's a little crazy, but Otis means well. He just wants his little slice of mother earth, like we all do.
You don't usually expect a morality lesson on the wholesomeness of country living in a low budget slasher flick with pervasive sex and nudity, sadistic violence and kinky barnyard erotica.
All the typical tropes of a slasher are present and yet do not make this movie anything you could call typical or predictable. Granted, you know, after the first sex scene there will be more. You know it will all end in murder. You know the jaded and corrupted will become further corrupted, but what you don't know is the strange raw power of grindhouse trash to deliver a moving message of humanity.
The characters are all stereotypes of one sort or another, the dialogue out of place and unfunny, the situation, blatantly staged. And yet, I always find myself getting sucked in, amused by the four friends silly antics; the implied savagery of the mustachioed lumberjack who wants to fuck the jaded and restless divorcee, and of Otis; the strange and lonely man, who talks to his dead brother and fucks around shooting rats on the rich stockbroker man's watch.
What does it all mean? It's like a trick box without a trick. Red herrings galore, this bizarre excursion into the wilderness of upstate New York and into the vicious little heart of darkness, rage and unquenchable lust, is oddly satisfying, meaningful, and yet still rife with gratuitous violence, sex and strange little scenes that make no sense in connection with the main storyline.
This movie will surprise you, it will amuse you(mostly laughing at and not with), though it's more likely to baffle than truly shock, it is definitely sure to entertain you for its duration with it's odd yuppie caricatures and the truly raw savagery of this long and bloody weekend.

Savage Weekend

2010-04-18T18:48:00.000-07:00

My first entry is sponsored by Gus' Moonjump, serving Warrenville, Illinois' moonbounce needs since whenever they started doing it: http:// www.gussmoonjump
You choose the occasion, they deliver the fun!

I talked to Leza about what we should start off with and we began by thinking the film Wages of Sin (2006) might be a good start, but we were concerned that somebody might end up watching it. Don't watch Wages of Sin. Really, just don't. If you think you want to just because I recommend not watching it, follow this blog for awhile. Look at the crap I'm willing to watch. It's not like sex, in this case, no means no. Then, I suggested The Manipulator starring Mickey Rooney. I've wanted an excuse to finish watching this film and the moral support to face my elfin nightmare. Leza wanted no part of it. At least not this time. We went through some other titles that we'll probably talk about later but none of them seemed quite right. Until Savage Weekend (1979) came up. Savage Weekend is directed by way cool pervert David Paulsen and stars the awesome William Sanderson from Blade Runner and every tv show that needs a softspoken redneck for twenty minutes. He also did a voiceover for Batman: The Animated Series, which is interesting, but not very.
Savage Weekend is the story of five city folk whose names I forget because I've been drinking. I refuse to look them up, even though I doublechecked William Sanderson on IMDB. I could have easily done so, and yet I didn't. So, deal with it. The city folk include: Cocktease Divorcee, the protagonist of the story (maybe), her uninteresting new boyfriend Upright Stockbroker, her sister Vapid Slut, her sister's sometime lover and friend to Upright Stockbroker, Sleazy Stockbroker and her sister's best friend Homosexual Caricature. Things start off with Cocktease Divorcee running as a mysterious Upstate Man looks on ominously, chainsaw in hand? What happened? You'll have to find out later. The action shifts to a wideopen and yet claustrophobic apartment you've ever seen, meet up with Cocktease Divorcee's ex husband who takes his son for the (Savage) weekend. Then, with the annoying child out of the way, they set off for the country, domain of the awesome Upstate Man. Upstate Man is my favorite superhero. He builds boats, misspells the word whore when branding his cousin as he rapes her, talks to his dead brother, has his own Jackson Browne style theme song that plays constantly and rides a bicycle. He also owns a chainsaw, which those who know me will tell you scores big points with me. Forget the Batman/Captain America debate. Upstate Man fuckin' wins. They also meet Mustachioed Handyman who has a thing for Cocktease Divorcee because her breasts are perfectly round and she smells nice, I guess. I see no other reasons to like this woman. Also, when they arrived a bat was pinned to their door. Homosexual Caricature, who acts like a cross between Buddy Cole from Kids in the Hall and Johnny Slash of Square Pegs makes a joke about the bat. It's not particularly funny and beneath your attention. This was before Upstate Man and has nothing to do with him. So, could be much cooler. Perhaps Upstate Man could have said something ominous about the bat. But he didn't, so the scene suffers.
Then they go fishing, Vapid Slut has sex and everybody meets Upstate Man, who is working on Upright Stockbroker's boat. They are not as impressed as I am. In fact, they're very condescending. Which is one of the interesting things about this movie. During the seventies, you see a lot of urban horror and a lot of redneck horror, but seldom do you see urban horror in a redneck horror setting, which Savage Weekend does in a very unique way. As the film goes on, you see the perversions of the city folk surfacing, seeing that they are the ones from the heart of darkness and not Upstate Man and Mustachioed Handyman. You watch as Cocktease Divorcee tests Mustachioed Handyman's limits during some fetishized cow milking, you see the look on Homosexual Caricature's face as he watches Vapid Slut and Sleazy Stockbroker carry on and you see Vapid Slut and Sleazy Stockbroker tease, use and hurt each other. As the film goes on, a masked pervert creeps through the house, watching the city folk and eventually doing much more. Could this be Upstate Man, who has a history or rape, talks to dead people and does not respond well to these city folk getting the boat his brother once worked on? You'll have to watch to find out. This movie is full of kink ranging from Homosexual Caricature and Vapid Slut doing some puzzling Rocky Horror type thing to the aforementioned milking scene and some very good kills that I don't wish to spoil. Savage Weekend is food for thought and the id alike, the anti-Deliverance, the anti-TCM. The rape isn't out in the woods, it's in us and no amount of sophistication can change that.

Hello from Krall!

2010-04-18T13:31:00.000-07:00

Hey there film freaks!

I’m Jordan Krall You may know me as the author of SQUID PULP BLUES, FISTFUL OF FEET, and THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO THE KARATE KID PART 3 (2^nd Edition).

It’s no secret that I love movies. That love goes beyond just appreciating the masterpieces of horror and film noir (two of my favorite genres). My love of movies reaches into the very depths of the cinematic abyss populated by such films as LAS VEGAS BLOODBATH, ASYLUM OF SATAN, ALABAMBA’S GHOST, and every film by Andy Milligan.

I’m an extremely critical person but over the years it seems like I’m one of the only open-minded people who is able to appreciate a movie like HALLOWEEN 3 or GLEAMING THE CUBE without being ironic about it. Fuck the neu-age film snob.

Believe when I say that I’m beyond excited to be a part of DOLLAR BIN MASSACRE and I thank Garrett and Leza for including me. I’m eager to hear what they have to say and I’m also eager to hear what YOU have to say. Feel free to drop questions or comments. But I must warn you. I have very strong opinions. I’m talking Dynatox strong. And in case you didn't know, that’s dump toxic waste in Borneo strong. You've been warned, kids.

Fair is fair. Over and out.

Hi there

2010-04-17T18:39:00.000-07:00

Leza here. I was raised by a film major mother to think that it's only film if it is Hitchcock, Kubrick, Bergman or Goddard. I didn't even see Nightmare on Elm Street til college for fuck's sake! Gradually my eyes were opened to a whole new realm of deviant sexuality, bizarre psychology and just good plain antisocial fun. When scouring the dollar movie bins (mostly due to being broke) Garrett and I both dove deeper into the countless gems forgotten by distribution rights. Movies without big budgets, Monogram and Corman movies made in a week, and found films that really stand the test of time. I think my favorite are the ones that seem like a different film each time you see it, mostly because it is so chaotic and oddly structured.
There was Christmas movie called The great Rupert, that I was convinced had a magical guardian angel squirrel who was answering a family's desperate prayers, untill I finally watched it sober and found out the squirrel was simply doing some housecleaning 'cause the landlord next door kept on stuffing his loot in his cubby.
When you watch some of these movies, the assertion by Michel Medved that Plan Nine from Outer Space is the worst film of all time is laughable. Plan Nine looks like Citizen Kane compared the vapid Holywood shit that is shoved at us every day, as well as the denizens of low budget nightmares that only those who scour the dollar bins will find.
I hope you'll join us on this little excursion to the wrong side of the film tracks. Enjoy!

Howdy!

2010-04-17T18:26:00.000-07:00

I'm Garrett Cook, Bizarro writer, cult film buff and gelato enthusiast. For ages I've been wanting to collaborate with my girlfriend, Leza Cantoral on a film based thing. We've tried several times, but never quite got it down. Well, we're ready to commit now and are bringing you commentary and debate about some of the worst crap Mill Creek and their brethren have dredged from the depths of the cinematic quagmire. We're also proud to announce that Bizarro author and Karate Kid 3 scholar Jordan Krall will be here to help us. Once a week, we'll also discuss a palate cleansing piece on a vintage horror, splatstick or noir classic. So get ready for insightful commentary, raucous debate and all around insanity. I know I am. Almost. I've gotta get ready first. But I'm ready to be ready.