To continue on with December’s theme of determining if our favorite holiday movies can be made again today or are just products if their time. We will take a look at a, shall we say, unconventional Christmas Movie.
This is my review of Epic Brewery Big Bad Baptist Imperial Stout.
Don’t think Die Hard is a Christmas movie? A few of you already got into this one and confirmed my biases in the subject.
As an aside, never make a bet at a bar. It either results in you losing all your money, your clothes, or the bar having to call Security Forces in to haul you back to Hurlburt Field. Sometimes all three.
Die Hard is indeed a Christmas movie. The movie is about a guy visiting his wife for the holidays. She was a career woman working for a Japanese company, both of which was something somewhat new for the time. She also lived in another city as a result of her having a career. He planned to meet his wife during the office Christmas party, scheduled on Christmas Eve.
…Of course the twist is the building is taken over by a small group of heavily armed, East German terrorists led by Hans Grüber. They hold everyone in the building hostage in exchange for the release their comrades in arms from various prisons across the world, the “Asian Dawn,” and access codes to a enormous safe holding cash bonds.
…the other twist is the aforementioned guy visiting his wife is Detective John McClaine, NYPD. While he showed up with what was then the latest and greatest in concealed carry (Beretta Model 92), he now has a machine gun.
HO HO HO
…and hilarity ensues.
The tricky part is if this can be made again today, and the answer in my opinion is: maybe.
It really can’t be the same movie because trends in world events would probably have to be updated to match the times. The company would have to be Chinese since they are the new Japanese, buying up all of America. Although the name of the building Nakatomi Plaza could stay the same.
McClaine’s pistol will have to be updated to a Glock, obviously. He would also have to be played by a person of color, or maybe even somebody with an accent. Idris Elba checks both boxes but Liam Niesen is acceptable. Prisoner exchange is also a likely motive behind taking hostages, but nobody really has bonds printed directly on paper anymore, nor is such a massive safe necessary to secure them. Just demand a transfer of cryptocurrency from the Chinese.
Where it gets dicey are the terrorists. During the Cold War, there were a number of communist guerrilla groups that provided an easy background on the villains. Being they are terrorists the easy update is to make them some flavor of Islamic terrorists. That however is politically incorrect because #notallmuslims. In addition, there are not very many examples of movies with the villains being part of an Islamic terrorist group post 9/11. True Lies, and The Siege were both released in the 1990’s. Post 9/11, only war movies set in Iraq or Afghanistan, four hour longClint Eastwood-backed drudgery, and a handful of TV shows that came out with both wars as a background feature Islamic terrorists—out of necessity. Uhygurs are certainly a bridge to far, given the how often movies are funded by Chinese interests these days. North Koreans and/or Cubans are a stretch.
Which leaves White Nationalists as the only acceptable villain group. This is convenient, given their leader can still be named Hans.
Honorable Mentions:
Jingle All the Way: A man played by Arnold Schwarzenegger attempts to buy his son THE TOY OF THE YEAR…on Christmas Eve. Which is silly, because he can just buy it on Amazon today, and have it delivered by Tuesday. Plus, in one scene he impersonates a cop, which makes this a total no-go.
The Santa Clause: A man played by Tim Allen inadvertently kills Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, dons his coat and becomes the new Santa Claus. Unfortunately, this requires Tim Allen to seek penance for the sins of being both funny, and traditionally male. Sadly he won’t do it, nor would they forgive him anyways. Like the other film mentioned, fatherhood is a dominant theme that nobody wants to portray in a positive manner. The title is a pun; a legal pun. Swiss would narrow gaze on a biblical proportion in response.
This beer is made in Utah. I want to make this clear, for everybody that wants to piss all over Utah for their association with weirdo religions, this beer is made in Utah…but it is illegal to sell there outside of a couple state run stores. Which is fine, because that leaves an awful lot more for me. Lots of roasted coffee notes, with a blast of whiskey. It does the job exceptionally well. Epic Brewery Big Bad Baptist Imperial Stout: 4.1/5.
The movie Labyrinth (1986) is a tale of an adolescent girl’s quest/hero’s journey/sexual awakening. It’s a fantasy that features muppets good and slightly evil and everything in between. It also features David Bowie in very tight tights with his cod on obvious display. You can’t miss it—and that’s the point.
But why is it the point?
THE SETUP:
Jareth the Goblin King and his co-star. No, not the muppet.
Our intrepid heroine, Sarah, is a girl whose mother ran out on the family to become an actress and from what tidbits one can glean, a relatively successful stage actress. Sarah is not resentful. In fact, she finds this wistfully romantic. Sarah has a baby brother by her not-very-new stepmother, whose treatment of Sarah is (per Sarah’s point of view) borderline abusive because she asks Sarah to babysit while Dad and she go out on a date. The viewer doesn’t get much but that the stepmother would not ask Sarah to babysit if she had a date or parties to go to and that she is frustrated that Sarah doesn’t want friends nor does she want to date or go out. Sarah just wants to live in her own fantasy world alone, cosplaying and dreaming about her mother’s glamorous life, which distresses the stepmother to no end.
Stepmom: She treats me like the wicked stepmother in a fairy story no matter what I do.
We get the point: Sarah’s living in her head in the starring role of Cinderella and loving every second of her victimhood. But she’s a teenager whose mother ran out on her, so that is to be expected.
So Dad and Wicked Stepmother leave and there’s poor Sarah wandering around the house in a romantic and fanciful poet’s shirt and vest, in the dark while it’s storming outside, bemoaning her fate and talking to the baby rather hatefully, yet handling him gently.
Sarah: I wish the Goblin King would come take you away.
And … cue baby vanishing. An owl thumps at the window and (because she is very smart), she opens it.
Then there stands a man, a tall man with freakish hair in RenFest garb. He’s the personification of desire, and Sarah is breathless with fear and attraction. He is Jareth the Goblin King, and she knows this instantly. She begs for her brother back. He plays with his balls to demonstrate his magic while giving her a challenge/quest/dare. If she can complete the labyrinth that surrounds the Goblin City in 13 hours, he’ll give her her baby brother back, but if she doesn’t, he will turn the baby into a goblin forever.
And off she goes on her quest like a good little hero/ine on his/her journey, encountering all sorts of obstacles along the way, the main one being her hubris that she can defeat the Goblin King
“Don’t go that way … If she’d’a gone that way, she’d’a gone straight to the castle.”
On the surface, the movie is a morality tale and is very explicit about it: Don’t take anything for granted and stop it with the hubris. A teenage girl watching this movie will get that. She will be breathless at the idea of Jareth the Goblin King taking an interest in a lowly teenage girl, but she won’t parse that. Why do that when she has a powerful, magical man’s attention and his lust (which is in plain sight), tempting her to the pleasures of hedonism? And he blatantly uses his cod to tempt her with his presence, his devotion to her, his love and desire for her as a woman.
Jareth: I ask for so little. Just let me rule you and you can have everything you want. … Fear me, love me, do as I say, and I will be your slave.
THE DECONSTRUCTION:
The story is a constant struggle between Sarah’s sense of adult responsibility, her burgeoning womanhood/sexuality, and her girlish dreams, desires, and fantasies.
The struggle comes down to two pivotal moments in the movie:
She falls in the darkness, eventually winding up on her own bed, which is frilly. Was it a dream? Was it real? Her bedroom is full of stuffed animals (that look remarkably like her muppet friends), RenFest clothing, a shelf full of elaborately bound fairy tales, a vanity on which there’s makeup and knickknacks. Every single thing in her room is a three-dimensional representation of everything going on in the fantasy. Most importantly (which you will miss in a blink), there is a newspaper clipping of a review of her mother’s play. It’s a picture of her mother standing with her costar, who happens to look exactly like Jareth the Goblin King.
The Goblin King is in the details.
She sits confused at her vanity while a character shoves all her old comforts at her and reminds her of how nice it is to be in her comfy warm and welcoming and fantastical bedroom, tempting her to stay a little girl. She’s painfully disoriented, but it’s her own room, her childhood in 108 square feet, her shelter from the world of adulthood, adult decisions, adult problems.
On the edge of her mind, though, is a purpose, a purpose she doesn’t remember until she sees one of her fairy tales and remembers. On she forges. You know she successfully retrieves her baby brother because that’s how the quest works. Humans like that.
In the last scene, she’s back in her house, the baby’s in the crib asleep, she goes to her room and starts putting away her childish things, Dad and Stepmom come home. The stuffed animals come to life and regretfully must leave, but they reassure her that should she ever need them …
They don’t finish the thought, but she dances with them while an owl (femininity, fertility, darkness) sits on a tree limb outside her window and watches them before flying away.
For now, she is firmly on the edge of girlhood and womanhood, having rejected both—for the time being—but knowing that it’s inevitable and she will leave her friends behind.
THE CIRCUMSTANCE:
I was not aware of this movie when it was released in June of 1986. My parents had bought a house on the opposite corner of the metro area from where I grew up and I was busy moving us. I and our trusty 1.5-ton passenger van moved that house almost all by ourselves. I was also getting ready to go to BYU. I would stay in the new house for a grand 2.5 weeks before I left for another adventure.
I was leaving my frilly childhood bedroom and stuffed animals behind and in a month, I would be dropped off at a dorm 1200 miles away from home watching my parents drive away and going back to my dorm room alone. But what was home? A new bedroom in a new house in a suburban neighborhood like the one I’d always fantasized about? Naw. “Home” was no more home than the dorm room was. My home was gone forever and we all know you can’t go home again.
The movie didn’t come to the BYU on-campus theater until late spring or early fall semester 1987. I don’t remember. I went with this gorgeous, funny, hyperactive Korean dude I was majorly crushing on. He couldn’t keep his leg still, bouncing it all the way through.
But the movie worked its spell no matter how irritated and distracted I was.
THE BREAKDOWN:
Fast forward 20 years. I found the online romance novel scene. Self-proclaimed feminists and budding SWJs were out pounding the internet pavement preaching the gospel of the Feminist Agenda of Romance Novels. Why? Because they liked them, they felt guilty about liking them with some of their problematic themes, and wanted mainstream feminism to stop sneering at what they liked. It was simultaneous defiance and begging for approval.
They didn’t get it. I was a romance-novel veteran and they hated the early ones where the heroine was brave and gutsy and involved herself in all sorts of feats of derring-do. They were bad. “This isn’t your mother’s rapetastic romance novel,” they would screech, not actually knowing what they were talking about. The romance novels of yesteryear had kick-ass heroines and more explicit sex than the namby-pamby stuff of the aughts.
A major participant in Romancelandia was a women’s studies professor. Her husband was Jewish. She was Catholic, but converted to marry him. He got a job at some rinky-dink college and she was a spousal hire (“You don’t get me if you don’t hire my wife”). Instant tenure. Hot stuff in her field (ORLY).
She had heard much wistful sighing over Labyrinth in Romancelandia so she sat down with her two tween sons and watched it. Like a good feminist and women’s studies professor, she broke it down to three things: David Bowie’s cod, phallic imagery everywhere, men (Henson and Lucas) telling such a stupid tale to fulfill their own perverse desires for a young girl. She thought it was hilarious and ridiculous, a sausagefest (with one sausage).
She, whose respected romance novel blog* with thrice-weekly posts would routinely get close to a hundred comments (impressive even in those days, for a one-chick blog), garnered a few vague “Oh, that’s an interesting take” type comments.
It sat there. For a week. Getting nothing more. She let it sit for a few more days. Nothing.
Finally, I said, “I really don’t understand how you missed the entire point of the movie.” And went on to summarize the above but far more briefly and only so I wouldn’t come off as totally unhinged with rage at her stupidity.
Because I was.
How in the world does a feminist women’s study professor—who “loves” romance novels (but only the politically virtuous ones) (zzzzzzz) and screams to her disdainful colleagues how empowering and feminist they are—miss this?
I stopped just shy of telling her she was a stupid traditional housewife who converted to a man’s religion to marry him, followed him to his profession, got a job on his coattails, and promptly had two children. Betty Friedan would be ashamed. There was nothing “feminist” about her, and then she missed this.
She gave me a polite, “That’s an interesting take,” but the floodgates opened. And the comments section exploded with other gently made points about Labyrinth’s importance to both feminism and the hero’s journey and the fact that a girl was on the hero’s journey (quite groundbreaking for 1986) and a girl’s sexual awakening—and that Jim Henson and George Lucas knew more about it than any other filmmakers at the time (and maybe still) and portrayed it accurately. Details and symbolism got pulled out left and right.
Dr. Hot Stuff: “Well, maybe I should watch it again.”
Ya think?
She lost a lot of credibility in Romancelandia that day, credibility that was, inexplicably, very important to her.
It’s that time of year to settle in and throw in a horror film. So, which ones should you watch? You could stick with Jaws, Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Saw, Hellraiser (did you know they made 10 of them), Child’s Play, Scream, Halloween, or your favorite long running franchise. Instead, I’m here with 7 of my favorite lesser known horror films, with some honorable mentions for some comedy horror films.
Yes, three honorable mentions. My article, my rules.
All three of these are comedy/horror films with different target audiences. Zombeavers targets the classic horror movie fans, using the standard tropes of the tales, but turning them around. It’s about a toxic waste spill that turns a dam of beavers into bloodthirsty killers. Anyone bitten by them will eventually get sick and turn into one as well. Do not expect high brow cinema going into this. The ending may very well kill Swiss, as they show another toxic waste spill, this time getting into a beehive (go ahead, so what the name of that one should be).
Tucker and Dale vs. Evil targets the more casual horror fan. Ever hear about killer rednecks and their murder cabins in the woods? Then you know what you need to going into this movie. In this case, the two rednecks are just trying to get to their newly purchased vacation cabin and get it fixed up. After a terrible attempt at flirting, some local college kids get creeped out and scared by them. Misunderstandings happen, college kids keep dying, and there’s even a woodchipper scene.
My Name is Bruce targets the fans of the one (and only) Bruce Campbell. In a small city, some kids fooling around in a graveyard unleash an ancient Chinese demon. One of them is the worst kind of fanboy, thinking that Bruce is exactly like Ash from the Evil Dead movies and goes to recruit him to help. If you don’t know who Bruce Campbell is, and have never seen the Evil Dead movies, go watch them instead.
Alright, into the serious ones. Fair warning, this is a Spanish horror film done by Guillermo del Toro, so expect subtitles. This is set at an orphanage during the last year of the Spanish Civil War. There’s great visuals, a creepy ghost, and the question of how can a child keep their innocence in the face of a terrible war. It’s thematically similar to Pan’s Labyrinth, but didn’t get the widespread acclaim. If you haven’t seen Pan’s Labyrinth, then see that one as well.
This one you may have heard of, it’s a bit old at this point, but I’m still a fan. It’s a relatively low budget film that hides it pretty well. A group of people wake up, all in different rooms, all wearing the same clothes, and not remembering how they got there. The room is a cube, with a door in each side (top and bottom as well). As they move through the rooms, they learn that some are trapped, and work to try to figure out the pattern, and what the hell is going on. This movie did spawn a sequel and a prequel which don’t quite match the same WTF quotient as the original (in my opinion at least).
This one uses two familiar premises: opening in media res, and a bunch of travelers getting stranded in a hotel (including a prisoner). People get assigned rooms, and try to settle in for the night. Someone (or something) has other plans. People start dying, and room keys are left by their bodies that don’t match the rooms the people were in. Then the bodies start disappearing. The two premises then get introduced to each other in a fairly novel way.
Sam Raimi did this one. If you don’t know who Sam Raimi is, I’ll direct you up towards My Name is Bruce up above. Raimi was making cult films before he hit the big time with the first Spider Man trilogy. (fun fact: the same Delta 88 has been in almost all of his films). Drag Me To Hell was his return to horror after the Spider Man trilogy, and he revels in it. A loan officer at the bank is forced to tell a gypsy that the bank can’t extended their mortgage again. The gypsy curses the poor bank worker, and things start taking a turn to the dark. As they learn more about it, the curse is set to have the loan officer dragged to hell after three days. Lots of blood and gore in this one, don’t watch it if you’re squeamish.
This is probably the best representation of Lovecraft put to cinema. It’s about an insurance investigator who needs to find out what’s going on with a missing author. The author is due to submit a new book to the publisher, who took out a multi-million dollar policy against him disappearing. The insurance investigator believes it’s all a publicity stunt, and parts of it started out that way, until something from outside found a way to use the author to get into this world. Then it becomes a reality bending story wrapping around in on itself, and managing to swallow its own tail at the end.
This is one you are the most likely to have heard of, it made a big splash when it came to Netflix. This tells the tale of a widowed mother raising a six year old by herself. The kid in this movie is a piece of shit as only a six year old can be. One day, he comes into his mom’s room and asks mom to read him a storybook he found called Mister Babadook. Mister Babadook tells the story of a monster (can you guess his name?) that torments people who learn of his existence. Strange things start happening in the house, mom blames the kid, the kid blames the Babadook. From this point, things begin to escalate.
Time for my favorite cult horror film, one that’s perfect for Halloween. Trick ‘r Treat is an anthology film telling several interwoven tales that take place in a small town (in Ohio, which seems to be a hotspot for horror movie franchises), with a little boy (known as Sam) witnessing most of the events. Most of the stories deal with the rules and traditions of Halloween, with those violating them getting punished in some manner. There’s ghost stories, the reason for the jack-o-lanterns, poisoned candy, the proper time to take down the decorations, and what happens to those who don’t give out candy at all? There’s been rumors of a sequel to this move for over a decade, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up.
So there’s some of my.favorite horror films to watch. If I left out your favorite cult film, I may not have seen it (or I may not have considered it cult enough to write it up). I’ve tried to stay with films that you can easily find to rent, purchase, or stream (otherwise Cemetery Man would be in this list). I also tried to stay away from the usual slasher films (Urban Legends would fit here), or ones that go too far into sci-fi (Event Horizon would go here). Go ahead and tell me how wrong I was in the comments.
My dad raised us to be fans of classic movies. He observed that he knew he had raised us right because I could pick out Spring Byington. We were fed a steady diet of Frank Capra, the Marx Brothers, WC Fields, Howard Hawks, John Huston… you get the idea. Indeed, this shaped many of my sensibilities.
The world is lousy with Top 50 or whatever lists, but this post is a bit different. Rather than rehash great movies that everyone knows, I wanted to throw out a few of my favorites that for whatever reason never achieved the fame that they deserved, but were influential on later films that you probably have seen. In some cases, there’s even a bit of a libertarian twist. Admittedly, this will be skewed toward older movies, but I’ll toss in a couple more contemporary efforts. If there’s one or two that you didn’t know and this inspires you to give them a watch, my work is done.
This was a noble experiment (and immediately following the end of Prohibition): take several great comedy teams with vastly different styles, set up a loose plot, then watch the fun. Although Charlie Ruggles and Mary Boland are nominally the stars, and they do yeoman work tying everything together, George Burns and Gracie Allen are the real comedy focus. And indeed, they’re at their peak, and they presaged just about every smart guy-dumb guy comedy team that followed. The sequences with WC Fields feel tacked on, but if you’re going to tack something on, you couldn’t do better. The thing that will immediately grab your attention is how much of this movie was stolen by the hilarious National Lampoon’s Vacation. Well, if you’re gonna steal, steal from the best.
This is actually a collection of five short films, each with a different director and screenplay writer, and all based on O. Henry short stories. OK, I’m a sucker because I absolutely love O. Henry’s writing and storytelling. And what delightful stories these are! Most of them will be familiar to anyone literate, and the screenplays hew close to the originals.
Interestingly, the Ransom of Red Chief filmlet was badly received and was apparently dropped from earlier versions. In my view, it’s the best one of the group, and this is a group with no clinkers. Fred Allen and Oscar Levant are perfectly cast as the kidnappers and it leaves one to wonder why Hollywood didn’t use them more. The rest of the cast is also an amazing collection: Charles Laughton, Marilyn Monroe, Ann Baxter, Jean Peters, Dale Robertson, Richard Widmark, and narration by John Steinbeck.
Other fun bits: I believe this may have been one of Marilyn Monroe’s first credited screen appearances. She was great as a hooker. Levant is best known for one liners like, “I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.”
Million Dollar Legs (1932) may be the most libertarian movie ever made and possibly the most surreal. The setting is the fictional country of Klopstokia. In Klopstokia, every woman is named Angela, every man is named George, which certainly can be an aid to memory. The citizens are all superb athletes, and the leader of the country (played by WC Fields) is chosen via arm wrestling. George survives several challenges, with very little effort in fending them off. The country is dead broke, but sees a way to recover by leveraging the athletic ability of its citizens (notably the president’s daughter, Angela, and his personal messenger, played by Ben Turpin, who can outrun The Flash) to win the 1932 Olympics. There’s a romantic subplot, naturally, involving a visiting reporter (Jack Oakie) and Angela that somehow manages not to ruin the fun, and the official way of wooing Klopstokian women is revealed- singing a traditional song, set to the tune of Eddie Cantor’s I’d Love To Spend Each Sunday With You, but with, ahem, different lyrics.
Typical dialog:
Reporter: What a marvelous country. Say, I’ll bet you if they laid all the athletes end-to-end here, why, they reach…
Angela: Four hundred and eight-four miles.
Reporter: How do you know?
Angela: We did it once.
I think this is the funniest movie I’ve ever seen. You’ll immediately see parallels to Duck Soup and The Mouse That Roared.
The History of Future Folk (2012) is a “small” film, but absolutely delightful. Imagine a mash-up of kids’ stories, sci-fi invasions of Earth, and a bluegrass musical. OK, hard to imagine, but somehow it works. SP and I kept looking at each other and saying, “Charming!” which is the best one word descriptor I can think of. Of course, for days afterward, we kept saying, Hondo!” which was the aliens’ greeting. The alien plans to conquer Earth are sidetracked when they discover an amazing invention of humans- music- and once they discover it, they immediately take it up with great skill. Best song: I Cannot Breathe In Your Atmosphere.
Here’s one that is almost impossible to find, a great tragedy. Dadetown is a 1995 mockumentary that you won’t realize is a mockumentary until someone spoils it. More realistic than reality. It’s a wonderful look at Schumpeter in action as a Rust Belt town, whose economy is dependent on a paper clip factory, suffers from a technology company moving in; in true creative destruction, the tech company specializes in document imaging, displacing paper and the requisite clips. The paper clip factory, in an interesting twist, was originally a WW2 aviation parts plant which had been converted to the new civilian use. The tech company, of course, uses essentially no blue collar labor and mostly brings in tech workers with urban sensibilities who start transforming the town. The culture clash between the tech workers and the old time residents is explored in a deep and meaningful way without the dime store moralizing of someone like Michael Moore. This is the pic that Moore would have made if he were a lot more creative and intelligent. It’s a crime that it’s so difficult to see. The auteur, Russ Hexter, died shortly after this was made, and the world is poorer for this loss. Roger Ebert hated it, which is what attracted me to it in the first place.
Hello Glibs, it’s been awhile, but your old Master of Scaremonies the Cryptkeeper is here to provide my annual superfuntimestory of the bestest holiday on my calendar outside of Halloween – Texas Frightmare Weekend! This article is *at least* five times as long as it needs to be, because I know you’re reading this at work and I’m trying to give you an excuse to not get back to that for an extra 10 minutes. You’re welcome. Do keep reading, though – there’s lots of cursing, lame jokes, celebrity stories, and a 40k reference for my fellow hyper-nerds. Plus I had fun last year with our game of, “There are so many links, I wonder which one of them randomly goes to a weird porn site?” that I decided to play again this year. Happy hunting!
To begin with, this shit has gotten completely out of hand. They sold out of Saturday single day tickets (est. attendance this year of 35,000), and the fucking hotel rooms sold out at the main venue within two hours of going on sale. We were able to snag a room at the last second because they caught some dude reserving 20 rooms and trying to re-lease them out at a markup. Thankfully the dumbass advertised them on the Facebook meetup page for the event, so the organizer cancelled his block reservation & they opened the rooms back up. My wife received an automatic update and we jumped on one. True story: we got the last one, and it wound up being a handicapped room. It was YUUUGE. Like twice the size of a regular room. What’s a fucking cripple need with all that space? Don’t they need less space? It’s not like they’re prancing about or have friends that they can invite up or anything else requiring room. Even the shower was much larger. Don’t just take my word for it, here’s a photo. It’s so big you don’t even get the edge of the bed in frame.
Crip room
Now most, if not all of you, are probably mentally saying to me, “Gojira, we know that Texas Frightmare Weekend is always held on the first weekend of May. So why come this year, Dallas Fan Expo, the larger (50k+ attendance) pop culture, sci-fi, and comic book convention that used to be called Dallas Comic Con, moved its date to directly compete? Aren’t they targeting the same people?” Well astute reader, indeed that was the plan – of the FanExpo organizer. Here’s a little inside baseball for you, as was related to me by a buddy of mine involved in the whole sordid affair: FanExpo wanted to be the only game in town & approached the Texas Frightmare organizer, Loyd Cryer, about buying him out. He told them to fuck off and die in a fire (paraphrasing mine -ed). In what is possibly an act of pure spite, which is just my conjecture and in no way libelous, FanExpo moved their event to the same weekend. I think their big-shot corporate overlords thought that the nerdy public is one undifferentiated mass, and that being the larger event with more headline guests, they would draw interest and put a little bit of a beat-down on ol’ Texas Frightmare.
Turns out the Venn Diagram of people who are comic book and pop culture nerds, and people who are hardcore horror fans, does have overlap, but not nearly to the degree that the FanExpo jerks had hoped. I do fear, though, that this blatant act of separatism has resulted in some unfortunate battlelines being drawn and our two populations being given reason to resent and distrust one another. Thanks alot, FanExpo! If I ever see Jonathan Frakes on the street, I’ll fuckin’ kill him and leave a human turd on his forehead and a little note written on a cocktail napkin that says, “Defend Horror” written in his blood and pinned to his body with a little plastic sword along with some photos of those abused dogs from the SPCA commercials.
Interestingly, the above paragraph wasn’t just one long setup to a largely unfunny joke about murdering Will Riker. There really is a distinct difference between the two groups, and if you swing both ways, as I do [insert “Oh My!” George Takei gif], you notice it when surrounded entirely by one group or the other. By and large the horror crowd, where I spend more time, is more…enthusiastic…about ordering their lifestyle around their interests. They don’t just dye their hair, they have a shit-load of tats and piercings, dress somewhat raggedly, curse a lot more, drink a lot more, and are generally more “blue collar” types. They also skew distinctly more conservative. There are a lot more pro-2A shirts, and shirts making fun of liberals, at horror events, than shirts or patches with leftist slogans. Hell, I saw a couple of Confederate flag patches on vests this weekend, and nobody gave them a second glance. For all you aspies rushing to the comments to correct me that it’s actually the battle flag of Northern Virginia or whatever the hell, save yourselves the spittle-flecked outrage. When I say, “Confederate flag”, you damn well know what I’m talking about, so just simmer down and roll with it. If you promise not to be a ludicrous pendant, I’ll not purposefully replace the word “magazine” with “clip” in any future firearms articles I may write.
The thing is, I’m not sure why this is. This is a group of people who are obviously comfortable with, shall we say, non-traditional mores in terms of public behavior, modes of dress, etc., and yet they actually skew conservative. The sci-fi/comic crowd is overwhelmingly leftist, but they also are overwhelmingly just fat guys able to take off their blue TOS shirts at the end of the day and blend back into “regular” society. I can’t help but wonder why this is. I’m sure Ken Shultz has a theory that he’d like to expound on (just ribbing you in good nature, Ken). Joe Bob Briggs mentioned it during his panel, as well, so it’s not just me making shit up…this time.
So not as many photos this year, for which I apologize. If you haven’t read my past entrieson this event, be warned: this is literally the only time of the year I take photos, so I cannot be assed to get good at it because I just don’t care. Anyway, even five years ago, when you purchased an autograph from a guest, it came with a selfie. Now every one of these greedy fucks charges an extra $10, except for a few who are cool.
Bruce Abbot is cool. He does not charge extra.
I will note that they didn’t have glowsticks available at the after party again this year. I think our little art project that I showed you all photos of in the 2017 entry put the kibosh on that for everybody. At least I hope that’s why there weren’t any. I’d love to believe that my one merry band of assholes managed to ruin something for tens of thousands of people. It’d put me right up there with John Dillinger.
Great guests though, and great panels. We had Jeffrey Combs, who given his wonderful Star Trek roles would have been just as at home at FanExpo, but he’s also done great work in horror. I’m a huge Jeffrey Combs fanboy, so this was a special treat for me. We had Meat Loaf, who fell off the fucking stage at his panel and broke his collarbone. Looks great for his age, though, really. Jenna Jameson, on the other hand, does not. Her ass looked like a fucking tray table. I wanted to set my drink on it, then smack her hard in the face and see if the drink fell off. It doesn’t show up in google image search, oddly enough. Trust me, I wanted to add a picture. Traci Lords has aged a bit better, and Cassandra Peterson (better known as Elvira) I’d still drill like an out of control oil rig. The big guns were Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell, along with Sam’s brother Ted Raimi. Robert Englund,Lance Henrickson, Tom Savini, and various other regular guests were in the house, as well as…Lee Majors! Scott Ian and Charlie Benante of Anthrax were also present, and the corpse of Tim Curry. Along with many other assorted peoples who had roles in some sequels or other.
The year started off with a screening of Re-Animator on Thursday night, with Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Abbot, and Barbara Crampton (who, like Elvira, is still super do-able despite being old) in attendance to do a panel. They also had Kathleen Kinmont from Bride of Re-Animator, but really who cares about her. She does reappear later in our narrative in a humorous role, so that’s something I suppose. In addition to their panel at the screening, they had a panel during the main convention.
The Re-Animator panel
The panel was great in that, rather than just tell stories, almost the whole thing focused on the craft of filmmaking, particularly low-budget film making in the 80s. Without going into great detail, they spoke about the long days on low-budget shoots (14-18 hrs per day, as principal photography had to be completed in 18 days), and about how big name actors can get away with being aloof, but working in the nooks and crannies, the only way to get a good performance is for the actors to be completely emotionally available to each other in order to create instant chemistry. They mentioned that, as they all were coming from theater backgrounds, they got together at Barbara’s apartment for a few weeks beforehand to rehearse, which is a big no-no if SAG finds out about it because it constitutes working without pay. Jeffrey mentioned that sometimes having fewer resources forces the director and editor to make tighter, better choices, because when given infinite time and money, some people go overboard and don’t know when enough is enough. He also mentioned that, back when you had to actually film on, you know, film, low-budget productions would purchase things called “ends”. These were the chopped off leftovers of film reels after standard budget films were done using the reels. They’d cut off what was left and sell it cheap. So it was a great way to accumulate film on a tight budget, but you’d only be able to do like 3 minutes on each one and it was annoying to have to work through. As for the audience questions, it’s bizarrely awkward to ask a question to a woman whose tits & bush you just saw, along with her about to get eaten out by a revenant holding its own severed head between her legs (if you haven’t seen Re-Animator, stop what you’re doing and watch it now. It’s better than any Marvel film by x1000).
The Lee Majors Q&A was a bit depressing. Due to the way television contracts were structured back then, he never saw a dime from any Steve Austin merchandise, and indeed claims to have had no idea so much of it was ever produced until he started doing conventions. He spoke about the old snobbery that shut out television stars from film productions, and told a funny anecdote about how he loved Bill Shatner when he worked with him, but that Shat had a tendency to, “die to the balcony”. He explained that it’s theater slang for wildly over-acting. He also talked about how Andre the Giant, when playing sasquatch on the show, pissed in the suit all the time, which was super gross, but was also the nicest guy in person you could ever hope to meet, which was super great.
Joe Bob Briggs did a good panel, and spoke about the state of trash cinema and its relative place in modern film production vs. where it was when he got started way back when. He and I chatted a bit about small towns in west Texas. He didn’t think I’d know a few of the places where he’d lived, but I went to college in Lubbock, and so we shared some fond memories of a shitty place that is populated entirely by people who fail out of that college. Another really nice guy. Honestly, the only person who has ever been a dick to us after all these years that we’ve been going was Billy Zane. I still think that, much like Georgia against Texas this past year, Alabama against Oklahoma in that Sugar Bowl a few years back, or Florida against Louisville a few years before that, he just didn’t want to be there and therefore that magically excuses shitty performances.
We bought a few stupid things, like a full-size xenomorph skull
So I own this now, I guess.
because I’m buddies with that vendor and he gave it to me for wholesale. There were some good costumes, but frankly the best ones were people who come every year, and I already took pictures of them and showed you all over the last couple of years. So below are some pics from this year, but not nearly as many. Karaoke on Sat. night was awful, like always, though everybody was in a good mood. Kathleen Kinmont showed up to rock out, but was wasted and happened to share an elevator with us back up to our floor. She was drunk enough that she didn’t stop singing or rocking out once off the stage – it went for the whole elevator ride. There were no infamous David Arquette episodes, however (fun fact: right before he got on stage that night, he bought me a beer at the bar. I didn’t know until later that he was supposed to have been on the wagon. Whoops). I’m also now turning it into an annual tradition to bum a smoke off of Lance Henrikson. Nice guy, but seriously, American Spirits? C’mon, Lance, I wanna see some fancy Hollywood cigarettes.
The year ended with the Sam & Ted Raimi with Bruce Campbell panel. It was really a treat. They’ve known each other since middle school, and told great stories about each other growing up. Sam busted Bruce’s chops constantly, and they told stories about all the things they did as they went around Detroit trying to scrounge up money to make Evil Dead. Sam Raimi has an annoyingly nasally voice, FYI. Anyway the highlight of the panel was, when half the room is raising their hand to ask a question, a particular person who was picked stood up and asked them their opinion on Mac and Me, a shitty 1988 E.T. knockoff. Now keep in mind, none of the panelists had a blessed thing to do with that abomination of a movie. Nothing. It was the non-sequitur from hell. They were so confused they didn’t even know what he was asking – Ted kept thinking he was asking about “mac and cheese”. The moderator even face-palmed and said under his breath but still audibly into the mike, “You get a chance to ask these guys a question and you ask about fucking Mac and Me?” and you could hear the exasperation in his voice. I mean it was bizarre. The questioner was booed down, and after the panel ended and I was waiting outside for my wife to use the restroom, Ted, Sam, and Bruce came out through that side hallway. They were still talking about that, making fun of the guy and wondering what the fuck he was talking about. Seriously, this is like getting to go back in time and pose a question to George Washington, and all you can come up with is asking him if he likes the new Prius body style.
So that was this years (mis)adventure. I was quasi-drunk for most of it and blew $1,500 in three days, but fuck it, that’s why I fight for $15. I look forward to updating you all on the event’s 15th iteration next year, if you don’t see me in the news for bombing FanExpo beforehand.
TWO evil elevator movies from the same director? You’re fucking telling me that you made one evil elevator movie, looked yourself in the mirror and said, “You know what? Ima do it again. The world needs another killer elevator movie.”Me in front of a legit 73′ Oldsmobile Delta 88, from the film Evil Dead.Somebody dressed as the bad guy from Army of DarknessHere’s one you don’t see every convention: a guy dressed like Dr. Loomis. Though he still had that fucking Walking Dead baseball bat, so fuck him.The “battle Delta”, the Delta 88 transformed for combat at the end of Army of DarknessThis person has cleverly turned a book into a monster. My wife tells me it has something to do with Harry Potter, and is therefore un-Christian.I just thought it was funny that this guy was dressed like a fascist, his name for the karaoke was like “Lord Commander” or some shit like that, and he sang fucking Blondie.I love the difference between horror cons and other cons. Here, for example, instead of ripped dudes in tight clothes saving the world, we have family-friendly comics with titles like, “Lets All Die!”Randos in costumeSome dude dressed as the CreeperThis was a clever one. He’s dressed like Stephen King’s poor character from the movie Creepshow.Clever Nightmare on Elm Street costume. More clever than the 1,000 Freddy’s walking around the convention, at any rate.Remember when I did a series of film reviews that focused on the giallo genre? This guy gets it.The Death Note guy was here the last few years, but the chick’s demon costume was super intricate and she ended up winning the contest on Friday night I believe. The most important thing is she was hot.OK now this is what is wrong with the world. This is the side of the box of a Castle Greyskull re-issue toy. Notice that, unlike, say, the original Castle Greyskull box, the person shown enjoying it is not a 5 year old boy, but rather a 35 year old “man” with a shit-eating grin on his face and I FUCKING WANT THAT CASTLE GREYSKULL.A little kid dressed as Nosferatu. I thought it was cute.A shirt for little kids. If you don’t know what the Pork-Chop Express is, stop reading my fucking column.Another great example of horror culture – a children’s book titled, “I Like To Eat Children”. And yes, I bought it for one of my nephews.Another pretty well done costumeI thought this was clever – the guy made a medusa skull.Remember when I mentioned in one of my film reviews about Anthropophagus, the giallo film about the crazy cannibal who at the end of the movie eats his own intestines? SOMEBODY MADE A FUCKING DOLL FOR THAT MOVIE HOLY SHITWeird nazi porn. “Deported Women of the SS Special Section” and “Gestapo’s Last Orgy”.Shit, it’s better than concentration camp pornThis guy was the rarest thing of all at a convention – an original character. Sadly because it’s an original character I completely forgot it’s name and the youtube channel the people were trying to tell me to subscribe to where they upload their short films.Ash Predator. He’s the Predator, but with a ripped blue shirt, chainsaw hand, shotgun slung on his back, and a deadite-colored severed head of another predator.Scott Ian of Anthrax making sure I know I’m not supposed to be taking a picture of him.Two tattoo artists this year. The wife and I are seriously thinking of signing up for a flash next year, which is really all they do given the time constraints.Randumb decoration on a table. Only at Texas Frightmare.Look in the background – it’s advertising a movie called Velocipastor that we saw for free that Friday night about a priest who turns into a were-dinosaur and saves Chinese prostitutes. It…was…awesome.
Trying to rise to the call for content I figured I’d try to combine both my interest in Japanese language and anime into a single quick read. I also want to suggest that all Japanese animation doesn’t revolve around an unnatural attraction to one’s younger sister. If there is interest I’ll do more. For the first attempt I figured I’d review an anime that I can actually recommend, Hayao Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away”.
Japanese: 千と千尋の神隠し
English: “Spirited Away”
千 – “Sen”- In this case what the main character is called through most of the film. It’s an odd name and the reason is explained in the film.
と – “to” this a particle equivalent to “and” here in English and links nouns together. Japanese is a bit more interesting because “to”is generally use link things exhaustively. “I went to the store and purchased (only) milk and bread“. However, Japanese also as another version や or “ya” which is used on a non-exhaustive list “I went to the store and purchased milk や bread” which means “I went to the store and bought milk, bread and other things“.
千尋 – “Chihiro” – Name of the protagonist
の – “no” – shows possession or used to link nouns together. Similar to ” ‘s” in English.
So we actually have the rare case where the Japanese title mostly matches the English one. “Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi” or “Sen and Chihiro’s Spiriting Away”
The key point I want to make here is the different reading of 千. In the first reading it uses onyomi or sound (aka Chinese) reading and in the second 千尋 it is kunyomi or Japanese reading and sounds like “chi”.
The character has the 尋 (hiro) removed from her name and her memory in the film and becomes “Sen” through most of the film. This kind of word play happens throughout the film and would be instantly recognizable to the Japanese audience and is essentially untranslatable in English.
It also stresses just how important kanji or the Chinese characters that Japanese uses are to convey meaning with written Japanese. This kind of word play is central to all kinds of Japanese humor and literature.
Spirited Away (Japanese: 千と千尋の神隠し Hepburn: Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, “Sen and Chihiro’s Spiriting Away”) is a 2001 Japanese animated coming-of-age fantasy film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, animated by Studio Ghibli for Tokuma Shoten, Nippon Television Network, Dentsu, Buena Vista Home Entertainment, Tohokushinsha Film and Mitsubishi and distributed by Toho…and tells the story of Chihiro Ogino (Hiiragi), a sullen 10-year-old girl who, while moving to a new neighborhood, enters the world of Kami (spirits) of Japanese Shinto folklore. After her parents are transformed into pigs by the witch Yubaba (Natsuki), Chihiro takes a job working in Yubaba’s bathhouse to find a way to free herself and her parents and return to the human world. – Wikipedia
Studio Ghibli films are generally top notch and “Spirited Away” is no exception. There are other more highly rated films from the studio, but near the top of my list is “Spirited Away” for it message of growing up and responsibility. It works as simple and fun story for children while still having many parts that will be interesting and thought provoking for an adult audience.
Alright, on to the second installment of As Seen On TV, and as I said in the first one I might deviate from TV shows. I’ll go ahead and do that now, but it’s OK because when I saw this movie it was on a TV, so close enough.
We all know the genre of blaxploitation, but did ever wonder where it came from? How did it start? Well, the film that is generally agreed as the originator of the genre is Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, a 1971 film written and directed by and starring Melvin Van Peebles (you might have heard of his son Mario, but more on that later).
Sweetback (as I will henceforth refer to it) is the story of a, well I’ll just wikipedia tell it:
A young African-American orphan…taken in by the proprietor of a Los Angeles brothel in the 1940s. …he is raped by one of the prostitutes at a young age. The women name him “Sweet Sweetback” in honor of his sexual prowess and large penis. As an adult, Sweetback (Melvin Van Peebles) works as a performer in the whorehouse, entertaining customers by performing in a sex show.
From there it’s a story of corrupt cops trying to frame him for murder because they want to pin it on a black guy (they plan to release him afterwards, they just want a fall guy to the pressure off). But the cops also a catch a Black Panther, and when they start beating him Sweetback attacks the cops and flees. From there it’s all trying evade the police while exchanging his sexual talents for help from lady folk.
Sounds like a perfect Glibs movie, but I don’t remember any blackjack. The movie itself may not be that great, but it had an interesting impact on movies that came later.
The film’s focus on urban black culture and themes of black revolution are the easiest way to see the influence, which was Van Peebles’ goal. He gained some influence for his past work in Hollywood, but movies exploring this culture were still seen as too out of the norm. He had been offered a deal from Paramount to make movies, but not this movie. The late 60s-early 70s is when the old Hollywood Studio System started to crumble. Independent films were becoming what was groovy. Going through the studios was no longer the only way films could get made. To this end, Van Peebles financed the film himself (after he ran out of money he got Super Predator Bill Cosby to invest) and worked with a ragtag crew of people within his network. Like when he needed to score the film he hired this little group a friend of a friend knew named Earth Wind and Fire.
On top of writing, directing and starring Van Peebles also edited the film, the style he used influenced films that came later. Even though I work in editing, I’m too technical of a guy, hell I’ll just let wikipedia say it:
The film’s fast-paced montages and jump cuts were novel features for an American movie at the time. Stephen Holden from The New York Times commented that the film’s editing had “a jazzy, improvisational quality, and the screen is often streaked with jarring psychedelic effects that illustrate Sweetback’s alienation.”[8] In The 50 Most Influential Black Films: A Celebration of African-American Talent, Determination, and Creativity, author S. Torriano Berry writes that the film’s “odd camera angles, superimpositions, reverse-key effects, box and matting effects, rack-focus shots, extreme zooms, stop-motion and step-printing, and an abundance of jittery handheld camera work all helped to express the paranoid nightmare that [Sweetback’s] life had become.”[9]
When the movie was released it got an X rating and one of the few theaters that would even show it cut some stuff out. Working to secure that release was another showing of Van Peeble’s hustling to make this movie happen, he had to go convince theaters himself to even show it, at first he only convinced two. But once audiences saw the film and word of mouth spread it ended up making $4.1 million.
Oh, I said I talk more about Melvin’s son Mario. For those of you don’t recognize the name Mario Van Peebles is a B or C list action star but has also appeared in mainstream films with the likes of Clint Eastwood and Wesley Snipes, he even just happened to guest star on an episode of The Cosby Show. Mario’s first role was playing young Sweetback in this film, you know when the character was raped. Yeah, his dad directed him in a rape scene. But once Mario got all growed up he made a movie about his dad making the movie based on a book his dad had written about making the movie. That’s a lot of basing. That movie is called Bad Asssss and relates some of the experiences from making Sweetback and is generally enjoyable, containing re-enactments of anecdotes like these:
Van Peebles and several key crew members were armed because it was dangerous to attempt to create a film without the support of the union. One day, Van Peebles looked for his gun, and failed to find it. Van Peebles found out that someone had put it in the prop box. When they filmed the scene in which Beetle is interrogated by police, who fire a gun next to both of his ears, it was feared that the real gun would be picked up instead of the prop.
While shooting a sequence with members of the Hells Angels, one of the bikers told Van Peebles they wanted to leave; Van Peebles responded by telling them they were paid to shoot until the scene was over. The biker took out a knife and started cleaning his fingernails with it. In response, Van Peebles snapped his fingers, and his crewmembers were standing there with rifles. The bikers stayed to shoot the scene.[6]
Van Peebles had received a permit to set a car on fire, but had done so on a Friday; as a result, there was no time to have it filed before shooting the scene. When the scene was shot, a fire truck showed up. This ended up in the final cut of the film.[6]
Welcome to the first(last?) in a new feature where I talk TV*. I’d like to explore some lesser-known or forgotten TV shows*, not just because they are shows* I like but also to see what impact they had on the industry.
Today’s Episode: Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future (1987)
Captain Power was a 1987 live action toy commercial TV series set in a distant future after the ‘Metal Wars’, and the machines have won. A group of rebel soldiers let by Captain Jonathan Power use Power Suit armor to take on the evil Lord Dread and his robot army.
It’s a little ham-fisted, to be sure, but it was a children’s show meant to sell toys. It was about watching future soldiers use cool armor and weapons to fight evil robots, but there are a few things that make it stand out today when looking back on it.
First of all, even though it was a show designed to sell toys, the creators sought to make something more compelling:
Captain Power, to the public at large, is perceived as just another excuse to sell toys. It is a notion that rubs story editor Larry DiTillio the wrong way.
“We’re not writing stories with the idea of turning each episode of Captain Power into a video game,” declares DiTillio. But DiTillio, a first season staff writer who became story editor when J. Michael Straczynski (Starlog #111) left the position for a similar post with the revived Twilight Zone, claimed that ramrodding the script side of Captain Power hasn’t been easy.
“This show has definitely not made my life easier,” chuckles DiTillio. “This is not just another kid’s cartoon show. The writing is always to an adult level. There is the interactivity which has been centered mainly in the battle sequences but we aren’t in a position of having to write X amount of animation and interactivity into each episode. I want to make it very clear that around here, we’re working for the story.” –Starlog #128
Indeed, the story of Captain Power deals with the horrors of war, human relationships and what it means to be human. In one story line the villain, Lord Dread, is confronted with the pain his war has inflicted on the woman he once loved. The story was written as much for the parents watching as for the kids.
But, I bet you’re wondering what DiTillio meant by “animation and interactivity into each episode”. Well, as stated the show was created to sell toys, the toys in question were a way for Mattel to use a new technology they had developed, a light sensing technology like that of Laser Tag or the NES Power gun. The play feature was that the vehicles for the action figures could interact with each other, if you ‘shot’ another jet with your jet it was a hit point, enough hit points and your pilot was ejected from the jet. This same technology was built into the show, allowing kids to interact and with enemies on the TV by shooting them as well as being shot. It was an interactive game built into the TV show, and pretty innovative for the time. You could also buy VHS tapes that had longer sequences on them to play the game any time you wanted.
This wasn’t the only innovation the show had on it’s side. Remember how the army of bad guys were robots? Well, the show runners decided to use a new technology called ‘computer generated imagery’ to create the robots instead of opting for guys in costumes. That’s right, they used CGI to create characters for a TV show in 1987, they were the first TV show to do it.
Impressive but, yeah it didn’t look too great back then and really doesn’t hold up well today. They may have been the first, but it was something that was on it’s way without them, eventually. The last great innovation Captain Power made probably had the most impact on the film and TV industry as we know it today.
Film and TV have been shot all over the world for many different reasons, but a staple of the industry for the last three decades has been shooting in Canada for that sweet, sweet government lucre. I bet you’ve already guessed it, Captain Power was one of the first major US television shows to entirely move its production to the great white hat of America. The show runners had to build the resources there from scratch and retrain local canooks to be able to shoot and edit an American Sci-Fi Action TV show.They leased an old bus terminal and converted it into a film lot. The writers from Hollywood would ‘modem’ the scripts to Canada and the rest of the production process was done there.
So what happened to such a fun, inventive, and successful TV show? Guns killed it! Well, not guns, but fear of guns. This was the 80s when busybodies started trying to get rid of violence on TV. The show had high ratings at the onset, but because of controversy surrounding the violence on the show it kept getting moved around time slots, which can kill just about any show. Also the toys weren’t selling as well as Mattel wanted. Also CGI was very expensive back than (a lot more so than today when it is still expensive.)
It is a show I remember fondly and when I started looking back on it I was surprised to learn how innovative the show really was. I’m currently re-watching it. There is also a good documentary on Youtube that goes into more depth of what I’ve talked about if you’re interested.
…and hilarity ensues.
