Archive for March, 2010
The Pig People
This film looks pretty far from kosher! I still want to see it.
[REC]2
Pre-ramble:
Like you, I love horror films. I also love cartoons. The Warner Bros and Merry Melodies cartoons are some of the best, with a talking rabbit pulling dangerous lit explosives from his “pocket,” and handing them off to gullible antagonists dressed in archaic hunting garb, or a coyote with an apparently large line of credit who mail orders all manner of devices in a fruitless effort to eat one scrawny bird. While watching cartoons fun was the order of the day and a large suspension of disbelief was all that was required to join in. One of my favorite gags was when Bugs Bunny painted the floor of a room, backing up as he worked, until he found himself painted into a corner. Unable to leave the room by crossing the floor he simply painted a picture of a door on the wall, opened it and stepped through, painting the last bit of floor before closing the door.
Jaume Balagueró and Luis Berdejo, in writing the screenplay for [REC] painted themselves into a corner. [REC] was big success. “How can we,” Balagueró must of thought to himself, “make a sequel to a movie about a building that has been sealed-off, from which nobody can escape? Let’s simply paint a door on the wall and send in some more roadrunners and coyotes!”
Dorothy Mills
Pre-ramble
The university I attended was a bit like Mistkatonic University in H.P. Lovecraft’s stories. It was a major university in a creepy small town surrounded by an even creepier rural area. In the vein of Lovecraft hero Randolph Carter, I was always up for a little exploring of the foreboding environs and I had heard that, on the two-lane highway about ten miles outside of town, nestled in the tree-covered foothills, there was a fairly decent café. So off we went.
On entering the café, as the door closed silently behind me, all sound and activity in the dining room came to halt. Everyone stopped what they were doing and turned to stare at us. It felt like all the air had been sucked from the room. An eternity later, the proprietor, a stocky woman with teeth like a jack-o-lantern, wordlessly seated us. The place was furnished in a mixture kute kountry kitsch and something else . . . erm . . . like how I imagine Rob Zombie’s house to look. At the next table sat a middle-aged guy, hair combed in a greasy ducktail, who was clearly wearing his best white tee-shirt, complete with a pack of smokes rolled in his sleeve. He eyed-balled me balefully. It could be worse, I thought. At least I’m not stuck on an island with these people. Which brings me to Dorothy Mills, a creepy little movie where a woman gets stuck on an island with these people.
Paranormal Entity
Pre-ramble:
There are times when you go with your eyes wide open into something that you know you’re going to regret. Remember the time that you ate an entire large jalapeno pizza and washed it down with a pitcher of beer? You knew you were going to be tasting those jalapenos again, probably sometime between getting the “room spins,”and the “hot sweaty chills.” You knew it was going to happen. You did it anyway. Remember that “morning after” when you rolled over and stared into the face of the living embodiment of regret. You aged a whole year in just ten seconds, didn’t you? Last call is not decision time!
When I decided to do this little blog, I knew that there were going to be regrettable movies that I’d have to watch – movies that I’d have normally avoided. Unlike the jalapenos-pizza vomit fest or the walk of shame, I do this out of the love I have for you, the one person who reads this blog. Sometimes I just have lean in and take one for the team. Paranormal Entity is an example of one of those movies.
The Man with the Screaming Brain
Pre-ramble:
Sometimes, things you would think would be good, just aren’t. As a child I had an inordinately deep love of peppermint. They made peppermint candy. They made peppermint gum. Heck, they even made peppermint ice cream. So why, I wondered, is there no peppermint soda? I decided that I would make my own. To club soda I added sugar, peppermint extract and green food coloring. Sure, red might be more appropriate, but we didn’t have red. Besides, red would have looked like cherry soda and that would be boring. I imagined that it would be green and bubbly with a bite – that’s just what I wanted.
Taken on their own, these ingredients are just fine, but when you get them together you get a pungent beverage that burns your eyes. It felt like I’d been hit with Christmas tear gas. It also made my pee green for a week, which I thought was kind of cool. “So that’s why there are no peppermint sodas,” I said to myself as the minty, blinding lash of the peppermint whip bit deep into my corneas, “It’s a really bad idea.” With that in mind, I bring you, The Man with the Screaming Brain, a movie that I like to think of as Bruce Campbell’s own attempt at making peppermint soda.