Thursday, September 30, 2010

Hideous Linky: The Righteous Fury of Carrie White

I am speechless after reading the brilliantly incendiary post over at KinderTrauma today, wherein Unk links the film Carrie with his rage at the recent rash of bullied gay teens who have committed suicide.

I can't add anything to his brilliant rant, so I can only humbly link and urge you to click immediately....

Carrie: Don't Ask, Don't Snell

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Rock the Quote: Black Christmas (1974)


I'm pretty sure Jason Adams at My New Plaid Pants beat me to it on this one, but it deserves to be highlighted again.

Black Christmas was the inspiration for Halloween and all other Holiday slashers that followed in the 70s and 80s. It starred the improbable trio of Andrea Martin, Olivia Hussey and Margot Kidder as sorority girls being stalked by a killer in the attic of their sorority house.

Hussey is Jess, the final girl with the boyish name. Martin is her kinky haired best friend Phyllis. Kidder is her drunken, taunting overly bold friend Barb. (They are the archetypal precursors of Laurie, Annie, and Linda in Halloween.)

Kidder's Barb has all of the best lines, including this classic:

Clare: ...[Y]ou know that town girl was raped a couple of weeks ago.
Barb: Darling, you can't rape a townie.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

A List to Ponder

Stacie Ponder over at Final Girl has requested Top 20 lists of favorite horror movies from her fellow horror bloggers. Because she is the alpha queen of horror bloggery, we must do as she says. Bad things happen to those who don't.


So without further adieu, here they are.

1. The Exorcist
With Regan’s violent rages, skin eruptions, and body secretions, The Exorcist captures the gross horror of puberty better than any film before or since.



2. Halloween
The second scariest closet I have ever experienced.


3. The Shining
Because it’s so much better than the book and Stephen King still can’t quite understand why. And Shelley Duvall is freakin’ amazing.


4. Psycho
The original Freudian freak show.


5. Alien
Sigourney battles double-jawed bugs while dodging buckets of extraterrestrial acidic drool. I named my cat Ripley. End of story.


6. Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Every time I watch this, I think it will be dated and fun, but it ends up re-traumatizing me all over again. It’s just still that effective. And Leatherface is the scariest drag queen since Divine.


7. Friday the 13th
Goes from creepy to campy and ends with a girl fight. Three words: “Kill her Mommy.” No Jason-based sequel or remake will ever compete. There's even some subtext to be had beneath the cheese.


8. Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Yay for slow zombies in bluish/green makeup! Yay for horror that criticizes the consumerist culture in a way the remake would never dare.

9. Carrie
The second best puberty-horror movie ever. I always hold out hope that things will end different. Sissy Spacek is just that good.

10. Rosemary’s Baby
“What have you done to its eyes?”


11. Videodrome
Videodrome draws you into its sleazy grasp early on and never lets you go. The line between reality and fantasy blurs beyond recognition and we start to wonder if the media-induced hallucinations of our protagonist are any different from our own. And Debbie Harry dishing out S&M punishment to James Woods? “Long live the new flesh!”


12. Suspiria
A bloody Technicolor hallucination that makes absolutely no sense (you can leave the school, ladies!), but has the gravitational pull of your worst nightmare … drawing you closer and closer to the dark mother within us all.


13. Silence of the Lambs
Two words: Jame Gumb and his psycho tranny tuck dance. OK, that was eight words.


14. Damien: Omen II
This movie creeped me out much worse than the original. Maybe because the idea of a kid struggling with his fate as the spawn of Satan coincided with my own homoerotic stirrings. Or maybe because a lady gets her eyes pecked out by a raven, then blindly wanders in front of a speeding truck. (And with Lee fucking Grant as Aunt Ann? I mean, come on!)


15. Martyrs
The French existentialist “fuck you” to Passion of the Christ.


16. Angel Heart
Underrated to the extreme. Great performance by Mickey Rourke. Perhaps one of his best. When he finally realizes the devilish truth and chokes out “who was the boy?” my spine is all ashivers.


17. Audition
That bag. Those acupuncture needles. The wire. Lordy!


18. Safe
Has that Rosemary’s baby’s creepy feeling to it while also being quite funny. The invisible killers that stalk Carol White – pesticides, germs, spiritual alienation, etc – aren’t supernatural. They are the silent, quiet horrors that stalk us all, every day. The last scene with her looking in the mirror saying “I love you” always gives me the sads.


19. Hellraiser
“And Jesus Wept.”


20. Requiem for a Dream

Plays like the Suspiria of drug addiction. The sense of dread and suffocation is almost unbearable. Like any good horror movie, things go from bad to worse for our characters … and there is nothing they can do to stop it. Ellen Burstyn shreds my heart to little pieces.

Monday, September 13, 2010

I've Got a Secret...

So this is a picture of me ... with a laptop ... wearing my super cool Damien t-shirt from Fright Rags (those guys rock ... go buy a t-shirt from them already!).... on my way to .... oh, I can't tell you ... but it's a project ... and it's cool ... at least I think so ... and I hope to have good things to tell you soon ... but for now there is just this ...

... and here is a picture of Tahmoh Penikett's nipple ... cuz' I ran into him this weekend at an Malaysian restaurant in Vancouver ... and because it's my blog and he's hot ... so there...

Friday, September 3, 2010

Homo Horror Hall of Fame: Leatherface

Everyone knows Leatherface. He wears the faces of his kills, runs around with a big chainsaw in the flatlands of Texas, and likes to hang his victims on meat hooks while they are still alive.


But what people always tend to overlook is his flair for cross-dressing.

OK, I know. I know. I hear what you are thinking, astute readers. Cross dressing doesn’t make Leatherface a homo. And not everyone who has the gay does drag (just ask anyone who saw me when I dressed as Melissa Sue Anderson from Happy Birthday to Me for Halloween one year... I was so bad that someone made me promise to never do it again).

So, you are right. Leatherface's cross dressing does not equal him having the gay. In fact, the one time Leatherface showed any sign of a sexual interest was when he dry humped final girl Stretch with a chainsaw in TCM2....

"Get your subtext out of my vageen!"

So, I could put him in the transvestite category with other hetero icons like Bugs Bunny and Uncle Milty. But his gender distress seems a little more extreme than that. If I had to assign an LGBTQ letter grade, I gotta assume he falls somewhere in the T zone.

Take the following examples:

Leatherface in Vicki Lawrence's Mama drag


Leatherface in Dixie Carter drag

Leatherface in fey meltdown, while carrying a
chainsaw like a purse in Dixie Carter drag.


OK, purists. I know. These stills are from the much-derided Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation. He also did some housewife drag in the original, but it's hard to get a good still. And I am NOT including anything from the Platinum Dunes’ remakes which, among other atrocities, sucked all the gay out of Leatherface … okay that sounded way dirtier than I intended.

However, I will counter with this: The original Texas Chainsaw Massacre and this admittedly awful sequel were the only ones written by Kim Henkel. They were also the only ones in which Leatherface donned drag. Coincidence? Kim invented this character, so I'm assuming he is the expert on his nature.

And, yes, I know fellow LGBTQers. It's problematic. The transexual psycho was a staple of the 70s and 80s slasher film, seemingly ignoring the fact that most serial killers are heterosexual white men (not that there's anything wrong with that ... being heterosexual and white I mean ... not the serial killer stuff). But it is what it is.

So for all the great hot tranny mess looks Leatherface has rocked over the years, he deserves a place in the Homo Horror Hall of Fame. Don't agree with me? Just try to take it away from him...

I won! I won!

Wednesday, September 1, 2010