Review Haiku: Pirahna 3-D

I couldn't care less

whether these douchebags lived or
died. In bad 3-d.

The Exorcist - Scenes with Linda Blair's voice as the demon

Thanks to King Joe the Wicked at Paracinema for posting this fascinating snippet. An industrious Youtuber has re-edited scenes from the Exorcist using Linda Blair's original voice, instead of the dubbed over Mercedes McCambridge voice.

Embedded player is disabled, so you will probably have to click here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3_z0mYXnMc&feature=player_embedded

Really shows you what an amazing job the young actress did in a demanding role. It's unfortunate that the sequel (one of my favorite bad movies of all time) pretty much ruined her career thanks to scenes like this ...



And this ...



And of course, this ...

Rock the Quote: Joe Versus the Volcano

Go ahead and laugh at me. Everyone does. But, I'll say it loud and proud: I love the much-derided Hanks-Ryan bomb Joe Versus the Volcano.

I am not alone. Check out this guy, who looks all sort or ironic hipster cool. He got a tattoo of the lightning bolt used as a visual throughout the film. I'll call him Seth. I think he'd want to be my friend if he knew our shared love of JVtV.

And consider this haters: it is written and directed by John Patrick motherfucking Shanley ... who also wrote Doubt. It rocks some heavy philosophy like Doubt, but instead of bickering nuns, we get Meg Ryan (playing 3 roles quite brilliantly) and Tom Hanks in a quirky not-so-romantic comedy about a man with a "brain cloud" willing to sacrifice himself to a volcano for the chance to live it up a little first.

Anyway, I love it and still think it's much better than people give it any credit for being. And so does Seth. And I'm sure he drives a Vespa and listened to MGMT way before you knew they even existed. So I feel validated. And now you so want to be in our club. But you can't ... until you drink the orange soda and confess that you love this deep, weird tale which contains one of my favorite quotes of filmdom ...



"My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake and they live in a state of constant total amazement." Meg Ryan as Patricia Graynamore

(Yeah, I know this has nothing to do with horror, but it's a blog ... roll with it people ...)

Awards season

I've been getting so much love from Miss Jinx over at Totally Jinxed that I'm thinking I might have to send her a fruit basket or a nice flan.

Yes, she has now bequeathed the "Bloody Award" to me. This Dr. Blood's Video Vault creation is viewable right here:


Being the world's laziest horror blogger (see Stacie Ponder quote, blog right), I will simply cut and paste the instructions required for receiving the award from her website.

“Below are twenty horror films which are universally accepted as classics listed in alphabetical order. Just rearrange the list by cutting and pasting them into your own order based on how you would rate them. For instance, if you think that "The Hills Have Eyes" is a better movie than "Hellraiser" then cut and paste it higher up in the list. Repeat this with all the titles until you have your own personalised top twenty. Other people will then be able to see if you have the same tastes in horror as them or not.”

So here goes ...

The Exorcist (1973)
Halloween (1978)
The Shining (1980)
Psycho (1960)
Alien (1979)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
Friday the 13th (1980)
Dawn of the Dead (1978)
The Thing (1982)
Rosemary's Baby (1968)
The Omen (1976)
Hellraiser (1987)
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
The Hills Have Eyes (1977)
An American Werewolf in London (1981)
Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
The Wicker Man (1973)
The Haunting (1963)
The Lost Boys (1987)

Though I will have to admit that almost every film below Friday the 13th (save for The Lost Boys) is a better film than Friday the 13th, it is such a sentimental part of my formative years that it just can't go any lower.

So, thank you Jinx for propping up my self-esteem for just a bit longer. Any more awards from you and I just might let my Zoloft prescription expire... wait, what's this?

For the love of love. Jinx has also awarded me the Happy award. Alls I have to do is list ten things that make me happy. Since I love following instructions, but hate giving them (see earlier awards post), I won't be passing it on to other bloggers. They should know they make me happy when my wormy face shows up on their followers list.

But here are ten things that make me happy in no particular order:

10) The extra large Japanese Cherry iced tea at Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf.

9) Table Rock Beach in Laguna, CA where I can dive around like a Hardy Boy with goggles and stare at all the sea life that BP hasn't gotten around to killing yet.

8) My cat Ripley (named after that other source of infinite joy ... Sigourney Weaver). I especially like it when she stretches out her fat belly to get her chubs rubbed. Ripley, not Sigourney.


7) Seeing a piece of art that completely cracks my eye open. This happened just recently with the movie Martyrs, but also happened at a Jasper Johns exhibit at MoMa.


6) Trader Joe's Vegan Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

5) Chips and salsa

4) The Mai Tais at Yamashiro in Hollywood. I don't drink very often. I have the tolerance of a toddler. But one of these puts me in a shiny happy place.

3) My nephews ... they just rock ... and watching them grow up, unafraid of the gay ... even writing essays about how "Gay Must Be Okay" ... makes me realize how all of us are seeds of a greater revolution.

2) My boyfriend ... he puts up with my 12-levels of crazy disconnected thoughts all crammed together like trains in Penn Station at rush hour ... he makes sure I remember to get three squares ... he pulls me out of my computer cave to make sure I go outside and speak to other human beings ... he warns me when I'm about to walk into things ... or onto things ... or under things. And he's super cute. I got lucky.

1) Getting recognition, love, and comments from readers. I still can't believe anyone takes the time to read my blog, but it always makes me happy to see my Follower tick increase or to get a comment or, of course, an award.

OK, so that last one was pure unpasteurized suck-up, but it also happens to be true. :)

Review: Martyrs (2008)

French filmmaker Pascal Laugier has done something that happens only about once in a decade. He has created an original, coherent, and uncompromising vision of horror. It is, IMHO, the first truly great horror movie of the 21^st century: Martyrs.

I wasn’t sure what to expect. I knew the film was controversial, but had carefully avoided reading too much about it. I knew that it was a divisive film, scoring a perfect 50% on the Tomatometer.

I became further intrigued after putting in the DVD and selecting an option for the filmmaker’s introduction. Laugier (I kid you not) apologizes for what you are about to see. I've never seen that before. It’s no grindhouse gimmick. He doesn’t plea with you to repeat “It’s only a movie” as a mantra to get yourself through it. He seems utterly casual and sincere in his apology. He seems to be saying: “This is the vision that came to me and now you must wrestle with it as I have.”

Where to begin? The narrative has so many clever redirects, so many jogs to the left when you thought you were going right, so many mind fucks, and so much yummy subtext that a plot summary almost does it a disservice.

But here is the setup: Lucie is a young girl who escapes a hellish torture chamber in an industrial building. She is brought to a hospital where she is haunted by the vision of an attacking demon, and is befriended by another orphan named Anna … a helping, loving giving tree of kindness, who is pained by her friend’s torment.

That’s everything up until the opening titles. Then, its 15 years later. That’s all I can say without a …

SPOILER ALERT!!!!

Instead of going through the clever plot twists (a plot synopsis is available on Wikipedia if you must know), I really want to get into the character of Anna and the ending which is, I assume, where much of the controversy lies.

Anna, our ultimate final girl, is a good soul. She is also a ragingly co-dependent lesbian stuck on damaged, psychotic straight girl Lucie. But she always tries to do the right thing. Though she is stuck in a universe devoid of moral absolutes, she is compelled to try to save everybody. But it is she that needs saving. And you want her to be saved. You would reach into the screen and do it yourself if you could break that fourth wall.

SERIOUSLY, THERE ARE SPOILERS COMING. IF YOU HAVEN”T SEEN MARTYRS GO RENT IT AND COME BACK LATER.

We want to save Anna so much that when, in the 3^rd act, her relatively good deeds land her in the hot seat of torture, it is a miserable experience. And her ultimate fate incites deep dread.

I imagine many viewers might interpret Anna’s "transformation and enlightenment" after her abuse as a statement that women (and perhaps gays) are meant to be beaten, tortured, and abused. That they/we are put here on the earth to carry the sins of the unenlightened.

But that is not the meaning I got from Martyrs. I got quite the opposite.

For in the end, Anna’s abusers, led by the evil Madamoiselle, are revealed to be a bunch of twisted soulless religious wackos looking outside themselves for meaning, literalizing the idea of martyrdom, and trying to steal spirit from someone who has the heart and soul they lack. In the end, what they get for their evil deeds is nothing. They are still as hopeless and devoid of meaning as when their fiendish plot was devised.

Yes, Anna quite literally transcends the flesh to become pure consciousness. She is the Christ. Their calculated martyrdom of Anna “works.” It is perhaps true that people who are subjected to horrible amounts of cruelty may have no other place to go than to the deeper realm of spirit and/or psyche.

But the misguided, selfish (and doomed) fools who have engineered her martyrdom for their own salvation (instead of looking within) are ultimately left with nothing. In that sense, it doesn't work. It fails miserably.

The closing scene (and especially the closing line) delivers the true theme of the piece. It is what, I believe, reveals Laugier’s true intention. Watching it made me realize that Martyrs was both a direct dick punch to Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ and a French existentialist fuck you to Christian fundamentalism.

C’MON. DON’T SPOIL IT FOR YOURSELF. GO SEE IT FIRST!

In the last scene, Madamoiselle, having received reports from martyred Anna on the secrets of the afterlife, gets ready to report her findings to her anxious flock. After causing the suffering of so many innocents to steal the essence of their consciousness, what is the message that Madamoiselle has to relay?

“Keep Doubting.”

Then she blows her brains out.

Hallelujah.

Fuck you, Mel Gibson.

Review: American Zombie

Zombies used to scare me when I was a kid. Back in the day (assuming that day was located somewhere around the time Leif Garrett was a household name), zombie movies weren’t even rated. Seminal zombie classic Dawn of the Dead was released in 1978 with the warning that “No One Under 17 Will Be Admitted”.

It made pre-teen horror geeks like myself drool, wondering what brain-searing images might be up on the screen.

They could have just said: "Prepare to get brainfucked through your eye socket" and it may have been more subtle.

Then Michael Jackson (no disrespect, may he rest in peace, sham-on) ruined everything with his dancing zombies in Thriller. Sure it was fun, inventive, and cool. But it made zombies seem, well, silly.

Or more to the point, it made me realize how silly zombies already were. They were slow moving (yeah, I know, not anymore, but we are talking pre-28 days Later) and really dumb. A zombie attack was like being chased by a herd of carnivorous turtles. Anyone dumb and slow enough to get caught and eaten probably should have been thinned from the herd anyway (just as Darwin intended it ... when he created the Universe in 7 days in a laboratory in Cambridge ... it's true ... just read the Bible).

I'm going to eat you ... if you just hold still and wait right there for 20 minutes ... rigormortis acting up in the right hip.

Anyhoo, in 2008 the zombie genre and the mockumentary genre had a mumblecore baby called American Zombie and I finally got around to watching it. Though it hasn't changed my feeling that zombies are silly, I found it to be a thoroughly fun, clever, well acted piece worth an add in your Netflix queue.

We're Here! We're Dead! Get Used to It!

Our protagonist is Grace Lee, an overly-earnest and politically correct documentarian, who teams up with her old college friend John to make a documentary about how zombies are a new political minority seeking its rights.

For all five of you who read my blog (love you guys!!), you know that I have had a hard time with True Blood because of the whole “Vampire Rights as Gay Rights Analogy” thing. It’s clever and funny, but it also bugs, because vampires are predators and(just put me in the humorless liberal club on this one ... something I will be sure to be embarrassed about in 5-10 years) gays are not predators.

So, the idea of a “zombie rights” movie had me a little skeptical from the outset. But, I think filmmaker Grace Lee succeeded in making a very amusing low-budget dark comedy.

The members of the “non-living community” are explained to be misunderstood. They aren’t mindless, flesh eating monsters, but people afflicted with the R428 virus which makes them undead, but still thinking, feeling, and one assumes eating ... er ... something.

Ivan, the perhaps-not-so-terrible

We have Ivan, the overweight teen who works at a convenience store and writes a zine (you gotta love that zombies still have zines!); Judy, an Asian zombie who works for a vegan organic food company; Joel, the revolutionary who leads Z.A.G. – the Zombie Advocacy Group; and Lisa, a middle-aged zombie with a bad dye job.

What makes the film work as a comedy (it’s not a horror movie by any stretch), is that we have a very funny conflict between respectful, painfully P.C. Grace and aggressive, pushy John. John asks the questions that Grace will not out of politeness. Important questions like … do you eat the flesh or brains of the living? It’s all very well played, their resentments well buried deep beneath their calculated filmmaker exteriors.

It also succeeds as a satire of modern urban liberalism. The zombies are all very lefty, sweet-natured, hippie types. But no matter how tame vegan Judy seems as she is tending her organic tomatoes, she is still a fucking zombie right? And, well, zombies are dangerous ... or aren't they?

Judy looking perfectly passive ... but will she cut a bitch?

Zombies as a metaphor for the pacifist left turns out to be quite inspired. Grace seems to be poking fun at us hippie types who have shunned our natural aggression and buried it deep into the psychological shadows, only to have it emerge in neurotic and unexpected places (like having a meltdown when Whole Foods doesn't have the Unsweetened Organic Hemp Milk that you like ... for example ... not speaking from personal experience).

Can zombies be happy as shut down, civilized, TV-watching, passive-aggressive Americans ... or do they need something more? It's a fun question and the movie has fun playing around with it.

American Zombie does a lot with its limited budget. I am not going to nit pick any details that don’t work, because there are so many that do.

It is very well shot, especially considering it is done completely handheld. One scene in particular stands out: As things start to go off the rails and Grace is in the back seat dealing with a crisis, the camera slips and focuses simply on the car window, drops of rain reflecting the flashing lights of cars that pass by. The visuals are meditative and quiet as we listen to the drama unfolding off screen. It’s a lovely, simple and cinematic moment that made me wonder what Grace Lee would be capable of given just a little more money.

Are you listening Hollywood?

GWM, over 30, blond, blue eyes, horror geek, 5'11", 165, Versatile

I am very lucky, albeit lazy, blogger. On a week when my blogging output was lower than Glenn Beck's IQ, two fantabulous bloggers (Totally Jinxed and The Spooky Vegan) have given me The Versatile Blogger Award. See it in all of it's green loveliness below:


So first of all THANK YOU to these talented bloggers for giving me this honor on a week that I felt I really didn't deserve it. It even made Glenn Beck cry when he heard it ... either that or he poked himself in the eye with his sippy cup ...


But now, I must earn it for there be rules attached to said award. Sees them below...

The rules attached to this award are:
• Thank the person who gave it to you (Thanks again, Jinx and Spooky!!)
• Share 7 things about yourself.
• Pass the award along to 15 who you have recently discovered and who you think fantastic for whatever reason.
• Contact the blogs you picked and let them know about the award.

7 Things About Myself:
1) One of my favorite movies is "Joe Versus the Volcano" (I know, but it's seriously a hidden gem and Meg Ryan's best work ... no, I'm serious ... where are you going?)
2) I have an incredibly low threshhold for pain.
3) I'm friends with someone who does those celebutard "body language" interpretations on the TV, which I think is fucking hysterical.
4) I'm also Facebook friends with the guy that wrote Friday the 13th (the original), which makes me love both the Internet and America a little bit more.
5) My cat is named "Ripley" after Ellen Ripley in Alien.
6) I once went on a date with someone who was on the 80s sitcom Head of the Class.
7) I have an almost unnatural fear of imposing rules on others (this will be important later!)
8) I sleep in separate beds.
9) I can't count.

Bloggers that J'Adore:
Like I said, I have a weird aversion to imposing rules on people (see #7 above), and clearly this post proves I have some difficulty following them as well. I know at this point you are probably thinking "Save it hippie", but it's the truth.

But I would like to give some love (and the award) to the following bloggers who are just a bunch of smart coolheads that you should check out. First to the bloggers that gave me this award.

Jinx at Totally Jinxed will just riff on whatever catches her fancy (beards, Ron Perlman, and being David Bowie in Labyrinth) or do an in-depth movie review of a movie I had no idea exists. My Netflix queue grows exponentially just by virtue of her being in my Google Reader. She also seems like an extremely nice person with extremely red hair. And she has a stuffed pirahna. You gotta give it up for girlfriend.

The Spooky Vegan loves Halloween and who doesn't love someone who loves Halloween? She mixes up her Halloween fetishism with handy recipes for those who don't dig the taste of cow mucus and muscle tissue. I can seriously say it is the only place on the internet that will provide an "I Spit on Your Grave" review and a Tuscan Bread Summer Salad recipe in the same week. I know, right? You so want to be her friend.

And here are a list of other bloggers that I think are worthy of the title (in no particular order) and why ...

- the jaded viewer (because he fucking swears alot and I fucking love that.)

- Day of the Woman (because she's like the kid sister I never had ... ok at this point in my life, she could be my daughter ... just don't try to steal her signature "Peace, Love, Brains" sign off, cuz' she will cut a bitch...)

- My New Plaid Pants (I just assume everyone already reads this ... and if you aren't ... why not? Jason Adams is smart, freakin' hysterical and totally mo's out at the sight of Jake Gyllenhall ... or Ryan Reynolds ... or ... well, you get the picture.)

- Billy Loves Stu (Gay horror blogger extraordinaire Pax Romano serves up lots of juicy horror homo tidbits ... I only wish he'd change that darn font color ... )

- Final Girl (because Stacie Ponder is the queen mother of all horror bloggers and has a wit so dry, you need an IV drip)

- Mrs. Hall (because she does starkly confessional blogging, digging down into her human suffering without the predictable ironic distance of most of the blogosphere ... and then will gush about how that Jason Stackhouse - that lean, mean sex machine of True Blood - makes her ladyparts smile. How can you not love?)

- Rick Rossovitch (ok, this guy almost never blogs and each entry has exactly one tag: "stream of consciousness," but I have been obsessed with Mr. Rossivitch since the 80s when he looked like this ...
... to the 90s when he shot his TV show Pacific Blue outside of my house in Venice and fed all my silver fox daddy fantasies while looking like this ...

... and has since apparently retired to work on his house in Ojai and do some random blogging about incredibly random things while looking, er, like this ...
(I would still so be his little mini fire truck, that's alls I'm sayin.)

OK, so Rick doesn't deserve the award, but I've never figured out a proper place to vent my obsession with Mr. Rossovich. So here 'tis. Plus his blog is fascinating in a post-celebrity freak out kind of way.

So, I know that was just 9 and I'm breaking the rules and junk, but please go check out these folks and follow their blogs. It will make you a better person and more people will want to have sex with you just for doing it.

Peace, Love and ... er ... that's all, just Peace and Love...