Wednesday, May 31, 2017

"Every drop of blood you spill puts more flesh on my bones."

Everybody needs to calm down and listen very carefully. I am one of a small group of people who know what "convfefe" means, and you really don't want to know. I wish I didn't. It's stupid. It happened a long time ago, it wasn't that funny in the first place, and I should know because I was there. You will roll your eyes so hard when you find out. The only mystery here is why D.J. keeps bringing it up. He gets like that when he's drunk. Let's talk about what's important.

Last week, I started a feature on my Facebook page wherein each day I post a GIF of a beheading from a different movie or TV show. I call it Daily Decapitation, and you should watch for it. Evidently Kathy Griffin saw it, misunderstood it on many levels, tried to steal the idea for her Twitter page, and the whole thing blew up in her face. Serves her right, the fuckin' hack.

What else won't people shut up about this week? 

Fidget spinners. They're toys. You really don't need to have an opinion about them.  

Now we're caught up on current events, let's talk about a movie. 

This week's Thursday Thriller is Hellraiser.


This gory 1987 dark fantasy established author Clive Barker as a director of feature films and introduced us to the Cenobites, a gang of sex demons who are into the most extreme kinds of sadomasochism. 

A horny guy named Frank (Sean Chapman) has exhausted his imagination in finding horny stuff to do. You name it, he's tried it and now he's bored. Tell me about it, right?

So Frank gets a hold of a puzzle box that is reputed to open up all the pleasures of Heaven or Hell and he opens up the Hell side because he's not particular. He soon learns Hell's idea of pleasure involves him being flayed alive.



Shortly after, Frank's brother Larry (Andrew Robinson) and Larry's wife Julia (Clare Higgins) move into the same house where Frank opened the box. Julia and Frank once had an affair. Skinless Frank (Oliver Smith) reminds Julia of all the horny times they had together and suggests they could have them again if she'd just bring home some men to kill so he can have skin again. What could go wrong?



Hellraiser is a gory tale of adultery and murder with insinuations of rape and incest. The Cenobites aren't even the weirdest monsters in it. It's one of those movies. If you haven't watched it yet, it's time, and if you have, it might be time to watch it again. It streams on Netflix, Hulu Plus, Shudder and YouTube

Wednesday, May 24, 2017

"Just face the inevitability of a violent death."

It's about to be Memorial Day weekend in America, and everyone's getting revved up for the race.

The last Sunday of every May, thousands of motor enthusiasts and people looking for an excuse to drink descend on the second most populous city in the Midwest to watch cars go around in a circle all day long. I am of course talking about The Indy 500. They put it in the same month as the Kentucky Derby as if to say, "Suck it, Louisville. Cars are way faster than horses."

And while that may be, the event is so montonously non-lethal. Almost nobody dies in these cars that go 225 miles per hour. The engineers are way too good at their job.

How am I supposed to be interested when the stakes are that low? I want to watch a race where people die.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Roger Corman's Death Race 2050.


This 2017 action/comedy by G.J. Echternkamp takes place in the not-so-far-flung future of 2050, when America is truly run like a business, a massive conglomerate known as the United Corporations of America. There's no president any more, just The Chairman, played by Malcolm McDowell. What's the Chairman's solution to problems of overpopulation? Distraction by spectacle. Each year a handful of drivers and their proxies race across the country and run over people for points. They can be a little hard to come by because most people are inside watching the chaos on their virtual reality sunglasses.

Manu Bennett plays Frankenstein, a champion driver who's been put back together after crashes multiple times. America adores him, but he is disillusioned. Marci Miller plays Annie Sullivan, his proxy. Sullivan has a helmet camera so she can broadcast the race from inside the car. The two don't get along very well.

Ignore the synopsis Netflix gives you, this not a sequel to the Corman-produced 1975 classic Death Race 2000, which was directed by Paul Bartel and stars David Carradine as Frankenstein, nor is it the next chapter in the Corman-produced franchise that Paul W.S. Anderson rebooted in 2008 with Jason Statham. Roger Corman's Death Race 2050 is a re-make of the 1975 version. Presumably Echternkamp reminded Corman it was supposed to be funny. 



The plot is nearly identical, but the details vary. Instead of Sylvester Stallone as Machine Gun Joe Vaterbo as Frankenstein's arch-nemesis, you get Burt Grinstead as Jed Perfectus, a man who was genetically engineered to be a perfect physical specimen so as to usher in a new era of human evolution. Instead of Roberta Collins as Matilda The Hun, you get Anessa Ramsey as Tammy the Terrorist, a religious extremist whose precise denomination is unclear, but appears to worship Elvis Presley. Helen Loris plays an altogether new character Dr. Creamer, who rides along in a car she designed to drive itself and serve as a sex toy that brings her to climax every time it kills somebody.

As with any good satire, there's a little something to piss off everybody in this violent jaunt. If you're not put off by the over-the-top stereotypes in the character of driver/hip-hop artist Minerva Jefferson (Folake Olowofoyeku), then her hit song, "Drive! Drive! Kill! Kill!" will probably get under your skin when she gets to the part about killing white people. 



I'm not usually into remakes, but a lot has happened with technology and celebrity culture since 1975. A lot of other movies have borrowed ideas from Death Race 2000, so it's only right a remake come steal them back. (Yeah, I'm looking at your TV announcers, Hunger Games.) The premise needed some updated jokes and it got 'em. 

Roger Corman's Death Race 2050 streams on Netflix.

Wednesday, May 17, 2017

"Stinking in the basement is OK if you're reading the right books."

Meth heads, am I right? You ever watch them shop? They twitch like insects as they flitter about from one shelf to the next, every product a magic bauble that must be scrutinized carefully and purchased at once. The clerk, keeping watch over this frenzied spree, anticipates a respite as they approach the counter with arms full of impulse items, when suddenly the meth heads see a rack of butane lighters, and have to click all of them five to eight times in a desperate search for "the good one.'

Can you imagine what a meth head would do with a few million dollars in a warehouse full of film-making gear?

This week's Thursday Thriller is The Evil Within.


I can't say for certain whether oil heir Andrew Getty ever visited such a warehouse, but he did die in 2015 with toxic levels of methamphetamine in his system after having spent $4 million to $6 million on making this damn scary movie. According to The Hollywood Reporter, it remained unfinished when Getty died, but producer Michael Luceri made the final edits to get the film released. Plenty of web sites are carrying the story, and they're all practically the same, so let's just talk about the movie.

A mentally retarded man named Dennis (Frederick Koehler) has had escalating night terrors about a blue Michael Berryman since he was a child. In a recent dream, Berryman stapled a zipper to Dennis's back, so he can unzip his skin and try to crawl inside it, sorta like in Freddy's Revenge. In fact, there are a lot of elements of classic horror films in play here. While it's a unique story, there are elements reminiscent of Hellraiser and a Nightmare on Elm Street in it, with maybe a dash of dialogue from The Exorcist, and topped off with a little homage to Psycho.

Dennis's brother John (Sean Patrick Flanery) is his caretaker. John puts up an antique mirror in Dennis's room one day. Dennis hates it and throws a fit, until his reflection starts talking to him. Dennis and his reflection have long conversations and one day the reflection suggests that if he wants to be smarter, he needs to kill a cat, starting Dennis down the path of serial murder.

Trippy, disturbing and intense, The Evil Within is a hidden gem that's worth watching a couple times to see all the stuff you didn't notice the first time. It streams on Amazon Prime.



Wednesday, May 10, 2017

"I will not be threatened by a walking meat loaf."

I stand corrected. You can't just keep pig's blood in a cooler in the trunk of your car for a couple nights. It will clot. To keep it from clotting you have to keep it super-cold, and perhaps add an anti-coagulant. I'm sorry I just took Stephen King's word for it, and am thankful for those readers who've played with enough blood to know better. I hope all you teens and guys in their 20s who have skeezy moustaches and drive muscle cars get this in time to adjust your prom plans accordingly. 

This week's Thursday Thriller is An American Werewolf in London.


This 1981 horror/comedy by John Landis is about two young American bros backpacking across Europe. David Kessler (David Naughton) and Jack Goodman (Griffin Dunne) stop into a pub called The Slaughtered Lamb one night to get out of the cold Northern England countryside. Their reception is only slightly less chilly, and just as one of the regulars lightens the mood with a mildly racist joke, Jack has to screw it up by asking why they have a five-pointed star painted on the wall. David and Jack decide to leave, taking with them nothing but a little advice to beware the full moon and stay off the moors. They screw that up. Jack gets killed and David winds up in a coma.


While still in the hospital, Jack's shredded corpse visits David and warns him that he is now a werewolf, while Jack is undead and will have no rest until the werewolf line is severed. He asks David to kill himself. 


Naturally, David declines. He gets out of the hospital and moves in temporarily with his hot nurse Alex (Jenny Agutter).

Sounds pretty good, right? Even if David is a werewolf, that just means once a month he develops an unquenchable bloodlust, kills a few people and wakes up naked and disoriented with no memory of the previous night's maulings. What's so bad about that?



Well, first and funniest, the people you kill start following you around telling you to kill yourself. Secondly, animals don't like you any more. Thirdly, wolfing out hurts like hell, and you know it's coming, so there's a lot of pacing around listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival beforehand.

This movie strikes a great balance between the comedy and the horror. The characters are funny and relatable, but when it's time to deliver the scare, it doesn't hold back. The transformation is one of the best that's ever been done, and cinched special effects man Rick Baker an Academy Award for best makeup.

An American Werewolf in London streams on Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Wednesday, May 3, 2017

"I can see your dirty pillows. Everyone will."

Faithless mortals, Old Scratch has a favor to ask of you.

You see, the movie I want to tell you about is based on a Stephen King book. It's actually one of the better adaptations of one his better books. Inevitably, some literate person is going to display their prowess not by actually reading this review, but instead by commenting that the book was better.

Obviously, the book format allows for a more detailed story, in case you wonder things like where Billy Nolan kept two buckets of pig's blood those couple days between butchering the animals and crashing the prom. It's generally taken at face value that reading a book is better for your brain than watching a movie. I've always been of the opinion that you can simply enjoy both.

Here's the favor I'm asking, mortals: contradict these self-righteous people. You don't have to attack them or insult them. Just get under their skin by telling them, "No way. The movie was way better than the book." You can make up reasons if you like -- the dumber, the better. For example, you could say, "The book wasn't even in color." I just want to see what happens. Thanks in advance.

Without any further ado, this week's Thursday Thriller is Carrie.


Brian De Palma directed this 1976 adaptation of King's first novel about a 16-year-old social misfit named Carrie White (Sissy Spacek). Carrie's mom Margaret (Piper Laurie) is such a religious nut she didn't warn her daughter about menstruation, because she thinks the curse of woman is punishment for sin rather than biological fate. When Carrie gets her first period in the shower after gym class, the poor girl thinks she's bleeding to death, and runs screaming to her classmates to help. They respond by pelting her with tampons and chanting, "Plug it up! Plug it up!"

If that's not enough trauma for Carrie, when she gets home from school, Mom locks her in the closet and tells her to pray for forgiveness.



You can probably guess how mom reacts when Carrie tells her that Tommy Ross (William Katt), the most popular boy in school asked her to prom.

Everyone except Tommy is pretty cruel to Carrie the whole movie, and King didn't give her a whole lot of self-esteem or coping mechanisms to deal with it, unless you count telekinesis as a coping mechanism. You know what? Maybe it comes out even.


John Travolta is in it. P.J. Soles from Halloween is in it. Carrie is one of the best films of the 1970s. It streams on Hulu Plus.

And remember, the book wasn't even in color.