The cheese-ball is back

Anna started school on Thursday and somehow, the planets aligned and the first day of school coincided with my day off. So not only did I get to see her off to school in the morning, but I also got to spend time being a layabout around the house, in control of the TV for what seems like the first time in forever.

I had seen that Phantasm II had been added to Netflix Streaming recently. I've always enjoyed the original Phantasm, even though it's absolutely nuts and incomprehensible on so many levels. A creepy tall man undertaker that is robbing graves to turn into midgets so that he can send them back as slaves to his planet (or is it another dimension) is just too strange for words. His secret is safe until small town kid catches a glimpse of The Tall Man picking up a casket all by himself. From that point on, it's an at time creepy, other times cheesy thrill ride that works with its obviously small budget. While not as overtly dreamlike as the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, I think that part of the appeal of Phantasm is its mystery - the "what the hell is actually going on here?" quality makes it worth sitting through 90 minutes of pretty bad acting (except for The Tall Man, of course) and very bad late 70s hair.

Fast forward 10 years and Phantasm finally got the sequel that fans were clamoring for. I remember watching parts of this movie on HBO as a teenager - or maybe it was home video, I really can't recall. But at the time I watched it, I had not seen the original film, so I was interested in it from a horror movie fan standpoint, but not so much as a fan of the original movie. So how does it stack up against the original? Well, in many ways it's a bit of a remake of the original movie, only with a bigger budget while also serving as a sequel. It picks up right where the original left off. Some of the original cast is back, but the actor who played Mike in the original was not back. But obviously, Angus Scrimm had to return as The Tall Man. Just as there is no Blondie without Debbie Harry, there is no Phantasm without Angus Scrimm.

I tweeted the title of this post when I was about half way through the movie - the tag line really should have been "the cheese-ball is back." All the excesses of 80s horror cheesiness are on full display. The women all have hair that has been Aqua-Netted within an inch of its life, there are more "gotcha" moments than you can shake a stick at, and the acting, while passable, is still pretty bad. But all is saved by The Tall Man. All Angus Scrimm has to do is walk on the screen and all is forgiven. Naturally, he has the best lines of the film which is saying something because he really doesn't talk that much. My favorite line was when he was holding the Catholic priest up by his inverted crucifix necklace and he says with patented Tall Man menace "You think that when you die you go to Heaven...you come to US!" Apparently Angus Scrimm, who is still alive and kicking, has embraced his role as The Tall Man and appears at horror cons across the country. If I played the Tall Man, I totally would. *sigh* If only Faye Dunaway would embrace her role as Joan Crawfod in the same way.

The spheres are also given an 80s update. They're capable of much worse than they were in 1979. One sphere digs its way through a guy's back, spinal column and up through his internal organs, only to get stuck on its way out his mouth. I had a hard time with this - not because of the gore, but seriously, anything capable of boring through the bones of the spinal column would certainly not get stuck at something like a jaw. But I'm sure that it was so they could show the goriness that resulted from the ball getting stuck, with blades continuing to turn as it shreds more facial flesh.

Even though it was cheesy, I really enjoyed watching it again, and naturally, the end set up for another sequel. Phantasm 3: Lord of the Dead and Phantasm 4: Oblivion are already out there, but sadly, not available on Netflix Streaming (DAMN YOU SALAZAR!) and apparently, there's a fifth one on the way.

Phantasm II is a fun and cheesy 80s take on a classic 70s horror film. It's well worth your hour and 39 minutes. Long live Angus Scrimm! (even though he's assured immortality already.)

A 2010 Nightmare

It's hard for me to get my head around the fact that a lot of the movies I grew up with are at least 25 years old now. It doesn't seem possible but really, when you think about it, being as old as they are makes them prime target for being remade for a modern audience. No genre has seen this happen more than horror. Many of the classics from the late 70s and early 80s have been revamped and reimagined - most notably Rob Zombie's take on Halloween, a new and not-necessarily-improved Friday the 13th and a new version of Dawn of the Dead, now complete with fast zombies. Of these new versions, I approved of Dawn of the Dead, had mixed feelings on Halloween and honestly, haven't even seen the new Friday the 13th so I can't really say much about it.

A remake of 1984's classic slasher flick A Nightmare on Elm Street seems like such a bad idea on paper. The original is pretty much perfect and seriously, why mess with perfection? Because we can, that's why! Freddy Krueger has been reinvented for the new millenium and everything old is, well, old again. I'll admit that I was intrigued by the remake but really didn't know what a remake could add to the story. When the scathing reviews came in (13% on Rotten Tomatoes) I felt justified. In a move rather unlike us, my friend Matt and I completely skipped it when it arrived at the dollar theater. Surely with reviews like that, it wasn't even worth a lousy $1.50. But when it finally hit DVD, I figured what the hell, I'll give it a try.

Clocking in at a measly 93 minutes, I'm still not quite sure what to think of this movie. As an homage to the original, I liked it. It is certainly nothing to write home about, but I thought it was a capable horror film that honored the intentions of the original movie without vomiting all over it. Nancy is still the main character, except Glen is now Quentin, perhaps to reflect that this is no longer 1984. The body-bag-in-the-school-hallway scene is still there, albeit much later in the film, as is some of the other imagery - particularly when it came to the death scenes.

Perhaps the biggest difference is that Freddy is no longer a child murderer but is, instead a pedophile. Apparently, this was Wes Craven's original idea for Krueger, but it was scrapped as there was national attention on the McMartin preschool case, so instead, he was just a murderer of children vs. a sexual abuser of children. No matter, he's still the bastard son of a thousand maniacs. Robert Englund, who played Freddy in all the original installments of the series, is replaced by Jackie Earle Haley who puts a much more menacing spin on the character. Say what you will about the original movies, but by the time you got around to A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child, Freddy had been reduced to comic relief. As my friend Missy famously stated at the end of that film..."THUMBS DOWN! I've been more scared at a Disney movie!" Alas, she was right. At least the new Nightmare was scarier than that.

Usually when I see these movies, I'm not much of a stickler for reality. This is especially true for a film like A Nightmare on Elm Street since so much of it takes place in dreams and sometimes, the dividing line between the dream and reality is nebulous at best. But Quentin stealing epinephrine syringes from a hospital crash cart and using them to stay awake REALLY bumped me out of the movie. It will not work, not even in a dream. What it will do is speed your heart up and make you jittery for a little bit. Even if it did manage to keep you awake, the buzz would be short-lived as the half-life of epinephrine is 2 minutes. Did they not have medical consultants on this film? Or were they just that lazy?

Be that as it may, I still recommend the film as I felt it didn't disrespect the original film and had a few pretty good scares. The final scare really took the cake, even though I was half expecting it based on the end of the original movie. Just don't expect an Academy Award winner (or medical accuracy for that matter) and you'll be good. Rumor has it that this film made enough that there's going to be not one but two sequels.

I won't see those at the dollar theater either.

Look who's evil now!

Horror and comedy frequently go hand in hand. The Nightmare on Elm Street sequels prove this beyond a shadow of a doubt. But the combination of horror, comedy and musical theater is a little bit rarer of a bird. Over the weekend I got a chance to finally see Evil Dead: The Musical at Kansas City's Off Center Theater with my friend Jason who had traveled from Boston to Kansas City for a conference. I'm not really sure where to start with this musical except that it was funny and campy as well as being a complete gross-out. So in other words, it was a total win.

Evil Dead: The Musical is based on the Sam Raimi films Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn. Both films deal with the summoning of demons by reading from the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis or The Book of the Dead. The musical cherry picks the best parts from each of the movies and creates its own plot line, punctuated by Broadway style show tunes that are as funny as they are profane. The five college students on their way to an old abandoned cabin in the woods have NO idea what what awaits them.

In addition to singing and dancing and very bad puns, there is a shit-ton of fake stage blood that gets used during this show. And not content to just let the players participate in the fun of being covered in blood and gore, each production of Evil Dead: The Musical designates the first several rows of the audience as the "splatter zone." Sit there at your own peril, because as the program said, they will do everything in their power to make sure that they get the blood on you. For the show we went to, there was a row of folding chairs right up by the stage and then the first 2 rows of permanent seating were covered in trash bags. I had heard about this and Jason and I both decided it would be better to NOT sit in the splatter zone. Unfortunately, I heard about the splatter zone AFTER I had ordered the tickets, so our seat in row B was clearly going to be splattered. I called the ticket office mid-September and got our seats changed to row C which they assured me would not be in the splatter zone. Well, imagine our surprise when we got there and there were trash bags over our seats. It all worked out - we talked to a manager and they seated us in house seats clear of the splatter zone (and also free of seats in front of us which is nice for two 6 foot tall people.) And it was a good thing - the people in the splatter zone were covered in blood. It looked like people had been murdered.

The cast was good and the songs were well sung. What I wasn't expecting was how much dancing there actually was! I'd have dropped over dead after the first number had I been in that cast. No wonder they were all in terrific shape. I was especially impressed with Sam Wright's performance as Ash - the physical stamina it must have taken for that role is a bit mind boggling. He is in virtually every scene of the show and sings in most of the songs. I was not as impressed with the guy who played Scott, which made the performance of what has always been my favorite song from the musical "What the Fuck Was That?" a bit of an anticlimax. He didn't sing it as much as he shouted it and after having listened to the cast recording of that song for the last 2 years, I was a bit let down.

We also found it very odd that the theater was in what was basically a mall, but it all worked out because we basically just hung out around Crown Center for most of the day while we waited for the show to start. It was a good venue for the show and the audience really ate it up.

The next morning, I e-mailed my friend Matt and told him that if there is ever another semi-local performance of this show, we must go. I would totally go again but this time, I think I want to sit in the splatter zone. They even had "I survived the Splatter Zone" t-shirts! I did buy a T-shirt at the show - my one souvenir from my trip to Kansas City this weekend. Here it is:


The one I really wanted had the hand making an "L" in the Evil Dead logo a la the Glee logo. The tag line was "Like Glee, only dead." The other one said "Evil Dead: The Musical - a fucking good time!" which I just didn't feel comfortable buying.

The show is not going to win Tonys but who says it has to. It was a bloody (pardon the pun) good time and really, what more can you wish for from something called Evil Dead: The Musical?

Devil inside

I've gotten to the point with M. Night Shyamalan that I simply don't trust him any longer. The Sixth Sense was great, Unbreakable less so and pretty much everything since then has been quite awful. I kind of liked The Happening in spite of myself - something about malevolent plants just really turns me on. So when I heard that Shyamalan's name was attached to the film Devil, I mostly just wanted to roll my eyes and move on without even dipping my toes in that pool. But last week it rolled into the dollar theater here in town and for $1.50, I couldn't resist.

Originally I was set to see this movie tomorrow night with a couple of other guys but one of them had another commitment and the other had the ironclad excuse of it being his wedding anniversary. So it looked like I was on my own for this one. That's okay - I'm not averse to going to movies by myself. I don't do it often and that's mostly because without the incentive of meeting a friend at the movie, I will usually give into inertia and just decide to skip the whole thing and stay home. For perspective, the last movie I went to on my own was Cloverfield.

But when I really want to see something, I can overcome that inertia and that's just what I did tonight. It helps that it's October and I was really in the mood to sit in a theater at a scary movie. Devil promised to deliver just the right amount of chills. The basic premise is quite simple. Five apparently random people end up trapped in an elevator in a downtown Philadelphia skyscraper. One of them just happens to be Satan himself. The set-up of the movie describes this as "the devil's meeting" - a South American legend in which the devil takes human form to punish a select group of people on Earth before claiming their souls. His entry into the world is always preceded by a suicide and so, naturally, Devil opens with someone falling out of a building and on to a delivery truck.

If I were only able to say one thing about Devil it would be that it plays like a long episode of The Twilight Zone. It never really delivers any true scares. There were a few jumps here and there, but, much like Paranormal Activity, it settled for creepy rather than scary. I felt like this was a good trade-off because with nearly all of the action taking place inside an elevator, it just wasn't a good set-up for honest to God scares. I found the story of "the devil's meeting" and the slow reveal of the components of the myth and their subsequent incorporation into the movie to be particularly well done. In addition to the events inside the elevator, there's an interesting side story of a Philadelphia police officer whose loss of his family to a hit-and-run driver nearly caused his own demise from alcoholism which fits like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle.

What I liked about Devil is that in this day and age of torture-porn horror films, it dared to be subtle and different. Yes, there is some gore, but most of the deaths occur off-screen which simultaneously heightens and lessens their impact. By doing this, it plays to one of the human brain's greatest strengths - the ability to imagine. What we come up with in our minds for what's happened when the lights go off in the elevator is much scarier than anything that could be put on film. It's refreshing to see a horror film that tries to scare with concepts and ideas, rather than gushing blood and decapitations.

Like I said, I didn't find Devil especially scary, but it did make me think which was not what I was expecting from a movie like this. I also had feelings for the characters, whether it be the people in the elevator that I mostly loathed because they were depraved human beings or the cop whose loss of his family affected me more than I thought it would.

This will be a movie that's shown on cable a zillion times. If late night TV were still running movies instead of infomercials, it'd be a new staple. It was definitely worth the $1.50 but then again, most movies are. The only movies I've ever seen there that were probably not worth the admission price were Silent Hill (people actually booed at the end of it) and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. It wasn't as good as the best horror movie I've seen for next-to-nothing (30 Days of Night) and had nothing on the fantastic-ness of Drag Me To Hell. However, if you're in the mood for a movie with its fair share of creepiness along with a little morality tale as well, Devil might just be the ticket.

I know it was for me tonight. And at 80 minutes, I felt like I was barely even at the movie. If I had paid full price for it, I'd have been pissed just based on that short running time!

Bump in the night

(Probable Paranormal Activity spoilers ahead)

After fits and starts that saw us postponing our first attempt, my buddy Matt and I finally managed to see this fall's must-see scary movie, Paranormal Activity. I have to admit that from the moment I heard about it, I wanted to see it, and I knew that Heidi would have no part of it. However, as the movie gathered steam and transformed into an unstoppable internet juggernaut, I became more and more skeptical about it. Did I really want to see it? Was this movie more hype than actual substance? Would I even be scared?

The answers to each of these questions, oddly enough, is yes and no. For those who have somehow kept themselves out of the loop, this is another faux documentary style horror film consisting of "found footage" in which a young couple, Kate & Micah, find themselves plagued by a demonic presence - one that seems to have followed Kate through most of her life. Micah buys a video camera all in an attempt to capture whatever-it-is on tape. All this really succeeds in doing is seriously pissing it off.

What I found surprising about the movie is how really not scary it was - it didn't deliver a genuine honest-to-God scare until the final five minutes. Instead of being out-and-out scary, it settled for being creepy, which was actually a smart move. With a budget of $11,000, it was clear they were going to have to go the Jaws route - the less seen, the better. In this day and age of being able to put anything on the screen (which we saw in spades before the movie during the trailer for 2012), I admire the fact that you never actually see what's stalking Kate & Micah. Instead, it's inferred, alluded to - so much so that you start to doubt your own eyes. This is a movie that somehow manages to make something as innocuous as the turning on and off of lights certifiably creepy. It shouldn't be, but yet, you can't help but be creeped out by it.

I didn't really buy the whole "found footage" concept of the movie. What we saw on the screen was far too edited to be raw video. I felt that the footage from The Blair Witch Project felt more authentic, like it could have actually been found in the woods. Also, let it be said here and now that Micah was pretty insufferable. First it was his name - not pronounced "my-kah" but instead "mee-ka" which had me thinking he was going to break out into "Grace Kelly" at any moment. He was also horribly insensitive to Kate - it's a wonder he ever got laid, although it certainly wasn't for lack of trying on his part. Additionally, he was too-stupid-to-live for bringing the Ouija board in even after he had been cautioned not to attempt to communicate with the demon. But God help me if that Ouija board scene wasn't one of the creepiest in the movie.

I am hardcore when it comes to horror films - it takes a lot to truly scare me. I think the last movie that really scared me was probably The Grudge. Laugh if you will, but I had to turn the lights on when I was watching that one. As I mentioned before, Paranormal Activity did not scare me so much as it intrigued me. The ending packed a wallop that I wasn't entirely expecting, but even that scare has dissipated in the couple of hours since I got home.

It was worth probably half of what we paid for it - as Matt said, it would have been a better dollar theater movie. But you live and learn - unless you're the stupid person behind us who thought she was watching an ACTUAL documentary. At the end of the movie, she says, "I want to know RIGHT NOW if that's a true story or not." Matt and I didn't have the heart to shatter her illusion.

(A word of caution: the use of shaky cam in this movie has the potential to turn even the strongest stomach. I made it all the way through Quarantine without feeling sick, but this one even got to me after a while.)

Not sleeping

I'm getting ready to work the overnight shift over the weekend and consequently, I'm up in the middle of the night with the hopes that I will sleep well into the morning tomorrow. I have turned off Gmail notifier so that it doesn't bother me, as well as the phone. I find it funny that Gmail notifier was my primary concern vs. the phone, even though the phone is much more likely to wake me up.

Anyway, I usually worry about not being able to stay awake on the night before I start the overnight shifts, but tonight, no worries, because I just got done watching the movie Quarantine, which was, from what I understand, pretty much a frame-by-frame remake of the Spanish horror movie REC which had been released about 6 months before Quarantine.

Holy. Crap.

I know that the movie was out last year, but I never saw it until just tonight. Here's the trailer but be warned, it gives away all the best bits. (Heidi, not that you would, but don't watch this trailer.)



The basic gist of the story is that news reporter Angela Vidal and her cameraman are doing a segment on the night shift of the L.A. fire department. They end up on a call to an apartment complex in which they are inexplicably sealed in by the police department. Through a turn of events I won't spoil here, much zombie carnage ensues. As I was watching this movie, I was kind of silently (and sometimes not so silently) mocking it for not being particularly scary and having characters that are, as my wife would refer to them, too stupid to live. You don't really get to know them all that well - some of them I never did learn their name - but that's hardly the point as they are pretty much Bantha zombie pudu and you know it.

Very Blair Witch-ish in nature, I found myself liking the movie in spite of its paper thin plot and idiotic characters. And then, in the last 20 minutes, it gets VERY scary. It doesn't hurt that the lights go out, and that everything is seen in shadows. Even the light on the camera is broken (in one of the movie's best scares) and then the rest of the movie is shot in night vision. It's these last 20 minutes that really redeem the film and keep it from being just another forgettable scary movie.

It's a pretty capable zombie flick, even though one could argue that they aren't really zombies. Rather, they are much more in the vein of the 28 Days Later zombies - infected rather than reanimated dead. These distinctions matter, especially to people like me.

So now that it's 2:30AM, I need to try to sleep. But every time I close my eyes, I see those images in the night vision camera and, well, hopefully I can get SOME sleep.

Watch it - it's streaming on Netflix for those of you that do the Netflix thing.

Podcast revealed

As promised, the podcast I participated in is up and ready for the download. You have one of two options should you choose to listen to it (and really, you should - we're brilliant.) You can go to the podcast web site (it's episode 31) and download from there. Alternatively, you can go to iTunes and get the podcast that way. Either way, do it.

I clearly need to be taught how to use a microphone, so go easy on me. If you have positive comments, I'd love to hear them. Please keep negative comments to yourself. My ego is, as Kylie would sing, made of glass.

And to anybody arriving at this blog via the Live Free or Blow Hard web site - welcome. Hope you like what you see. It was a blast being on the podcast and just want to say thanks to Matt and Lance for having me on.

You wanna see something REALLY scary?

I really didn't mean for a post about Samantha Fox to sit at the top of my blog for the better part of a week, but sadly, it did. What can I say? The week has gotten the better of me, BUT it is now over and I am on a 5 day break from work. I am very excited. Tomorrow, I'm headed down to Des Moines to meet up with my friends Matt and Bess for lunch at Proof which looks quite ritzy but Bess assures us they serve soda in cans. So no worries on that front, I guess. Heidi is going for a massage at the East Village Spa while I am at lunch.

And then, later that night, I am headed down to Matt's house for the recording of his weekly podcast Live Free of Blow Hard. He, along with his friend Lance, have been doing this since February and have 30 episodes under their belts. Their topics run the gamut and although I usually can't find 60 consecutive minutes to listen to their podcast, I have only missed a few. I admire their tenacity because podcasting is a much bigger commitment than blogging! They invited me to be on the podcast quite a while ago, but a combination of my work schedule, their recording schedule and the topic we chose has delayed that until now. Our topic is going to be (just in time for Halloween) "top 3 horror films and why?" although I'm sure that they'll title it much better than that. Anyway, it is sure to be a good one. I have been doing my homework so as not to look like a complete idiot.

Once the podcast is done and posted, I will post a link to it here so that those of you who choose to listen can do so. I would say, like Heidi did earlier this week, if you want to hear what I sound like, you should listen, but since I've done those few video blogs and a good chunk of you actually know me in real life, that's not much of an incentive. But if you like horror films, you probably won't want to miss it.

Also, Kylie is set to take the stage in Chicago in a mere 30 minutes and yet here I sit. DAMN YOU SALAZAR!

Easter - if it were a horror film

We went down to Ankeny today to my friend Jeff's sister's house for an Easter egg hunt. Anna had a great time, and Jeff surprised all the kids by dressing up as the Easter Bunny. Anyway, I snapped photographic evidence of his arrival.


Looking at it now, it is like I captured the moment just before everyone at the Easter egg hunt was murdered by the evil Easter Bunny. I think that Easter is the only holiday that does not have a companion slasher movie. Instead, we have to settle for Night of the Lepus, which I have never seen and after watching this trailer, I think I must Netflix it immediately.



And here's a clip from the movie. To quote The Vicar Of Dibley, it looks like a "production of bloody Watership Down!" Emphasis on the bloody part.

I find your lack of posts disturbing

But Lord Vader, there's a reason for the lack of posts. Actually several. But really, at this point I would have been strangled by the Jedi chokehold, right?

I have been sick for over a week now. Not knock-down, drag-out sick. Not sick enough to miss work. But sick enough to be so fucking annoyed by it I can't even begin to describe it. I wake up every morning feeling pretty good, but it's a downhill spiral from there. About midday, my legs and arms start hurting and by the evening, my eyes are hot as if I have a fever. But, as we all learned from House, tests don't lie and I am not feverish. Last night, I woke up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat. So I'm hoping that I have turned a corner. I mostly just want to feel better and, as Heidi pointed out this morning, my biggest problem is just that I am the most impatient sick person there is. We'll see how tonight goes.

We lost our internet service for approximately 30 hours this week. It was kind of like the night the lights went out in Georgia only without all the murder and lynching and whatnot. A bad modem was to blame - after 5 years, it decided to give up and went to modem heaven. We now have a brand spanking new DSL modem that Qwest expressed to us (for free, no less) and after some initial issues with getting it hooked up, we are all reconnected. Of course, the Macs found the network right away and had no problem. My PC, on the other hand, continued in its tradition of being a gigantic pain in the ass and refused to see the wireless network. I stood on my head and sprinkled pixie dust and moved the wireless antenna a fraction of an inch and suddenly, there it was. The night we were without internet gave us a close approximation of what it must have been like for Ma & Pa Ingalls on the prairie. (btw, if anyone can tell me WHY the lights went out in Georgia that night, I would be forever grateful. It has always been a mystery to me.)

Someone referred to the extension of the Sticky & Sweet Tour as Sticky & Sweet 2: Electric Boogaloo. I love it!

We are all shuffling off to see Coraline in 3D this weekend. I finished the book last night (I was the only one left in the family to read it) and it sounds like it will be worthy. It was scary in parts, but not too scary for Anna. She is over the top excited for the movie. Even though it will be expensive, what a fun family outing it will be.

I did that 25 Random Things meme on my Facebook page, and one of them detailed how I am still a little bit scared of The Exorcist, especially the scene toward the end of the movie during the exorcism when for a few seconds, there is an image of Father Karras' dead mother sitting on the bed bathed in white light. It is not scary (certainly not as scary as Regan turning her head all the way around and cussing at her mother) but it has ALWAYS creeped me out, such that I usually avert my eyes when the scene is coming up. Well, thanks to this isn't happiness, I saw the photo of that scene (see it here, I can't bring myself to put the picture on the blog) quite unprepared to see it. It's like someone sneaking up on you and punching you in the back of the neck. (Heidi, if you saw this picture, you saw the scariest part of the movie.)

And to wash that nasty picture out of my brain, here's a great photo of Madonna that I had forgotten about. How I loved the cowgirl phase.

Just in time for Halloween

I grabbed this from Boy Culture - it's too good not to share.

Another blog I read had this to say about McCain's photo above - "Did anyone else see John McCain turn into a zombie last night?" Classic. (Sorry! I can't remember where I read it!)

And let's hope the media does its job and investigates these Joe the Plumber reports bubbling to the surface. (yes, it's a Kos link. I know.) It might go the way of the whole "did Palin give birth to her youngest child?" thing, but this (unlike the other) is worth investigating.

Larger than life

No, this will NOT be a post about the Backstreet Boys song of the same name.

Heidi has been stuck in revision hell for the last week, coming out of her office mostly just to refill her coffee cup (except when she takes the thermos up and then we don't see her for hours!), leaving Anna and me to mostly fend for ourselves. This is nothing new. I've experienced this countless times before, usually in October/November when she was getting a maunscript ready for the Golden Heart. We know that it happens, and we also know that it reaches an end. But since she has been in her own world (literally), Anna and I decided to go see what kind of trouble we could get up to.

That involved us going out to Family Video and renting a Wii game that I have been intrigued with in theory, but wanted to try before I plunked down the money for it. It's Rampage: Total Destruction (warning: sound pretty much instantaneously.) It is basically an update of the 1986 arcade game Rampage, which has you controlling monsters of various forms, knocking down buildings, eating people, etc. My sister and I played a PC port of this constantly probably 15 years ago so I have a lot of fond memories of the original game. Anna and I also played an emulation of the original game for a while a couple years ago. Whenever the monster ate a person, she laughed uproariously. So when I saw that it was available for the Wii with souped up graphics and up to 30 (!) unlockable monsters, we had to give it a go.

We did find it, picked it up for $3.50 (for 5 nights, no less) and then hit Dairy Queen on the way home. We shared one of their cotton candy Blizzards (which, amazingly, had no calories or fat) and then headed home to play.

It's pretty cool to be able to play this game in three dimensions, and the ability to play through real live cities has been fun. But it still suffers from the problem that the original game had: it is repetitive as hell! Destroy all the buildings, move on to the next block. That is not to say that it is not fun, I just don't see it having a super long shelf life. Anna and I have a blast playing it, though. It's especially entertaining to hear her say "Dad, I'm gonna go find some more people to eat!" And as I mentioned before, you're not limited to the original George the Gorilla, Lizzie the Lizard and Ralph the Wolf. There's a giant chicken, a giant ram, a cyclops, a shark, etc. They all do pretty much the same thing so the differences are more or less cosmetic.

Like I said, Anna and I have fun playing it, but it's certainly not worth full price. I found it on Amazon Sellers for 13 bucks and that is still just a little more than I am willing to pay for it. If I could get it for 10 bucks including shipping, then they might have a deal. Instead, we'll just play the hell out of it until Thursday when it's due back.

And in keeping with the giant, mutated animals theme, I finally sat down and watched my Netflix that had been sitting on top of the TV for at least a week. Eight Legged Freaks is a giant spider movie from several years back that has been hanging out in the top 10 of my Netflix queue for ages, but always getting bumped back by other, sexier movies. I was so pleasantly surprised by this. It is a B-movie, there's no doubt about it, but what a heck of B-movie it was.

Basic premise is toxic waste spills into a local stream in Prosperity, AZ and it mutates the spiders (just the spiders?) to gigantic arachnids. I was expecting some pretty bad effects, but surprisingly, they were excellent. There were a few times when the CG-ness of the spiders was apparent, but mostly, I was just so overwhelmed by the sheer number of the spiders that I didn't pay attention to that much.

At only 99 minutes, it was certainly not a huge time sink, and it was very enjoyable to boot. Here's one of the better sequences.



An enjoyable weekend, that's for sure. Now it's time to get ready for work.

Father's Day

Today is Father's Day and it's been a pretty good one so far. Nothing too terribly exciting, but it was good nonetheless. We finally made it back to church after what I swear is a two month absence. It was good but not quite what I was looking for. However, that's the chance you take when you're Unitarian. Since there is no such thing as a "typical" UU service, you just never know what you're going to get. We biked there and it rained on us on the way home, but the fact that I could bike there and back WITHOUT getting crushing chest pains tells me I'm in better shape than I thought (and it's a 4 mile ride round trip!)

Anna was so pumped about Father's Day. I kind of knew what I was getting from her. She had wanted to get me a hammock because she remembers hanging out in a hammock at my brother's house in Phoenix. Photographic evidence below:

(P.S. - I hate that picture of me, but I was sick so I was not at my best.)

However, hammocks were quite expensive - 80 dollars, if you can believe it - plus we didn't really know where we would put it. So instead, she went with this:

Wise move. It is harder than I anticipated, but we're learning slowly but surely.

I always feel a little bit guilty about Father's Day because it's like my family gets double-whammied from my birthday and then Father's Day right on its heels. Usually I tell them not to do much for Father's Day, but they don't really listen to me.

Happy Father's Day out there to all the other dads that read this blog - specifically Matt, Yuri, & TKT, but anyone else that I might be forgetting. And to my own father as well, who I know reads these pages of inane chatterings.

Hopefully Anna doesn't end up thumping me with an ashtray as I sit and demand my Father's Day cake. Because if that's the case, I'll have to come back a la Nathan Grantham. It's Father's Day, Bedelia!! Where's my cake?

Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as a bad zombie movie

I just got done watching the 2008 "remake" of Romero's Day of the Dead. I got it from Netflix at the same time that I rented the low-budget Sci-Fi Channel original movie Loch Ness Terror. I thought for sure that Loch Ness Terror would be the crap movie of the two, considering it was straight to cable and the whole premise was just too laughable to pass up. Surprisingly enough though, it was the zombie flick that failed to make the grade.

The fact that I started watching this movie several weeks ago and just now finished it speaks volumes. It failed on so many levels and was so unbelievably bad. I should have been more wary of a direct-to-DVD movie, but anymore, effects are cheap enough that even movies with a shoestring budget can have decent effects and be worthy of at least one watch.

So how did this movie fail so miserably whereas something like Flight of the Living Dead succeeded, if not brilliantly, at least capably? It all boils down to respect for your source material, in this case, the living dead. Day of the Dead broke several zombie rules and as most of the regulars know, nothing pisses me off faster than a zombie movie that does not follow the rules.

My biggest beef with the movie was this whole "the zombies retain a portion of what they used to be." I mean, seriously. Everyone knows that once someone's a zombie, they are no longer the person they were. They are driven solely by the desire to consume human flesh. That's why the "vegetarian zombie" (the guy was a vegetarian prior to becoming a zombie) was so utterly ridiculous. He was able to be around the heroes because he wasn't interested in eating meat. WTF?

Another problem I had was the zombies using guns. Zombies simply lack the rudimentary skills to operate complex firearms. Sure, the FlyBoy Zombie figure comes with a gun accessory, but that whole thing has always puzzled me. But there the undead were, jumping out of windows with automatic weapons, gunning down the survivors. Again, WTF?

Then there's the whole fast vs. slow zombies. I can see the arguments on both sides, but I think, when push comes to shove, I have to come down on the side of slow zombies. Yes, the fast zombies are very scary and they add a dimension of horror that the slow zombies can't muster. However, the whole idea of a zombie apocalypse and the ensuing terror from it lies mostly in the fact that the zombie horde is unstoppable because of its sheer number. Yes they are slow and could, in theory, be beaten back because of their slowness. But it's the fact that they are there by the hundreds that makes them threatening. That, to me, is scarier than a zombie growling and salivating and then running at you faster than a Concorde. But as usual, YMMV. And the fast zombies are probably scarier on screen anyway for a lot of people.

I finished the movie, but it was a huge disappointment. It's probably the first time a zombie movie has really disappointed me. I'm fond of saying that zombie movies are like pizza and sex - even when they're bad, they're still pretty good. But after having watched Day of the Dead, I'll have to be reevaluating that blanket statement.

Jinkies, Cloverfield!

I went out tonight and bought the Cloverfield DVD as a bit of a reward to myself for not going completely stark raving mad for all the time spent in the car the last couple of days. It was only $16.99 at Target, with no two-disc special edition to tempt me, so I figured what the heck. It was one of those movies that I was really excited about at first, then dissed for reasons I still don't get, and then loved once I finally saw it a month or two after it was released.

Anyway, I was watching the special features on the laptop up on our bed, and Anna comes wandering in after her bath. I was afraid that she might be scared of the monster, but she climbed up next to me on the bed and they were showing how they did the scene in which the monster is being bombed.

Anna's reaction: Dad, that is NOT scary. The monster looks like his head is on upside down!

Her other classic comment was, upon seeing the green screen shot with the main characters in the helicopter: "Dad, is that Scooby Doo?"

No, kid, I'm sorry, but it isn't.

But the good thing? I think I am well on my way to having a kid not scared of horror flicks. Mission accomplished!!

Zombies on a plane

OK, it's 1AM and I really should be in bed, but I really need to blog this. I just got done watching, I shit you not, Flight of the Living Dead. You read that correctly. Not NIGHT of the Living Dead, FLIGHT of the Living Dead. As it turns out, I have rented so many zombie movies from Netflix, they have started recommending zombie movies to me. Last night, while I was trying to decide what to get from Netflix next, I came across that little gem in my recommendations. I'll admit it, I was powerless to resist it, based almost entirely on the title alone.

This movie hardly needs a plot summary, but the bottom line is zombies (the fast kind) wreak complete and utter havoc on a 747 bound for Paris. The index case is explained via some completely laughable (and ultimately unnecessary) reason having to do with the malaria "virus." (Hello! Malaria's not caused by a virus!) Once you get that out of the way, along with some back story set-up for various passengers, it's nothing but flesh eating nastiness for 96 minutes.

I am happy to report, that like Freddy vs. Jason, Alien vs. Predator and Severed: Forest of the Dead before it, this movie is so much better than any movie named Flight of the Living Dead has any right being. Honestly, I was expecting something that would qualify for Up All Night with Rhonda Shear on USA Network back in the day. The zombie effects are very good, especially for a movie that went straight to DVD. It is littered with no name actors that actually turn in some pretty good performances. The only actor that was familiar to me was Kevin J. O'Connor, who I recognized from The Mummy.

Taking several cues from Snakes on a Plane (which I also enjoyed in spite of myself), it managed to take the zombie genre in a direction that I'm not sure anyone else has taken it. Sure, the zombies on the ground are scary, but you can always run away and hide. What are you going to do when you're stuck on a plane? You're pretty much screwed. But while Flight of the Living Dead put a new spin on the undead, it also respected the zombie rules. This made me very happy as nothing pisses me off more than a zombie movie that does not know the rules. And what's the most important zombie rule? All together now..."Kill the brain, you kill the ghoul."

Watching this movie tonight also renewed my desire to someday, somehow be a zombie extra in a movie. It doesn't even have to be a big budget movie! It can be someone's home movie for all I care. As it stands right now, my only hope is to have a Halloween party and invite people that would want to dress up like zombies with me.

Not sure if that will ever happen.

This movie is highly recommended to any fans of the zombie genre. It has a healthy respect for zombies but is also not afraid to go in new directions. Totally worth a Netflix rental. Now here's hoping that I can get Alien vs. Predator 2: Requiem next. I must truly be a glutton for punishment.

The ultimate Nerdery addition

I am up entirely too late tonight, but Heidi, Jeff and I had a Queer As Folk marathon. Only 10 more episodes to go. That will probably take us 2 years to finish at the rate we watch. Watching that show is not easy with a 6 year old around!

So over the weekend, I saw Cloverfield, which I had initially avoided for competely unknown reasons. I think I got caught up in a bit of a backlash against it, railing against it as a Blair Witch clone and irritated that there was the possibility that the monster would never be revealed. Friends of mine went and told me that I needed to go see it, and still, I resisted. Once I found out that the monster does actually appear onscreen, I started to rethink my opinion. By the time I saw the trailer again prior to The Mist, I was bound and determined to be part of the experience. You can't be as into the pop culture as I am and miss things like that. When it showed up at the dollar theater this weekend AND Anna was away at her grandma's house, I went. It was very good, even though the pretty people with perfect teeth really annoyed me for the first 20 minutes or so.

The monster was VERY cool, not at all like other monsters that have destroyed the Big Apple. It actually reminds me a bit of the Grither from a Tales from the Darkside episode that I remember being scared to death of as a kid. When I found this, I thought I had died and gone to heaven.


That would fit in quite well with all my figures in my Nerdery!! The only trouble? It's A HUNDRED BUCKS!! I think that a hundred dollars is too much for a toy, no matter how many points of articulation it has, even if it DOES come with a Statue of Liberty head and 10 parasites. Intellectually, I believe this. Emotionally and when my 12 year old boy is firmly at the controls, I know that line of reasoning is complete and utter shit.

So if you a spare C-note sitting around burning a hole in your pocket...

Play Mist-y for Me

I just got back from The Mist a while ago. Matt and I met up at the dollar theater here in Ames to see yet another movie that neither of our wives have the slightest interest in seeing. It's become quite a tradition, one that I hope continues for some time to come.

Anyway, I remember reading "The Mist" about a decade ago. It's a Stephen King novella that is in his anthology Skeleton Crew. The basic plot consists of a motley crew of people trapped in a grocery store after a supernatural mist rolls in. Taking a lesson from The Fog and realizing that fogs and mists in and of themselves are not all that scary, King places some of the most god-awful creatures in that mist, creatures that feed on anyone unlucky enough to be out in the mist.

But what "The Mist" is really about is fear and what it can do to a group of people. As a friend of mine pointed out to me in e-mail the other day upon hearing that I was going to be going to this movie, there are many points in the movie that bring to mind the episode of "The Twilight Zone" called "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street." It does this because while the monsters outside the grocery store are hideous and lethal, it is perhaps the mob mentality and fear inside the store that is more deadly.

So frequently, movies like this go for laughs, and while there were some humorous moments (and surprisingly enough, not that many of the unintentional kid), it mostly took it's source material seriously and treated it with respect. But more than that, it was equal parts social commentary, B-level monster movie and character study. Not at all what I was expecting, but let me tell you how that was INFINITELY more interesting than a monster movie or a gore fest. Not that there wasn't gore in the movie. There were gory moments in the movie that would do a zombie movie proud.

There are a lot of good performances in this movie, but the standout is, without a doubt, Marcia Gay Harden as a Bible-beating lady quietly spoken of as crazy prior to the arrival of the mist. Once the carnage begins and she starts talking about the end times, people begin to take her seriously. She functions well as a living and breathing antagonist, one that is not hidden by the mist but is present in three dimensions. In many ways, she is as threatening to the protagonists as the monsters.

Speaking of the monsters, I have to say that I was amazed at how good the effects were considering it probably had not much of a budget for effects. They also must have read my mind because many of the monsters living in the mist were exactly as I pictured them when reading the novella.

Much has been made of the ending, which is substantially different from King's original ending. Without giving too much away, Matt and I kind of looked at each other after it was over and, well, I'm not sure how we felt about it, other than it came from completely out of left field and I think we were both sideswiped by it. I would never dream of spoiling it here for those who will eventually see it.

The Mist was probably the best adaptation of a Stephen King story that I have ever seen, and of all the movies that Matt and I have seen on the cheap at the dollar theater (Halloween and 30 Days Of Night being the others), it was far and away my favorite. The fact that it functioned so well on several levels, that it was more than just a horror film with rubber creatures and CGI monsters makes it worth seeing. It's not often in movies like The Mist that we end up giving a shit about the characters, but here, we really did. If we hadn't, the ending wouldn't have been half as effective as it was.

So check it out, it's on DVD on March 25th. But don't say I didn't warn you about the ending.

One night in Haddonfield

So last night I went out to see Rob Zombie's reimagining of the John Carpenter horror classic Halloween. It was at the dollar theater here in Ames and even though the name is a misnomer, it is still exceptionally cheap at $1.50. I went with my friend Matt who is fast becoming my horror-movie-watching buddy of choice as we both have wives who do not do the whole horror movie thing. He was great fun to see a movie with - especially one that had the potential to be as bad as this one.

Let me start by saying this: Halloween, like Freddy vs. Jason and Alien vs. Predator before it, was the beneficiary of exceedingly low expectations. I was pretty much expecting the movie to be awful, since it had only gotten a 25% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But surprisingly, it was very passable entertainment - certainly worth a buck and a half, but actually, worth more than that when you get right down to it.

In Rob Zombie's vision of Halloween, much more time is spent developing the back story behind the events that would take place in Haddonfield, Illinois. While some stories composed almost entirely of back story are not so good - i.e. the Star Wars prequels, Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince - I actually liked seeing the story behind the madman, so to speak. I loved the significance of the mask and how he came to be wearing the clothes that he was the night of his escape from the mental hospital and subsequent murderous rampage. The portrayal of Myers by Tyler Mane (who is 6'8") was very effective, even though the adult Myers never uttered a single word. His physical presence was impressive and menacing - just what the role needed. Zombie really made Michael Myers unredeemable save one moment toward the end of the film- as if he were remotely redeemable in the original run of movies - but it was almost as if he were evil incarnate.

So the back story took about half the movie's run time, which left approximately an hour to tell the story that we all know - of Laurie Strode and her horny high school friends, and the murder and mayhem that ensues on that Halloween night. I thought this part of the movie was strange - mostly because it kind of had a 70s feel to it, even though it was clearly set in the present day. I thought that the shots of the town were much better than in the original - mostly because they actually looked like Illinois, rather than southern California filling in for the Midwest. And most of the scenes defined "autumnal" which I suppose is appropriate, but I really liked that. I also thought the mood was set rather well considering the filmmakers had significantly less set up time, having spent all that time developing Michael Myers' back story.

The girl who played Laurie Strode (the role originated by Jamie Lee Curtis) was a cute, spunky, Sarah Michelle Gellar type who overall did a good job. I had one huge problem with her performance though - and I know that Matt had a similar complaint. Once Michael was on the rampage and chasing her through various set pieces, she simply would. not. stop. screaming. Ever. In the original Halloween, Laurie Strode is actually quite capable and does not degenerate into a screaming meemie. Not until Halloween II does Laurie become a scream queen. The Laurie in this movie is a screaming meemie times 100.

The movie also fell prey to the common horror movie trap where the end just went on entirely too long. You can only take so much of the killer chasing the girl and getting up after being shot with the "blow its head off" gun (as opposed to the "piss it off" model - a great line from the movie.) I would have preferred it to have a better ending than it did - a tidier one. There was a spot where it could have ended rather effectively, only to insert a Carrie-like "gotcha!" (which, admittedly, I fell for) and then went on for another 20 minutes.

So overall, this movie was a whole hell of a lot better than it had any right to be, especially when it was essentially a remake of a horror classic. It was MUCH gorier than the original, and I was pleased to see that it had a healthy respect for its source material - much like the recent "reimagining" of Dawn of the Dead did. Despite that it was familiar, it managed to deliver a couple of genuine scares which is a couple more than I thought I would get.

Lessons learned from Halloween: lower your expectations, and enjoy the ride. Oh, and teen sex ALWAYS ends in bloodshed. No matter what.

In New Zealand, no one can hear you scream

While the other movies we have out from Netflix have been being exchanged rather quickly, I am sorry to admit that Netflix probably made money off of me as I finally got around to watching Black Sheep tonight after Anna passed out from the sheer exhaustion of her birthday party. More on that tomorrow, but for tonight, we're going to talk about psychotic, flesh-hungry New Zealand sheep. Oh, and did I mention were-sheep as well?

I think that my expectations for Black Sheep might have been a titch too high considering what it was that I was going to be watching. I mean, seriously, genetically altered, man eating sheep? In all honesty, though, it was slightly disappointing because it played both for scares AND laughs. I think that so rarely works. However, when it does work, i.e. Shaun of the Dead, it works very well. Unfortunately, the end result is usually something like Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child ("thumbs down! I've been more scared at a Disney movie!") I think Black Sheep probably fell somewhere in between those two extremes, but rest assured, it was more Dream Child than Shaun.

One thing I will say for Black Sheep, though. It decidedly did not skimp on the gore. There was one scene of mass carnage and gore that had even me, seasoned horror film veteran, turning away. It would have done even the best zombie movie proud with its portrayal of sheep eating living humans. Ultimately though, gore does not equal scary - it mostly equals gross. When combined with truly scary elements, it can accentuate the scariness, but I don't think that gore is capable of being scary on its own merits.

The other thing I will say for Black Sheep is that it was probably written by a guy who is completely in touch with his 12 year-old boy. There were sheep fart jokes. I'm even willing to forgive the attempt to combine horror and laughs to let something like that in. Grown men who have a healthy respect for the 12 year-old boy in all of us get a great deal of admiration from me!

So it's a recommendation from me, but keep your expectations low. Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but what can you say? I'll be sticking to zombies, thankyouverymuch. Next up is probably going to be 28 Weeks Later.