I just finished watching Hammer Films' The Woman in Black with Harry Potter Daniel Radcliff, Ciaran Hinds and some of the most frightening CGI I have ever seen.
This film was pants-wettingly-scary, plenty of jump out of-your-skin moments.
True story: In 1984, my girlfriend and I went to see a Friday the 13th movie on a rainy, Easter Sunday before her parents took us back to Miami University. I remember thinking it was odd that there were so many small children in the same theater.
The movie was laughably bad, which is not always a bad thing with me. As I was explaining to my girlfriend that Jason was surely about to grab his next victim from under the stairs I paused long enough to jump out of my seat and somehow leap completely over her, landing on her lap and screaming the rest of my snarky comments about how predictable a movie it was into her ear, all because Jason Voorhees grabbed his next victim from under the stairs.
Bill Hinzman, No. 1 Zombie from the cemetery in the original Night of the Living Dead, the ghoul that was "Coming to get you, Barbara." is dead. John T. at his superlative blog,Shocks to the System has written a very loving tribute to the man, his character and career.
I have written about my life long nightmares of gaunt, hollow eyed men pursuing me, but I never realized until tonight that Bill Hinzman was the zombie that haunted me.
I doubt I will sleep better tonight knowing he is dead. In fact, I hope comes to chase me one more time.
I returned to the center of the universe last week-The Sandusky Mall. Large malls were a novel phenomena in the heartland of the 1970s. These local edifices were both brothels, where the sins of lust and conspicuous consumption were fanned to fever pitch, and cathedrals that provided expiation and atonement. This was an irresistible, sensual experience a dissatisfied, alienated teenager. I devoted countless hours to searching behind the mall's garish facades, prowling its promenades, perusing the emporiums and boutique,s and spending my quarters in the meretricious arcade, hoping to find that one thing that would bring gratification.
Paul Schrader's Hardcore, 1979, is a dark, postlapsarian fable showing America's rapid and irresistible decline into debauchery and decadence. As the family of staunchly religious busnessman Jake VanDorn unravels, the forces of darkness move in to entice his teen-age daughter into their subterranean culture.
WIWLN is going on hiatus. Writing this blog i one of m y favorite things to do, but I have a couple of time crunches that are interfering with my watching movies and writing times. It is sad that this is happening now because there are lots of cool things that I want to see and write, especially now that so many of my favorite blogs are putting up their end of the year lists.
We are stuck between housing right now; we have one house that we can't move into and one house that we have to vacate very soon. This little apartment is already crammed full of moving boxes, but no definite date when the bank will let us move into the new place. The present delay has to do with Bank of America LOSING some of the paperwork. I won't bore you with the details, most of which I don't understand myself.
And also, my grand daughter is visiting us now. She is a riot, but exhausting too. Here is a video of the little angel, asleep in the car on the way home from the beach we went to on New Years Day.
When I was in college, back in the eighties, a friend of mine had a cartoon on his door that showed two men outside a movie theater. One guy is telling the other that he didn't know if the movie he was good or not, but "it was worth the price of admission just to experience the illusion of motion created by a rapidly projected series of still images on a screen."
That pretty much describes my reaction to Guy Ritchie's latest film, the sequel to 2009's Sherlock Holmes. Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law are re-united as Holmes and Watson, Aurther Conan Doyle's Victorian crime stopping odd-couple.
The Damned, Dave Vanian, Captain
Sensible, bass player, Rat Scabies
Growing up in Stultified, Ohio, I lived for the unusual. Living in a town with a library that removed offense articles from magazines and record store that featured only family friendly music, stimulation was hard to come by.
I wrote about Thirsty for Love-Sex and Murder ( in its native tongue, Aska Susayanlar) before (read about it here). It is available at Google Video. Loads of fun and only an hour long, I highly recommend it. Subtitled.
Despite a shocking opening that turns Sophocles on his head, 2009's The Commune quickly turns itself into a family melodrama that seems too familiar, but is also too alluring to dismiss. Spotlighting pretty, blonde Jenny (Chauntal Lewis), an adolescent in full "You just don't understand" mode who doesn't want to spend her 16th birthday away from her best buds. Mom (played by writer-director Elisabeth Fies) has had enough of her daughter's hormonally charged, emotional hemorrhaging and needs some time to herself. So off Jenny goes, to visit her visit her estranged father at his commune in the mountains.
Since Gilligan's graphic is more interesting, I used it as the banner for this post.
Retrospace, is one of my favorite places on the Internet. If you have any curiosity about what life looked like in the good old days, an hour or two at Gilligan's site is time well spent. I saw this worthy posting the other day and it got me thinking about Josie and the Pussycats, my first taste of sex and rock and roll. Of course the drugs leg of the triangle would come from Scoobie Doo's Shaggy, but that wouldn't be until I was in college.
One of my favorite film makers, director Ken Russell died this week. John T. at Shocks to the System shared from his personal experience as a film student under Russell's tutelage and Aylmer at Unflinching Eyewrote a short but very insightful analysis of Russell's films and relationship to British cinema.
It seems that our trip to New England has left me bedridden for the the day. My tools to fight boredom between naps are a laptop, an Internet connection, and a set of DVDs Named Horror Do Not Watch Alone. Curiously, the discs identify themselves as "Do not watch" when I put them in my laptop.
There are a handful of directors that I love purely because of their beautiful visual style; I just want to grab individual frames from their movies, blow them up to poster size and decorate my house with them.
The Halloween Spirit appeared, for the first time this year, on Friday night when Adrienne and I went to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a loving tribute to many of the movies I saw as a kid. This was the first time in (way) over two decades that I had been to a "live" RHPS showing. Fortunately it wasn't at midnight because there is no way I could have stayed up that late.
It was a great show; in addition to the antics in the audience, there was a fairly well choreographed stage show. Many of the men and woman in the audience wore jaw-droppingly revealing costumes, often made up of bustiers, lingerie and thigh high stockings held in place with a garter belt. I was hoping to see amongst the usual Playboy Bunnys, sexy nurses, maids, stewardesses and pirate babes, some serious female role model type costumes like Slutty Secretary of State or Supreme Court Dominatrix.
Today was a beautiful fall day, high around 70 degrees. There is a definite advantage to living in southern Georgia. I am taking it as pay back for the crushingly hot summer. How did I choose to celebrate this beautiful gift of a day? By stretching out on the couch in my big fluffy bathrobe and watching Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke, 2008).
I just came from watching (the prequel to) 1982's The Thing, confusingly enough also called The Thing and I am giving it a 3/4 jar full of change (I am looking for an original icon to use to rate movies) of terror.
Last night, my cat Olivia and I watched Ken Russell's Salome's Last Dance (1988), and wow, what a blast. I can't think of any director I have been as devoted to as Ken Russell. Looking at his IMDB page, I have watched ten of the 19 feature films listed.
Just like his earlier film, The Boyfriend (1971, with Twiggy and 6 foot, 6 inch dancer Tommy Tune), Salome's Last Dance presents itself as a story within a story. However, instead of focusing equally on the actual setting of the play, Salome is almost solely about a performance of Oscar Wilde's banned play, Salome, for it's author, by staff and customers of a brothel.
Russell's love of literature was also featured in 1988's Gothic, about the famous, 19th century, horror story writing contest that produced both Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and John Polidori's The Vampyre. Experienced as a laudanum induced hallucination, the viewer gets to
see, among other things, breasts with eyes for nipples and Henry
Fusell's painting, The Nightmare, come to life as the Shelleys, Lord Byron and other guests attempt to outdo (and undo) each other
Russell's flamboyant, visual style was completely unleashed in 1975's The Who's Tommy, which took viewer on an insane, psychedelic trip. Resist the urge to watch this movie under the influence of drugs, the film is hallucinogenic enough. Tina Turner's performance of "The Acid Queen" will tear your soul apart. And you will never forget Ann Margaret, all in white, writhing on on the floor in front of a television screen, ejaculating baked beans (an allusion to the cover of an early Who album).
Tommy starred Oliver Reed. Reed is best know (to me) as the hairy chested Leon in Hammer's 1961 Curse of the Werewolf. He was nominated for an Oscar for his role in Ridley Scott's massively overrated Gladiator ( I know it is a great film, but believe that sometimes the weight of sadness that must crush Russell Crowe is so overwhelming that many nights, he goes in his study, stares at his Best Actor Oscar and weeps in shame, knowing that it belongs to Chow Yun Fat for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.)
Reed played Urban Grandier in Russell's 1971 The Devils, a stew of sex, religion, political intrigue, hysteria, and lesbian nun sex. Clearest memory, besides the big orgy wherein a statue of Christ is sexually assaulted by a bunch of "possessed" nuns, is the arrival of the witch hunter, who leads his entourage onto the scene like a rock star complete with long hair and purple tinted glasses.
Anyway, Salome's Last Dance is a visual treat as the lounge in the bordello becomes transformed into the setting of Wilde's play. Wilde's prose, mostly unadulterated, flows from the mouths of the elegantly costumed whores and johns in a delightful cadence. Imogen Millais-Scott, as Salome, captivates the viewers eyes as she prances around the stage, the petulant teen-ager whose desires lead to her undoing.
I am tired of people forwarding me emails or exhorting me to copy-and-paste their facebook status to mine, espousing the fallacious belief that America can be saved from its debt crisis if I and my family would buy only American products from locally owned businesses. Even more so tonight when I got one that promised "if every American spent just $64 more than normal on USA made items this year, it would create something like 200,000 new jobs" after reading about John Boehner walking away from President Obama's "grand bargain" due objections over raising revenue by "removing tax breaks for oil companies, corporate-jet owners, and hedge-fund managers." ("No 'grand bargain' on the debt ceiling," from The Week, the Best of the US and International Media, July 22, 2011, volume 11, page 2).
