Monday, November 8, 2010

Here are some of the things I really want to talk about:


(This is a repost from my other blog.  This was when I decided I should start a new blog.)
I am a lifelong fan of horror movies and this past October I immersed myself in them. I watched old horror films, from the 1932 White Zombie to a slew of recent remakes of classic horror films such as the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Nightmare on Elm Street, Dawn of the Dead,and Halloween, and some new original films like Jennifer's Body, Trick 'r Treat and House of the Devil.
I have to say that compared to the originals, these remakes were pretty tepid. The new Texas Chainsaw Massacre is nowhere  nearly as frightening or bull-goose loony as the first one. One thing missing was the totally over the top family dinner scene, where a shrieking Marilyn Burns is tied to an armchair made from real human arm’s.


Fangs of the Living Dead
I was also pleased to watch several Euro-horror films from the mid 1970s. Many of these films are pretty obscure and maybe for good reason. They all thrived on bizarre plot twists, poor acting, and incomprehensible dialogue. On the other hand they were all gorgeously filmed, featured great costumes and sets, and made excellent use of the beautiful female stars.


The Blood Drinkers


Lastly, I spent a lot of time watching a group of films by Filipino auteur Eddie Romero. These films were made in the late sixties and early seventies and most featured the word blood in the title. The best of these films is called The Blood Drinkers and can be watched for free at Hulu.com. Beautifully shot in a mixture of color, black and white and monochrome tinted scenes, and populated with some of the most interesting villains I’ve ever seen, it reminded me of the stylish films of Jean Rollin.

My companion for most of these films has been Olivia, our black cat. She curls up in the crook of my arm and watches as my computer screen with me. I’m pretty sure she’s not actually watching the movies, but rather than moving colors on the screen. Otherwise I would give for one of my ear buds so she could listen.

Friday night-Rabid

Sunday, November 7, 2010 02:14 PM

Last Friday was an awesome day. I did a couple of firsts in physical therapy, then went to a party in the neighborhood that was the most fun I have had in a long time. What better way to cap off a great day like that than to watch David Cronenberg's 1977 film, Rabid .

David Cronenberg is one of my favorite movie makers. His last two films, A History of Violence and Eastern Promises are among my favorites. Early in his career, in the mid-1970's, he made a name for himself directing very original, creepy films horror films.

His first two, mainstream films, Shivers (1975) and Rabid (as they were known in the US) explored a subject that would soon became a world-wide obsession; a mass plague, transmitted by sexual contact that would transform its victims into monsters. Both these films were made well before AIDS became the global scourge it would later become in that decade and the one to follow.

People quickly demonized AIDS suffers or even people who might be a high risk. The first time I heard about AIDS was my freshman year at college, when someone voiced their fear of catching the disease from Haitian dining hall workers.

In both films, the plague is released in small, isolated communities, an exclusive apartment block on an island in the earlier film, and in a remote, sparsely populated area in Rabid.  Shivers ends with the infected leaving the island to spread the illness; Rabid goes a step further and shows what happens when the plague gets to a large city, Montreal.

In Shivers , Cronenberg casts a wide net with several competing story lines happening at once. Rabid is more restrained, focusing primarily on one couple, Hart and Rose. Marylin Chambers, primarily known for her career in adult films,   especially Beyond the Green Door, the 2001, a Space Odyssey of adult films, plays Rose.

Rose, a Typhoid Mary type carrier, wakes up from experimental surgery craving human blood. She ingests the blood through a proboscis like thing under her armpit that penetrates the victim and sucks the blood she needs. In a typically Cronenberg-esc image, while draining the blood, Rose calmly strokes her victim's heads in a disturbingly nurturing way.

When they awake, the victims are green foam spewing mopnsters, seeking their own supply. Except for when they are attacking, these monsters appear human enough to pass, able to get close to their intended victims, unleashing the plague in a largely populated area.

Marylin Chambers does an apt job in her role as Rose. The last act of the film allows her to show quite a bit of versatility. These are the scenes where she struggles with her changing identity; no longer being the person she was, young, pretty, surround by a nurturing group of friends and family, and what her illness has made her.

Anyway, both films are totally worth watching and I have moved Cronenberg's third film, The Brood to the top of my Netflix queue.


Monday, November 8, 2010 11:41 AM

Sunday, November 7, 2010

P. J. Soles

P.J. Soles in Rock and Roll High School
In my post about watching The Devil's Rejects I forgot another reason to like the movie; getting to see P.J. Soles again.

P. J. had supporting roles in seminal classics Carrie, Halloween, and Stripes.  But she captured my teen age heart as Riff Randlle, superlative Ramones fan in Rock and Roll High School .   I think it was her pigtails.


She is one of  a group of fellow travelers who suffer painful and humiliating deaths at the hands of the Firefly family when their paths intersect at a hotel.

I don't remember my gym classes being quite like this.  



Friday, November 5, 2010

What I watched last night: The Great Rock and Roll Swindle

Friday, November 5, 2010, 10:14 AM
Last night I watched The Great Rock and Roll Swindle, a somewhat fictionalized account of the birth, short life and demise of the band The Sex Pistols. The Sex Pistols are considered to be one of the most influential bands in rock and roll, much more for the for their lifestyle and the controversy they created than for their musicianship. They were the anti-band; whatever it was, they were against it.
This was the closest I ever got to reading
about The Sex Pistols
Growing up in the small Midwestern town of Norwalk, Ohio, I was in my early teen years during the reign of the Sex Pistols. In the days before the Internet, to learn about anything exotic (anything outside the borders of Ohio),like punk rock, one had to go to the local public library and use the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature to find magazine articles about it. It was dismaying to find that the Rolling Stone magazine that featured the Sex Pistols from October, 1977 had been heavily censored by the staff at the library. The article and any pictures had cut out of the magazine.
The librarian was nonplussed when I confronted her about this act of censorship. She clearly thought that it was the library's job to remove offensive material before making it available to patrons. That did it for me, if the Sex Pistols were against everything, then I was for them.
Today, like a deadbeat dads who desert their infant children the Sex Pistols ceased to be before they got the chance to know their absentee fathers.  But in post bicentennial America eir ill-behaved antics made headlines. Reactions to their outlandish behavior ranged from amused to outrage. The post hippy world didn’t know how to respond to this angry punk rock child.
Johnny Rotten,The iconoclast's iconoclast,
For me the Sex Pistols, with their destroy everything attitude, provided definition to the walls of my cell, giving me an object to butt my head against. At last, I could see what was confining me or so I thought.
Of course such a self-destructive, nihilistic force, does not produce cogent statements or a manifesto of belief beyond “I want to destroy everything.” Paradoxically while calling mass destruction, Johnny Rotten also elected himself as the leader of this movement, urging his fans to “Follow me!”
One of the miracles of our modern age is the Internet. Thanks to the Internet, finally, 30 years after its release, I am able I was able to watch The Great Rock and Roll Swindle, a mockumentary about the Sex Pistols, as from the perspective of Malcolm Mclaren, their manager.
But thanks to the Internet I’m finally able to watch this film 30 years after its release. Up till now I only had a copy of the soundtrack (on vinyl). It is disorienting to see the still images from the record jacket and the sounds from the album put to life in a film. Seeing those boys from 30 years ago who wanted to destroy the world's icons (and refused to become icons themselves) didn't make me feel nostalgic and pine for days gone by.
But I did feel it was a vital part of my education.

 Here is the trailer on YouTube: 

Poor Sid, he took destruction to its end.

Thursday, November 4, 2010

Thursday Morning and the Devil's Rejects

T hursday, November 4, 2010, 8:30 AM
I t is a beautiful fall morning in Oxford. The early sun is making everything glow with a golden light. Looking into our front yard, I see birds and squirrels going about their business in the trees. In the distance I hear the whistle of an approaching train joining the sound of chirping birds. I take the last swallow of my morning coffee and look around the living room:
T he Fat Bastard, also known as Thor, jumps up from his place on the couch and runs across the room, his big, orange and white belly swaying under him and causing Eloise to go into hyper alert mode. Stiff legged with her radio antenna like ears unfurled, she approaches the window, scanning the street for any signs of potential threat.
T he only thing she notices is that Thor has abandoned his place on the couch, which she promptly takes. Her ears twitch occasionally as cars and people pass our house, but she remains asleep.
L ast night I watched Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects (2005) , his sequel to 2003's The House of a 1000 Corpses . I saw The House of a 1000 Corpses and was not impressed with it, so I felt no urgency to watch the newer film. One thing that I did know about it was the Lynard Skynard song Free Bird was effectively used in the last gun fight. Since Free Bird was taking up space in my head last night as an ear worm, I decided to look for the film and watch it.
T o my frustration the only copy of the film I could get was a German dubbed version. Fortunately I was able to find English subtitles, but they was out of sync with the movie. The subtitles were about a minute behind the movie. Since the plot was  pretty straightforward and didn’t require have much in the way of narration, it was easy enough to follow. The story is pretty simple; the bloodthirsty, sadistic killers from House of a Thousand Corpses are fugitives from the law. That’s about it.
O n the plus side, the soundtrack was pretty cool, featuring great classic rock. Especially breathtaking was the final sequence, Free Bird playing on the soundtrack as the screen is filled with a montage of shots featuring the wide open spaces of Texas.
B ut there is plenty to not like about this movie. Two of the things that I had the biggest problem was #1 there is no clear insight into who these people are. Captain Spaulding, played with great zeal by Sid Haig, is the leader of this clan of misfits. He is the only one that has regular contact with outside society. He even has a job, granted he is an extremely creepy clown, and a girlfriend. The rest of the Firefly family are barely human and exhibit a psychotic rage that violence is their chief form of interaction with outsiders. The violence and sadism is so over the top that I quickly found myself desensitized to it.
My other big point for not liking this movie is the overt misogyny of the film. Why does every member of the Firefly Clan, including the two women, target females? Is it because they look better naked? I was surprised at how quickly I became inured to the site of yet another pair of blood splattered breasts.
I can’t say I would recommend this movie; its steady display of overt acts of violence quickly becomes boring and uninteresting. That was definitely 2 hours of my life I will never get back.
The waiting area at physical therapy is very small and if there’s more than one are two other people there, I feel like I’m in everyone’s way with my chair. I sat and the waiting room at physical therapy today for 15 minutes. Today there were four people in there, so I just parked my chair in the hallway and looked into the waiting room. There was a big, balding guy in gray sweats and what looked like brand new white New Balance sneakers sitting on the left side of the room , reading a Time magazine.
Directly in front of me was another, older guy in work clothes, talking animatedly on his cell phone. He wore ankle high, sweat stained work boots, faded khaki pants. The blue-collar of his shirt had been washed until it was nearly white. Underneath his baseball cap his broad nose supported thick glasses with wire rims and tinted lenses. When he spoke into his cell phone, he moved his body in a secret rhythm, dancing by himself in his chair. First he would nod his head from left to right, then whichever hand was holding the phone, that shoulder would jump up and down. he would jerk his body once and then his feet would stamp, one at time, on the floor. When listening his body was statue still, but as soon as he opened his mouth the solitary dancing began again.
It’s easy to tell who is there for therapy from those who are there to pick up patients; we patients arrive wearing our work out clothes. The other two occupants were one of each. The one closest to me was wearing red and white sweats, clearly there for her thrashing; the other woman had the look of a mother waiting for her child to finish before taking him back to school or returning home with them.
After such a clear and sunny start this morning, skies are now gray and dropping rain. And once again my pets is have taken up a sleeping positions around me.
8:52 PM