#WritingFromIsolationWard
Category: Entertainment
Dear Roger,
I respect your list; but I am not a professional critic and do not abide by your rules, save the photo thing. I’m far to shy to ask my heroes for photos, even Henry Rollins.
However, I will list for you my various cinematic sins; as a penance of sorts (even if I am proud of them).
For years I have been a silent and respectful moviegoer, quiet in my seat (save guffawing or walking out of movies that have offended my delicate sensibilities, shy flower of Jesus that I am). In recent years I have taken to being “that guy” in theaters; the one who yells at the screen and makes a scene, the sometimes combative loudmouth who maintains that he is enhancing the experience. Here are my most memorable Movie Theatre Sins:
- During Sin City yelling “Go on there, Drink that Piss” and “God Damn, that’s alot of blood, I hope he brought some band-aids”
- During Constantine; yelling “My Precious” during the spear retrieval and “Can you hear me now?” when the phones stopped ringing for Evie
- I forget what movie, but threatening a coterie of young men who would not shut up during the movie, I turned, looked them in the eye and loudly threatened to dress them in soda and ice if they didn’t shut up or move. They moved, undressed in Corn Syrup and Flavoring.
- Yelling, “Where are the Gi-Joes?” during a fight in Transformers, loudly booing the dialogue, hissing when Optimus Prime spoke, mooing during the love scenes. I didn’t like it.
- Paying to see The Pirates movie, part 3.
- Nearly running out of the Theater when the girl ghost pops up and barfs in “The Sixth Sense”
For these and all my other “That Guy” sins I am for the most part, not sorry, but I am hapy to claim them as my own.
Kevin.
It looks like there will be no “Death by Calamari” at the end of Watchmen next March; which is fine. Giant Squids be damned. Except when they would make the movie Awesome!
People Under the Stairs
This 1991 Wes Craven horror covers a few nice Horror Tropes; incestuous siblings that are also slum lords and serial child abusers, cannibals, moral lessons for children and good dinner manners among sexually abused teens. Good Wholesome fun. Everett McGill & Wendy Robie do an excellent turn as the fundamentalist, incestuous, hyper-greedy and hyper-violent Brother and Sister duo that run a long-form real estate slum empire and hoard gold. Kind of a Kinky and Violent Unca Scrooge really. They get their in the long run at the hands of the boys they’ve been keeping in semi-mute cannibal hordes in their basement.
How would this Movie Have been improved by the Presence of a Giant Telepathic Squid?
In the basement there is a giant pit full of water that has somehow escaped the notice of the local authorities and utilities. It is filled with decayed corpses of the “bad boys and girls” from the house. How does the dynamic duo keep their long term killing and eating of kids a secret, two words “telepathic squid” they are servants of some Lovecraftian Horror that lives in their basement, part of a long legacy of worshippers that have owned this land for centuries and they use their wealth to lure in people from all over to feed to their god. This latest Generation has become a little too close and stopped producing heirs to the legacy, thus they are forced to try and build a new generation from the kids they steal. In the Climax, instead of “Daddy” getting it, it’s a giant squid that blows up, but not before pulling most of the house down on itself. Extra special, it’s the squid that pulls Alice back into the house after she tries to jump from the roof to escape.
Escape from L.A.
In 1996, the sequel to “Escape from New York” arrived and showed us another vision of an American Future overrun with Moralists and Religion; right with God was the only way to live and it was all done for your protection. Undesirables are shipped off to the new Island of LA, a godless land lorded over by gangs of miscreants and Plastic Surgeons, where pop-eyed freaks are the best tour-guides in town and transexual gang leaders are able to fly on heavier than air personal rigs. Awesome.
How would this Movie Have been improved by the Presence of a Giant Telepathic Squid?
It’s on an island,why not surround it with the Godless Children of C’thulu and imbue it with Cyclopean Architecture. Can you think of a more godless place than an actual Godless Place? Imagine Snake Plissken having to fight creatures that are the mutated remains of the Rodeo Drive set? Ravening hordes of hairless Chihuahua/Rat/Frog hybrids that scurry from place to place, devouring the newly arrived. Replace Che Guevera lookalike with a Che Geuvera lookalike, with tentacles and you have a vastly improved horror setting that let’s Snake Plissken blast them with impunity and makes AJ Langer’s character all the more tragic, seduced by a squid indeed.
Also, wouldn’t Steve Buscemi look great as a Shuggoth?
The Bridges of Madison County
Clint Eastwood and Meryl Street grit and snarl their way through a romantic tale of too greying at the temples….yawn. This 1995 Adaption of the Robert James Waller novel might have set the hearts of many a middle aged woman to puttering, but ugh. Snore. Boring was invented to describe this ploddng artifice of narrative and plot. Squint all you like Clint, no awards are deserved for this steaming pile of Crap.
How would this Movie Have been improved by the Presence of a Giant Telepathic Squid?
How could it not, replace the plot with a series of small towns that have been depopulated by attrition and ennui, have Clint and Meryl happen upon a small child at said bridges, tossing bits of his family into the waiting maw of a passing Squid and you have a horror masterpiece waiting to happen.
The Boy in the Plastic Bubble
As if his years on Welcome Back Kotter were not enough reason to shun and avoid John Travolta, he develops a fatal disease that forces him to live (and love) in a plastic bottle. Everyon say Awwww when he pines for the girl (Glyniss O’Conner) next door and finds love through the plastic skin.
How would this Movie Have been improved by the Presence of a Giant Telepathic Squid?
Plastic Bubble? More like, fresh wrapped Squid Food. Tod Ludbich is being kept invoilate for his 21st birthday by his cultist parents. Food for their forgotten Squiddy master. Only the love of the Girl Next Door can save the Boy in the Bubble from his fishy fate. Sometimes the Crap just Writes Itself, like the un-squid filled version does.
Dead Space
A repair crew visits a damaged mining ship in orbit around a planet that has yielded more than just pure mineral goodness; now the repair crew need to fight off the crazed and mutated remains of the mining ship’s personnel and escape back into space and home.
Dead Space plays about the same as every other Over the shoulder third person horror game. Aiming is fairly good, scares are plentiful and the Graphics are above par. Some notable game play mechanics issues that I found annoying, no jump. Fire was not always fire, it was sometimes “flail” at air, requiring you to remember that the right mouse mutton needed to be pressed … OH DAMN I’M BEING EATEN AGAIN!!!!.
Never mind that you can’t run & shoot at the same time. The game just punished you for having the gun out, you walked extra slow if you brandished any weapon larger than the empty gloves, but ran fine if you just “carried” the weapon. I spent the majority of this game cursing or panicking, it was high school all over again. Whether it was running down halls praying that nothing would pop out or frantically trying to get the damn gun to fire (which never seemed to work if I didn’t keep it at “the ready” before a fight. Did I mention that I kept the gun “ready” for more than 5 hours in the game?
I took to launching mines into every room I entered, but that made no difference, as the monsters were often non there until I saw them. Let me state that again, if I couldn’t see the monster, it often wasn’t there. Which means I could shoot a mine into a room, have it explode, then run face first into the monster behind the door that wasn’t there until I saw it.
Perhaps if Issac ran through the whole game with his eyes closed, there would have been no monsters at all!
My rating: stars
I’m being overly critical, of course.
I played the game in small bursts; letting my heart rate slow to a near attack between firefights and enclosed space battles with small crowds of dessicated infants with serious worm issues. It wasn’t a “dark” game, which was refreshing, as many horror games hide the monsters in the dark and rely on them jumping out to get you (Doom 3, and so on). Dead Space scared you by letting you know the monsters were coming well in advance and that there was nothing you would be able to do to stop them, save gird your loins and find a solid wall to stand against or a long open space to run through.
The dismemberment mechanic worked fairly well, but beyond the really touch monsters, I was able to bludgeon or stomp most of them to death with minimal effort; which happened more than I would have liked. Also, I don’t think I killed a single human in the game. Which was a crime, as more than one human character needed to be dismembered by my line gun. C’est La Vie.
I played the Game on my Core Duo, on Windows Xp Sp3 with an Nvidia 8500GT video card and 2 gigs of ram. I turned off bloom, blur, motion blur, advanced lighting and shadows and played it at 1440×900. I don’t think I suffered one slowdown or hiccup in game play. Not one. It was solidly beautiful and fluid throughout, even without added dressing.
As for the plot, there were some fairly severe inconsistencies introduced; not the least of which was the Marker itself. I won’t stray into spoiler town, but I will state this, [spoiler] “THE MARKER WAS NOT THE SOURCE OF THE EVIL, IT WAS THE SOLUTION TO IT. “[/spoiler]
In “New” Hulk #7, the Wendigo who are looking for the Red Hulk end up in Vegas where Bruce Banner unleashes the beast all over them, this beast:
Issue Seven is split between the “Banner” Hulk and the Red Hulk backup story. The Backup story revolves around She-Hulk getting together a All Girl Hulkbusters group to take on the Red Hulk. It reads like an old “funny” She Hulk story, which is okay, but really, “She Hulk” is funny enough without being constant comic relief.
Vlad has seen Better Days. The whole Vampire mythos is about as stale as a series of Animated Bloodthirsty Corpses can be. Vampires have been KungFu Artists, Cowboys, Criminals and Oversexed Kittens.
Francis Ford Coppolla gave us Dracula’s story as a timeless Love Story, a Romeo and Juliet between a fallen Holy Soldier and his lost Wife.
Vampires have even been a sexy alien menace.
It’s time for a new Dracula, abandoning everything that has gone one before. A Vampire in a world that has no concept of it. Imagine a teenage girl, finding that she has died in a freak accident on Church Grounds, finding herself in a coffin. Forced to dig her way out she’s lost and disoriented, it’s been weeks since she died. She’s ravenous, she drains a family dog, then vomits the blood. It’s not animal blood she needs.
While the Vampire priest has been done (to death) the Vampire Postal Clerk hasn’t. A Documentary style Horror/Comedy about a secretive man who is charged with being a pedophile and is instead found to be a vampire, touching off a worldwide hunt for the Vampires.
Dracula was never a Vampire. He was always just a human pretender, but was clever enough to fool whole swathes of humanity. When his secret is close to discovery, he seeks out a real vampire, a monster too terrifying to be real, unleashing a massive wave of “true” vampire bats that go on to infect a massive swath of the population of Europe. Dracula is then forced to battle the Vampires he was pretending to be.
Step Brothers
John C. Reily and Will Ferrell play the Man-Boy roles they may have been waiting their entire careers for as two spoiled and pampered manchildren of Single parents, they are faced with losing their status as the sole focus of their respective parent’s attention and fend for themselves.
An uneven and sometimes hilarious comedy. That is the single best thing one can say about this movie. Both Actors do exactly what you expect of them and 60% of the good laughs are in the trailer. I actually stopped watching the movie at points; cringing at the craven way the two men behaved. There are some notably funny moments, but the package as a whole is flawed. I’d recommend watching this as a rental or borrow it from your friend who buys all of Will Ferrell’s movies without question.
My rating: stars
Criticism aside, there is one scene in the movie that literally brought me to coughing racks of tears, I was laughing so hard. Imagine the massive fight between Neo and Agent Smith but 100 times more brutal and with school-aged children in the role of the massive crowd. Now imagine Will Ferrel swinging a small child as a weapon.
That one scene almost redeemed this movie to a solid 4.0. almost.
Crossed Issue One Preview, originally uploaded by Kevin Wardrop.
I’ve read a number of “Horror” comics, and more than my share of Zombie Comics in my day. I don’t think that I’ve ever really turned a page and then immediately wanted to skip what I’m seeing so quickly until I saw the Climax of this Comic.
It’s a real achievement for a Writer and Artist to come together and create something that shocks as effectively as the best horror movie. Better still if one can be equally repulsed at the same time. This Comic is truly horrifying and frightening.
Frightening like crowds of flesh hungry Peckerwoods with permanent viagra hard-ons and shrieking harridan meth-head women.
Frightening like the total breakdown of society into Paunchy Nerds and Wiry Speed freaks with Knives and dangerous libidos.
Not to mention the fact that a Nuclear Bomb has gone off in the Geographical Neighborhood.
Not To Mention that society has broken down.
You can Check out Crossed at your local Comic Store and if they don’t have it, check out Avatar Press
Story by Garth Ennis, Art by Jacen Burrows
You can check out more of my photographs at: Flickr
To Draw it down to Numbers
Published by NiteMayr on October 23, 2008An American Carol Week Number One (1,639 Screens):
Sicko Week Number One (441 Screens):
There has been alot of noise about “Real Americans” and “Real America” these past couple of days. The McCain campaign makes much of the fact that their supports represent the silent majority or the moral majority of the Country. The Down-home Salt of the earth that make up the real body of the electorate. The Authoritarian Right would have you believe that Liberals make up a tiny black-hearted exceptional bump in the world, and that the Rock-Ribbed Conservatives are in the Majority (while simlutaneously telling us about how they are persecuted).
These discussions are sometimes referred to as culture wars, expressed in purchasing patterns and behaviors. I can think of no better illustration of how North American people are really split than their viewing habits. They have to pay to see these films, they sometimes have to drive over some distance to go there, more than television, movie habits reflect the will and tastes of the affluent west and these numbers don’t lie.
People in the Western World ARE Liberals. They are Liberals by choice and in vast numbers, and if anyone tells you otherwise, they are deluded and foolish. Now if only they could vote that way too.
Oh, and in case you don’t know, An American Carol lasted two weeks in Theatres and Sicko, 13.