The VVitch (screencaps)

 So I couldn't resist screen capping the hell out of this one. Unfortunately, the copy that was uploaded was not the best and was so dark that I had to do some shitty HD tweaking on my lame-ass editor, and a lot of it still looks like the inside of a woodchuck's asshole. Several couldn't be saved, so into the trash they went. I should have waited for the BluRay but I've never been known for my patience. Sorry, did my best.

Green Room

I have not seen Green Room yet.

Hence, this post shall not be a review of the film Green Room.

However, my brutha from anutha mutha and podcast sidekick Erik has thrown together a mini-podcast show of his very own in which he cusses and rants and plays a shitload of anarchic punk tunes as an unofficial soundtrack for Green Room.

Also, while I'm slaving away at work all weekend, Erik and my buddy Derrik Carey will be joining forces on Astro Radio Z to discuss Green Room this Saturday night, as in tomorrow, as in get real, we all know you have nothing better to do and nowhere else to go, so sit your ass down and tune the fuck in.

And in the meantime, click this:

The Unofficial Green Room Soundtrack

Cat Person VS. Cat People

So my best buddy Erik and I sat down last night and recorded a brand spanking new hour of us rambling on (and on, and on) about shit nobody cares about in our sad "I will eventually die alone, covered in Cheeto dust" nerdy way. We talk about the Tank Girl comics, the new Radiohead album, Foul Play, plaid shorts and cheap hair dye. You should really tune in and listen to it if you have an hour to kill and are feeling particularly masochistic.

Fear Of a Dork Planet

(click it, bitch)

We also discussed the 1942 horror noir classic Cat People, but as we only allot ourselves approximately 15 minutes per subject so as to cram as much pointless shit into an hour as humanly possible, we really didn't have time to hit on all of the subtle nuances and underlying metaphors of the film. So I'm gonna do it now, the way I like to do, by pitting original against remake. And here we go.

Cat People (1942)

Directed by: Jacques Tourneur

Starring: A bunch of people who probably had stars on the Walk of Fame at some point, but inevitably got replaced by Kardashians and Grumpy Cat. See what I did there?

Jacques Tourneur was the master of horror noir, a conductor of shadows and fog, a painter of mood and blood - not of the frantic, arterial spray variety, but rather the dark, slow spreading, thickening puddle which leaves the body only after the soul has departed. His films were dreamy, gauzy ballets of subtle, quiet horror. As films go, it's weak in comparison with Tourneur's later films: I Walked With A Zombie and Curse of the Demon. Clocking in at an hour and eighteen minutes, it's a swift and to-the-point little film about a young, sweet faced girl from Serbia who comes to America and finds a very different land than they gloomy, superstitious one she left behind. She's a unicorn in a metropolis; she shouldn't exist, but she does. And no one can see what she really is because they've forgotten how. 

As the new world closes itself to the old, Irena opens wide, a transplanted poisonous orchid blooming in its new garden. But guilt is a powerful anchor and there's still ancient earth clinging to her roots. She hesitantly enters this new world with its promises of sexual freedom and liberation, but her Old World shadow - in the shape of a cat - keeps looming up behind her to swallow her and drag her back. Irena is so conflicted that she literally splits in two. Demure, polite, starched and ironed wife material on the outside VS. sultry, mystical, full blown PMS bitch kitty on the inside. And it doesn't take much for the claws to come out and the fur to fly. Anger, jealousy, lust... any and/or all of these emotions, deemed unladylike even here in the Brave New World of America, will transform Irena into a sleek, savage, ivory fanged monster should she allow them to overtake her rather than reining them in as a lady ought to do. Cue bitchy *meow* noise here.

This must have been some heavy shit back in 42. I mean, they were actually talking about S-E-X! in this flick! Or rather the lack thereof. Irena does not have sex with her husband, ever, and likely never will. We have to wonder why her husband Oliver loves her: she's an ice queen, wound up and corseted and withdrawn so tightly that it's a wonder she can pee. Does he really love her, or was his marrying her the Young Professionals version of purchasing a Dresden doll for his mantle? There's no warmth there, no real intellectual stimuli, nothing. So why does he love her? 

Obviously he's confused idolatry with love. He likes looking at Irena with her perfect little face and trim, tiny figure, but not as a person. We all know that he'd be better off bonking his secretary, a lively little minx with her own interests and ideas who has no trouble at all expressing her feelings and desires.

Oh, and let's not forget the smarmy mustachioed headshrinker, whose A#1 goal in life is to fuck Irena, Hippocratic Oath be damned. Oh yeah buddy, yous gonna get fucked by Irena all righty. He's quite the smug prick, David Nivening all over the damn place. He strikes me as the sort of man who would probably leave his socks on while he screwed - fussy, black dress socks made out of the finest silk, no less. In summation, he's really oily and creepy and gross and icky and I can't help but think that he's the kind of guy who wears his grandma's underthings and smears himself with Crisco before doing a naughty little German dance hall routine in front of the full length mirror.

But he pushes his white man entitlement too far and gets disemboweled by Irena the Kitty so haha good riddance.

Cat People (1982)

Starring: Klaus Kinski's snake fucking daughter, that guy who always gets mistaken for John Hurt but isn't, that redheaded chick who used to be married to Lenny Koznowski, Malcolm McClockwork Orange, Ruby goddamned Dee, Ed Begley Jr. who gets his arm ripped off by a panther and I didn't care, Lynn Lowry!!! and the city of New Orleans. Oh, and David Bowie's lovely voice singing the film's theme song "Putting Out Fire (with gasoline)."

Okay, 40 years have gone by, it's 1982 and SEX. Sex everywhere, everyday, on every available surface in every imaginable position. Truckloads of sex and more on the way, with sexberry syrup on the side. Everybody is having sex while they're having sex...well, everyone except for Irena Gallier, newly arrived from some distant country where baobab trees grow out of red dust and black leopards get room service.

Irena, an orphan, has come to New Orleans to meet her long lost brother Paul, whom she has not seen since childhood. Irena has been raised in a foster home and seems like a totally normal, well adjusted young lady. Paul has been in and out of prison and eschews shirts. He enthusiastically welcomes Irena into his grandiose Nawlins mansion and almost immediately takes over the role of the pervy psychotherapist in the original. He has obviously installed Irena in his home to serve as a fucktoy. But you can't rush a relationship like that, so Paul bides his time by venturing out into the red light district, turning into a black leopard and attempting to maul a prostitute.

Meanwhile...

Irena, sketchpad in hand, fucks off to the zoo and spots a black leopard in a tiny little cage which she is inexplicably drawn to. We of course know that it's her brother, caught in his cat incarnation. You see, in this version, cat people only turn into cats after they've had sex. If they wish to turn back into humans, they must kill. Paul failed to kill the whore, so now he's the newest attraction at the zoo...until he yanks an unlikable Ed Begley Jr's arm out of its socket, escapes and returns home in human form to tell Irena all about their sordid family history. Their parents were brother and sister and werecats can only have normal, non-cat-changing sex with each other. A grossed out Irena flees, not wishing to carry on the family tradition of incest...even though she grew up with Klaus Kinski so you wouldn't think this would be such a big deal for her.

She moves in with Oliver, the nice zoo boss who caged her brother, and doesn't have sex with him. She wants to, but she's scared. Her virginity is an object of total disbelief and fascination for Ollie's coworker Alice, who wants to know all about the times that Irena didn't get laid. Weird chick. She also has the hots for Ollie, but steps aside with only a slight grumble when Ollie's preference for Irena becomes clear.

Paul tries to kill Ollie in leopard form.
Alice kills Paul.
Irena takes a train to Hallucinatory Africa, where she meets her dead leopard mother.
Irena returns to New Orleans.
Irena terrorizes Alice in a public swimming pool.
Irena fucks Ollie.
Irena changes into a leopard.
Irena kills somebody and turns back into a hot chick.
Ollie ties her to the bed and has kinky bondage sex with her.
Irena turns back into a leopard.
Ollie locks her up in the zoo cage left vacant by her brother.
Ollie and Alice start bonking, because they're normal and they can.
Ollie visits Irena with some pork shoulder and ear skritchies to show that there's no hard feelings.

The end.

Moral: Sexy, exotic foreign women who come to our country, take our jobs in zoo gift shops and steal our white Aryan men are sluts in heat. You can maybe fuck them once or twice, but seriously - cage those whores up tight and be fruitful and multiply with genuine American girls with no accents. The end.

The Sound and the Fury

Music. Much like paintings, a single song can conjure up different emotions and images for a vast amount of people.

I'm laughing at clouds.
So dark up above
The sun's in my heart
And I'm ready for love.

For instance, my mom associates the classic song Singin' in the Rain with Gene Kelly, cheerfully tap dancing his way through a rainy cobblestone street, partnering with lampposts and creating sunshine with his voice. For me, the mere mention of the song title Singing in the Rain invokes the unwelcome mental image of Malcolm McDowell in plague mask and freakishly oversized codpiece prancing around the living room of a house he's just broken into, snipping anatomically select holes in the red jumpsuit of the home owner's wife as he merrily belts out his tune. And then rapes the holy shit out of her while her husband is forced to watch. Yeah, I can't hear Singin' in the Rain anymore without feeling all of the caustic fluids in my gastrointestinal tract start to churn sourly, worming their way up my alimentary canal, threatening to hurl themselves projectile from my body in a hot jet of half digested microwave burritos and Cosmic Brownies unless I turn the radio/TV off ASAP.

There's something infinitely awful about songs of innocence and wonder, written by happy-go-lucky lads and lassies in chipper moods, and then used as a backdrop for something ugly and devastating. It forever alters the song for me, and I can no longer hear it without making that unpleasant association.

It's not too hard to figure out, you see it every day
And those that were the farthest out have gone the other way
You see them on the freeway, it don't look like a lot of fun
But don't you try to fight it, an idea whose time has come
Don't tell me that I'm crazy.

Like Huey Lewis's bouncy, quirky little ditty Hip to be Square. It's a silly, stupid little slice of pop cheese, but harmless enough, self deprecating enough to make even the most cynical goth crack a ghost of a smile.  I was never a huge Huey fan, but the song never annoyed me to the point of wanting to stick the author's face deep into a vat of french fry medium. (However, Steve Miller is still on my shit list for The Joker, a song that rubs against my nerve endings like cat claws down a chalkboard.)

But then here come an unnervingly Tom Cruise-esque Christian Bale, with his frisky little white boy dance in his sleek, see-through rain coat and chrome axe so flawlessly shiny and pretty that he could almost drive it to work. And suddenly, Hip to be Square becomes a vicious, meat-cleaving, arterial slicing, high-pitched murder screaming anthem for fastidious serial killers everywhere. Whenever I go over to a guys place, and I see a single Huey Lewis CD on their rack, I'm the fuck out, date over.

Yes, I'm stuck in the middle with you,
And I'm wondering what it is I should do
It's so hard to keep this smile from my face,
Losing control, and I'm all over the place

Some songs just float quietly through the years and decades, familiar as an old flannel shirt in the back of the closet. You don't own the album and probably wouldn't be able to name the band for 50 points on trivia night, but when it comes on the radio you can sing along with it and know the tune by heart. The 70s were stuffed full of songs like that, one hit throwaway wonders by bands that broke up 30 years ago and were never heard from again. I mean, how many people would know who the fuck I was talking about if I said Stealer's Wheel? *crickets* Yeah, now what if I said "Remember that song that Michael Madsen was dancing around to when he cut off that cop's ear in Reservoir Dogs?"

Histories of ages past
Hung in light and shadows cast
Down through all eternity
The crying of humanity

Or hey, how about Donovan? Remember him? Groovy, delicate featured Scotsman with love in his eyes and flowers in his hair? Wrote a sweet little song about a magical man spreading love and enlightenment through the land. It's a hypnotic, psychedelic little kaleidoscope of a song with a pinch of Hindu spice, weaving stars and flowers out of midair. It also makes a great soundtrack for a slo-mo murder in David Fincher's Zodiac. The Hurdy Gurdy Man of the song's title, originally intended as a wise and loving yogi, is now the Boogeyman, pumping bullets into a parked car and watching as flesh shears away, arteries explode and blood droplets careen through the air to impact upon the interior like thick tears, all in hyper vivid slow motion so you don't miss a single thing. Happiness and peace and the innocence of the 60s suddenly becomes dark and sinister, and you will never again hear Hurdy Gurdy Man without thinking of shadows, muzzle flashes and death.

Oh, won't you come with me
And take my hand?
Oh, won't you come with me
And walk this land?
Please take my hand.

Speaking of the groovy sixties, remember Iron Butterfly? They were the precursor to Led Zeppelin, heavy and funky and trippy, and acid rock anthem about love and lands of milk and honey which nevertheless would appeal to a serious group of headbangers. Their one hit song In A Gadda Da Vida is a straightforward love song, but its bottom heavy thump makes it a dark and serious dirge, a profession of love sung perhaps by a disturbed man who is considering taking up stalking. It just needs the slightest push to send it over the edge from Rockin' Love Ballad to Head Slamming Serious Heavy Metal Threat, and that push comes in the form of Francis Dollarhyde, aka Tom Noonan, aka The Red Dragon killer of the film Manhunter, an 80s neo Noir thriller about an obsessed cop, a manboy maniac and a dragon tattoo that is not on a girl. Francis, the films killer, descends into his final abyss of insanity to the tune of In A Gadda Da Vida, and you just know that the survivors of his last rampage will always associate that particular song with Hell Itself.

Came the last night of sadness
And it was clear she couldn't go on...

And hey, nothing says "This is your last night on Earth, and soon you will die at the hands of a crazed maniac" like a song entitled "Don't Fear the Reaper", a bleak and nihilistic 70s epic which chronicles the inevitability of death, which has no regard for age or innocence. So when Jamie Lee Curtis climbs into Nancy Loomis' (Kyes) aircraft carrier sized car about half an hour into the film, and pot is smoked as the daylight wanes, and the news that someone has broken into a hardware store and stolen ropes and knives sails right over their marijuana soaked skulls, and Blue Oyster Cult's biggest hit "Don't Fear the Reaper" plays endlessly on the car radio between them...yeah, they're fucked. May as well have T-shirts made up for the two of them which read "Victim #1" and "Final Girl." That's how fucked they are.

(and no, I'm not commenting on fevers or cowbells - deal with it)

No more will my green sea go turn a deeper blue
I could not foresee this thing happening to you.

And last but not least, that one goddamned song that dances around your head for days and flits away before you can fully identify it. It's like a fruit fly in the soupiest heat of July: buzzing right in your face, refusing to be waved away, divebombing you every five fucking seconds and you just know the goddamned thing is laughing at you mockingly at a sound level just out of range of your pathetic human ears. You never really see it - maybe a blackish blurry dot dancing at the edge of your vision. You slap at the air and curse loudly and everyone looks at you like maybe you've lost the last speck of your sanity and you're about to flip all the way the fuck out and go totally postal. Yeah, there are songs like that - snatches of lyric, familiar riffs that loop in your subconscious, and if you don't remember what the fuck the name of that goddamned song is pretty fucking soon, you are going to kill everyone within a five mile radius.

In Kevin Bacon's case, it's The Rolling Stones Paint It Black, a song about untimely death and the grief that accompanies it. It's a perfect choice for Stir Of Echoes, a movie which got lost in the shadow of the vastly more popular but seriously inferior ghost flick The Sixth Sense. The name of the song and its connection to the ghost of a murdered girl elude Bacon, and it's a dilemma we can identify with, with or without the murdered ghost girl part.

The Harlot Shall Be Burned With Fire

I dedicate this post to that guy in Sacramento who - without being asked one fine, sunny day in 1998 - informed me that I would never marry, and even if I did, all of my sons would be homosexual because I was "too strong" a woman. Kiss my ass, you fat fuck.

Forbidden Planet (1956)
Starring: Robby the Robot, Mr. Naked Gun, Earl Holliman (who did NOT star in Attack of The The Eye Creatures) and Anne Francis stars in (ooh ooh ooh) Forbidden Planet at the late night double feature picture show...

Directed by: Fred M. Wilcox
Based on William Shakespeare's The Tempest.

Basic plot: A bunch of manly, horny, smug white guys go to another planet and discover some old guy, his super hot teenage daughter and their pet robot gadding about, doing as they please. Time to civilize this shit. Except there's a monster lurking about.

Why it's Sexist: Alta, the aforementioned hot teenage daughter, has never known another person except for her father. She's utterly innocent and has been raised in an environment free of limitations and/or shame. She runs around in tiny little dresses because she can and why the hell not? But here come The Penis Squad, and Captain Leslie Nielsen is quick to lay all of the blame for his horndog crew's pervy behavior squarely on Alta, saying she deserves to be raped for running around so scantily clad.

"Well, what'd you expect? Don't you understand, Alta? No? Well, look at yourself. You can't dress like that around men, especially not a space wolf like Farman. I'm in command of 18 competitively selected super-perfect physical specimens with an average age of 24.6 who have been locked up in hyperspace for 378 days. It would have served you right if I hadn't... and he... oh go on, get out of here before I have you run out of the area under guard - and then I'll put more guards on the guards!"

Nice.

Straw Dogs (1971)
Starring: Dustin Hoffman, Susan George, that guy who was in Titanic, some slut and a lot of icky scumbaggy guys.
Directed by: Sam "I hate women" Peckinpah.

Every female in this movie is a whore. For no reason other than that they were born whorey and like being whorish. Susan George walks around with no bra on, nipples entering rooms before she does, even though she's married to dweeby Dustin Hoffman and should be acting like a proper dowdy hausfrau. She shows her tits to whomever wishes to see them and not only encourages but enjoys the rape bestowed upon her by her brutish ex boyfriend. She doesn't care too much for the sodomy forced upon her by some other guy, though. But she's dumb and slutty and not very nice, so she deserves it. Also deserving it is the vapid teenage girl who is George's Whore-In-Waiting and, because of the lack of doable guys in this small, manure-encrusted town, tries to seduce the village idiot, who "accidentally strangles" her to death one night.

Seriously, I hate Sam Peckinpah. I'm not saying he wasn't a master filmmaker with an awesome vision, but he was simultaneously a deeply perverted scumbag. That's my opinion and I'm sticking with it.

Bellflower (2011)
Starring: a really badass, souped up, flame belching, apocalyptic muscle machine named Mother Medusa. Also, some totally average people.
Directed by: the same average person who stars in it, of course.

Basic plot: Two totally unlikable slacker asshole douchebags with no jobs and no class bum around a small California town, thinking they're badasses and preparing for the imminent apocalypse by tricking out their car Mad Max style. For some reason, a totally hot blond hooks up with lumpy loser Woodrow, who stumps around like an ambient dumb pudding, displays zero charm, a void where his wit should be and the overall personality of burnt toast. Utterly shocked when hot blond dumps his ass, Woodrow retaliates by fucking his best friends longtime crush (because he's that hot, apparently = *eyeroll*) and turning into super amazing asshole man, dreaming himself into an alternate universe where girls are willing to die if they can't have him, and hot blond will tolerate his escalating abuse if it means fucking him just one more time because he's obviously so amazingly Sex God Cock Endowed. Yeah. Right.

The car is the absolute best part of this movie. The rest is a lot like listening to some drunken, unemployed douchebag at the bar rant and rail about how everyone else is to blame for his own assholism.

Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer (1964)
Starring: several hundred pounds of Play Doh.
Directed by: some guy

Basic plot: Donner the Dickhead knocks up his long suffering wife, who subsequently gives birth to a mutated freak named Rudolph. Donner is horrified and things get worse when his boss - an evil corporate tool named Santa - makes it clear that Rudolph will not score a spot on his sleigh team because he's so fucking ugly. Donner's constant verbal abuse drives Rudolph out of the house. Both Rudy's mom and girlfriend want to go find him and bring him home, but Donner tells them to stay put because "this is man's work" and girls with their stupid ovaries will just fuck everything up. Needless to say, the girls don't listen and don't get five feet before they need rescuing. Santa sees a way to exploit Rudy's deformity and cashes in, and all was merry and bright.

Jurassic World (2015)

That's right, woman. Kneel before me, eyes downcast.

Starring: Opie's daughter, Indominus Rex, some beefy guy, a couple of annoying kids, some Velociraptors and an assload of shitty CGI.

Directed by: some guy

Basic plot: Cute, adorably klutzy little corporate Miss Priss in white skirt and high heels just can't resist the Neanderthal charms of He-Man Velociraptor trainer and gets all blushy and stammers when he chests up in her face. So she sends her nephews out into the park on a suicide mission so she can play damsel in distress and get her scrawny ass saved by Mr. Beardy Alpha ChestHair McHighSpermCount.


Die Hard (1988)

Allow me to preface this one by saying "I love this movie." I really do. It's a load of fucking fun and I will never not watch it if it's on. But let's be honest: it's sexist as shit. John McClane comes to California to visit his estranged wife for Christmas, only to find that she's gone back to her maiden name. He's none too pleased with that bullshit. Then some bad guys start blowing shit up and taking prisoners, and wifey now needs rescuing. And the best way to save her skinny ass is by undoing the clasp of her Rolex (a gift from her boss and a symbol of her "unfaithfulness" to John by choosing her career over him) and allowing it to fall from the top of a high rise along with the bearded baddie who was going to kidnap her. And wifey decides, in the end, that McClane suits her better after all.

The Last Boy Scout (1991)
Starring: Bruce Willis, a cat puppet, Halle Berry in her pre diva-bitch days, Damon Wayans.
Directed by: Tony Scott. No wonder he killed himself. 

Brucie again, ditched by yet another wife and taking no responsibility. Wife in question is a cheating bitch. Teenage daughter is boy crazy. It's okay if a whore drowns in a jacuzzi because that's her job. Nice girls die. Brucie makes pussy jokes in front of his 13 year old daughter. Here, let's let the script speak for itself, won't we?

[Joe has just found out that Mike was sleeping with his wife]
Mike Mathews: It just happened, Joe. It...
Joe Hallenbeck: Sure, sure, I know... it just happened. Coulda happened to anybody. It was an accident, right? You tripped, slipped on the floor and accidentally stuck your dick in my wife. "Whoops! I'm so sorry, Mrs. H. I guess this just isn't my week."

Alley Thug: All right, you want it in the chest, or the head?
Joe Hallenbeck: Yeah, that's what your wife said.
Alley Thug: Hey, would you stop with the wife shit?
Joe Hallenbeck: Ask me how fat she is.
Alley Thug: Fuck you, man! How fat is she?
Joe Hallenbeck: She's so fat I had to roll her in flour and look for the wet spot. Motherfucker, if you wanna fuck her you gotta slap her thigh and ride the wave in. Now I'm not saying she's fat, her high school picture was an aerial photograph.

Jimmy Dix: You don't like women much do ya Joe.
Joe Hallenbeck: [about his wife] At least I liked the guy she was fuckin'. He was my best friend.

True Lies (1994)
Starring: AHnuld, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Arnold, the Babe from Wayne's World, Tom AHnuld, some vaguely mideastern looking terrorists and Charlton "I Am A Big Man With A Gun" Heston.
Directed by: James Cameron, what the fuck were you thinking?

Ugh. This film is fucking vile. A guy showed me this film on our second date, claiming it was his all time favorite film. I dumped him immediately afterwards. Jackass.

Super cool secret agent man AHnuld suspects his mousy little wife is cheating on him, so he fantasizes about murder, incarcerates his wife, terrorizes her, humiliates her, damn near rapes her and wins her love back by doing so. Teenage daughter is on verge of becoming slut. Wayne's World Babe loves her terrorist boyfriend so much that she doesn't mind much when he beats the shit out of her and stands beside him to the bitter end. AHnuld kills everyone, saves all the wimminfolk and they love him so much because he's so cool, the end.

I would rather vomit up everything I've ever eaten, and then re-eat it, before watching this misogynistic pile of feces again. Also, I just really fucking despise AHnuld. The man is a finger sniffing, reptilian, disgusting, creepy,  STD riddled, steroid skeevy, smarmy, piggy lecherous old fart.

Dear of a Fork Planet..

Beer of a Spork Planet is back after a month long hiatus and Episode #12 is up and ready to be listened to!

Actually, there was an Episode #11 about a week ago which I forgot to promote because I wasn't on it so who cares? No, but seriously - Erik did a solo half hour show in which he paid some serious haunty homage to the much and justly lauded Lore Podcast, which is best listened to whilst driving through the backwoods of Exeter really late at night with the car headlights ghostily illuminating the skeletal trees. And I totally just made up two new adjectives there with all of the literacy of a 2 year old crashing from a Fruit Loop high.

Anywho...

On this latest episode of Gear of a Cork Planet, Erik and I discuss such riveting topics as the selection of noodles available on the menu of the White Dragon Noodle Bar in futuristic Los Angeles, to the superiority of milk left behind after a bowl of Booberry cereal has been consumed. This podcast isn't for wimps, baby.

Taboo subjects are raised and dissected. Cultural norms and social etiquette are pantsed and forced to walk around the block crying "I am a ninny!" We dare to question the need for yet another fucking Star Wars installment. Erik once again proclaims his love for Rosario Dawson. I counter with a claim on Norman Reedus's manly mansomeness. Does Lembas bread really taste like orange blossom honey and bacon? Is Pollyanna McIntosh really a show pony of sexuality despite the fact that her face looks like a crude chainsaw sculpture? Has Tom Waits always been 75 years old, even as a baby? Will we dare to light our hands on fire and plunge it into the traditional Gut-Loaf Whistle Pie - just like Grandpa used to do before they took him away? Tune in and find out before we record Episode 13. Who knows what we'll be discussing next? Hamster sandwiches? Forbidden sex rituals of circus midgets? Dewlaps? All of it is possible and none of it matters here on Rear of a Stork Planet!

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Into the flood again...

Seattle, WA ~ Friday, April 5, 2002
Weather History for KBFI
Precipitation ~  0.05 in
Events ~ Rain

Could she love me again, or will she hate me?
Prob'ly not, I know why, can't explain me.
Did she call my name?
I think it's gonna rain
When I die.

~ Alice In Chains

It's been 22 years to the day since Kurt Cobain died. Facebook is awash with posts commemorating the event, reminding us all that the world has grown bleaker and generally more hopeless since that Spring day when the reluctant Father of Grunge was found with his face blown away by a single shotgun blast.

I was 24 when it happened and, in all honesty, it really did seem like the death of an entire generation. For roughly three or four years, we'd ruled the world: we were the latchkey kids of the seventies and eighties. We'd suffered through a Cold War, Reaganomics, Wham! T-shirts and Flashdance legwarmers, pink and green neon and yuppie-ism. Now it was our turn. We were the misfits, awkward and depressed, suspicious of authority, zombified by Prozac and stuck with the stale leftovers of the metal years in the form of shitty hair metal knock-offs like Dangerous Toys, Winger and Slaughter. When grunge exploded onto the scene in a plaid flannel colored mushroom cloud of weariness and anger, it was like a massive defibrillator reanimating our dormant corpses from a drugged sleep with a sharp kick to the ribs.

I find myself nostalgic for the 90s a lot, even though at the time I was convinced that we were living in perpetual final countdown mode. The economy was booming, colors seemed brighter and I personally attended two Lollapalooza's. I was simultaneously the most miserable and the coolest person on planet Earth, suffering mightily in my John Lennon purple tinted sunglasses, combat boots and Beastie Boys T-shirt. Hope seemed tangible and I could afford a pair of Doc Martens on my coffee shop salary.

Then Cobain died, and all of the color was bleached out of the world. I cut the rainbow hair wrap out of my hair, gave my fatigue jacket back to the secondhand store and went to work, blending in with the rest of the faceless cogs. I moved out of my twenties and found myself in my thirties with no idea of how I'd gotten there.

But if Kurt Cobain's death was the tolling of a bell signalling the end of an era, then Layne Staley's passing was the ringing silence that follows, the kind that fills your ears with the loud, numbing silence that follows a deafening cannon fire.

I found out about Staley's death on an online message board, back in the early days of the InterWebs. I heard nothing about it on TV, or read anything about it in the newspapers, nor heard it mentioned even in passing on MTV, which has ceased being a legit music channel by that point and had become one long fucking commercial/reality show, making stars out of mannequins and containing all of the substance of a stale marshmallow.

Alice In Chains, along with Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and Jane's Addiction, had ruled the early 90s. When lead singer Layne Staley disappeared from the public spotlight in 1996, nobody thought much of it. It was just another case of a band's time being over and their fame flames dampened by obscurity. Everyone just assumed he'd retired and was living off of the millions earned by their albums, relaxing in ostentatious luxury in some mansion somewhere with some supermodel or other. None of us - the scattered GenXers - had any idea that he was dying. And he probably had no idea that any of us gave a shit.

“I know I’m near death,” Staley said. “I did crack and heroin for years. I never wanted to end my life this way. I know I have no chance. It’s too late." 

I remember reading bad reviews for Dirt in Rolling Stone, who would later go on to claim it was one of the best and most important albums ever recorded once Layne had died. I remember hearing people make fun of them, claiming they weren't really grunge, had once been a glam metal band and were just shamelessly cashing in on the whole Seattle thing because it was there and they could. Clearly, none of the naysayers had ever heard Layne sing.

He looked like he was made out of cheap white porcelain that would shatter if rattled too hard. He was woefully pale, gaunt, so skinny he could have easily found gainful employment as a toilet snake in the plumbing industry. He was almost too pretty for a boy, with delicate features and pure blond hair. But the voice that emerged from those girly pink lips was anything but willowy and innocent. Layne sang like a Harley Davidson engulfed in a gasoline fire. His voice was a rusted chrome calliope, a metallic Metatron, ripping the air apart like a dirty length of rebar through a sheet of plain white paper. He screamed like a demon and wailed like a banshee, plunging into depths of sorrow and slamming back up again with a violent fury. Nothing about his voice was phony or affected or manufactured solely for monetary gain.

"When police kicked in the door to Layne Staley's University District apartment on April 19, there, laying on a couch, lit by a flickering TV, next to several spray-paint cans on the floor, not far from a small stash of cocaine, near two crack pipes on the coffee table, holding a fully loaded syringe in his right hand, and the syringe in his leg, reposed the remains of the rock legend."

For me, Generation X truly died with Layne Staley. Cobain's death had been sudden, loud and utterly shocking. Staley's death had been a slow, sad suicide, lasting over five years and finally puffing out like a wet candle, without fanfare. In a way, Layne had literally done what the entire X Generation had been doing figuratively for the last 8 years: fading, dissolving, unmourned and unmissed. He proved what we had all thought of ourselves all along, that we had been left behind, forgotten and never much wanted to begin with. I know that sounds self pitying and melodramatic. Tough titty, it's how I feel.

Spring is a cruel season, and the six inches of unprecedented snow that fell on the tulips and daffodils yesterday did nothing to improve the bottomless funk I've been in since March, when I turned 46. For reasons unknown, my mood soured and all of my hope dried up and died. The world seemed irreversibly ugly to me, and life a long, pointless joke. Lasting three weeks, it was the longest, darkest spell of bipolar depression that has yet struck me down. Staley's lasted for six years. And yet he didn't officially commit suicide, didn't blow his head off with a shotgun, just accepted that his choices had been bad ones and his life doomed to end sooner rather than later. And fourteen years ago today, he died alone on his couch in front of the TV and it took two weeks for anyone to notice he was gone.

That about sums up our generation.

Not Cool

Explaining the meaning of the slogan, Raimondo said "young people ought to think about coming to Rhode Island, visiting Rhode Island, starting a business in Rhode Island because we're cool and we're hip. We're entrepreneurial, and it's warm."

 Cooler and warmer. That's our new state logo. Designed to bring the tourists flocking to our tiny little state and pump their much needed greenbacks into our struggling economy. It's hip and it's mod, it's what all the kids will be saying soon. Yeah. Wow. It's the bomb diggity, or some such shit.

Frankly, if it had been up for public vote, I would have gone with The Home Of Mobsters & Lobsters. Or, if we're going for bald faced truth, how about: "Where the Streets Have No Name." Or "New York's Ashtray?" 

All smartassedness aside, I love Rhode Island. I have to - I live here. But recent attempts to drive tourism haven't exactly been a rousing success. One recent article, which ticked off the weirdest attractions of all 50 states, offered Mercy Brown's headstone as Little Rhody's draw. The grave of a teenage girl who died of tuberculosis. Wow, yippee. Clearly, whoever wrote that probing piece of fluff has never heard of Nibbles Woodaway, the Big Blue Bug of Providence. Or fucking Ghost Hunters. Or, hey, how about H.P. Lovecraft? You know, that guy who was born here and died here and is buried in Swan Point Cemetery? Wrote all those short stories that got turned into huge sci-fi horror flicks? Oh wait, that's right - he was a racist. Imagine that, a white guy who was born 126 years ago being racist. Everybody, Ssh! We can't possibly drive tourism by drawing the nation's attention to a racist guy who's been dead for 70+ years. What would the neighbors think?

Yep, think it's time to drag out that article I wrote about Lovecraft when his likeness was stripped from the World Fantasy Awards...

Eccentric. Xenophobic. Anglophilic. Racist. Introverted. Every devoted fan of Howard Phillips Lovecraft has heard these terms applied to the acknowledged father of cosmic horror at one time or another. No one denies that these rumors are most likely true. Quite frankly, I'd be shocked to learn that Lovecraft - a white male born in 1890 to a staunch, upper crust New England family - was anything other than a racist. He spent his childhood in seclusion, subjected to his deranged mother's Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy abuse and, as a result, ended up a reclusive adult with no self esteem who wouldn't venture outside of his own house until after dark. I'm pretty sure that Lovecraft hated and feared everyone - white and black, Jewish and Christian, male and female, etc. He hated himself.

But to say that we can no longer have an award named after him because he was a racist? Because, by comparison, hypocrisy is so much more acceptable? Come on people - this is just getting fucking ridiculous.

Yes, Lovecraft was a racist. But what white man wasn't a racist back in the late 1800s/early 1900s? Was it right? Hell no! But it was a different time and, as such, an entirely different world. Things have changed. Lovecraft himself changed as he got older and made more friends and - gasp! - fell in love with and married a Jewish woman! Had he lived long enough to see the stock market crash of 1939 and the second world war, perhaps his ingrained beliefs might have changed and softened. We'll never know. But that isn't the point, anyway.

If you're going to strip an award of its name because you disagree with the author's admittedly antiquated beliefs, then you'd better take a good, hard look at all of the other awards and their namesakes.

The Hugo Award - named for Hugo Gernsback, described by writer and editor Barry N. Malzberg thusly:

"Gernsback's venality and corruption, his sleaziness and his utter disregard for the financial rights of authors, have been so well documented and discussed in critical and fan literature. That the founder of genre science fiction who gave his name to the field's most prestigious award and who was the Guest of Honor at the 1952 Worldcon was pretty much a crook (and a contemptuous crook who stiffed his writers but paid himself $100K a year as President of Gernsback Publications) has been clearly established."

The Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award - Do I really need to go into graphic detail about the generally accepted belief that MJ was a pedophiliac freak?

Edgar Allan Poe (The Edgar Award) - The undisputed master of horror. He was also a drunk, a drug addict and married his thirteen year old cousin when he was 26.

The William Faulkner Award - Amazing writer. Drunken sot. Notorious philanderer.

The O. Henry Award - named for William Sydney Porter, a man who lost his job as a banker after being indicted for embezzlement. He fled to South America but was later arrested, tried and convicted for his crime and sentenced to five years in prison.

The Nobel Prize - named for Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite and whose family made a fortune from the manufacture and distribution of armaments.

And why stop there?
If we're calling out all of the racism, sexism and anti-Semitism in the entertainment community, let's also make the following Verboten.

Disneyland - nope, you can't go there anymore. Not unless you want to be seen as a sexist, racist, Jew-hating bastard. Walt Disney was a founding member of the anti-communist group Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. In 1947, during the Second Red Scare, Disney testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), where he branded Herbert Sorrell, David Hilberman and William Pomerance, former animators andlabor union organizers as Communist agitators. He was a woman-hating bigot whose own grandniece confirms rumors of his prickishness.

Bugs Bunny - no more Saturday morning cartoons for you. Bugs Bunny made fun of Native Americans, Asians and African Americans, depicting them all as ignorant savages who were easily outwitted. He also insulted drag queens and insinuated that extraterrestrials in general and Martians in particular, were idiots in comparison with the Almighty Inhabitants of Patriotic Planet Earth. No more Loony Toons for anybody, ever again.

Aunt Jemima Pancake Syrup - have fun eating your dry, naked pancakes from now on, you wanna be Grand Dragon of the KKK.

And don't even think about watching Gone With The Wind anymore. How dare you view a movie which depicts all black people as happy darkies singin' in the cotton fields all dee livelong day? Let's track down and burn every copy of the movie in existence, because it is offensive. Now. In the day and age where we live. Because Heaven Forbid we should see what ideas and behaviors were once considered perfectly acceptable and have now been discarded as we supposedly grow and change as a society and learn to embrace our backgrounds and cultures.

Look, I'm not saying that racism is ever okay. It's not. Not in this day and age. But what's done is done, and trying to cover up history is every bit as harmful as letting it continue unchanged.

So Lovecraft was a racist, So the fuck what? Why must I be forbidden to enjoy an artists creations simply because their personal beliefs are considered reprehensible by the greater percentage of society? Did you know that mystery author Anne Perry is a convicted murderess? Are you going to stop reading her books now? Varg Vikernes is the biggest fucking scumbag in the world (in my humble opinion) but I still like the song Dunkelheit and I make no apologies for that.

Lovecraft was a human being - flawed and molded by his time, his surroundings and his circumstances.

Lovecraft's writing could be clunky, clumsy and offensive. Even in the 1920s, his writing was archaic and not to everyone's taste.

But he created a sub genre, like it or not. He was the first writer to blend science fiction and horror successfully. He launched the Cosmic Horror movement.

If we have to cease appreciation for every single person who has ever had an idea, a thought or an expression that someone somewhere in the world found offensive, we would never read another book, look at another painting, see another film or award another prize to anyone. Where do we draw the line? When do we finally admit that no one is perfect - never has been and never will be - and try to overlook their flaws in favor of their strengths? I said overlook, not ignore. Acknowledge that he was a damaged person with prejudiced ideas - ideas that were the norm at the time in which he lived. Add a new award named after Octavia Butler, by all means. In addition to Lovecraft's award. Don't try to erase his failures as a person from the annals of history: stand his likeness right next to Octavia Butler's and acknowledge that this never could have been possible if we had not evolved as people and grown more accepting of one another. In uniting them, we acknowledge the past and progress into the future.

But by banishing Lovecraft and his works, by burying the things we are ashamed of, we admit we have not grown or accepted any responsibility at all, but simply wish to pretend it never happened. And that is childish, pointless and utterly fruitless.

PS - our new state logo really sucks. Just saying.

Let Us Prey

But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?

~Mark Twain

It's a well known fact that the Devil often goes down to Georgia, looking for a soul to steal. But even the Devil has standards, and swindling cornpone Republican dimwits out of their sweaty cracker souls doesn't provide much of a challenge after a couple hundred years. So, come 2014 and Ol' Scratch decides to wander up Scotland way, as far north from the Mason Dixon line as he can possibly get without being subject to a steady diet of lutefisk.

There's not much call for chickens in the bread pan, picking out dough up north, so instead the D-Man makes a dramatic entrance on the rocky coast, vomited up by the deep blue sea and escorted by a veritable murder of crows. For some reason, he looks exactly like Davos Seaworth, the Onion Knight and official Hand to King Stannis Baratheon...who isn't even a king and doesn't deserve to be anyway after allowing his daughter to be burned at the stake because the night is dark and full of terrors or some such shit. But I digress.

Liam Cunningham, aka Davos Seaworth, is our unnamed main character, neither protagonist or antagonist, just cool as fuck, striding through the Scottish countryside like a total badass, chainsmoking and squinting harder than Clint Eastwood in a dust storm. The tiny cobblestoned village he wanders into has no name and an approximate population of fifteen people, fourteen of whom are serial killers...including three of the four members of the local police force. The fourth one is a block faced rookie named Rachel, who achieved small town celebrity years earlier by being the only survivor of yet another serial killer/child rapist. Now she's a haunted, straightlaced, by-the-book beat cop, whose presence is resented by the other three cops: her boss, the closeted gay Jeffrey Dahmer-esque captain, the slutty female cop and her piggy partner whom she spends most of her night shifts banging in the back of their squad car. When Rachel arrives for work, already having arrested a troublemaking teen for drunk driving, her efforts aren't appreciated or rewarded and into the drunk tank goes her catch, locked up along with a high school teacher who beats his wife. Jesus, the cast of Trainspotting had more promise than this fucking town.

Anyway, they are soon joined by a local doctor who has viciously slaughtered his entire family, small children included, and Liam Lucifer up there, who appears to have been a hit and run casualty at first, sporting a superficial head wound and remaining stubbornly mute. He seems content to sit and stare at Rachel and give everyone else a walloping case of the creeps. Eye contact with him proves lethal as he seems to know everyone's deepest, darkest secrets and drives all of them to homicidal rage. Pretty soon, everyone is killing everyone, or plotting to kill everyone, or getting ready to kill everyone after killing everyone else. Everyone except Rachel, that is. She's trying to stop everyone from getting killed by everyone and trying to avoid getting murdered by everyone except for Liam, who doesn't seem the least bit interested in harming anyone. He's too busy levitating matches, plucking black feathers from the air and driving his cellmates to confess their ugliest sins. He never comes right out and says he's The Devil, but he drops enough hints along the way. He also has a habit of popping up out of the shadows whenever there's a deceptive lull in the narrative, all Exorcist-Eyed and freaky.

Honestly, the story doesn't make a whole lot of sense, the characters are wild caricatures, the events that unfold comparable to dropping acid and getting lost inside of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride for an hour or so and the probability of so many people in the same vicinity being so skullfuck batshit crazy so farfetched that I gave up trying to take it seriously about 20 minutes in and decided to view it as a Marvel Comics version of a fable by Aesop. Liam Cunningham makes it entirely, enjoyably watchable simply because he's not Vin Diesel or someone similarly slimy. Cunningham is intensely likable, even as Satan, and though his relationship with Rachel is and remains somewhat muddy, we don't really give a shit. He's the only likable character in the entire film. Think about that a second - Satan is the only character in the entire film that you care about and want to see triumph. I haven't welcomed the presence of a cinematic Satan this exuberantly since Peter Stormare showed up at the end of Constantine to save us all from the blandness of Keanu Reeves.

So yeah. Let Us Prey - as perhaps indicated by its title - is cartoonish and overwrought and more than a little ridiculous, but it's fun. Bloody and nihilistic, ugly and mean, but entertaining as fuck.

Ceremony (1994)

Once Upon A Time, there were gingerbread castles built by capitalists for the express purpose of luring in movie fans and sucking all of their money out of their pockets. These castles were called "video rental stores" and they were located in the far away never never lands called Strip Malls. Within these video rental stores were rows and rows of shelves, covered in a thick layer of dried soda goo and dust which melded together to create a sticky amber carpet. When you picked a movie off of the shelf, there was an audible sucking sound as the plastic peeled away from the sugartape that had anchored it for months, sometimes years. If you decided you didn't want that movie, there was a perfect rectangular clean spot surrounded by a wall of gray lint, in which to replace the case. And more often than not, if you did rent the movie, you had to rewind it yourself when you got home because whoever had rented it previously never did, because they were Not Kind and did not Rewind. Those people go to Hell when they die and spend all eternity manually rewinding tapes with pencils.

There was - luckily for me - a video rental store right next door to my apartment when I was 18 and was finally allowed to rent R rated movies without a parent present. I worked my way through the horror movie section, and back then it was all dismal-budgeted DTV shit that would never see a DVD release and eventually disappeared into the same dimension where Ren & Stimpy found the
legendary mountain of missing left socks.

Okay, enough set up. Let's get to the point.

 

Ceremony

Year released: 1994
Directed by: Joe Castro
Starring: some girl, Uncle Forry, Freddy Krueger's mom and BoiledEggEyes McRamFace over there.

Synopsis: A million billion years ago, God got all pissy because one of His angels questioned his job title for one second and instead of learning how to accept constructive criticism, He banished her from Heaven forever and somehow she ended up getting imprisoned inside of a cheapshit grandfather clock which is slowly counting down the seconds until she'll be released to wreak havoc and a whole lotta other bad things. Some girl talks her religious study classmates into coming over to her house to confront the angel-turned-demon at the stroke of midnight and make sure she stays in the clock where she belongs. Oh, and some other freaky shit happens like Vampire Jesus, giant tequila worms, blue gargoyles, red boobs, green clovers, blue diamonds and fortified with 12 vitamins and minerals.

I rented this movie for the cover box. I didn't know what it was about and didn't care. It just looked cool. Unfortunately, the demon on the cover has about 3 minutes screen time total, has no dialogue and never gets to screw that chick in the red dress offered up in a circle of ceremonial candles. It's been over twenty years since I last saw this film, I can't find it online and I'm absolutely not going to waste $44.98 on a used VHS copy on amazon. I doubt this whole movie cost $44.98 to make, so fuck that.

I took some really shitty still shots from the trailer. Honestly, the one minute and 7 second long trailer

is as long as the whole movie should have been and features the best parts of the movie.

Forrest Ackerman, who would appear in any horror movie as long as he could wave his Famous Monsters Of Filmland magazine around at some point, plays kindly grandpa in a wheelchair here, and he doesn't last long. A slo-mo dream sequence features him erupting like Mount Menstruation all over Virginal Granddaughter's white dress.

At some point, the One Annoying Girl who Freaks Out and threatens to ruin everything gets tied to a chair and left alone in the kitchen after the group has discussed how vitally important it is to stick together and not leave anyone by themselves. Fucking brilliant. She gets possessed by a giant worm which rams itself down her throat in a allegory for oral rape by mutant cock the likes of which hadn't been seen since John Hurt got face fucked by a giant clit in 1979. Or when Craig T. Nelson puked up a maggot with teeth in 1986. Take your pick.

I don't remember how this movie ends. I don't care. It ended and I took it back to the video rental store and rented something good. And despite the fact that it sucked, I rewound it. Because I am a better person than you are.