Beyond The Gates

Christine and I are back, having a cyber-slumber party in our internet pajamas. We may be 500 miles apart, but the smell of popcorn and nail polish is palpable. A recent and mutual appreciation for 2016's homage to John Carpenter's The Thing (and several thousand other horror movies, but mostly The Thing) made us nostalgic for the gritty, grainy horror movies of the 80s, with their garish covers tucked inside of sticky clamshell cases. We had so much fun, we decided to do it again. Christine suggested Beyond The Gates, a totally retro 80s groovin' horror flick if ever there was one. Starring the color scheme from Stuart Gordon's From Beyond, a Casio keyboard with the demo button stuck in the ON position, Barbara Fucking Crampton and a sweet, old school video rental shop stuffed to bursting with dusty, dogeared VHS tapes.

The Beyond, 1986

Me: I miss old school video stores.
Christine: Me too, so much! Just the smell of them! 
Me: And the sticky wire racks.
Christine: I can still smell it if I think about it!

Indeed, video stores did have a signature scent. Old bookstores smell like vanilla dust, dead talcum powder and gently mildewed paper. Video stores smelled like plaster dust, industrial grade cleaning fluids and tiny pools of Coca Cola that have hardened into jellied lumps of amber. Sigh ~ If only Jurassic Park scientists could extract the DNA from such a specimen.

John & Gordon, Beyond the Gates - 2017

Anyway, the movie...
Long ago, in the land of 1992, geeky dad opens up a video rental store and stands admiring it with his wife and two boys and everything is slo-mo Kodachrome perfection. We get a GREAT opening credit sequence with the absolute cheesiest synthesizer music which, if played long and loudly enough is guaranteed to open a wormhole in the time/space continuum and transport you straight back to 1982, with full on legwarmers, feathered hair and the smell of copious amounts of Aqua Net hairspray.

With the credits out of the way, we are shoved ahead 20+ years into the mumblecore milennial present day, where John and Gordon - the aforementioned sons of geeky dad - have arrived at Ye Olde Video Store to close up shop, pack up the tapes and move on with their lives. Their dad has disappeared. Again. Geeky dad was also apparently Drunk Dad and has a history of wandering off and abandoning his family.

Glen & Terry, the original John & Gordon.  The Gate, 1987.

Son John is the scruffy slacker, Gordon is the drywall offspring of Elijah Wood and Harry Potter who Used to Drink but Has Gotten His Shit Together. Despite the fact that he has the personality of a sheet of styrofoam, Gordon has a reasonably hot girlfriend named Margot, who loves him so much that she has stuck with him through his alcoholism and his abusiveness.

Me: He's got the personality of a piece of burned toast.
Chrsitine: I know, SO DULL.

Anyway, the sons slog through some limp, stale dialog, looking for all the world like they both just slammed a six pack of Nyquil. They halfheartedly pack up some video tapes.

Why is there a caricature of H.P. Lovecraft hanging on the wall?

Me: There's an awful lot of bootleg tapes in there. Was he renting shit he taped off of HBO?
Christine: I know - who would rent them?
Me: Besides a Japanese reporter looking for The Ring?
Christine: this is like The Innkeepers - SO slow in the beginning!
Me: That movie sucked. Hard.
Christine: Thank you, why do people like that one? I don't get it, nothing happens.
Me: Because mumblecore is cool, apparently.
Christine: bah

After a lot of long scenes of them being stiff and awkward around each other and having very forced, clipped conversations, John trots the Obvious First Victim into view. A guy named Hank who has a weird and very lazy mohawk.

Christine: Hank's hair, what is up with dat?
Me: If Vyvyan Basterd and Dicko Baker had a baby.

After wondering aloud why the hell Jeffrey Combs isn't in this, we move onto the main plot: the discovery of a board game called Beyond The Gates (Yes, we have a title!) with a videocassette guide hosted by Barbara Crampton as Ingrid Pitt in the Siouxsie Sioux story.

We get a couple of other characters thrown in superfluously: Dahlia (as in Black) the slightly whorey waitress, the cop who looks like young Ray Dennis Steckler and David Duchovny's illegitimate offspring, and an 18th century mortician who looks like - and is every bit as intimidating as - the Emcee at Club Scum in 1988's Hobgoblins.

John, Gordon and Margot decide to sit down and play the game, because they have absolute fuck-all to say to one another and no cable. Half an hour drags by. Gordie Potter finds a Marauders Map, a voodoo doll is dug up, Bad Mohawk Boy bites the dust Captain Rhodes style and a very unimpressive gate appears in the basement, surrounded by fog.

Midian, this ain't.

Christine: That would make a great bed headboard.
Me: Or a Spinal Tap prop.

Stuff kinda sorta happens. There's sleepwalking and goofy nightmares and badly choreographed fight scenes. At one point, Mortiis shows up to scream in Gordon's face. I've never been so confused in my life. The film quickly becomes a metaphor for Gordon's alcoholism. Cellar Dweller, Witch Board, Videodrome, Evil Dead 2 and Fulci's Gates Of Hell leak out of the frames. Everyone has red on them. And I totally spotted that copy of House Of Leaves on Gordon's bookshelf. Finally it ends with everyone happy and ready to face the bright, brave future, and waxy mortician guy greets another prospective buyer of Beyond The Gates in the form of yet another Indie Hipster douchebag. The end.

Christine: I don't always pick bad movies, but when I do, they have voodoo dolls and gates from hell! 
Me: It's not UTTER garbage. It' still better than Insidious.
Christine: I almost can't wait to see how badly you trash it! Sorry I made you sit through that. Please remember I didn't say it was "good." 

I totally forgive you, Christine.

Summation?

The Void (2016)

So I came home from work the other night after an exhausting nine hour shift and decided I needed to watch a horror movie before bed, because I'm masochistic like that. Someone had mentioned The Void on Facebook, maybe Caitlin Kiernan, I don't know. I have a lot of Lovecrafty friends and mention of this movie has been popping up like fat, greasy, meaty bubbles in a pot of fish stew. So I popped open Netflix, saw it was streaming and thought: "Well fuck me, it's right there and the playback is so much better now that my cable isn't being stolen anymore" so I hit play.

Holy SHIT! Hellraiser Reanimates the Evil Dead Prince Of Darkness Xtro Thing from The Beyond! Perhaps it was the late hour, possibly my own sheer exhaustion, definitely a little bit of "I haven't seen a decent horror movie in over five years" frustration, but I damn near exploded. This flick moves faster than curry diarrhea through a greased up asshole, and is almost as gross to look at. This is season 1 of True Detective, starring Skinless Uncle Frank as Herbert West, directed by John Fulci and Lucio Carpenter and filmed on location in Silent Hill, Carcosa. I was absolutely, utterly and immediately and hopelessly infatuated with this film. I wanted to be its best friend, paint its nails and stay up all night giggling with it.

I immediately gushed about it all over Facebook. If I could have carved its initials inside of a heart on an oak tree, I would have. And I found a Void Buddy in Christine Hadden, editor-in-chief at Fascination With Fear, who agreed to humor me when I asked if she would be interested in watching the film with me and discussing it via FB messenger as we did so. Here is the result:

Me: Is it weird that I find Shotgun Dad to be kinda hot?
Christine: Well, he looks a little like Donald Pleasance, but ok.
Me: Well that killed it.

Shotgun Dan is actor Daniel Fathers, who was also in Pontypool, a fact which automatically makes him cool. Shotgun Dad has no name, so I'm sticking with Shotgun Dad. He's supposed to be a Red State militia type in a cowboy hat, rootin' tootin' and shootin' his way through the crackhouse full of weirdo pervy cultists who may have killed his wife and baby daughter and gave his halfwit son a half assed tracheotomy. But when he gets really pissed off/stressed out his Midwest tough guy speak slips away, revealing a British accent. Okay, so he kinda sorta looks like Donald Pleasance a little bit. But he has way more hair and is far more badass.

Christine: Dude is relatively hot...is he not?
Me: I'm sticking with Shotgun Dad.
Christine: The cop, not the junkie, by the way. 

Not Barry Pepper & Not Lily Taylor

Aaron Poole is the "star" of this cosmic skullfuckery. The cop, not the junkie. I've never seen him before, in anything, anywhere. He's from Canada and kinda looks like Barry Pepper, the end. Oh, and the junkie looks like Peter Lorre circa The Maltese Falcon, the end.

The small cast - Shotgun Dad, Halfwit Son, Cop and Junkie arrive at the Marsh County Hospital (total Lovecraft reference) to join the rest of our cast - Cops ex-wife, Grandpaw, Pregnant Teen, Asian Intern, Some Guy, Head Nurse and Kind, Elderly Doctor. The clothing is serviceable, the colors are neutral, the hairstyles simple. Timeless is the best description. And nary a cell phone nor a laptop to be seen. This could be anytime, anywhere...although I believe Christine and I settled on Iowa, 1980s, because we could and why not?

Me: Where the hell does this take place, do you think? What state?
Christine: Probably somewhere like Ohio. No ocean to speak of...no mountains...hell, could be anywhere.
Me: Red State fer shure.
Christine: IOWA!
Me: Sounds good.

Prince of Darkness

Then suddenly and with no warning and out of freaking nowhere, the gore hits the fan with a solid, meaty slap. In rapid succession, at least three classic horror movies are thrown right into our faces:
*Session 9 - a long, silvery implement is pulled slowly out of a now deflated eyeball.
*Prince Of Darkness - a blond woman turns her face to the camera...except there is no face, just a raw and bloody ruin where her face skin used to be.
*Nightbreed - She continues to tear at her face as cop screams at her to stop, tearing the skin mask away from her skull in bloody ribbons.
Christine also claimed it smacked of The Crazies, but it's been many years since I've seen The Crazies and I forgot to ask her for specifics, so I suck.

I opine at this point that Cops Ex-Wife looks a little like Lily Taylor. Christine votes for Zelda from Pet Sematary. Christine wins. NEVER GET OUT OF BED AGAIN!

Dafuq is that?!

As a dark and rumbly storm moves in across the sky, and the plot moves into the morgue, and a mysterious force silently cuts the isolated hospital off from the rest of the world, The Autopsy Of Jane Doe comes to mind. Outside, The Strangers appear to perform their own version of Kill List. A briefly stunned Cop slips into dreamland for a few seconds and hallucinates stock footage from Hellraiser and Event Horizon. But when he wakes up, he's right smack in the fuck in the middle of The Thing, as Nurse McRipFace unleashes an unholy bellow and begins hemorrhaging tentacles out of her mouth and eye sockets. After a long, frantic, harrowing round of axe chopping and pus squirting and tentacle waving and demon screaming and Expendable Sheriff killing, Shotgun Dad and Halfwit Son - whose name turns out to be Shaun - both have red on them.

Halloween 2 gets a Suspiria color palette as we check on the Cthulhu KKK out front. Meanwhile, the cast of The Mist heads into the spider pharmacy and Cop gets a phone call from Lost Highway. While Cop talks to Simon (who lives in the weak and the wounded, Doc) about his ex-wife's fate, Shotgun Dad flips through some True Detective (season 1) Polaroids and realizes that a trip downstairs to Silent Hill to confront Dr. Satan is unavoidable. Heh, un-a-VOID-a-ble. See what I did there?

Christine: This is like Jurassic Park on the walkies.
Me: See, this is why I hate basements. Velociraptor Zombies!
Christine: This (basement) is like Silence of the Lambs - goes on for miles!
Me: And into the abortion scene from Creep. (also) Dead & Buried.
Christine: They should have called this LOOKING FOR CTHULHU.
Me: Or "Hellraising The Thing Alien From Beyond."
Christine: Definitely The Resurrected.
Me: Re-Animator!
Christine: Walking Dead right there.

Xtro

Me: The Road! (referring to basement full of zombies)
Christine: Nightbreed again.
Me: Audition! (referring to a bloody, moving sack on the floor)
Me: Headdesk zombie! (referring to gif above)
Christine: That's so awesome!
Me: Upside down zombie! Very Xtro!
Christine: GODDAMN! So creepy! I LOVE XTRO!
Christine: The Shining! (as Kim stumbles about with an axe) 

Cop ventures into the bowels of the basement and straight into the Alien Queen's egg chamber, without Ripley or a flamethrower to help him. He takes one look at what Skinless Uncle Frank has done and goes full blown Ash from The Evil Dead. The axe rises and falls, rises and falls. But unlike the first axe dispatch scene - full of ferocity and meat-thudding and inhuman screeches - this one is somberly silent, drawing away from itself in sorrow.

Prince Of Darkness

But there's no time to mourn! Cop wanders into Skinless Uncle Frank's personal chamber in Hellraiser 2, filled with sheet draped corpses. Skinless Uncle Frank has gone full blown Martyrs and is now determined to summon the Prince Of Darkness, figuring it's safe this time around because Shotgun Dad is NOT Donald Pleasance, does NOT have the axe, and therefore cannot possibly stop him.

Christine: OWA TAGU SIAM!
Me: You watch your mouth!
Christine: This is just wild...WILD

And indeed it is! Pregnant teen pulls a Polonious on Cop and kneels before the Void, ready to birth the baby, which turns out to be Skinless Uncle Frank's baby, his own resurrected dead daughter Sarah. However, it looks like the cloner in Pregnant Teen's womb scanned only the inside of Sarah's colon and part of her nostril, because what comes ripping out of Pregnant Teen's womb in a gorrific bucketslap of blood in the face looks more like Xtro up there fucked a pork roast, put a skull on its face, waited until it was half finished with its first plate of spaghetti and then rammed some rabid rhino DNA right up its ass. Baby Pork Roast is on the rampage through Freddy Krueger's boiler room, snorting and squealing and slamming skulls into bone and brainjuice with one mighty stamp of its grasshopper drumstick. More people die. Cop tries to shut the doorway. Halfwit Shaun battles the pork roast. Kim locks herself inside of a Halloween slat closet and gives herself away by loudly whimpering. The Pork Roast reenacts the Engineer chasing Kirsty down the corridor scene from Hellraiser and the final scene is an eerie matte painting by H.R. Giger for Lucio Fulci's The Beyond as seen through the eyes of the crew of the Nostromo before LV426 was even called LV426!

Me: The Thing, The Fly, Necromentia!
Christine: Silent Hill, slight bit of Pumpkinhead, and some LOTR orcs.

Yes! YASS! All of that and more! So much, so gross, so crazy skullfucking batshit cosmic insane! Exceedingly throwback! So 80s! Much clamshell! Very wow! More of this for me, please!

Split Splat Splut

"So, the girl who uses Splat is gonna review Split?" ---> my mom, upon learning of my intention to write an "as-it-happens" review of the newest M. Night Shyamalalalalawhatever flick, starring that girl from The VVitch and James McAvoy, a man who is either really sexy and fuckable, or who really is not. I can't decide. Also, I recently ruined half the bathroom towels and a good section of tile flooring with my most recent reapplication of Splat's Midnight Rubies. So yeah: Mom: 1, Me, 0.

Ugh. God I hate M. Night Shyamaladingdong. Almost as much as I hate James Wan. James Wan tries too hard. M. Night doesn't try at all. He directs like he's got a severe Nyquil hangover. I've never seen such halfhearted directing. I can almost hear him saying: "Yeah, okay, so, do something for a bit and then maybe, I dunno, mumble for a while. We'll just keep the camera rolling."

Well, I'm just going to go ahead and assume that skirt length = mortality rates. The higher the hemline, the sooner the death.

Is it wrong that I'm hoping that one of James McAvoy's personalities turns out to be Mr. Tumnus?

Do we really need an upskirt shot on Betty there? I mean, she's got nice legs, but it creeps me out to think that the director might have a Gramma fetish.

Okay, so the scene where McAvoy's nine year old personality clumsily kisses our doe-like star and then says "You might be pregnant now" made me laugh. Well, maybe a smirk with an audible exhale. I'll take what I can get.

And the score is currently at Mom: 2, Me, 0 as mom refers to the three kidnap victims as Spluts.

Oh, he's a Kanye fan. That explains everything. 

I'm getting bored. Again. I mean, I'm nowhere near as suicidally bored as I was with Lady In The Water, but fuck, yeah, is something - anything - ever gonna happen?

Okay, mom has been banished from the living room for saying "Well thanks a Splot!" 

These are the calmest kidnap victims I have ever seen. Why is it that all of the characters in every single M. Night film act as though they've just emerged from major surgery and the tranquilizer hasn't had time to wear off yet? Nighty-poo, you've been making films for what, 30 years give or take? Are you ever going to allow your characters to wake up and react the way normal people do?

Nobody reacts this exaggeratedly slowly when when they sense that a violent stranger has just gotten into the car beside them. No girl runs this slowly away from a man who has threatened to kill her. No one ever stops to read a note left on the kitchen table in the house of a serial killer when one has finally escaped their cell. No sane person EVER FOLLOWS THE SLOWLY-BEING-DRAGGED-OFF CORPSE OF THEIR FRIEND AROUND A CORNER IN A DARK ROOM. None of this is scary. All of it is irritating.

I suppose this film would have made more sense if I'd ever bothered to watch Unbreakable. But I'm not curious enough to do so now. And even though I haven't seen it, did anyone else find Bruce Willis' one line cameo at films end just a little "post-credit-sequence-Ash-in-the-Evil-Dead-remake-saying Groovy" too cheesy-esque to be taken seriously? 

Nice to see that her traumatic experience hasn't changed our heroine. At all. Or roused her from the stupor she's been in for the last ten years. Honey, you survived. You're supposed to be all strong and confident now. Anything to say? No? Just gonna stare at us blankly with your glassy eyes until the scene finally cuts away? Okay. I'm just saying, it's a little anticlimactic, considering all you've apparently been through. And I know it's not you, because you had emotional responses aplenty in The VVitch - screaming, laughing, etc. I know you're capable. So tell us...or maybe just show us, on the doll, how M. Night directed you: "Okay Anna, in this scene, I want you to act like you're reading a James Michener novel in a beige room without windows, and you've just had, like, the biggest turkey dinner ever and washed it all down with Dilaudid. Good. Now, hold that for the rest of the film. No matter what happens, don't react in any way. Pretend you're a department store mannequin listening to Kenny G. on an eternal loop. Perfect!"

"Are you as bored as I am?"

Nevertheless, I persist.

“The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

I fell in love with Margaret Atwood when I was seventeen years old. I don't remember why I picked up a copy of The Handmaid's Tale - had I heard my friends talking about it? Was it the drawing of a blood red nun on the cover that intrigued me? It's been too long, and I'm not going to lie. I don't remember. Somehow, it ended up in my possession and I read it. And I do remember foolishly thinking: "Well thank god nothing like this could possibly happen now."

(insert cringe here)

After reading that book, I plundered the library for anything and everything with her name on it. I discovered Lady Oracle. Poor, fat little Joan, denied her butterfly wings, fleeing to London, losing her virginity to a Polish count, finding success as an authoress of bodice-rippers, faking her death and sacrificing her long, red hair to a box of mud brown dye. I wanted a lime green car coat with toggles down the front. I wondered what might have happened if Joan had agreed to marry the Italian cook who'd fed her breaded shrimp and promised her lots of babies. Would she have been happier? 

I snatched Cat's Eye off the shelf the second it was published. I already knew Elaine - the weird, slightly socially awkward girl, bullied by a group of elementary school chums who pretended to be her friends. She was me. She was every humiliating moment I'd ever had, walking home from school with my head down, hoping the popular girls would leave me alone for once, wouldn't make fun of me, wouldn't try and get me to fight. I was meat like you like it. Every time I dropped a glass or a dish henceforth, I would think of the term "shatter patterns."

The Robber Bride thrilled me endlessly. I identified strongly with Charis, the Piscean nincompoop who worked in a New Age store selling tapes of whale songs and sparkly geodes. I loved Roz with her tight, tacky clothes in loud colors, and Toni with her too big dress and her ability to speak backwards fluently. And Zenia, the man stealer, the widowmaker, the liar. Most of all, I wanted to have lunch at The Toxique, served by a dandelion haired waitress.

And so I was stoked - stoked, my friends - when I learned that Hulu would be making a brand new miniseries based on that first book I'd encountered: The Handmaid's Tale. But now, instead of being seventeen, I am forty seven. The year is 2017. The world is rapidly becoming an ugly, frightening place, ruled by hatred, steered by fear, fueled by paranoia and greed. I am afraid every day. I have been blackly depressed for three solid months. My ability to hope is shrinking. In this frame of mind, I sat down and watched the first episode.

OB-ject, or ob-JECT?

Oh gorgeousness. Everything is just as I pictured it whilst reading the book. It was beautiful, it was perfection, it was fucking horrifying. The Republic of Gilead, so quaint and well manicured and outwardly serene. Silent sisters walking two by two to select oranges and poultry. The long cotton dresses, the baking of bread and the quilting of fabrics. Had we remained outside of the houses and stores, we might have thought "Oh, how perfect. A simpler time, a return to values, a Kodak moment." 

But we don't. We've already seen our protagonist's husband shot, her daughter taken away by force, herself hauled into a detention center, forced into a red habit with white wimple, viciously reprogrammed by a stern group of stocky prison matrons with cattle prods. They have no names, no property, no rights anymore. They are assigned to men. Their only purpose in life is to bear children sired from a government approved program of ritualistic rape. If they fail to conceive, they are punished. If they speak out against the regime, they are punished. If they are caught having relations with anyone other than their assigned male, they are punished. If they are lesbians, they are punished. 

I had a massive panic attack at 2:30 am after watching the first episode. I woke from a dream about Gilead, sweating, heart racing. I felt like hundreds of rough hands were trying to pull me back down into the dark. "Sleep. Conform. Obey." 

I made it through the second episode relatively unscathed. I could handle this. I'd sat through The Red Wedding, hadn't I? It's just a show, based on just a book. Except it wasn't, and it isn't, and I knew it. 

Episode 3. I made it to the first commercial break. I sat staring at inane ads for cars and products in open-mouthed horror. It wasn't even the impending doom that was troubling me, it was the flashbacks, the events leading up to and how it had all happened so quickly, so easily. 

The scene in the coffee shop, when Moira and June attempt to purchase coffee, only to find that their credit cards have been shut down. The usual female barista is gone. A male barista has taken her place. My stomach began to sink at the first sign of his scorn and contempt for his customers, whom he clearly has no wish to serve. They are inferior, good for nothing but having babies, too uppity and proud in their tight yoga pants, too secure in their careers, too blatantly sexual with sweat running down their necks and into their cleavage. I knew this man. I've met him before. Many times. 

He tells them to get the fuck out. He calls them sluts. Their faces are bemused, their smiles expectant, as if waiting for the punchline. Because this has to be a joke right? Right? But it's not. Their smiles fade. They thought they were safe. They're realizing they're not and never will be again. Their expressions, slowly filling with horror, are also resigned: you know this is not the first time they've been called whores by a complete stranger. But now, he's within his legal rights to do so, without fear of repercussion. They back out of the shop, where only men sit now, and leave, bewildered. What is happening?

Then, June is fired from her job for being female. Every female employee in her building are told to gather up their stuff and leave. And it's not the stunned looks of confusion and growing fear on the faces of the women that horrified me, it was the reaction of her male supervisor: he is terrified. He apologizes. He repeats "I have no choice, I have no choice!" He too has lost his power. It's a terrible feeling: weak and powerless. But we know his will be restored eventually, in some capacity, because he has a penis. He knows the women will never be seen again. He knows this is the beginning of something horrible, and he cannot stop it from happening. He is almost crying. I was shaken down to my toenails. My stomach roiled. 

I haven't yet finished episode 3. I'm too sickened and dismayed and crippled by a multitude of panic attacks. I've had three so far this week, one walloping blow after another. Primarily because of this show. And that's exactly why I'm going to force myself to finish it, see it through to the end. Because I'm awake. I know this can't be ignored. Anyone who doesn't watch this show with a growing sense of disquiet and unease is either in a coma, or still stubbornly insists that Trump was the only good choice for America. The premise of The Handmaid's Tale is no longer farfetched. Actually, it never was. I was a sleeping seventeen year old, but thirty years of being female tends to kick you rudely out of your dreams.

Force yourself to watch it. Whether you're male, female, Republican, liberal, white, black, Jewish, whatever... you're not immune. You are not exempt. You have no right to remain asleep anymore. Wake up, now.

Invisible Nosedive

^ NOT to be Idolized.

Sigh.

Two more months to go until Game of Thrones returns. The Dead Files is on hiatus. I already blew through all of the new episodes of MST3k: The Return. I'm BOOORED. I need a new show to become obsessed with. NOW. A task made especially difficult because I am ridiculously picky. I hate most TV shows with their infantile humor, sugar-coated realities, or worse...reality TV shows that worship ignorance, arrogance and glamorize stupidity. I had no idea what "Cash me ousside, how bow dah?" even meant until I googled it. I wish I hadn't. I didn't need to know that, and I feel dumber for having looked it up. I could have spent that wasted five minutes listening to Kanye West talk about how wonderful he seems to believe he is and felt more entertained.

After eavesdropping on my coworkers conversations, I decided to give Black Mirror a shot. I'd heard them talking about Westworld and wasn't interested because #1 - Westerns, yuck and #2 - Uh, Yul Brynner, hello? I'd listened to them squeal over Orphan Black, Orange is the New Black (what is with the color black lately?) and some other shit that didn't interest me in the least. But Black Mirror sounded try-worthy, reeking of The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits. And hey, it was streaming on Netflix so fuck it.

There was only one season available, so I clicked on episode numero uno and waited to be impressed.

Ugh, god. Why don't I like Bryce Dallas Howard? I really don't know. Maybe because Jurassic World made me want to scour out my vagina with Borax and a steel brush and then lobotomize myself? Perhaps because Lady in the Water was about as thrilling as watching grandma fold socks for an hour and a half? I mean, she may be a very nice person in real life, I don't know. But the sight of her perky, eternally beaming face makes me want to squirt her with a bottle of weed killer until she goes away.

Oh well, at least her merciless cuteitude is put to good use here. Brycie is Lacie, a vacuous, terribly insecure and phonyass get-along girl, thrust into a not too distant future where Facebook and Instagram have merged into one universal website where you can rate your friends, your family, strangers on the street, etc. instantly and with disastrous results. Most people cruise along with 3.5 averages, living amiably and quietly, satisfied with their mediocrity. But then there's people like Lacie, who currently enjoys a 4.2 and has gotten a taste of the power it can bring and the doors it can open.

Lacie's world is a pastel perfect dessert shop window, everyone dressed in soft focus spring colors, floating through their Stepford Lives in pleasant, superficial stupors. Everyone seems happy and well-adjusted. Lacie, desperate to rent an apartment in an exclusive housing community where a rating of 4.5 or higher will get you a significant break on your rent, is trying too hard. She shoves her niceness down people's throats, forces her generosity onto anyone unlucky enough to step inside her pink plastic bubble, trying so hard to be perfect that she makes people choke on her artificial sweetness. She's cloying, to say the least.

For some reason, her uploaded photograph of a disfigured doll makes her rating shoot higher and wins her the friendship of some blonde bitch with fake tits who rests on her lofty 4.9 laurels and flashes a diamond engagement ring the size of Andre the Giant's worst hemorrhoid. And oh goody and Lordy Lou, she wants Lacie to be her MAID OF HONOR!!!

Ugh. In the never-to-be-forgotten words of the porn shop clerk in the 1991 British sitcom Bottom - "No thank you sir, I'd rather have a pineapple inserted violently into my rectum." If I never attend another bridal shower/baby shower/bachelorette party in my life, I will shed this mortal coil happier than the most obnoxiously happy asshole ever to be slapped with the happy stick in Happydale.

But anyway, it was about this time I completely lost interest and turned the show off. I knew where it was headed: Lacie will fuck up somehow and lose all her points and learn a lesson about the true meaning of life and blah blah blahdee blah, I don't give a twopenny fuck what happens to any of these meat mannequins. Wait, no, that's a lie - I hope they all die horribly and spend an eternity in a Hell without Wifi, Starbucks or pom key charms.

Back in Ye Olden Days of 1986, the then revamped version of The Twilight Zone aired an episode called "Too See the Invisible Man." It starred a guy who, for some reason, my memory insists was Steve Gutenberg, but wasn't. Not Steve Gutenberg played the part of a typical corporate douchebag tool. The year is 2104 or something, and all human activity is surveilled by drones. Thanks, Obama. Anyway, he gets caught being a giant douche to everyone and is sentenced to a year of invisibility. He has a nickel sized implant inserted in his forehead for all to see, and it's no good trying to disguise that shit with a jaunty cap good chap, because it's got a laser that burns through anything that tries to conceal it, so haha all over THAT smartass fucker. Although I do have to feel sorry for anyone in this futuristic metropolis who has really bad acne and constantly gets shunned by accident until the Oxy can do its job.

At first, Not Steve Gutenberg is pumped. He can walk into a bank and help himself to big handfuls of cash. He can elbow his way to the front of the line at the all you can eat buffet. He can walk down the street, calling everyone an asshole without fear of retaliation. But he also can't call for assistance when he's deliberately hit by a car. No one is allowed to talk to him, or acknowledge his existence in any way, not even other Invisibles. Punishment for acknowledging an Invisible is a year of Invisibility. But by the end of the year, NSG has learned his lesson and becomes so ridiculously compassionate that he gets sentenced to another year of Invisibility for acknowledging a sobbing Invisible woman.

Please eat his face off, please.

Okay yeah, they're far from identical, but close enough for Black Mirror to feel like recycling. I tried the next episode - something about a slovenly, neckbeardy loser who needs money quick and ends up screaming for 40 long, irritating minutes as he imagines giant spiders in a VR haunted house. I got so tired of listening to him scream that I turned that one off too. Friends told me to try the Christmas episode, which I did, and shut off 20 minutes in. Because I just didn't give a shit about any of these people, or the selfish plights that landed them in their current kerfuffle, or their stubborn refusal to accept responsibility for all of the shit things they've done and are still doing. I can see that shit on Jerry Springer. I want a fucking escape, where sociopathic actions have severe consequences.

So far, all of these new shows have lacked one critical element: a conscience. Can we please stop glamorizing sociopaths?

45 Has Arrived

A review of the film The Arrival

by 45

as portrayed by Alec Baldwin

(but not really)

So, after a long day of playing golf in Mar-A-Lago, there's nothing I like better than to plop my fat, khaki clad ass down in a golden velvet recliner in my private movie theater. I get all the best movies, lots of movies, I have them, I get them before anyone else does because I'm president and you're not. Okay so, my son Eric runs the projector because my tiny hands can't navigate the remote, and anyway why should I have to do it when I'm president and you're not?I have a great big tub of buttered popcorn balanced on my ample gut. Man, I love all that butter. It's thick and yellow and runs down over the popcorn and drips onto my hands, it's like a rich, golden shower of deliciousness. I love it so much I actually had my water supply replaced with premium butter so I can have a golden shower every morning.

We had to watch this movie called The Arrival today because I accidentally sat on my copy of Happy Gilmore and broke it. Actually, I think Killary broke it. But I figured "Hey, this movie oughta be good, nobody loves aliens more than me, I love them so much I marry them." But this movie was dumb, it was stupid, it made no sense and Amy Adams walks around in a big puffy suit with no makeup on, clearly she's a 3.5 because Jeremy Renner never once tries to grab her pussy.

These aliens land on Earth and it's way too easy so clearly we need to build a wall around our entire planet to stop these refugees from coming in from the sky. They look like calamari and talk in coffee rings, it makes no sense. This bad black hombre from Chicago just walks into Amy Adams house and starts ordering her around. Clearly he's from Hate Street where everybody is black and he's telling everyone what to do because he has no respect for superior white people. He's obviously the bad guy, I'm sure at some point in the movie he'll rape Amy, loot the alien craft and vote for Obama. Nobody is less racist than me though, so I'll keep watching just to prove me right.

So Amy had a hot daughter at some point, a 10 even when she was 5. But she gets sick and dies because her dumb mom didn't save up her money for her pre-existing condition and it's totally her fault because she can see the future and should have known this was going to happen, but she went out and bought iPhones anyway. Sad.

Actual scene from the movie.

Nobody tries to shoot at the aliens at all. If I had been president in this movie, I would have made the aliens pay for the guns and the bullets to kill them and fed all of the hungry people in the world on the smoking remains of their calamari because I'm the best humanitarian ever. But our military is depleted because this is the future that Liberals want: gay, coffee-ring talking Muslim squids. They're clearly a gay couple, they both have boy names and no visible pussies, just long squirty dick-things. Sad.

Finally some Republican hero gets it right and tries to blow up the immigrants aliens because clearly they want our jobs and to rape our women. That black guy from before tells his people to start looting and burning down the cities. I didn't actually see him do it, but he did, because that's all black people do. Sad. The alien homos back off about 40 paces and then Amy calls some Japanese dude and tells him she voted for Killary and loves sushi, even alien walking sushi from a gay planet, and he decides not to kill them. Nobody asks America what they want so this movie is totally dumb, I'm president and Japan isn't, APOLOGIZE!!!

Then Jeremy Renner - who is totally not a real man because he hasn't groped Amy once or pointed out her obvious 3.5 status - falls in love with Amy though you couldn't even tell because he doesn't even slip her the tongue or offer to shower her with his manly golden fluids. She starts dressing nicer, but she doesn't have much in the way of boobies and it's real hard for a flat chested woman to be hot.

I didn't get all of that time travel stuff because it was hard and I don't like to think, and after my third gallon tub of popcorn I was getting sleepy. There wasn't any sex in this movie, just one blowie-up part with explodey things and no part where I played myself, the president, and beat up all of those terrorist aliens with Ted Nugent and Sean Spicer backing me up. And why did the alien spaceship look like a segment of a Toblerone chocolate covered orange? Man I love those things. Orange is almost as good as gold, it's in the same color spectrum, I've seen orange pee, those Russian prostitutes love their asparagus.

I give this movie a 4, which is still more than Amy Adams.

The One Dark Night of the Autopsy of Jane Doe

~~~spoilers all up in this bitch...

The Autopsy of Jane Doe

2016

A private residence.
A pile of dead bodies.
The aftermath of a murder has been discovered by police. As news crews begin to arrive like vultures drawn to the scent of a particularly ripe slaughterhouse rejection pile festering beneath the summer sun, dumbfounded cops try to piece together what the hell happened, helpfully establishing a plot foundation as they go along.

Officer Roose Bolton wanders about a tidy two story in Suburban Somewhere, VA. You'd think he'd be used to the sight of mass carnage (insert Red Wedding joke here). You'd also think this role should rightly have gone to Larry Cedar, but it didn't. However, the two actors bear enough of an uncanny resemblance that I remained stubbornly distracted in every scene that actor Michael McElhatton appeared in, trying to convince myself that it was Larry Cedar, even though I knew it wasn't. I'm still not 100% convinced, no offense to Michael McElhatton.

Anyway, in the meanwhile, a team of cops/excavators have discovered a fourth body in the cellar. Unlike the murder victims upstairs, this one has no sign of trauma to mar her perfect, porcelain beauty. Nary a single drop of blood has dared to smear her Ivory Pure complexion. This is Olwen Kelly, a slightly buck-toothed, totally beautiful yoga queen who is shortly due to make my best friend Erik's short list of Girls To Fuck Before He Dies.

The corpse of the girl is removed from the crime scene and transported to the closest morgue. 

One Dark Night
1988

A private residence.
A pile of dead bodies.
The aftermath of a murder has been discovered by police. As news crews begin to arrive like buzzards attracted to a particularly ripe dumpster parked behind the KFC, dumbfounded cops try to piece together what the hell happened, helpfully establishing a plot foundation as they go along.

Wait...is that Peter Lorre and Betty White in the upper lefthand there?

Anyway, the corpse of a sinister Russian psychic vampire named Raymar is removed from the scene and transported to the nearest morgue. Batman is informed, but fails to see the imminent danger, despite the fact that he is married to Raymar's daughter, Olivia.

Fast Forward to 2016...

Not Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Emile Hirsh and Not Larry Cedar.

Meet our main protagonsists: mortician Brian Cox, his son and heir to the embalming empire Austin, played by Emile Hirsh who, when last I saw him, was starving to death on a bus in Alaska. Austin doesn't really want to take dad's place as the Mayberry Meat Carver and is planning to blow town with his girlfriend Emma, a girl who could have been Mary Elizabeth Winstead if she'd just tried a bit harder.

Now, Austin hasn't told his dad that he's blowing town, because he won't admit that he feels a little honor bound to stick around and hang with the old man ever since mom died. And when Sheriff Not Larry Cedar shows up with the pretty corpse of the half buried girl, Austin ditches Emma to help dad. Inexplicably, none of the other bodies from the crime scene are delivered to the same morgue, and Dr. Original Hannibal Lecter is only asked to autopsy Jane Doe, hence the title. The procedure begins, with Emma slated to return later that night to rescue Austin from boredom.

Rewind to 1988...

Lavender Ladies: Superbitch, ToothbrushFace and E.G. Daily!

Meet our main protagonists: sweet virgin Julie, her boyfriend Steve and Steve's ex girlfriend Superbitch. Superbitch is also the leader of the coolest clique in Generic High School, The Sisters, a 80s version of The Pink Ladies complete with satin jackets but seriously lacking in the catchy tunes and hickey department. For reasons indecipherable, Julie desperately wants to be a member of The Sisters and agrees to spend a night in the local mausoleum as initiation. 

Superbitch and her best friend Toothbrush Face are planning to slip Julie some potent hallucinogens before dressing up in bedsheets and yelling "BOO!" at her later that night. Their friend E.G. Daily! - whose name must always be followed by an exclamation point because she's supercool and was in Valley Girl and The Devil's Rejects and totally rules and shit - does not approve of the plan and ditches her Sisters. Hijinks ensue, with Steve planning on crashing the party later that night to rescue Julie from Bitchdom.

Jane Doe...

As Cox and his son start cracking bones and peeling skin, they realize that something is horribly wrong with the corpse of the immaculate Jane Doe. She seems to have been the victim of a vicious stabbing, a genital mutilation and a third degree burning, but only inner scarring tells these tales. She's also stuffed like a Cracker Jack box filled with morbid prizes: a tooth wrapped in linen, some jimson weed and a detailed tattoo worn on the inside of her flesh. As the autopsy wears on and the discoveries become more and more disturbing, bizarre phenomena begins to occur: a level 5 Biblical storm is brewing outside. Inside, lights flicker, the radio plays by itself and the corpses currently occupying the other steel drawers in the Slab Lab are not content to lie still any longer. Awakened by some inexplicable psychokinetic force, the bodies start sort of floating about the place, being creepy. Father and son get increasingly freaked out and run around the morgue, hiding in offices and dodging Jane Doe's telekinetic powers.

Raymar...

As Julie settles in for the night, tripping balls in her sleeping bag, Raymar's casket begins to crack and eerie light spills out of his tomb. The other resident corpses occupying the other concrete drawers in the Necropolis are not content to lie still any longer. Awakened by some inexplicable psychokinetic force, the bodies start sort of floating about the place, being creepy. Julie, along with the unwitting Superbitch and Toothbrush Face, get increasingly freaked out and run around the morgue, hiding in bathrooms and dodging Raymar's telekinetic powers.


Emma...

"Oops, my bad."

Emma returns to the morgue as promised and fails to properly announce herself, causing Brian Cox to do his best imitation of Jack Nicholson in The Shining, with Emma in the Scat Crothers role. Mistaken for the floating corpse of Mary Elizabeth Winstead, he kills her with one blow and immediately pretends to be sorry about it because Austin is standing right there and apparently not very happy about the fact that he is single again.


Steve...

Steve is tipped off by E.G. Daily! that Julie is being tormented by Superbitch in the spooky mausoleum and teams up with Batman's wife to rescue her from the army of sluggish floating corpses.

From there on out, it's pretty standard stuff, with Raymar's daughter saving the day with her Avon compact mirror and Steve and Julie leaving the mausoleum together, traumatized and shaken but undoubtedly destined for college, marriage, kids, a dog, a white picket fence and a 20 year mortgage. The original ending suggested that Julie had not been saved in time and ending up absorbing Raymar's powers, giving his Svengali spirit a brand new virginal vessel in which to pilot himself around. One wonders how Raymar would look in a lavender satin jacket, bopping around the mall. But test viewings of this downer ending were negative and it was changed at the last minute, allowing Julie to escape intact, and both Superbitch and Toothbrush Face are buried beneath a squishy mound of rotting bodies who gang-rubbed them to death some 20 minutes earlier.

Autopsied...

Jane Doe, which has a fantastic, riveting build up, sort of peters out in its final moments. It's nowhere near as lame as One Dark Night, but it resolves nothing and leaves itself as wide open as a rib-cracked chest cavity. Cox offers himself to Jane Doe, who turns out to be an unnamed, centuries old witch, to save his son's life. Austin dies anyway and Not Larry Cedar shows up again, still not being Larry Cedar and insisting that the body of the girl be transported to a different county because the paperwork on this case is already a bitch and a half. Total bummer.

I can highly recommend the first hour or so of Jane Doe. It's spooky and puzzling, like Silence of the Lambs meets The VVitch. I just thought the ending could have been stronger, neater, more... resolved, I guess? But it's still definitely one of the better horror films I've seen in a while: well-casted, goodly acted, bigly-scary, smart and stuff. And Brian Cox is in it - Brian Cox in anything makes anything worth a watch.

But still...no Cedar.

"Why am I not Larry Cedar?"

XX

XX. As in the chromosomes, not the parental advisory guide issued by the motion picture association. There's no hardcore porn going on here. Just decaying magic, tucked away in the Victorian attic of the childhood mind: porcelain doll parts, baby teeth and blow flies. And with a nod to both Blood Tea & Red String, and the 1988 Czech film Neco z Alenky, we begin this much talked about and anticipated anthology of four short horror films directed by four women of horror.

 The Box
Based on the short story of the same name by Richard Matheson, which had been previously turned into a feature length film called Button, Button starring Cameron Diaz about a mysterious man with a mysterious box with a mysterious button on it which, when pushed, causes some mysterious stranger to die mysteriously and grants the button pusher a kajillion mysterious dollars.

This version has a mysterious stranger with a mysterious box, but that's where the similarities end. This time out, the box in question is a gaily wrapped gift box clasped in the lap of a disfigured dude in standard issue black trench coat and fedora. A little boy named Danny innocently asks what the box contains and Creepy Man obliges, lifting the lid just far and just long enough to allow Danny a glimpse of what lies within. Whatever it is, the look on Danny's face announces to the audience that childhood is over, raped and dismembered and strewn upon the wasteland like chicken bones.

Danny abruptly stops eating, and suddenly The Box turns into that once scene from A Christmas Story where Randy refuses to eat his Meatloaf Double Beatloaf. Except there's no ensuing game of Show Me How the Piggies Eat to alleviate the possibility of malnutrition.  Danny just stops eating, much to the alarm of his parents. Questions go unanswered. Demands have no effect. A trip to the doctor clears up exactly fuck-all.We never find out what was in the box and it's not supposed to matter, but it does. I need answers.

The Birthday Party

Melanie Lynskey is back, and she's goofy. With genre-twisters like Heavenly Creatures and The Frighteners tucked under her voluptuous belt, Melly baby decides that a starring role in a horror version of Weekend At Bernie's is the next logical move. And sure, why not? I mean, it certainly makes The Oregonian seem coherent by comparison. This particular short is a blue steak with a thick vein of black fatty humor running right through the middle of it, except you don't really realize this until after you've chewed and swallowed.

Don't Fall

Pretty standard slasher shortie, sort of an Evil Dead Lite with a camper instead of a cabin and some stick figures smeared on a rock instead of a skin-bound Necronomicon. Apropos of nothing, a demon shows up, possesses everyone and they all die, the end. Oh, and the first girl to get possessy looks a lot like Ellen Sandweiss. The end.



Her Only Living Son
Rosemary's Baby Lite. I mean, the kid's name is even Andy. The end.

My attention dwindled as the shorts played out, hence the increasingly truncated reviews. I wanted to enjoy this a lot more than I did. And I'm not dismissing it as outright awful. It's more like that one Facebook friend you have, who posts pics of their kids every week. The kids look the same, with only slight changes as time goes on, but you respond with a polite smiley face anyway, because you don't hate the kids or their proud parents. You're just bored. Because everyone else is doing the same thing with their kids. And everybody's kids look the same, and you can't remember their names anymore and get them mixed up a lot. XX may be the long awaited daughter of the horror anthology brood, but it looks a lot like V/H/S and Holidays and ABCs and V/H/S/2...  And no matter how stubbornly their parents insist that they are gifted and unique and special in their own snowflakey ways, they're not, and could use some old fashioned discipline. 

Honestly, the best part of the film were the introductory pieces of stop motion animation starring a walking doll house, a rotting apple and a disembodied needle and thread. I would rather have seen a feature length film about that. But then I already have. I saw both Blood Tea & Red String, and the 1988 Czech film Neco z Alenky, the latter of which was entirely created by a woman, and both of which are vastly superior.

I know that, because I'm a female horror fan, I'm supposed to be gaga over XX. But I'm not. sorrynotsorry