Bruises on the Fruit

Consider this article as both a follow up to my review of Soaked In Bleach, and as a segue piece into tonight's Fear Of A Dork Planet podcast, during which Erik and I plan to discuss the songs that shaped our misspent youths and the film Soaked In Bleach. Don't get me wrong; I love our podcast. I look forward to the hour that Erik and I spend blathering about movies and music and books and socks and Godzilla films. But I am also the first to admit that I am not good at public speaking. By nature, I am an extreme introvert. There is a neverending cyclone of words inside of me, but my open mouth cannot release them in a smooth breeze. I forget words. My thoughts become jumbled and snared. I forget the point I am trying to make, hence why I often pause and trail off and leave a great big gap of awkward silence for Erik to jump into and fill.

So I just want to expand a little bit on what we'll be discussing later tonight. Namely, Kurt Cobain.

On March 9th, 1994, I turned 24. On April 9th, 1994, I found out Kurt Cobain was dead. I was living in Bloomington, Indiana at the time and hated it. It was too humid, too landlocked and too filled with corn shucking yeehaws who voted Republican and praised Jesus with a glassy eyed devotion that scared the shit out of me. I was planning on moving soon. I just couldn't decide where. Either Sacramento, CA. or Seattle, WA. I missed the ocean. I needed the diversity of a coastal region.

It was a bright, warm Saturday morning and I was washing the breakfast dishes when the newspaper slammed down on the doormat. I had the door open, screen door letting in some fresh air. It was too early yet for cicadas and fireflies - the only two things I loved about the stifling Midwest summers - but that year, I had something else to look forward to. I was going to Lollapalooza in a few months time. I was beyond psyched. I was a GenXer. It wasn't a label I had sought out, or an accessory I chose to wear: by birth and by temperament, I was a GenXer. I had finally found my place in the world, even if I wasn't living in a geographical location that felt like home. The early 90s had justified my very existence. It was okay to be artistic, withdrawn and disdainful of a world that expected me to cast aside my childish colors and become another cog in the machine. The world had suddenly exploded into a Renaissance of music both angry and forlorn, of fashions cast off by generations before and patched back together into a bizarre poverty armor. My bedroom walls were plastered with posters of Alice In Chains, The Screaming Trees, Janes Addiction and, of course, Nirvana. I was high on the ever-shifting kaleidescopic hues of self deprecation and despair braiding themselves together to form a tremulous hope for our futures.

I dried my hands. Brought the newspaper in. Opened it to the headline. Saw Kurt Cobain's name and, in that first millisecond of recognition, thought to myself: "Oh god, what's he done now?" He'd only just recovered from an overdose in Rome. Had he done it again?

I didn't read the article. Not then. I folded the newspaper back up, sat down on the kitchen floor and cried. Does that sound like GenEx drama? I don't really care. I cried because I would never hear a new Nirvana song. I cried because I knew that the GenEx revolution was over, right then and there. We'd been a fragile movement at best, ready to crumple if dealt a strong enough blow to our sensitive shells that we'd dared to try and emerge from. We never thought that the blow would come from one of our own.

I wasn't mad at him for killing himself; I was mad at the darkness for finally gaining the needed foothold to overpower him. I knew what it was like to have tar black sorrow running through your veins and clouding all rational thought. I was sad because I knew things would never be the same. The feeling of community and belonging that we'd somehow miraculously managed to find was shattered. I would still go to Lollapalooza later that summer, but the pall was inescapable. We'd bought tickets to see Nirvana and instead ended up attending his wake. Once the concert ended, so did the summer of GenEx. We went home, shut the door, retreated into moody silence, turned the volume down on our stereos, drew disturbing stick figure pictures in pencils and wrote depressing poetry and took our Prozac.

Three Years Earlier...

Autumn, 1991 in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I was getting ready for work and, as usual, had both the TV and the radio on. It was mid morning and I'd been listening to The Howard Stern Show whilst getting dressed and fixing my hair. The sound on the TV was muted, but it was tuned to MTV and had a blank video cassette lodged in its guts on the off chance that a good video was shown for a change. I liked recording them and playing them back, and had stacks of them in my closet.

As I walked back and forth from my bedroom to the bathroom, trailing rejected outfits, cans of hair spray and tubes of lipstick, I caught sight of a not-immediately-recognizable video playing on the TV. I didn't recognize the band and had apparently missed the intro. Shot in muddy oranges and sepia tones, it looked to be taking place in a high school gymnasium. Tattooed cheerleaders whipped themselves into anarchic frenzies. Order was quickly abandoned, the seated audience quickly rejecting their confinement and stampeding down to the floor with the band. The band members themselves looked just like their audience. These weren't "Rock Stars" parading around, demanding homage and keeping their distance. These were just guys, gritty and average looking, unshaven and rumpled in their secondhand clothes. The sound remained off as I continued my pre-work preparations, but I kept glancing at the screen, intrigued, watching as the gym was trashed, destroyed and finally eaten by flames.

I came home that evening and turned MTV back on. I'd been unable to shake the images of that strange video from my head all day and determined to find out who the hell this band was and if their music sounded as good as the video looked. Within the hour, Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was played. I turned up the volume and pressed RECORD. What I heard was galvanizing. I'd spent the last years of the 80s feeling increasingly frustrated with the soulless pop music that my age group accepted as "good" and sounded to me the way stale bubblegum tastes. This was different. This was new and angry and powerful and disgusted. It was a gigantic FUCK YOU to the very same channel that was playing it. I felt like one of the privileged few who got the joke. And before the song had ended, I knew and even said to myself: "THIS is going to be HUGE."

And it was, for better or worse.

October, 1994...

I was still in Indiana, but not for much longer. Preparations had already been made - I would be leaving for California before the winter could close in. Back to the state I'd been born in. I felt defeated. I wanted to be excited about starting all over again. I'd gone to Lollapalooza just a few months ago. Gotten drunk on the way up and listened to Skinny Puppy. Bought a T-shirt. Cheered The Beastie Boys. Spoke with strangers. But it was horribly sad. The previous Lollapalooza's had felt like life; the celebration of diversity. This one felt like a party that no one really wanted to attend and couldn't wait to leave. Smiles were sad, enthusiasm wilted. The people I went with drifted away soon after and I never saw or spoke to them again.

I woke up on the morning of October 9th to a rainstorm. It had been six months to the day since Cobain's suicide and I had just had the longest, most realistic dream of my life so far. In it, I had gone back in time. It had been the first week of April, 1994. I was still in Indiana, but knew I had to leave. I had to get to Seattle and find Kurt Cobain and somehow talk himself out of taking his own life. I started walking. There were distractions along the way - a gypsy caravan, a troupe of dancers, a fortune teller who invited me to stay with her in her mobile home where she hung crystals in every window and grew ferns - but I always returned to the path. I kept walking. I never forgot my destination.

I found him in the rehab he was currently drying out in. I walked into his empty room and patiently waited for him to return. He did, and stopped dead in the doorway when he saw me, a nervous look on his face at the sight of finding a stranger in his room. I stood and said something which only makes sense in dreams: "It's okay Kurt, I'm a Pisces too." He didn't answer, just closed the distance between us and hugged me. We held each other in silence for a very long time.

When he finally let go, we were no longer standing in the antiseptic rehab facility, but in the greenhouse in Seattle. Rain beat against the windows. He looked so tired.

"You couldn't have saved me." he said. "No one could have."

I woke up and it was still raining, in the dream, inside me, in Seattle too most likely. I laid in bed for a long time that morning, knowing it hadn't been a dream. Knowing I would never forget it. I wrote it down later, every sight, every sound, every word. I told no one. Eventually I lost the journal I'd written it in, but it didn't matter. I remembered it all, mostly his last words to me. But it was just a dream. Dreams prove nothing and come from nowhere. But it was my dream, and I'd like to believe it was more than that. That maybe he really did just stop by as I slept to say goodbye. I kept it to myself for twenty two years, and now I'm giving it to you. Because as much as Kurt ended up hating fame, he still gave us his music and it made our cold worlds a little bit brighter for a short while.

And there's no way I could fit such a long-winded, pretentious, drama-stuffed GenExy schpiel into an hour long podcast without boring the shit out of everyone in the process, so I'm putting it here. And now I feel a little lighter.

Annabelle

I'm too tired and filled with snot to write a proper review of anything today. However, I'm in the perfect frame of mind to trash a shitty movie. So here ya go:

Ah yes, the 1960s. When everyone was white, every car doubled as an aircraft carrier and every female was a Breck girl. Our pasteurized and homogenized protagonists are clearly carved out of mayonnaise. I have no idea what their names are, but her hair is neither stiff enough nor high enough to convince me that this is the late 60s.

For some reason, Mrs. Mayo has started collecting dolls for her unborn baby. Whose sex has not yet been determined. And since this is the sixties, I have a hard time believing that her husband would encourage - let alone supply - his wife in her doll hoarding. God knows if she squirts out a boy, the presence of all those dolls might turn him gay in utero.

In this case however, I think the presence of so many life sized ugly fucking ghoul dolls in wedding dresses with murder lipstick would turn any baby, regardless of sex, into Jamie Gumb.

And the film quickly establishes that milk white, suburban Republicans are the Good Guys here, and anyone with even the slightest bit of interest in the hippie culture will turn into a full blown Charlie Manson Helter Skelter druggie dropout who will break into your house and slaughter anything and everyone that moves, or doesn't, because SATAN. Yeah, okay.

Neighbors runaway hippie daughter returns to kill Christian parents with her hairy, beardy biker boyfriend and his demonic belt buckle. Lard white cops show up and shoot the smelly hippies. Smelly hippie female dies clutching ugly Annabelle doll, bleeding all over it in the process. Blood cannot possibly make this fucking doll look any creepier. Seriously, if the American Girl series had released Little Quadroon on the Bayou, complete with voodoo pins and incantations, this thing couldn't have been less attractive.

First jumpscare: a sewing machine running by itself. Wow. Horrifying. Yeah, look, we know that Mrs. Mayo is going to run her slender, alabaster finger right under that needle, so just do it already. Thank you.

Second jumpscare: housefire via Jiffy Pop.

Well lets see; not reacting to the home invasion which nearly resulted in my death, my husbands death and the murder of our unborn baby seemed to work out okay, so I think I'll just gaze stupidly at my flaming kitchen for a few seconds instead of reaching for the fire extinguisher or running for the phone. Emotions are for ethnic people.

Baby girl is born. Bring on them lacy bonnets and bootie socks, alright.

Throwing creepy, bloodstained doll into steel trash bin is a surefire way to ensure that said same doll will magically reappear in baby's bedroom and be seen as harmless and utterly benign by mom, who clearly never stopped taking the Xanax prescribed for her after the whole PopCorn Trauma Incident.

Eek! Attacked by a gauzy curtain!

So, hippie girl died in regular clothes, comes back as a ghost in white baptismal gown? How does that work? Is there a standard issue uniform handed out in the afterlife?

Introduce black female character in attempt to make white couple look Hip and With It. No racism here, soul brutha.

Cue thunderstorm.

Geez, I know this is now the early seventies but a green velvet couch against purple floral wallpaper? Did The Joker decorate your swingin' pad? Tack-eeeee! Where are the earth tones and the macrame owls?


Ugh, you know, give me one good goddamned solid reason why I shouldn't dick-punch everyone involved in the making of this film right the fuck now? I am SO SICK of this assembly line shit. It's the same goddamned plot over and over and OVER again! Trauma prologue, normality resumes, subtle threats pop up, sanity is questioned, truth is discovered via a skeptical but degree holding professional, menace is dealt with by a mystical minority wild card, order is restored, all is well, and one last Jack-In-The-Box pop in your face to leave room for a sequel. This is not how you make movies. This is how you mass produce a product. Movies are not supposed to be products. If I wanted a bland handful of tasteless, nutrition void filler, I'd buy a fucking Twinkie.

Bloody scrawl left on wall by dying hippie devil worshipper is mark of Belial or some such shit.

Nope. No emotion can enter your face at any time, regardless of the situation. That garbage truck that just slammed into your baby carriage and which could have pancaked said baby into mush puddle if she'd been in it at the time? Nope. Nuthin'. Just hold that glassy stare, mama.

Oh great. They're being haunted by Bette Davis in Whatever Happened To Baby Jane. Now that's horrifying.

Cue obligatory meeting with parish priest who looks vaguely like F. Murray Abraham.


Okay movie, you've stolen from Rosemary's Baby, Pin, Silent Hill, The Omen and Child's Play. Are you done? Can you now make an attempt at originality? You've got eighteen minutes left to redeem yourself.

Thirteen minutes.
Six minutes.

Yep, make sure to kill the black character.

The End.
Fuck you movie.

Those Across the River

So if you are not currently listening to the podcast that is Fear of a Dork Planet  an hour long verbal spewage of all things dorky and geeky which my BFF Erik and I record roughly every two weeks...

#1 - You suck, and fuck you.
#2 - You probably missed our eloquent discussion of all things Lycanthropic. Namely, the lack of good films about werewolves.

The Wolf Man, An American Werewolf In London, The Howling, Dog Soldiers, The Company of Wolves, Ginger Snaps...those are the films that immediately come to mind when the subject of werewolf movies comes up. And believe it or not, it's a subject that comes up fairly often in my world. But sadly - as awesome and classic and majestic as they all are - they are the only werewolf films worth listing. Over 100 years of horror movies and we only have 6 werewolf flicks worth watching?

I mean sure, you could point out the Underworld series if you wanted to, but that's less a movie about werewolves than it is about Kate Beckinsale's black leather wrapped asscheeks. There's always Hammer's Curse of the Werewolf, but Oliver Reed was no Christopher Lee, lets face it. But push those aside and reach further into the bargain bin and what do you get? I Was A Teenage Werewolf. Werewolves On Wheels (which I liked, but would never call a good movie by any means). The thoroughly craptastic War Wolves. The flaming bag of werewolf shit that was Arizona Werewolf. I haven't personally seen Wolf Cop yet, but I can and will vouch for Big Bad Wolf being, if not a noteworthy entry into the genre, at least a really dirty and vulgar chew toy worth playing with once.

The subject then came up of books about werewolves. Not much there either, sadly. While The Howling was a great movie, the book it was based on was total shit. As I was struggling to remember another werewolf book, or even a book that briefly mentions werewolves, or has one as a secondary character, and totally failing to do so (first person to mention the Twilight saga will be kicked right in the kidneys), Erik came to the rescue and asked if I'd read Those Across The River. Which I had not. Never even heard of it. Mere days later, Erik produced a hardback copy of the book and I made short work of it. You know that rare happiness that comes from reading a new book? A new book that's really good? You can't wait to get home and crawl into bed and read. You almost don't want to finish it because then what will you do?

I'll definitely be heading to the library sooner rather than later in search of more books by Christopher Buehlman, the author of Those Across The River. I have no idea what Between Two Fires, The Necromancer's House or The Lesser Dead are about and I don't care. I will find them. And I will read them.

But in the meantime, let me tell you all how awesome this book is.

Set in 1930s Georgia, right smack in the middle of the Great Depression, the pages of this book practically wilt with the sticky humidity of a particularly cruel Southern summer, even though it's January and the temps barely got above 21 the whole entire time I was reading this. Nightmare plagued WW1 vet Frank Nichols has been run out of the North on the proverbial rail. His crime: "stealing" another mans wife. The wife in question is Eudora, a blond sweet potato with heterochromia. They're really, genuinely, truly and deeply in love and are going to get married ASAP. But for the time being, they move into Frank's old family home in Georgia, a rent-free set up where Frank hopes to finally write his book and the couple hopes to get back on their feet after a long and ugly divorce from Dora's vindictive ex.

So yeah, they're not married yet, which is a HUGE No-No in the 1930s. Especially in the South. So Frankie and Dora pretend they are married and hope for the best. But the little town of Whitbrow has bigger problems than premarital sex. It's the midst of the Depression remember, and the dirt poor South is even dirtier and poorer than usual. The monthly tradition of sending two fat hogs across the river, draped with flowers, is under fire.

Wait, what? Um, why are these God Fearing Christians sending pigs out on a boat to the forest on the other side with much ceremony and spectacle? Seems they're not even sure anymore. It's just tradition, passed down through the generations. But times are tough and bacon is scarce, so a decision is made to send no more pigs. It's a waste of good food.

A month goes by. Life goes on. Dora takes a job as a schoolteacher at the Whitbrow one room schoolhouse down the road. She's eager to teach and eager to help the white trash offspring realize that there's more to life than bailing hay and feeding chickens. And a goodly amount of the kids seem just as eager to learn. At least until the day Dora arrives for work and finds twenty dead bodies in varying stages of decomposition tied to the kids desks. Over the chalkboard, scrawled in grave dirt are the words:

SEND THE PIGS

k, you know what? I ain't even gonna lie. I peed myself a little tiny bit when I read that. Those three words literally sent chills all the way down to my bone marrow. I'd already been captivated by Buehlman's writing style, his unique metaphors and quirky insights. His writing is like a frantic, alcohol fueled jitterbug in a room full of aged waltzers. But this scene - not the first, but definitely the point in the book at which you know shit is about to get real - is...hell, what word do I want? Beautiful and terrible are too generic. Breathtaking sounds cheesy. Galvanizing, maybe? I suppose it's close enough. The effect was not unlike being slapped across the face with a handful of blackest Gothic horror. As bad as it is, you know it's going to get monumentally worse.

And it does. Barbarically, savagely, grotesquely worse. It doesn't just get worse, it gets unholy. Every ugly human emotion is stripped down to its bare components and transformed into bestial lust: for sex, for blood, for torture and ruin. You don't survive horror like this without severe repercussions. This shit makes the corpse littered trenches of WW1 look like a picnic by comparison. The already skull fucked Frank may survive the physical brutality, but his skull is about to get fucked even harder, gang banged by an entire pack of honest to god werewolves whose knowledge of pain and torment were handed down through generations of abused slaves straight from the sadistic hands of the plantation owner who was Frank's own kin.

This is quite literally the BEST book I have read in a very long while. The fact that it's about werewolves is just the fresh fetal pig carcass on top of the bacon sandwich. I've heard rumors that it's being made into a movie, although those rumors are five years old now. Word up if it comes to fruition: don't fuck it up. Do not fuck this story up or I will hogtie you, bedeck you with flowers and smear honey on your ass before I push you out on a canoe bound for the woods. The Megiddo woods. Where the Look-A-Roos live. 

Nice touches, those. I got the joke, Buehler. *wink

Happy Barbie Birthday!

Finally! A reason to celebrate! Let us drink to Glowing Life instead of mourning over Gloomy Death! For today is the birthday of the living, breathing Roman candle that is Barbie Wilde: Actress, author, mime, dancer, punk fairy, goth maiden, shiny leather angel, bloody bouncy black-winged demon, electro Mother Superior of the Church of Iridescent Splendor, neon bonfire splatterdoll supreme.

Barbie is one of the most genuine people I have ever had the pleasure of befriending. She's cool and classy, but also silly and sweet. Never pretentious, ever exuberant, always smiling even when she isn't. Cats eyes and candy lips. She's like that librarian you have a crush on, the one with the scholarly glasses and the stern hairstyle and the knee length practical skirts. You know damn right well when the library closes, she's in red patent leather and leopard print, whipping out the lipstick like a switchblade. It's like someone threw Simone Simon and Cyndi Lauper in a blender, added some techno and hit the switch marked SATAN. What the hell kind of glass do you pour her into? Salted rim or sugared? Flambe or on the rocks?

Yeah, you know who she is. You'd better. She's battled Charles Bronson and grizzly bears, gone Bollywood and ruled over Hell's labyrinthine corridors.

But she's also championed Sophie Lancaster and spoken out against Assholes who Drink & Drive.

She's the muse behind Voices of the Damned, The Bestiarum Vocabulum and The Venus Complex, all of which you should be purchasing and reading if you have not already done so. They're not books, they're bloody sandwiches opened up on your lap, reeking of spoiled meat and honeyed lies and quivering on the crest of an eternal orgasm.


Happy Birthday Beautiful Barbie! In a world of decaf coffee, you are a strawberry champagne supernova at the middle of a chocolate fountain. And best of all, you're my friend. Thank you for that.
❤ ❥ ♡ ♥ ღ ɞ

The Meh-venant (aka I was rooting for the bear)

rev·e·nant
noun
a person who has returned, especially supposedly from the dead.

Yeah yeah, I know - this will no doubt make me about as popular as a fart in an oxygen tent, but fucking sue me. I'm not really into these big, brawny, hairy, glistening, two-fisted, Manly Man against Nature, pseudo-Shakespearean sweaty-balled, mythological He Films. It just ain't my thing. Maybe because I'm female - not ruling out that possibility. So perhaps I am not at all qualified to review The Revenant, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy and a bear. But it's getting so much Oscar Buzz that one cannot help but inhale the contact high and hope for the best. So I watched it.

Black Robe, 1991

And was underwhelmed.
Don't worry, this will be a short review.
I'm pretty much just going to point out the things I didn't like about it.

I've already seen this movie, not once but three times. The first time, it was going by the title Gladiator. Impossibly godlike good man unjustly loses wife and son and attains hero status by seeking his vengeance, even though he's kind of an asshole really.

The second time I saw it, it was Black Robe. Canadian Indian pilgrimy forest saga with dream visions and arrows through the throat and the scalpings and white guys shagging hot Indian princesses and gruesome blood splattered death and stuff.

Valhalla Rising, 2009

Finally, it showed up toting itself as Valhalla Rising, a good, long mead horn crammed full of distorted hallucinations, Indians, more horrible rapes and deaths and muddy guys getting bloody and bloody guys getting muddy and smelly animal skins and Vikings boxing, yeahyeahyeah.

I liked Gladiator.
I hated Black Robe.
I loved Valhalla Rising.
And so here I am, totally MEH over The Revenant.
Like Celie said: "It be's like that sometimes."

I could not understand a single fucking word that Tom Hardy said. Maybe he needed more time to extract himself from the mumbly, twitchy Mad Max shell before taking on this role, I dunno.

I like Tom Hardy. I could have dealt with the mushmouthedness of his Hairy Crazy White Guy if I had even a molecular sized scrap of like for Leo DiCaprio. But I don't. Never have. Not saying the guy lacks talent, because he doesn't. I've just never been a fan.

I'm really really really really fucking sick of seeing Hairy Stinky 1800 era Lumberjacks win the love of the hottest Indian Babe in a Buckskin Bikini and simultaneously earn the respect of even the oldest and most wisest pipe-smoking Medicine Man ever to shapeshift into an eagle. Bull. Shit. White guys were all pretty much cockroaches back then, lets be real. (shit, most of them still are) Cut the Little Big Man/Thunderheart shit already. They didn't want us here, and we pretty much fucked everything up. No white hunter/trapper who lived before the age of the underarm deoderant had a valid Native-esque dreamquest or an honorary Limbos With Farm Animals name. Shit all over that nonsense.

And yeah, I was rooting for the bear.

Look, she had cubs. And she was there first. Get your dumb honky ass outta the fricken woods, Jethro.

And also yeah, I probably was the only person singing to myself at the point where Leo reunites with his dead son via a dead Indian hottie in a euphoric snow-globe dream: "Touched by an Angel, Fucked by a Bear!"

I be's like that sometimes.

But hey, go ahead and give Leo an Oscar. I don't give a shit.

Werewolves, Mustaches and Phlegm...oh my

Episode 6 of our podcast - Fear of a Dork Planet - is up and ready to be listened to.

It truly is the dorkiest podcast on Planet Earth, the inane ramblings of two terminal wally's who watch way too many movies and like way too many obscure things. Also, we have no lives.

On this episode, we discuss shitty birthdays, mustaches, David Bowie, donuts, Alan Rickman, werewolves and big gobs of other neat stuff. You also get to listen to me cough all the way through the podcast because my headcold still hasn't dried up completely. And both Erik and I suffer from early onset Alzheimer's as we repeatedly try to remember people's names and repeatedly forget. I also have trouble verbalizing my thoughts because I took a Cyclobenzaprine about an hour before we started recording. Because my back hurts. Because I'm old and decrepit.

We also name drop several outstanding businesses and locations in and around Providence, Rhode Island. Basically, if you don't live here, you're missing out and your life is a hollow lie.

Dear 2016: You've Made My Shitlist

Okay, Baby New Year - you and I gotta talk. You are fucking this year up royally thus far, and we're only 17 days in. If the remaining 348 of your reign are going to suck as hard as the first 17 have (and when I say "suck" I mean "bendy straw in a black hole" magnitude suck power) I am personally going to hunt you down and ram your fudgy little diaper right the fuck down your shitty little throat, you sadistic little twatbag.

So, quick recap of your failures, kiddo: You let Lemmy die. I don't think I need to state Lemmy's full name for you. There was only ONE Lemmy, you know damn right well who he was: the God of motorcycle metal and pure, velvet whiskey.

Then you flushed Angus Scrimm down the mortality toilet, and thank you very much for that, asshole. Not only was Angus Scrimm a horror icon - the Frozen Mortician King of the Phantasm series, the father of Vampire Prince Vladislas and so on and so forth - he was also a beautiful, cultured man, perhaps the last of his kind.

Everything comes in threes, but I have to admit: when I woke up and heard that David Bowie too had been called back to the black stars, I felt like an elephant had just gored my heart out of my chest with its mighty tusk, stomped on it and then used it to wipe its ass. How could you even think of forcing the Leper Messiah to succumb to something so plebeian as cancer? David Bowie was no mere human being: he was an ever changing psychedelic chameleon God, a walking kaleidoscope, an interstellar obelisk.

Still reeling at the loss of a living Zeitgeist, I woke up the next morning and learned that Alan Rickman - aka Hans Gruber, aka Severus Snape, aka Metatron, aka Alexander Dane, aka The Blue Caterpillar, aka Colonel Brandon, aka fuck you, you get the idea - had succumbed, at the exact same age to the exact same asshole disease, as Bowie. And at that point, I was just:

FUCK!!! Fucking fuckity fucktitty fucking fuckers fucking fuckshit FUCK!!!

I couldn't fucking do it. I could not post one more goddamned obituary on my fucking blog. I was sick to death of death. Me. The Morbid, aging unrepentant Goth and self-appointed Queen of Sorrow and Horror. I was done.

Not that I could have posted anything even if I'd wanted to, because you and your shitty reign of tantrum terror decided to get me sick. ME. I who have worked in a pharmacy for years, exposed to every phlegm-filled cough, every chunky sneeze and every germ-encrusted touch within the greater Providence area. I am supposed to be iron-clad immune by now. Do you even know how virtually impossible it is to call out sick from a workplace where everyone is sick 24/7? I HATE calling out sick. But you left me with no choice, did you? Because god forbid I should suffer with a simple little headcold, sniffly and coughy and stuffy. NoooOOOOOOooo, you had to go and take and give me a nice little GI bug on top of it. For forty eight hours, I puked. I hurled and retched and barfed and spewed, and then did it all over again.

I threw up orange juice and 7Up, water and lemonade. I even threw up my fucking Zofran. Do you know what Zofran is? IT'S A GODDAMNED ANTI-NAUSEA MEDICATION!!! I barfed up my anti-puke pills! You think that's funny? I don't, you little bastard! Off I went to the ER, where the nurse tried four times - and failed each time - to stick a fucking needle in my collapsing veins. On the fifth try, it finally took, but I'd already had one vein blow up and three others roll away like dying earthworms. I knew that the inside of my elbows would look like Sid & Nancyland within 24 hours. And they did. All purple/green/yellow, pretty!

And was that the end of it? No, of course not. No sooner had my bodily fluids been restored and my nausea tamped down when my spinal cord said "Fuck it." I had no more sick time to use, so I hobbled around work like Granny GummyWorm, my coccyx feeling like a precariously balanced plastic tube filled with broken glass. I've got my prednisone now, and my lovely cyclobenzaprine and am well on the road to recovery. But I am still not at all happy with your performance, Baby New Year 2016. You are now officially on probation. If your performance does not improve by Spring, you will be sternly dealt with, up to and including a verbal warning and termination. You are not allowed to let anyone else die, nor are you allowed to let me or any of my friends and/or family members get sick. You will improve your attitude. This write up will be going into your permanent employee file. Get your shit together. This is your final warning.

Look up here, I’m in heaven...

David Robert Jones 

8 January 1947 – 10 January 2016

Death is no escape from me.

Angus Scrimm
August 19, 1926 ~ January 9, 2016 
 

You are in the presence of Angus Scrimm, of House Lawrence Rory Guy. 
King of the Silver Spheres and the Red Dwarves. 
Ruler of the Funeral Home, Bleeder of Mustard, and Father of Radu Vladislas.

"You think when you die, you go to heaven? You come to us! You play a good game boy, but the game is finished. Now you die."

Dear Amalie...

I'm not a music critic. I don't know shit about music. It's structure is a mathematical mystery to me. I can't read or play notes. Believe me, I've tried. Music is a language I cannot speak. But I can understand it. Not all of it, just certain dialects.

Same with paintings. All art speaks to me. Some of it is friendly, some rude, a lot of it comes off as the desperate attention seeking pleas of a spoiled child.

Films. Writing. Sculpture. Fucking Scrimshaw, whatever. The way that art speaks to us on an individual basis reminds me of a course I took in civil liberties long ago. I forget the actual examples that the text book provided, but it was something along the lines of: "So and So Clothiers advertises their blue jeans as the Best Jeans on Earth! Is this legal or false advertising? Answer: It is legal, because even if there is only one single person on Planet Earth who agrees that So and So's jeans are the best ones in the whole entire galaxy, that one person makes their boast true." That was a revelation to me. I was seventeen at the time, give me a break.

You see, up to that point, I'd been a pretty pigheaded kid. What I liked was "right" and those who didn't agree were wrong and were missing out, choosing to read/watch/listen to/etc. stuff that was clearly inferior and which they would regret wasting their time on someday.

I was wrong. Wrongy Wrongest WrongFace McFuckWad, I admit it. All art is beautiful and unique and perfect and utterly flawless, even if I don't happen to think it is. Somewhere out there, someone thinks it's the proverbial shiz-nite, as the kids say. And that makes it so. I still have trouble accepting the fact that somewhere in the world, someone actually thinks that Ulli Lommel is a fucking genius, but hey - if it makes you happy, more power to ya. I can certainly argue with you on the topic and give you my viewpoint as to why I think you may have a serious mental illness, but in the end, my opinions will not be magically transformed into solid facts, no matter how stubbornly I may insist that they do so. There is no universal viewpoint when it comes to art. You either accept this, or you're an asshole.

You know what else assholes do? They send anonymous hatemail to artists they don't like. They offer no constructive criticism, they simply take a verbal dump in their hairy little chimp paws and hurl it across the interwebs in frustration. I've gotten my fair share of hatemail from authors, directors, producers, actors, fellow critics and self-appointed experts who feel the need to belittle me personally if I didn't think that their film was anything less than brilliant. I've been called a bitch, told I'm stupid, yadda yadda like I care. And I'm just a nobody, a freelance film critic with zero professional schooling and no impact upon the film world at all. Why the fuck do people even care what I think? It's an opinion. If you don't like mine, don't read mine. Write your own. Problem solved.

However, in all my years of dubious pseudo-fame as a horror critic, I never, ever received a single death threat, though. So I cannot even begin to imagine how Amalie Bruun must feel.

Amalie Bruun is an artist from Denmark. Her chosen medium: black metal. I like metal, all kinds of metal. I know a lot of people don't. That's fine. You're not required to, just as I am not required to limit myself to one subgenre. I love Darkthrone and Ulver and Mayhem. I also love R.E.M. and The B-52s. I don't owe anyone an explanation for that. I like what I like.

I'd never heard of Amalie Bruun up until two days ago, when the Facebook page for Helvete Music Store in Oslo, Norway posted her story via Metal Injection. I read the article and was outraged, disgusted and angry for her. Then I scrolled down and found a link to her latest album streaming free. And clicked it. And listened.

Dear Amalie:

You are lovely. Lovlier than a frozen Northern forest filled with copper bells. Your voice is Beauty's ghost, which the wild wolves long to echo with their ancient howls. Your shrieks are a banshee's deepest mourning, sorrow incarnate, pure white rage shattering the icicles and leaving the trees to weep. I only listened to your album once (thus far), but I heard the truth within it. This isn't the sound of empty throwaway jingles or lifeless ditties for puppets to jerk to upon a colorless dance floor. This is pain, and fierce remembrance and ancestral pride. This is bone dust and black oak, virgin's blood and crone's damnation. Some argue as to whether your chosen medium is indeed black metal, or even metal at all. I don't really care. I hear you, not just with my ears but with all of me; my nerve endings, my blood, my dreams, my sorrows and regrets. And, of course, my anger.

I am an American woman. And I am so ashamed of the men in my country. I swear to you, they are not all like these ill-mannered monkeys who envy your talent and cannot fathom or respect the power of a woman to draw upon her her bloodline back down through the ages. I am sorry that these few poor examples of the male sex are so envious of your ability and so threatened by your strength that they feel the need to tear you down. It enrages me to think that any man could dare equate his masculinity with the ability to physically overpower a woman, rather than using that same power to protect and honor her instead.

I will not waste my time attempting to shame these men who know no shame. I would rather thank them for giving me, through their ugliness, the chance to find your beauty. I would rather thank you for rising above their animalistic baseness and shining like a mirror upon them, reflecting back all of their ignorance and cowardice. These are not men. No real man would wish to see a woman destroyed, for what then would he fight for and prove his valor to? Men without honor are no men at all, but low pigs wallowing in their own filth and misery.

I am sorry. From the bottom of my heart, I am deeply sorry that my male American counterparts have regressed and degenerated and forgotten what it means to truly be a man. But the blood in your veins never forgot that you were descended from giants and warriors and goddesses, singing elven songs and showing us the beauty in the darkness. You dwell where most fear to tread. Men - the immature, inferiority-plagued ones, anyway - always want to control what they don't understand, always want to reign in the wild and break the resistant. Especially American men, raised in steel, surrounded by plastic, promised perfect porcelain dolls without souls as prizes for every pain they inflict. They've forgotten that Nature is female, and Nature always wins. You can beat it back, tame it for a while, maybe even force it to follow your rules. But it will always come back exactly the way it wants to, and the hell with society's ill perceived boundaries. It will be here long after we are gone. And it will be the ones who acknowledged its purity, respected its strength and did not fear its shadows who will be remembered.

You will never be as cool as Tim Roth

You will never wear a leather codpiece and spout Shakespeare in a, eastern European castle next to Jorah Mormont.

You will never make Gary Oldman look stupid, nor intimidate him with your superior intellect and ability to reason.

You will never stab Richard Dreyfuss in the gut with a collapsible dagger, or be offered an opportunity to have sex with a cross dressing Danish tragedian.

You will never stand beside a stately John Hurt, both of you in full dandy drag complete with foppish powdered wigs, little satin knee pants and lacy ruffles, looking like a completely poncy git and still be considered the films Ultimate Badass, doing as you bloody well like and drowning in willing pussy. Or unwilling, as the case may be. You will never sneeringly screw Jessica Lange doggie style or drive Liam Neeson to his knees in defeat.

You will never play Vincent Van Gogh. And even if you do, you won't be able to meet the ferocious caliber of Roth's Van Gogh. Ragged and paint splattered, drunken and unshaven, teeth a horror of paint stains and rot. You will never surpass his simple awe at the beauty of nature, his solemn acceptance of life's horrors, nor his explosively violent, blood drenched, canvas ripping, glass shattering, atom bomb level destructive drunken rages. You will never bleed oil and absinthe and your face will never shine like a sunflower.

You will never star in four Quentin Tarantino films.

You will never lay on the floor of a warehouse, slowly bleeding to death from a gut shot, and still turn in a riveting performance. You will never entirely erase your heavy English accent and make yourself sound as though you were born and raised in Southern California. You will never have your pants unbuttoned by Harvey Keitel while he whispers sweet nothings into your bloody ear. You will never blow Michael Madsen away by emptying your magazine into his body. You will never try to watch The Lost Boys, mutherfucker. You will never be called Pumpkin by a girl named Honey Bunny who loves you with all her heart.

You will never play a scummy Russian-Jewish mafioso who fucks Moira Kelly, incinerates Edward Furlong and makes eating french fries look like an Olympic event. You will never not be on a boat, or wear a little bellhop uniform, or play Charles Starkweather, or hang out in the steaming jungle with John Malkovich and Iman, or have your kneecap shattered with a golf club, or call Jelly Roll Morton an asshole.

Look, just shut up about Planet of the Apes, okay? Everyone makes mistakes.

When A Stranger Calls

Doomed Babysitters.

Babysitters. On the horror movie food chain, babysitters fall somewhere between camp counselors and prostitutes. I babysat for a while in the 80s. Scariest thing that ever happened to me was the night I sat for two kids - a ten year old boy and his seven year old sister - and when I asked them what they wanted on their hot dogs, they both enthusiastically asked for mayonnaise. Mayonnaise. On their fucking hot dogs. Insert shudder of horror here.

By that time, I'd already seen the 1979 film When A Stranger Calls, and I'd see it a few more times as it popped up on TV now and again. But for some reason, I could never remember what the movie was about after the mucho famous twenty minute opener had concluded. I remember Charles Durning wandering around. I remember Colleen Dewhurst playing a blowsy barfly. That's about it.

So I went to Wal-Mart the other day. Look, I needed a new bra, don't judge me. Target never carries my size and all of their shit has underwire anyway. You ever try wearing an underwire bra when you have triple sized torpedoes like mine? It's like wrapping twine around a still growing melon. It hurts.

But that's not my point. On the rare occasions I am forced by poverty to go to Wal-Mart, I always check the DVD bargain bin. I rarely find anything good in it, but yesterday I scored: When A Stranger Calls, both the original and the remake, were on a double bill DVD for $3.50. Not the biggest or best score I've ever happened upon, but not bad either. So home I went with my new bra, my DVD and a spiffy new eyeliner pencil. Go me!

And today I watched both the original and the remake, back to back.
And now, I'm going to tell you about them both.

When A Stranger Calls (1979)

Starring: Carol Kane, Charles Durning, Tony Beckley, that mean-faced chick who was in Foul Play, Colleen Dewhurst, the other chick who played the mom in Amityville 2 and Ron "Super Fly" O'Neal.

 If you aren't familiar with the first half hour or so of this film, you are not a true horror fan. Teen babysitter Jill Johnson is terrorized by anonymous phone calls from a creepy guy who keeps asking her if she's checked the children. After calling the police and having Ma Bell tap her phone line, Jill learns that the calls are coming from inside the house. She narrowly escapes being murdered, but the kids have both been torn apart by psychopathic Curt Duncan, who is hauled off to jail and eventually incarcerated in an insane asylum.

Seven years later, Curt escapes and the father of the two children he butchered hires Charles Durning to find him and kill him. Meanwhile, Curt has found lodgings at a homeless shelter and tries unsuccessfully to hit on Colleen Dewhurst at a bar. Rebuffed and growing increasingly more deranged as his antipsychotic meds wear off, Curt goes looking for Jill once more, who is now married with two small children of her own.

This isn't a movie about the traumatized Jill at all, despite the fact that the film both begins and ends with her. This is a drama about a cop so disgusted by the crime he's had to clean up after that he justifies murder to himself. It also spends a good amount of time trying to make us understand the killer, a man who utterly despises himself and whose attempts to fit himself back into society and live a normal life are sadly doomed before they can even begin. Curt is a creep and everyone knows it, himself included. He exudes a thick, black, gelatinous aura from his every pore, and anyone with even the slightest bit of sensitivity recoils from him in disgust. It didn't hurt either that British actor Tony Beckley was cast as Curt. Beckley - who looks like a cross between John Hurt and that one guy who was in that one movie about Jack The Ripper whose title I can never remember, but he had really black eyes, anybody know which movie I'm talking about? - was literally dying when he played this role. Cause of death is listed as cancer, rumors say AIDS, but it doesn't matter. Beckley almost lets the disease play the part. He is walking death; pale and gaunt (even for a Brit), hollow eyed, he looks like a skeleton wrapped in rags. How he worked up the strength to run from Charles Durning through the city streets, and then body tackle Carol Kane in the climax, is beyond me.

And though Tony Beckley's performance as Curt Duncan is powerful and probably the best in the film, I think it's also where the film itself falls apart. Nobody wants to see a boogeyman reduced to a shivering pile of pathetic, whiny human failure. You don't want to identify with him, or pity him. He ripped two children apart with his bare hands. Sympathizing with him made me feel dirty, like an accomplice to his crimes.


When A Stranger Calls (2006)

Starring: Camille Belle, Tommy Flanagan, Lance Henriksen, Derek DeLint and some disposable, partying, irresponsible, miraculously acne-free teenagers.

So here we are in Remake-ville, and this time around, the filmmakers understood what worked in the original and what didn't. The entire second and third act were axed and the film instead became a full length phone call scene. However, it remains stubbornly faithful to the original in character names and throwaway scenes. The babysitter is again Jill Johnson, babysitting for the wealthy doctor Mandrakis and his socialite wife. The kids are already asleep when Jill arrives and are also just getting over a bad flu. A noisy ice maker and a discarded Popsicle are also echoes from the original, and the key exchange of dialogue between Jill and The Stranger is left intact: 

Jill Johnson: You really scared me, if that's what you wanted. Is that what you wanted?
Voice of the Stranger: No.
Jill Johnson: What do you want?
Voice of the Stranger: Your blood all over me.

Now here, I have to admit, I preferred the delivery in the original. Beckley's whisper and the pause he slips between "Your blood" and "all over me" the former of which is spoken almost reluctantly, the latter hissed with orgasmic eagerness. It was truly a blood chilling moment and the sight of the blood draining out of Carol Kane's face was probably real. It's a horrifying line, promising pain and pleasure, and I shiver with revulsion every single time I hear it.

Delivered in the remake by Lance Henriksen's distinctive purr, this line should have been every bit as chilling if not more so. But for whatever reason, someone decided that Lance should just deliver it flat, indifferently and bluntly, as if he were placing an order for a sandwich at the supermarket deli during a lunch rush. That line was meant to be savored by its speaker. It's foreplay. One can picture Beckley's Curt naked and blood lubed upstairs, probably jerking off as he speaks to Jill for the last time. One can imagine Lance doing no such thing. Shame really, because I think he could be the Ultimate Pervy Creep if given the opportunity.

The film stretches its original 20 minute premise out over an hour and a half and, at times, gets almost as boring as the entire first hour of House Of The Devil. Almost. A couple of distractions are thrown in: Jill's slutty friend Tiffany, the stereotypical Latina housekeeper Rosa, the family cat, etc. Then comes The Moment:

But we already know it's coming and so it falls flat. What started out as a tense drama turns into just another slasher film as Jill runs through the house, using various tools and appliances as weapons, barred from simply running out of the house by the small fact that the kids are still alive and need rescuing.

Lance Henriksen's role as The Voice is over and The Stranger drops down from the rafters. Suddenly having run out of things to say, he becomes Jason Voorhees and Michael Meyers, silent and slow, deliberately walking after the running Jill, knowing he will catch up to her because this is a slasher film.

Now, had this version gone off on a psycho tangent and told us who The Stranger is/was and what makes him tick, Tommy Flanagan might have been able to give the late Tony Beckley a run for his money. He's an intense actor, a slow burning, dark eyed smolder of a man. And those scars on his face? 100% real. You see, Flanagan is a Scottish actor, known for his roles in Gladiator, AVP and Sons Of Anarchy. Before that, he was a DJ in Glasgow who was attacked outside of a club late one night and given the trademark "Glasgow Smile" with a very sharp knife.

But no. Flanagan is reduced to a sexless slasher killing machine. He doesn't even get a cool mask. He doesn't even get to talk, possibly because his Scottish accent sounds nothing at all like Lance Henriksen. But hey, that would have been a cool twist - one guy makes the calls, the other does the dirty work? Just a thought.

And that's it kids. Both films had their flaws and successes, their strengths and weaknesses. Neither of them was perfect, but nor did they both outright suck.

They were both okay. The end.