Not Cool

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let Us Prey

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

~Mark Twain

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ceremony (1994)

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

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

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

 

Ceremony

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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