Forrest Ackerman Gone for the Moment: He'll Be Back

The man who coined the term "sci-fi," who likely did more than anyone else to popularize horror and sci-fi cinema, and who long ago inspired a certain Mad Mycologist to a lifelong love of all things weird on celluloid, videotape and paper, has passed away at age 92.

Forrest J Ackerman, writer-editor who coined 'sci-fi,' dies at 92

Forrest J Ackerman, who influenced a generation of young horror-movie fans with Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine and spent a lifetime amassing what has been called the world's largest personal collection of science-fiction and fantasy memorabilia, has died. He was 92.

Ackerman, a writer, editor and literary agent who has been credited with coining the term "sci-fi" in the 1950s, died Thursday of heart failure at his home in Los Angeles, said John Sasser, a friend who is making a documentary on Ackerman...

As readers of this blog know, I love horror flicks. I've been a fan all my life, and Ackerman is one reason that's so. When I was but a little gore-pup, at the age of no more than 5 or 6, I used to visit a local newsstand near my grandparents' home in Brooklyn every month to get the latest issues of Warren Publishing's Creepy and Eerie magazines. One day, I noticed another magazine on the same rack. It was Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland, and I was hooked. I read that magazine for years. I might not be the gorehound I am today were it not for Ackerman's successful effort to warp my young mind.

In fact, horror cinema would probably be very different were it not for Ackerman being right there as the genre blossomed in the drive-ins of the 1950's and 60's. I wonder if there would be a Troma today, for example, if not for Forrest J. Ackerman.

Not to worry, horror fans. Ackerman will be back shortly... no doubt as a 50' tall zombie with glowing purple eyes and tentacles for arms. If anyone could ever do it, it'd be Forry.

And when that happens, boils and ghouls, only the grateful shall be spared. So, thanks, Mr. Ackerman, for doing all you did — and will no doubt keep right on doing — to make me into the freak I am today. I truly appreciate it.

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First Winter Cold

I believe I have my first real winter cold. It started yesterday with a tickle in the throat when I woke up, but by the time I taught my first bio lab this had progressed to a sore throat and loss of voice. Three hours later my throat and voice were almost completely shot and a cough came on as well. By the time I finished my second biology lab section at around 8:30 PM, my throat was on fire and my voice completely shot.

This morning, I woke up at 3:30 with a pounding headache, a cough, a mild (100°) fever and an utterly raw throat. I've spent most of the day since in bed, which is where I plan on spending much of the rest of it as well.

This is what happens when one gets locked in a room with students for six hours every week, the temperature drops by about 30° in a single day, and sleep has been in short supply.

LL gets back from Florida tomorrow, having successfully defended her prospectus. I'm hoping to be in better shape by then. My other plans for the day include chicken broth and a couple of movies from Netflix. I should be getting Lucio Fulci's Beatrice Cenci and The Dead Pit today. And sleep, too. Nyquil is my friend.

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The Call of Cthulhu: Truest Lovecraft Film Adaptation Ever

The first grown-up book I can ever remember reading was a collection of H.P. Lovecraft's stories, and others. I was eight years old when I started reading the works of Lovecraft, Derleth, Campbell and Lumley. The paperback, Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Volume 1, made quite an impression on me. I have long since read everything that Lovecraft ever penned, including his unfinished works, his dreadful poetry, and his collected letters. I've even visited Lovecraft's grave, a trip I plan to take once again this coming December.

I've also seen nearly every screen adaptation of Lovecraft's work. There are probably a thousand of them by now, so I can't say I've seen every low-budget attempt, but I have likely seen the majority of them. Some, like a wholly and justly unknown Italian attempt at The Nameless City, are best forgotten (and thankfully that abysmal film seems to have soon been forgotten after the HPL Film Festival in Portland at which I watched it some years ago). Others have been great fun, ranking among my favorite horror films, but are loosely based on the stories and don't really capture the mood of the literature very well at all. Stuart Gordon's films, such as Re-Animator and From Beyond fall into this category. As much as I love those cheezy flicks, they're injected with a sense of humor that removes them from the possibility of being truly Lovecraftian. They're a bit like making a film version of Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue starring a man in a rubber gorilla suit who takes a pie in the face from time to time. In 1970, Daniel Haller tried to make a relatively Lovecraftian film version of The Dunwich Horror starring Sandra Dee and Dean Stockwell, but it just didn't work.

I very recently saw the first faithful and good adaptation of a Lovecraft story. It's a low-budget silent black-and-white film made by a novice director: The Call of Cthulhu. Director Andrew Leman and writer Sean Branney get Lovecraft in a way that nobody has before. Their film, clocking in at just 47 minutes run time, is an excellent work in itself, but fans of Lovecraft will particularly appreciate how true they've remained to the story and how well they've captured the mood and movement that characterizes Lovecraft's work.

You read that right, by the way. This is indeed a silent black-and-white movie made in 2005. It revels in its anachronism, too, even adding effects to make the film look dated and damaged. While this is artifice, it lends an ironic authenticity to the film and makes it work visually in a way that nobody else has been daring or genius enough to attempt. The resulting patina is dubbed "Mythoscope" by the film makers.

The Call of Cthulhu was made on a shoestring budget, which was quite daunting (according to the crew of the film, interviews with whom are presented in the DVD's special features). Much of the action is set either at sea or on the island of R'lyeh, the latter of which had to be built from scratch in a backyard in California out of wooden scaffolding and cardboard. It works. Rather than going for realism, what Leman and company have done is to resurrect something that I haven't seen outside of old Impressionist films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu. In fact, at risk of being flamed by afficiandos of that school of early cinema, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that The Call of Cthulhu actually stacks up well against those movies. I don't say this lightly; it's that good.

Even the stop-motion animation in The Call of Cthulhu, crude by today's CGI standards, works perfectly within the context of the movie itself. Stop-motion Cthulhu's movements are a bit jerky and somehow not quite right, which is exactly how they should be. It's also believable against the backdrop of a silent movie; if Cthulhu had been a slick computer graphic it would have destroyed the believability of the overall film.

The actors, a cast of complete unknowns, does a wonderful job here. Their performances might have been overacting in a "modern" film, but the overstated facial expressions and broad movement are exactly the stuff of the silent era.

Taken together, The Call of Cthulhu portrays faithfully but stylistically Lovecraft's vision of the bloated, tentacled horror who waits dreaming in the sunken city of R'lyeh. If that last sentence means anything to you, you must see this film.

What are you waiting for? Go watch a trailer!

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Baby Bunnies That Kill You in Seven Days: YouTube Weirdness

A friend of mine, knowing my fondness for The Ring, sent me a link to a YouTube video. Someone spliced together video of cute baby bunnies with footage from the cursed video from The Ring to produce something just a little bit perverse.

If you've just watched the above, you have seven days to live before succumbing to fuzzy baby bunnies — from hell!

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Amplify Naked: In the Lab on a Sunday

I'm here at the lab this afternoon. See?

You can tell it's a lab because there are microscopes and other sciencey-looking things in the picture.

It being Sunday, I'm the only one in the lab, which is a bit lonely but also very nice. During the week, we have an undergrad here on a summer project in which he's working under the supervision of a post-doc to sequence a whole bunch of Boletales specimens from another university to make sure that they're actually what they're supposed to be. Most type specimens were collected before the days of molecular analysis and so in many cases nobody is as sure of their identities as they could be. It's a worthwhile project, but with everybody else doing their molecular thing, too, the clean lab is often at capacity. I have a sizable experiment I'm working on, testing a couple of primer sets for my so far-elusive cytochrome oxidase subunit 1 genes under a new protocol on the thermocycler. It's not that complicated a project, really, but getting it all set up requires a bit more physical room than is usually available. I'm just now waiting for the cycler to finish before I run a gel and hope that I actually get some bands. Then I'll be able to see if one of the primer set works better than the other, if both sets work well and the difficulty has been all about the annealing temperature, or if the whole thing just isn't going to work for some reason. I suspect the combination of a new, family-specific primer set and a different thermocycler regimen will solve the problem. We'll see.

Because there's nobody else here today, though, I also got to watch an old Del Tenney drive-in flick after getting the thermocycler set up. I watched the amazingly goofy Horror of Party Beach in a conference room. There's something particularly gratifying about kicking one's feet up and watching a cheezy flick about radioactive jellyfish-zombie-monsters that eat only nubile young beach party girls and the scientists trying to devise ways to destroy them when one is sitting in a biological science center and waiting for PCR products to be amplified. You can always tell the scientist in a 1960's rubber suit horror flick; he's the guy in the white coat, smoking a pipe and saying things like, "The organs of these beings are too decomposed to retain oxygen so they've been replaced by sea anemones. They're giant protozoa!" Errrr... yeah. I hope I don't give an answer like that when I take my quals.

I did want to get this experiment run today for another reason, too. With LL coming home, I won't be here most of next week. If I get everything ready for the sequencer by the end of the day today, I can have it on a plate tomorrow and get my sequences back on Tuesday. Or I can have it ready for the plate on Tuesday and then download them and toss them into an alignment next Monday. Either way works, really.

34 more minutes left on the thermocycler now. You know, if I'd have known I'd be the only person here today, I'd have amplified naked.

Nobody touch that line. It's going on a t-shirt.

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Horror Flick Review: The Other Side Is As Much Treacle as Gore

I watch about three or four horror movies per week. Usually, I have some idea of what I’m going to be seeing based upon the description of the movie on the CD sleeve. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. A good example of this was my recent misfortune to rent the movie The Other Side from Netflix. I thought I was getting a horror movie, not a sermon. I was very, very wrong. I hate it when I’m misled as to what the movie I’m going to watch is really about.

I find this happens too frequently for my taste with horror movies. It seems that the religious can’t keep their hands off of my favorite genre. I never seem to know until I watch one of these surreptitiously Christian-themed films what I’m getting myself into.

The Other Side was not just badly acted and poorly written and plain not entertaining, it was like a religious landmine buried in the path of the unwitting. The story could have been interesting; a murdered man escapes from hell along with a number of other condemned souls only to find that his fiancée has also been murdered. He sets out to discover the killer who did in both himself and his wife-to-be. In the meantime, he and the other escapees must do combat with the Reapers, demons who have been dispatched to retrieve the escaped souls by blowing their brains out with firearms. OK, not exactly rocket science and not likely to win any awards, but it could have been the basis for an entertaining 1½ hour flick.

Alas, the writer and director weren’t satisfied with that. They were going to deliver what they seem to have thought a profound religious message. Thus, 40 minutes into the flick we have our hero stumbling into a church and praying for forgiveness. He must confess his sins before God to win salvation from "the pit." The Reapers, you see, are almost impossible to kill. Oh, you can shoot them and they will fall down, but they can leap into any other dead body that happens to be lying around and then start the chase again. Only with divine intervention and forgiveness for his sins can that hero win entrance to heaven. The end of the movie is telegraphed from early on; it's clear how this all has to come out, provided that the viewer has a minimum of six firing synapses.

The viewer soon finds out that Jehovah has been planning for the big escape from hell all along! Two of the escapees who accompanied our hero were actually angels who were put there with foreknowledge of the events that would transpire. All of a sudden, we find out that one of the big scary escapees is a good guy, amidst soaring music and his big bald head silhouetted against a blue sky replete with puffy clouds. We also find out that the murderer was our hero’s brother (shades of Caine and Abel, anyone?) out to get at their parents' fortune, and that he had mom and dad brutally murdered for the same reason years prior. But it gets sappier still!

In the end, the hero dies. Even though he has committed a murder earlier for which he was never convicted, he has asked forgiveness from the Son-O-God. This is a pass into heaven (because faith is more important than actions to those who live in a world of wishful thinking) where his dead girlfriend is waiting for him in a lake surrounded by waterfalls and bright white light and, apparently, angelic choirs. She delivers a little speech about how wonderful God is and the power of redemption through Christ. Then, as the music soars again, they share a sloppy open-mouthed French kiss. The music soars some more the bright light increases in intensity and… I couldn’t watch anymore. Seriously, I was beginning to get nauseous. This is a horror movie? Yuck. Perhaps there will be a sequel involving sanctified personal lubricants and cherubic fluffers. I might actually want to watch that.

Honestly, I don’t begrudge anyone who wants to see one the ability to view religiously-themed films. Not in the least; everyone should be able to watch whatever floats their boat. If you want to watch porn, watch porn. If you desire to be clubbed about the head with ham-fisted religious messages — even inconsistent ones that wind up with couples having premarital sex in a clearly Christian Eden-like afterlife — go for it. By the same token, I’d like to know when I’m about to watch such a film so I can find opt for more fitting fare. This sort of saccharin pseudo-horror flick really does nothing for me other than upset my stomach. Zombies? Not so much. I can watch them chew on a leg bone all day long and not want to return lunch. Why not let people know when the subject matter of a film is going to be preachy? Is it because the directors honestly think they might win converts with a low-budget DVD like The Other Side? Are they just kind of dumb and don't realize that such junk is best kept out of the hands of heathens like myself who are bound to rip the tripe into bits at any opportunity? I don't get it.

Every so often, perhaps once or twice a year, I get suckered. This time I wound up watching (most of) The Other Side. Previously, I’ve gotten stuck with other religious turkeys like 2003’s 13 Seconds and 2005’s Evil’s City. Neither of these two abysmal flicks advertised their religious intentions either and in both those cases I also can away feeling like the Holy Ghost had just relieved itself into my eye sockets. Not a pleasant sensation. While The Other Side was a bit better technically than those other two stinkers, it wasn’t by much and certainly not by enough to make up for cheating me out of time that could have been used to watch an actual horror flick.

If you’re in the mood for a sermon with gunfire and lots of exploding blood squibs, maybe The Other Side will be to your liking as much as it wasn’t to mine. Enjoy the guts and treacle. If you’re like me and don’t appreciate being preached at, give this one wide berth.

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Millenialism, Childhood Trauma and Barack Obama: The Sad Case of Molly Kagan

It's been a trend among some local newspapers to offer their readers the opportunity to create blogs attached to the papers' websites for some time now. Doing so probably garners these bloggers a larger number of local readers than they'd otherwise get. The Tallahassee Democrat offers such "reader blogs," one of which belongs to Molly Kagan. There are two things that can be safely said about Kagan; she hates Barack Obama and she loves Jesus. OK, three things. She's obsessive and paranoid about both, and this is pointed out particularly well in her most recent blog article. In it, she reveals that the Gospel of Matthew is trying to warn us not to vote for Obama whom, she says, "will play a major part in prophecy" — and not a good one.

Obama and Biblical Prophecy

For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect. MT. 24:24

I was raised in church and I remember seeing a movie when I was little about the second coming of Jesus Christ. It scared the hell out of me. People woke up and their husbands, wives and kids were gone. People driving were suddenly gone and cars crashed. Many people remaining knew what had happened and some ran to church. Jesus Christ had returned for believers.

In my more than seven years of experience with blogging, I've found that it's a good rule of thumb that anything that starts off with a Bible quote in red font is followed by a torrent of crazy. Molly, for her part, reveals to us the origin of her disorder. She was traumatized in a church, with the consent of her parents, no doubt, by a film designed precisely to frighten the credulous little children. She's like a casebook example for those who maintain that religion is child abuse. I don't think that's a necessary connection, but what was done to Molly Kagan certainly qualifies. It's sad to see someone later in their lives who was subjected to such abuse as a child and is now manifesting the kind of paranoia that follows in what she's written about a Senator from Illinois.

What does that mean? It means that you have repented to God and admitted that you are a sinner, believe that Jesus is the son of God and he died for your sins, and that you confess your faith in Jesus as your Savior and your Lord.

Sounds easy, huh? Well, in the movie their were a lot of people who had not done that and they were left to suffer quite a bit. They had to hide their faith and some were beheaded, etc. In today's world it is the same. The gospel has been told to many people who have turned their back on the Lord. No one knows exactly what will happen to the non-believers, but those of us who believe know the end is near.

Ah, Millennialism, that reeking pile of mental degeneracy that leaves its believers waiting for the cosmic hitman to come and start the beheadings. Can you imagine taking a little girl to see a film in which others were tortured and beheaded for not believing the right things? If I were to take my four year old niece to the kind of gory zombie movies that I enjoy on occasion, if I were to expose her to such blood and violence, people would rightly think that there was something wrong with me. They'd likely call me a child abuser and they would be correct in saying so. But apparently if I show her movies about the return of one particular living dead individual that results in death and dismemberment, it's excused as "religious education." This is sick and depraved stuff without question. This is emotional abuse, and the fact that a movie is shown in a church shouldn't exempt it from the same standards that would apply if it were shown in a theater. Both are public places, and small children shouldn't be exposed to this kind of violence in either place. Kagan's paranoia is testimony to the emotional impact and damage that results from such exposure.

Obama falls right into Jesus' plan for his return. Everything he says is subject to his whim, or polls, or his advisors. He was the most liberal Senator prior to his Presidential candidacy. Now, he has become more of a moderate. His wife is being given advice to soften and be less vocal. They are both deceptive and it is very obvious that although Mr. Obama is not the anti-christ, he will play a major part in prophecy. He is the epitome of the aforementioned bible verse.

Wait... I thought True Believers wanted Jesus to return. Kagan now seems to be worried that he'll show back up if Obama is elected. This strange sort of ambivalence is typical of people who have suffered childhood trauma. It's a psychic dissonance that crops up time and time again. These people have been scared shitless by their own religion all their lives and they don't understand that the condition exists because it's all they've ever known. As human beings, they're frightened of the ramifications of their own faith — as well they should be if they aren't complete sociopaths. The Christian Tribulation is a terrible thing, a holocaust of the greatest scale.

If Molly Kagan truly believed that the return of Jesus was something desirable, and that the election of Barack Obama would hasten that Second Coming, she would logically be Obama's biggest fan. A vote for Obama would effectively be a vote for Christ. As it stands, she sees the return of the Nazarene as a reason not to vote for Obama.

There are a good many reasons for which one might be concerned about an Obama presidency, but reading him into a text written nearly 2,000 years ago is not one of them. Seeing a modern individual in such a text is a kind of paranoia. The astounding bound beyond the confines of rational thinking required to arrive at such a conclusion defy the definition of a sound mind. Whoever wrote Matthew doesn't demonstrate any knowledge of there even being a continent that we now call North America or a country called the United States let alone that there would someday be a Senator from a state called Illinois who would run for president of that country. The Bible is replete with overt lists of nations of which the authors of its various books were aware, so the assumption that one of them would cloak the identity of some other nation to whom he was giving advice (which is precisely what Kagan is saying) has no basis in precedent and can be seen as nothing better than wishful thinking. Matthew 24:24 could equally be applied to John McCain, Robert Mugabe or Larry Craig as it could be to Barack Obama. It could be applied, in fact, to almost any politician from any period in the history of any tribe, city or nation. Politicians have always been deceptive to an extent, particularly in times and places where they relied on the good will of citizens to hold office. Politicians who require the ballots of the people — whatever people we might care to name — spend a certain amount of their energy on telling the voters what they think will appeal to the greatest possible majority. Kagan goes into her Bible-fueled, fear-saturated rant already thinking that Jehovah has picked a candidate (who just happens to be the one whom Kagan herself supports), so she applies the verse she's selected a posteriori to the one she doesn't like in order to connect with other True Believers on an emotional basis, to inspire fear of punishment. Essentially, Elohim are watching over your shoulder in the voting booth and will hold you accountable if you don't vote for the person whom Kagan says the God says to vote for. God the wrathful busybody is speaking to you through a blogger in Tallahassee, and you'd better listen up or you'll wind up beheaded while the righteous and prophetic Molly Kagan smiles down on the bloody scene from her vantage point in the clouds.

Does it get much loonier than this?

Please think about your vote. Think about Obama's constantly changing words. Think about what will become of our beloved nation. Repent and be ready.

Gee, it's a good thing that we have Molly to remind us to think about our votes. We would have forgotten to do that without her scary, scary reminder of religious violence and the end of the world and how the streets will someday run red with the blood of the infidels. I hadn't taken into account that I might have my head lopped off if I didn't cast my ballot for John McCain in November. Let me think about that for a moment...

Hmmmm.

Nope, I don't see it as a valid reason to vote for dogcatcher, let alone president. It still seems like a bunch of crazy nonsense cooked up in a roiling kettle of mental injury. She further reinforces her own outcome of childhood trauma with an appeal to another gibbering paranoiac; Kagan links to an even crazier article written by Michael Bresciani which, amongst the many bizarre contentions made, includes this following gem:

In thirty five years of teaching the Bible tenants of the second coming of Christ (eschatology) I have heard the question 'do you think he could be the Antichrist' asked thousands of times about dozens of people. Now I see the question being asked about Sen. Obama on blogs and websites and in fellowship halls more than any other name to date.

I don't believe that he is the Antichrist because according to scripture the Antichrist comes from and rules over Europe. But since the false prophet who aids the Antichrist comes from a completely different nation I am watching Obama's meteoric rise with that fact in mind.

We who love America and its constitution and original purpose are disgusted beyond measure with what is happening to our nation. We who love God and trust his word are seeing prophecy unrolling right before our eyes. It doesn't make it any easier to swallow but we are always thankful that warnings were part of Gods grace to us so we wouldn't be easily deceived or overcome. Christ comforted those who were to see the ugliness of the last days bring the world to its knees with a saying that calls the big cry for change for the sake of change what it really is; a cunningly attractive deception.

For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect. MT. 24:24

Sound familiar?

This Millennialism or eschatology or whatever other names it may go by is a pernicious influence upon both our politics and our culture, to put it gently. It seeks to make what would otherwise be a very good reason for treatment with lithium and thorazine the basis for legal and political decisions. I hope there will come a day when children are no longer traumatized with the sort of horrific imagery that has resulted in this emotional disorder, resulting in adults like Kagan and Bresciani injecting their madness into the political process. As it stands now, it seems that America is saddled with far too many of these nuts. In the days before the internet and cable television, they would have largely existed as isolated individuals walking up and down the street screaming "The end is nigh!" as passersby rolled their eyes and sought to avoid them. Thanks to the vast worldwide network, they can find one another now. They can support each other's paranoia and take on an undeserved air of legitimacy that helps their numbers to snowball. They would have been given treatment, and treatment they need far more than newspaper-sponsored blogs.

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World Ends Today

Good morning, folks, and welcome to the end of the world.

As you have undoubtedly heard, a Millennialist self-styled prophet has predicted that humanity will be wiped out today by a massive nuclear war. Only the prophet's own merry band of polygamous followers will be preserved on their compound just outside Abilene, Texas.

For some reason, this particular prediction of imminent apocalypse has captured a good deal of public imagination. In the past few days, this blog has received a tremendous number of hits from people searching the variants of the phrase "world ends on Thursday" on Google. These people are not exclusively Americans, either. A small but significant proportion of the hits have been coming from Korea, Australia and Western Europe. I don't know what the motivation behind the searches is; there may be people sitting back and laughing at the prophecy as well as those who are genuinely concerned that today is the day that the feces meet the fan.

What are you doing to mark the end of the world today? As for me, I'll be in the lab dissecting and sequencing beetles. I have two DVDs coming from Netflix today — Superbad and Raiders of the Damned. The Netflix plot synopsis of the latter of these is:

In the wake of a cataclysmic global war that saw widespread use of biochemical weaponry, flesh-eating zombies are overrunning the planet -- and a helicopter transporting scientists who are working on an anti-zombie serum is humankind's only hope for survival. When the chopper crashes and strands the researchers in the midst of Zombieland, the onus is on a special-ops squad (led by Richard Grieco) to bring them back alive.

That sounds like appropriate viewing for the apocalypse. Provided that the world is here by the time I get home from the lab tonight, I'll be watching Raiders of the Damned.

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Got Netflix? Stream This.

If you have a Netflix subscription and can stream video, click on the graphic below to check this out:


You'll be watching an episode of the Masters of Horror series. This one's by Joe Dante, and it's called "Homecoming." The run time is just under an hour. Political zombies; ya gotta love 'em.

I wonder if the Bush League has seen this. Nah, probably not.

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Takashi Miike's Visitor Q: Salvation Through Destruction

Supernatural horror film is an odd genre that attracts enthusiasts for different reasons. For me, I most enjoy the surreal, absurd elements they all contain and which the best of them consciously exploit. This usually, but not always, is embodied within these films as a kind of sly humor. The films of George Romero, for instance, give society as well as the viewer a little poke in the eye every so often by exaggerating some traits. In Romero's case, this comes across most obviously in his Dawn of the Dead, with its zombies-in-a-shopping-mall depiction of the priorities of American consumerism. What could be more of a "consumer" than a mindless walking corpse that devours the living flesh? Such depictions are both absurd and political.

This mechanism isn't solely to be found in outright horror films, though. I spent last year getting acquainted with the works of Luis Buñuel for similar reasons. His surrealist absurdity and political sensibility as well as his perception of the inherent humor in human nature make for some amazing films. Cet obscur objet du désir, Le Fantôme de la liberté and La Voie lactée rank among my favorite films for many of the same reasons that I so enjoy a good supernatural horror movie. The celebrity bomber in Le Fantôme is every bit as absurd and rationally unbelievable as Hellraiser's Pinhead.

More recently, I've been taking in the films of Japanese director Takashi Miike. Miike is a provocateur, a Buñuel on acid if you like. He goes out of his way to shock the viewer but not for the value of shock alone. Watching Miike at his best is like being awakened roughly from sleep. It may be unpleasant but it gets the job done and it grabs every bit of one's attention. While Miike's films contain horrific elements I don't think calling them horror films does them justice; he has more in common with Buñuel than with Romero or Clive Barker (perhaps a bit more with the former than the latter). I've so far seen several of Miike's better-known works: Audition, Ichi the Killer, Imprint, and One Missed Call (the original, not the gutless American remake). As off-the-wall as all of those films are, nothing in them prepared me for Visitor Q, which may be one of the most original and most disturbing films ever made — and possibly one of the greatest of the last 30 years if not ever. Visitor Q is the Citizen Kane of absurdism, the Godfather of shocking surrealism. It is transgressive, repulsive, poetic and heartbreaking all at the same time. I doubt that there has ever been anything like it.

In Visitor Q, Miike creates the ultimate dysfunctional family, the pathetic Yamazakis. The household is headed, at least nominally, by Kiyoshi, a host and creator of reality television shows who has no empathy for any other human beings and treats their pain solely as fodder for better ratings. His wife, Keiko, is a limping heroin addict who brings in extra money by prostituting herself as a reluctant dominatrix but cannot stand up to her son, Takuya, who takes out the aggression that results from his being horribly bullied upon her by beating her with an assortment of implements he keeps in a special closet in his neurotically neat room. The fourth member of the clan is daughter Miki, a prostitute who, like her father, always has camera in hand to turn her trysts into a sort of reality show. In the opening scene, a chapter entitled "Have you ever done it with your father?" Kiyoshi is Miki's client; the whole thing is videotaped. The shocking, terrible incest that takes place is just a disappetizer that sets the tone for the rest of the film. Be warned, it gets harsher from here and by degrees more absurd than the tragic/comic interactions ensuing when daughter criticizes father's poor sexual performance. To say that this film isn't for everyone and that the squeamish will spend the better part of its run time averting their gaze from the screen might be an understatement.

Into this appalling morass descends Visitor Q, a destroying angel of mercy who insinuates himself into the picture by clubbing Kiyoshi over the head with a rock while he waits for a train and then again a bit later while he walks down the street. Visitor Q sets about both observing and destroying the Yamazakis, sometimes holding the camera as if creating his own show and sometimes provoking the action as every imaginable transgression is engaged in by the family itself. Kiyoshi decides to turn his son's beatings and general degredation by his bullies into a reality show in which he himself will play the father. As the bullies fire Roman candles through the windows of the Yamazaki house, Kiyoshi declares that he "doesn't know how to feel as a father," a partial truth. Kiyoshi feels nothing unless it's rage or shame as we learn in the scene where he rapes and murders his co-anchor when she expresses her loathing of him.

This, however, is only the ultimate transgression in a long list of depravities that includes a graphic depiction of Keiko's newfound pride in her ability to lactate in a demonstration of which she literally floods the family kitchen for the benefit of a bemused Visitor Q who sits watching while shielding himself with a little plastic umbrella. By this point, the family itself and the lives of all involved have been completely destroyed. This last horror is what ultimately saves them; salvation can only come when the self-debasement of these people is total, and this is what the mysterious Visitor makes happen. If we haven't figured this out by now, Takuya lets us know by expressing his gratitude for the devastation — while lying face-down in the pool of his mother's secretions, like a baby re-immersed in the womb.

Visitor Q is a powerful movie in many ways, and one that is going to repulse anyone who isn't every bit as psychopathic as is Kiyoshi. Thus, it is a trial to get through the film, particularly the horror-comedy of a scene of necrophilia gone terribly wrong that results in the dutiful Keiko having to assist her husband with a shot of heroin and a bath of vinegar to get him free of the corpse into which he has inserted himself (ahem). The themes of transgression and redemption ultimately unite in a final scene that itself partakes simultaneously of the two modes. Miki comes home after her own encounter with Visitor Q in which she is treated by the stranger in much the same way as he treated Kiyoshi, leaving her battered and scarred. In the end, though, every wound on every character is healed — both the psychic and the physical. The final scene is masterful; Miike brings together revulsion and peace in a manner I've never seen done before. In the end, he leaves the viewer as he found the viewer; conflicted and ambivalent. It is impossible to say by the end of this film whether the final scene is right or wrong; it is only necessary for the chaos to end.

Visitor Q is a great movie, but the ways in which it is great are often offensive in the extreme to those of us who are fortunate enough not to be Yamazakis. If one can feel empathy for other human beings then this film is challenging in the extreme. Nevertheless it is also an extremely rewarding film for those with a stomach strong enough to make it all the way through as Miike defies us to switch the film off. Love it or hate it, though, there has never been another film quite like Visitor Q. I don't like to use the clichéd word "extreme," but in this case it is truly warranted. In the end, Visitor Q must be experienced; it cannot be explained adequately in a few lines of text. Indeed, the questions it brings up and never fully answers will leave the astute viewer wondering about them for some time to come. This movie is messy, terrible and wonderful. It's 100% Miike without the slightest bit of self-censorship other than what I can only assume is a humorous device of always placing a little blurred circle over genitalia. After all, with its repertoire of incest, rape, murder, necrophilia and various shades of violence throughout, the graphic depiction of a penis would be tame stuff by comparison.

Visitor Q is Miike's dare to his audience. I recommend it highly, but first you must ask yourself how much you can take and then if you can take just a little bit more. This is a spiky jewel, indeed.

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Do Zombies Use Soap? Do Soaps Use Zombies? Graveyard Alive Has the Answer.

It's been awhile since I've written about any horror flicks in here, and with good reason. I've been through a long stretch of watching lousy to mediocre movies in the genre. There's so much boring, derivative junk out there that it's all too easy to trash any number of such movies or just yawn through the whole thing. Still, the presence of so many bad flicks makes it all the more fun when I do come across something clever to recommend. Graveyard Alive: A Zombie Nurse in Love is just such a movie.

The title is a bit misleading; there's no graveyard to be found anywhere in this film. Instead, what we get here is a flick about the undead that was written, directed and produced by women, and they've finally answered a question that has been puzzling us all for a very long time. That is, what if Night of the Living Dead had taken place on the set of General Hospital? It's a zombie soap, folks, and Elza Kephart and company make it work to produce something clever and distinct in the horror-comedy genre.

Shot in black-and-white, Graveyard Alive simultaneously evokes the feel of an old horror movie and early soap operas. There's melodrama throughout as plain, dull nurse Patsy Powers tries to recapture her high school sweetheart from calculating rival nurse Goodie, whose father runs the hospital at which they work, and land a promotion to head nurse, too. A woodsman is bitten by something and shows up at the hospital with an axe buried in his head — and an elevated libido due to the "mysterious bacteria" multiplying in his body as we learn from the book Zombies: A Modern Menace. The book is owned by Van Helsing-like Ukrainian surgeon-turned-janitor Kapotski who, being ever-vigilant against the zombie menace while swigging copious quantities of vodka, kills the woodsman-zombie in the only way possible; by stabbing him in the "third eye" with a solid silver knife. Not before Nurse Patsy and the woodsman almost have a tryst, though, which ends up with Patsy being bitten on the hand... and then the fun begins.

Becoming a zombie doesn't have to mean that a girl must give up on love, though. Patsy soon figures out that a little make-up and perfume will do wonders and, thanks to Kapotski's tome, that consuming enough human flesh wards off wrinkles and can really give a living dead girl that youthful, healthy glow that men can't resist. Before long, Patsy is transformed into a ravishing sex kitten that is the object of every man's rapt attention. A nip here, a chomp there, and before long there are plenty of zombies about. These aren't lumbering, vicious zombies, though. They generally seem to be having a pretty good time with unlife. Still Nurse Goodie isn't about to let Patsy get her claws back into Dr. Dox, and the story of their rivalry unfolds in tongue-in-cheek soap opera melodrama that culminates in a scene that pays homage to one of my personal favorite scenes from Night of the Living Dead — the one in which the little girl kills her mom in the basement with a trowel. Just watch for the swinging lightbulb.

Graveyard Alive was completed in 2003, but it took three years for it to find a distributor. It's may have bumped up against Shaun of the Dead in the process. After all, how much of a market was there for "zomromcoms" a few years ago? Still, Graveyard Alive is quite different from Shaun and, while not nearly as polished, doesn't really deserve to be compared to it.

I can't think of any other zombie horror-comedies created by women, and for that reason alone Graveyard Alive is worth watching for those who are looking for something a little different. All by itself, though, it's good fun and rather light on the gore as compared to a lot of what's out there. Sure, we get a scene with someone munching on the last bits of a human leg like it was an oversized turkey drumstick, and there is a stabbing or two and one somewhat graphic handling of an unidentified human organ, but that's about it. This isn't a bloodbath by any stretch. You won't be seeing anyone using their teeth to rip away chunks of flesh from a screaming victim in this one, though you will learn how an up-and-coming professional zombie woman keeps her teeth whiter-than-white.

This is one to track down and check out. You might well be glad that you did. Start by checking out the trailer for Graveyard Alive and the movie website.

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Research Plan Jumps the Next Hurdle

My embryonic research plan just got a second thumbs up, having cleared my committee. Aside from ways in which I can narrow my focus and save myself a bit of work, there are no major changes. I'm told there's enough in here for multiple dissertations; I'm only trying to get one, but I don't mind sharing if I wind up with an extra one laying about.

At the moment, I feel like a balloon with about half the air let out. My plan for the rest of the day is to go home and let the other half out with a couple of beers and a viewing of Meat for Satan's Icebox to be followed by the splitting of a pizza and an episode of Doctor Who. That should be enough to stop the wheels spinning in my head for a bit.

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The Day Ends Not So Gloriously

Today was a really nice day right up until the end. Lab even got done early. I walked back to my car at 8:00 PM sharp, opened the driver's side door and that's when I noticed the glass on the seat. The passenger-side window had been smashed and my $120 MP3 player stolen. Nothing else was taken (the thieves missed a much more valuable GPS unit). Typical smash-and-grab. My insurance covers the glass with no deductible and our renter's insurance will even pay for the lost MP3 player.

I had to file a police report, and I had to wait for an hour for the police to show up. So much for getting home early; lab usually ends at about 9:00, and that's when the cop arrived. He took the same information I had given when I called in the first place and essentially told me, yeah, my window is broken and the MP3 player is gone. I felt much better after he'd cleared that up for me.

I usually take my MP3 player with me when I park the car, but I was in a hurry tonight because I was running a little late. I forgot it. I'm mildly annoyed by the whole thing, moreso by the fact that I would much rather have been at home watching a horror flick than standing there for an hour. On the plus side, it's a warm night and it isn't raining. The glass repair people are going to come to my house tomorrow morning and everything will be taken care of in that regard.

While I was waiting, there were a bunch of male students hanging out on their porch having a barbecue and drinking beer. They had twangy country music blasting. What would an injury be if there were nobody around to add a little insult?

Oh well. It's not a big deal, but I suppose today was much to good of a day to get away with. There's nothing for it but to go ahead and watch Neon Maniacs as I'd been planning on doing all day. Life in the big city and all that.

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Zombie Jesus, The Movie

How did I not know about this until this morning? How could I not have seen it yet? Where can I get a copy?

For the love of Zombie Jesus, somebody tell me!

Yes, this is a real movie:

Mary Maynard has returned to town to mend the relationship with her devout priest father. But Zombie Jesus has his own plans for their reunion. Compelled by the horror of Christ, Mary teams up with the local jew, Isaac in a desperate crusade to save Mary’s father.

Netflix doesn't have it. I must find out from where I can get my own copy of Zombie Jesus!

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Shutter: Sometimes the Dead Should Just Stay Buried

Shutter is a movie that asks an important question — how many times can filmmakers try to remake The Ring before audiences get tired of seeing the same imagery and stop going to Asian-flavored horror flicks? And the answer is one time fewer than it took for Shutter to get made. This film is bad enough, derivative enough, and insulting to the intelligence of its audience enough that it could well become the stake driven through the heart of Samara-clones that finally keeps them pinned in their coffins where they belong.

Shutter features the black-and-white (much like Samara) ghost of a dishonored Japanese suicide named Megumi who may be the most boring, most prosaic revenant spirit ever to appear in a horror film. She has perfectly coiffed hair and wears a spotless floral print dress and isn't very scary at all. Just as The Ring's Samara could come crawling out of a television set, Megumi resides in photographs. In fact, one of the film's greatest weaknesses is a long-winded attempt at explaining spirit photography. One of the things that made The Ring interesting is that it didn't bore the audience with an explanation of how Samara came to reside in the airwaves; that much was left to the imagination. It was just the way things were. In Shutter, we get Seiko, a character whose sole purpose in the film is to act as a ham-handed plot device. She just so happens to have a boyfriend who publishes a magazine about spirit photography, you see, which provides the opportunity for the wife of haunting-target Benjamin Shaw to get a lecture on the subject. When Seiko announced that her boyfriend was an expert in the field at the screening I attended I heard several audience members — many of whom were teenagers, thanks to the film's PG-13 rating — laugh out loud. What a fortunate coincidence!

Megumi just isn't much of a threat to the world at large. In fact, she's arguably not even malicious. She wants revenge and, through the course of the film, takes it upon the three men who wronged her. She doesn't do that in very interesting ways, either. Two of the three men die in a most predictable manner. In the meanwhile, Megumi goes out of her way to warn Jane Shaw about husband Benjamin's true nature. She's not all bad, and in this context that makes her all the more unthreatening. Why should anyone be afraid of her? I don't think anyone in the audience was.

In a particularly intelligence-bruising moment of the film (one among several, but I'll stick to the most egregious), we learn that Megumi has been haunting Ben Shaw for a long time. In fact, she's been riding around on his shoulders. When he gets weighed at a doctor's office, in fact, he turns out to weigh more than 280 pounds. You would think he might have noticed this on his own. Wouldn't most anybody realize that they were carrying around an extra 100 pounds or so? Not this character. The audience groaned audibly when this fact was revealed. How stupid are we horror fans taken for, anyhow? I'm all for the suspension of disbelief, but it's up to the director of a film to provide the means for that to happen; he couldn't have just expected the audience to believe anything he wanted to throw at them, could he? It felt like he did, and it felt like it didn't work at all. Of course, since Megumi apparently has mass and can interact with physical objects, I see some excellent satire potential here. She must bump her head into a lot of door frames while riding on a man's shoulders, after all. I doubt that Shutter will ever find a place in popular conscience that would be rewarded with a mention in Scary Movie 12, though. Everything about it is much too forgettable, and I don't expect that most people will remember it after its inevitable two-week run in the cinemas.

With its contrived story, flat acting, attempts at shot-for-shot recreations of scenes from The Ring, unintelligent screenplay and predictable climax, Shutter may elicit one or two "Ewwwww gross" responses from younger audience member, but there's not a spine tingling moment in this one. It's far more product than it is film. If you must see it (and I can't think of one thing that makes this snorer a must-see film), wait until it comes out on DVD. It simply isn't worth the price of admission, not even for a matinee.

I usually include some images with my horror movie reviews, but none are available of the boring ghost from Shutter. Perhaps the directors realized how dull this one was. There is one photo at IMdB which I can't and won't bother trying to reproduce here. That's pretty much as scary as Megumi gets, though.

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The Slaughter: Lovecraftian Horror Comedy for Horror Hounds

I watched Jay Lee's Lovecraftian horror-comedy The Slaughter last night and I've got to tell you, I loved it. Admittedly, it's a little slow to get started after a tremendous opening sequence (my compliments to Lee on his cinematography and editing on it), but once it does it's a funny, gory and campy hommage to both H.P. Lovecraft and classic horror cinema in general. I recommend it highly for those who enjoyed The Evil Dead, Re-Animator and Return of the Living Dead series.

Arguably, Lee might love those flicks a bit too much (if that's possible) in ways that show up in his film. We do get one sequence in which a zombie utters lines straight out of Return of the Living Dead ("I can smell your brains!") as well as one decapitated head shot in which I expected to hear "Take the screwdriver out of the head!" but didn't. It was close, though. The Necronomicon shows up in The Slaughter in almost exactly the form it appeared in in The Evil Dead, bound in human skin and having what looked almost like a face on its cover.

Still, if it's not original stuff, it's good. We get a feminized version of Cthulhu (Cthulha, of course) played by the exotically beautiful Adriana Esquivel who starts off suitably hideous but winds up drop-dead gorgeous but no less menacing. Zak Kilberg plays irritating college anarchist Iggy with flawless comic timing that interlocks perfectly with Jessica Custodio's Dana in nearly every scene in which they appear together. In the best example of this, the two play a scene together in which they discuss what kind of zombies they're dealing with. Are they George Romero zombies or the new virus zombies? What's the difference? Can we just shoot them in the head? It's funny patter, but it's what any true horror fan would be wondering about in the same situation.

There's a high gore factor here with solid special effects, even if the ghostly hands rising up through the floor look a little cheesy once or twice. The make-up job on the zombies is convincing and Cthulha was done nearly perfectly — a couple of tentacles would have been nice, but we can't have everything and those teeth were plenty nasty on their own. For that matter, a Lovecraft-based flick without the presence of Jeffrey Combs doesn't seem quite right, somehow, but Brad Milne is still good in the role I think must have been written with Combs in mind. He even looks enough like Combs that the absence of the great Lovecraftian actor isn't a handicap for The Slaughter

Despite it's misleadingly generic title, The Slaughter is great horror fun that has just about everything a horror hound could ask for. If you've not seen it yet, find it. This is top-notch stuff. Jay Lee has just wrapped shooting on his latest flick, Zombie Strippers, which just got released this week in Norway. It's getting a theatrical release in the US on April 18 and stars much of the cast that was in The Slaughter. I'm so there!

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Blog of the Disappointed Dead: New George Romero Film Not Playing in Worcester

George Romero latest film, Diary of the Dead, is playing. It sounds terrific. He's gone back to relatively low-budget, "guerilla" film-making, apparently. The review in the San Francisco Chronicle has some very good things to say about it, certainly. The little man in the chair is applauding for this one. I don't generally trust film critics when it comes to horror movies, but I find myself in agreement with Peter Hartlaub more often than most. Of course, I've been a huge fan of Romero's zombie flicks almost since birth. With the possible exception of the more-shaky-than-most Day of the Dead, every one of the Living Dead movies is a classic in my list of horror greats.

Now, here's a little bit of what Hartlaub has to say about Diary of the Dead:

Others try to imitate George A. Romero, but only the original master of zombie horror would think this one up: On the run from the latest zombie takeover, and in serious need of some firepower, the young film students at the center of "Diary of the Dead" find refuge on a farm ... belonging to an old bearded Amish dude. Want to guess how long it takes before his principles of nonviolence go out the window?

..."Diary of the Dead" begins with a handful of filmmaking students in the woods, shooting a bad mummy picture. They're crabby and cold and entirely too serious about their work. When the dead start walking the earth and their lives become a real monster movie, group leader Jason (Josh Close) follows the approach of any modern-day hack filmmaker - he tries to become a YouTube star by documenting the carnage...

...this is still a thinking man's exploitation film. Romero has something to say about media consumption in the 21st century, and the priority that some people will put into their second life - even while the first one is about to become an appetizer...

The birthday party zombie clown scene is a classic...

When there's no more room in hell, this film will contain profanity, gunplay, relentless gore, scythe-related violence and a homicidal face-eating clown.

What more could a horror-hound want out of a George Romero undead flick? Zombies eating the Amish, a revenant birthday clown and social commentary about internet-based instant celebrity? Ohmigod, where can I see this flick right now?!

Oh, look... it's not playing in Worcester! I'd have to go to Boston. Why isn't it playing in Worcester, dammit? This isn't fair. This is a tease. Where are the zombies in Worcester that aren't enrolled in my lab section (want to make instant zombies? Start talking about the biochemistry of photosynthesis to a bunch of freshmen.)?

I've worked hard all week. I spent four hours grading yesterday. I wrote a seven-page exam. I deserve undead, face-eating birthday clowns. Apparently, when there's no more room in Hell, the dead will stalk the cinema — but not in Central Massachusetts. Grrrr.

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Blood Car: Driving Costs an Arm and a Leg. And a Head. And a Torso.

Imagine a world in which the price of gas has gone through the roof and only the wealthy can afford to drive. Oh, yeah, that's the way things are already. OK, imagine a world where the price of gas has topped $30 a gallon and only Bill Gates and Warren Buffet can afford to drive. Now we're talking. Welcome to the world of Blood Car, two weeks into the future.

In this world lives a vegan kindergarten teacher named Archie Andrews. Archie was trying to invent an engine that would run on wheatgrass but accidentally discovers that it runs only on blood. Not just animal blood, either, as we learn after a few puppies get shot with a BB gun. No, only human blood will do. Throw into the mix a nasty, hookerish anti-heroine who sells meat at a meat stand (lemonade wasn't paying the bills, I guess) who is willing to do anything to ride in a car again. It's inevitable that the gentle schoolteacher will turn into a psychopath who throws strangers into his trunk in order to fuel his automobile from hell.

But wouldn't the government want this blood-fuel technology? Of course! They don't want it just so that everyone can drive to church on Sunday after tossing a little old lady from Pasadena into their trunk, though. They want to build blood tanks and blood fighter planes. In order to get their hands on Archie and his marvelous hemoglobin Hummer, they're perfectly willing to toss one another onto the whirling blades that extract fuel for the Little Engine That Could Kill You. In one of the flick's funniest scenes, a government agent attempts to explain to Archie why it's his patriotic duty to turn over the Blood Car to the government. Imagine Dubya making a speech after downing a six-pack and a half pound of 'shrooms and you'll get some idea of the content of the agent's speech.

Blood Car is a whacked-out first effort video threat that works and works well most of the time. It's got a punk attitude and a sick sense of humor that shine through almost constantly. It's a first effort from director Alex Orr, so it can be forgiven for some of the amateurish acting — which, in this case, also works much of the time. There are a couple of glaring continuity errors; Archie opens an artery and sticks a plastic tube into his arm in one scene only to appear in the very next without a scratch on him. Still, there's enough to this movie otherwise that I was willing to overlook the shortcomings and just enjoy the thing.

There's a lot of blood in this movie. If you didn't expect that a movie called Blood Car was going to involve gallons of blood being liberally sprayed about in at least every other scene, I feel sorry for you. Blood Car. The car runs on blood. Get it yet? Excellent. There's an axe to the sternum in one scene and in another the trunk is left open as victim gets turned into Premium. There's also sex, most of which is comical but (warning to the squeamish here!) we do get one quick shot involving urine. If you're worried about going to hell because you've seen Blood Car, you probably shouldn't watch it. Then again, you've probably stopped reading by now, anyhow. Screw you. Who needs you?

Beneath all the blood and sight gags, Blood Car is also a commentary about America's love of its autos and the ridiculous lengths to which we'll go to be able to drive them. It takes consumer culture that one step further: there is the consumer and there is the consumed. You can be the driver or else you can be fuel for that which is driven. There is no price too great to keep our cars running, whether it's the invasion of some oil-producing nation after trumping up stories about weapons of mass destruction or tossing that third cousin you don't particularly care for into the "gas tank."

Blood Car winds up generating at least one potentially iconic image toward the end as a government agent holds a gun to the head of a kindergarten-aged girl as the way is paved for a technology transfer. The people who made this flick seem to have something to say about the oil-based economy and they do it with humor but they're not pulling any punches either.

For all of its flaws, Blood Car is worth a look. It's horror-comedy with a hook. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll get a tune-up. Check it out.

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Dead Clowns: Cinematic Pie in the Face

Real horror hounds know that there is a taxonomy of horror flicks, and one of the subgenres is the "evil clown" movie. The vast number species in the taxon have low overall fitness, but it still exists based largely on the one or two better movies in the group — particularly the cult classic Killer Klowns from Outer Space, a bizarre and creative specimen that played for laughs. And that's the thing; if you're making a movie about evil clowns, especially a low-budget one, there must be a sense of humor at work somewhere in the mix.

Enter Steve Sessions' Dead Clowns. It's an exceptionally straight-forward story. In 1954, a train car full of clown crashes off a bridge and gets buried in silt at the bottom of a bay. Years later, a hurricane comes along and, for some reason, the zombie-clowns attack a nearby town in revenge for their failure to convict a tugboat skipper who damaged the bridge and caused the crash. We learn this in the first fifteen or so minutes; the rest of the movie is shot after shot of zombie clowns eating people. Of 95 minutes, a good 70 are nothing but these shots; the rest is stock footage of hurricanes.

In fact, there's not even any dialog the first part of the movie. People don't even scream when being eaten by the dead clowns. Instead, we get amplified munching noises. We can hear the clowns chewing, and that, the sound of wind, and calliope music are nearly the entire soundtrack of Dead Clowns.

There is no lighting in this film. I understand the constraints posed by a low budget, but if the budget is so low that it can't accommodate any lights at all, just don't make the movie. Video is a visual medium, after all, and you lose everything when the viewer can't see what's going on. More than half of Dead Clowns is so dark that by the time the viewer has squinted and strained to figure out what the image on the screen is, the scene has changed to something else that can't quite be made out. There may be a practical reason for this, however. The effects makeup seems to consist of two stiff rubber zombie masks that appear over and over. By not lighting the scenes, the viewer is partly prevented from seeing this fact for himself. The director uses the same couple of masks over and over again in conjunction with a variety of brightly-colored clown costumes to attempt creating the appearance of numerous ghouls. That brings up another problem, though — either the costumes were rented or else purchased and returned. Either way, they're kept spotless throughout the movie. Here we have these dead clowns who have arisen from a silt tomb at the bottom of a body of water and are wandering through a hurricane and they manage to never get wet, let alone muddy. When we see a clown costume, it looks like it has been freshly removed from a plastic package. The creases in the clothing are perfect. It doesn't work; these Dead Clowns might just have been out and about for an evening's trick-or-treating.

So the flick plods along through scene after scene of a zombie clown with one of two faces eating various parts of victims about whom we know nothing, with the exception of seminal scream queen Brinke Stevens' character, Lillian, who dies with an unceremonious whack of a hammer early in the movie. It all seems pretty random, making for something more like footage than it does a movie. After 90 minutes of this, the movie simply ends. The zombie clowns aren't defeated. In fact, hardly anyone even puts up a fight. People get eaten and then the movie is over and the credits start rolling.

There's no humor at all. There's no plot. There's nothing but cheap-looking masks and plodding oversized clown shoes and some poor gore spewing from characters who can barely be bothered to whimper as they're being chewed upon in the shadows, and then it's all over.

Take my advice on this one; if someone gives you a copy of the Dead Clowns DVD, use it as a coaster. It will do better preventing stains on your furniture than it does as entertainment.

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Of Zombies, Time Lords and Extra-Dimensional Spaces

The season premiers of Doctor Who and Torchwood air on BBC America tonight, a prospect about which LL and I are quite excited. Watching those shows has been our Saturday night ritual for some time. While they've been in repeats since late last year, we've been filling in the time by renting DVDs of the old Doctor Who series so LL can get caught up a bit (last night, in fact, was The Ribos Operation serial with Tom Baker as The Doctor). LL particularly likes K9 and wants to get one.

If one did come by a K9, would Massachusetts law require that it be licensed as a dog or as a motor vehicle? Hmmm...

I'm also looking forward to receiving a bad horror flick called Vampires vs. Zombies. I'm not sure what it's about, but I'll figure it out once the flick starts. That came up in the conversation LL and I were having over morning coffee:

Me: We should be getting Vampires vs. Zombies from Netflix soon. It sounds hilarious.
LL: If zombies and vampires were the only creatures left on earth, they'd both die out.
Me: I think the zombies would survive. The vampires could suck their blood all they liked, but you can only kill a zombie by shooting it in the head.
LL: True. There's probably no blood in a zombie anyhow.
Me: Then again, I guess the vampires wouldn't die. The zombies wouldn't burn them or drive stakes through their hearts.
LL: But if their bodies were in pieces...
Me: The parts would eventually get back together again. Zombies don't have a metabolism, so they can't digest things.
LL: That would take a long time, though.
Me: Well, that would depend on how much the zombies ate. It's got to come back out somehow eventually...
LL: Yuck.
Me: Stuff has to get pushed out when the zombie fills up. The inside of a zombie isn't like a tardis or an extra-dimensional space...
LL: spews coffee onto table, laughing

Welcome to mornings around the O'Risal household. Yes, I think we both qualify as geeks... but LL is worse than me! I may have Vampires vs. Zombies queued but she's got a documentary about fonts on her list. When did a font ever eat someone's brain?

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