Oh my. Most of my buddies on Facebook lean leftwards and I am anticipating an explosion of liberal rage come Tuesday evening. They can’t seem to shut up talking about Christine O’Donnell, or whoever the right-wing boogeyman of the moment happens to be, while completely ignoring the main gripe of over-reaching government that is going to swing this election. I will try to document the “gosh, Americans are stupid” and “Somehow this is still Bush’s fault” nonsense and publish it here. If the Democrats pull off a miracle and keep the house, I will be knee deep in standard liberal gloat. Either way, should be fun.
My Halloween movie fest continued last night with a re-watching of Mother of Tears, the third film in the Three Mothers trilogy. When I first watched the film I pondered if it would get better on rewatching. Nope. It was actually more painful on the second viewing. What a rambling mess of a film with awful acting and dialogue all around. No screengrabs for this film. It doesn’t deserve that level of respect.
My Halloween movie fun-run continues with Mario Bava’s Kill Baby, Kill. Not really his finest work, but it is memorable for the scenes of the ghostly child at the windows.
This is a very creepy still, but, in the context of the movie, it doesn’t come off as eerie as it could. I’m probably the 9000th person to post this screenshot on the Web, but any Kill Baby, Killpost must include it.
The film is filled with more great compositions such as this one in which a young girl is compelled to impale herself with a sconce.
Italians sure do love their spiral staircases. As a note to budding architects who work in cities with high counts of maniacs and vindictive ghosts: a simple straight flight of stairs is probably a bit better in emergency situations. Oh, and avoid the metaphysical endless room loops.
The first full-length record from Martin Atkins all-star review. Very drum centric as one would expect—on many of the tracks it seems like drums and vocals are about all they could muster. This band is, almost by definition, self-indulgent and quality is a bit of a crap shoot. Sometimes they are great, often times they are an audio endurance test.
My plans to watch a bunch of horror movies in the run-up to Halloween have not been going to well. I did manage to re-watch Dario Argento’s Inferno the other day. I have always considered this to be one of Argento’s weaker films of this era, but the more I watch it, the more I like it. It has much of the wonderful colored lighting, expressionist sets and dynamic compositions that made Suspiria so great. Also, despite the flawed and incoherent plot, there are plenty of memorable scenes.
For some reason I especially like this scene where our hero, Mark, gets bewitched during his musicology class by The Mother of Tears…
This is only a brief cameo from the third mother, but it’s very effective. Too bad the actual movie about her, Mother of Tears, was so mediocre. They should have just looped this scene for 90 minutes and released it as a feature.
Inferno takes it its time in getting to the main villain, Mater Tenebrarum, but the scene in which she reveals her true identity is one of my favorites in Argento’s entire body of work…
Mark, don’t be lured into her fiery trap!
Without giving away the surprise, the shot above is so, so well done. Apparently, this is some of Mario Bava’s special effects handiwork. Good stuff. I encourage anyone who appreciates films simply for their beauty to check this film out.
Another old sci-fi novel by Heinlein that cares more about the concept than the story. Even at 120 some pages, it still felt too long. I guess fans of “hard” science fiction may appreciate the constant hammering of the main concept of a spaceship as the known universe to its inhabitants, but it gets old fast.
After years of releasing full-length surf records sprinkled with a few jokes and some schtick, The Phantom Surfers finally made a joke album sprinkled with a little surf music! The disc is filled with skits and guest appearanes by various filth luminaries like Rudy Ray Moore, Blowfly and post-Raw Neil Hamburger. The premise here is to be as dirty as possible and, to this end, the band succeeds wonderfully on tracks like “The Golden Turd” and “The Phantom Surfer’s Alphabet.” All records, CDs and daytime dramas should strive to be the XXX Party.
This is a surprisingly straightforward Phantom Surfers record. The premise behind this record is that it is with Dick Dale. That is half true. They include two actual 50s pre-surf music Dick Dale songs: “We’ll Never Hear the End of It” and “Fairest of Them All.” Both of these are pretty terrible and Dick Dale was none-to-pleased with their inclusion.
Dead Space Extraction is yet another “on-rails” Wii shooter game. The Wii, with its pointer controls, is the perfect platform for these kinds of games. House of the Dead: Overkill is probably the best in this genre and, coming from that arcade-tastic game to this, Extraction will take a bit of getting used to. For one thing, the controls don’t quite work with the Wii zapper as it was meant to be used. In addition to your basic shooting and changing weapons, you can use a beam to grab power-ups and items. That means you’ll need to get to those buttons on top of the Wiimote during the frantic firefights. Also, there’s a bit too much spaztic controller waggling for my tastes. However, in lieu of a point-based arcade game, you get a pretty engaging story-based game with lot of dialogue and character development and, when you are finally allowed to shoot stuff, the shooting mechanics are pretty solid.
This weekend the family dragged me to a scarecrow building contest. This is a contest intended to allow kids to be creative and show off their stuff as budding young artists. Of course, my wife decided it would be a great opportunity to kick some underaged-art-noob butt. Pictured here is her winning entry in the category “most likely to scare a crow.”
