But it ends with a quick grab and, a backwards flop, and then a fistful of gore flying through the air:

Here it is in case you missed it:

I also re-watched Four Flies on Grey Velvet. This is another Argento film that gets better with every viewing (I gave it a 7 when I first saw it). The plot is full of holes and has a vital clue that relies on such phony, crap science that it’s hard to suspend disbelief at all. But this is another Argento that is filled with humor, stunning visuals and another great, experimental Morricone score. So, if I were to rank Argento films this is how I would do it:

1. Suspiria
2. Deep Red
3. The Bird With the Crystal Plumage
4. Inferno
5. Tenebre
6. Four Flies on Grey Velvet
7. Opera
8. Phenomena
9. Cat o’ Nine Tails
10. The Stendahl Syndrome
11. Jennifer (from Masters of Horror)

Beyond these there’s just a bunch of forgettable garbage.

Speaking of which, this evening I completed Zombi 2 which I gave a rather terse review some time ago. I forgot just how creepy the zombies are in that film. It’s very bleak and dread-filled and has some really gross and disturbing effects. Modern zombie films (even The Walking Dead) don’t seem to understand that it’s this sense of supernatural dread and hopelessness that makes the zombie apocalypse so frightening. Sure there is also a ton of cheese (um, shark vs. zombie) but this is still one of the best films in this overcrowded genre.

I also watched The Bird with the Crystal Plumage again. This is more a thriller than a horror film and it’s one of Dario Argento’s best. Stunning visuals, lots of tension and, at times, a genuine sense of humor that disappeared from Argento’s later films. Oh, and it has one of Ennio Morricone’s best scores.

Luigi Cozzi’s Hercules is one of the greatest movies ever made about bear punching. Part of what really sells the bear punching in this film is the pure rage depicted in the facial expressions of the movie’s star, Lou Ferrigno. In order to demonstrate this, I have compiled some best stills from the movie for your browsing enjoyment. Note the vein-popping fury shown here as Mr. Ferrigno enters his fugue state of uncontrollable ferocity.

Fully enraged, let the bear punching begin! 

There’s only one place for the likes of you… SPACE!!!

Raaarrrrr! Die erector set monster! DIE!

Chariots of the gods? Hell no! Chariots of throbbing rage!

I am Hercules, son of Zues.Taste my FURY!!!

I will crush your puny minons and feast on their souls!!

My back may be against a wall, but your false gods will wither before my screams!

Arrrgh! By the gods, my wrist is aflame!

The weak shall perish!

Something, something FURY!!!! Expect a glossy coffee table book soon.

Movies

Like last year, there really wasn’t anything that truly amazed me this year. My best rated films were Moon and The Maltese Falcon. I watched more T.V. than I have in recent years, so I suppose I could add Lost, V or The Walking Dead as honorable mentions.

Books

Towards the second half of the year I started reading a bit more than usual and found several books truly grabbed me in ways that no movie or show did this year. If I had to pick a favorite from this year it would be George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, especially if considered along side the three other books in the series that I also read and loved. At a near-tie for the number one spot is Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind, which started my on my current fantasy lit kick. Finally, rounding out the top was Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem. Honorable mentions would go to Mistborn books 1 & 2, Devil Born Without Horns and Racing the Beam.

Video Games

I played a ton of games this year. My highest rated game was House of the Dead: Overkill for the Wii. It was stupid, crude, violent and hilarious… loved it. My runners-up would be Mass Effect and Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Mass Effect further proves that the best science fiction is in video games these days, and Zelda is Zelda… ’nuff said. I am still mid-game in GTA IV and Metroid Prime Trilogy but I suspect those two titles would have made this year’s list too had I completed them in time. I also played a few casual games I liked such as Puzzle Quest and Plants vs. Zombies.

Steam just finished their massive annual game sale and I stocked up so there should be no shortage of gaming for me in the next year and beyond.

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.

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.

What you see pictured here is some of the DVD packaging for the independently produced documentary film about text adventure games, Get Lamp. In the digital age, packaging matters and the creators of Get Lamp went above and beyond in creating a DVD package that satisfies collectable object fetishists like myself. The inner gatefold sleeve is covered with a nostalgic fantasy illustration that looks like it came straight off of an Atari 2600 cartridge. The DVD also came with a fancy numbered and editioned coin (mine’s number 1540), which would seem kind of cheesy (alá the tin coin that came Ultima V) but is actually very well crafted and, dare-I-say cool. All this comes together in a well made cardboard DVD case that alone almost justifies the $40+ dollar price tag. Thankfully, the film is very good and, as one might expect, the discs contain the usual DVD extras, featurettes and bonus footage. As an added reward, you also get a nice selection of actual, playable games on the DVD -ROM partition of the disc. If you have any interest in text adventures, video games and computing history, you should check this out! More on the film itself later.

Last night I attended the Chicago premiere of James Nguyen’s Birdemic: Shock and Terror and got to shake hands and chat with the director (pictured above… he’s the one with the menacing claws). Birdemic is a movie that has to be seen to be believed. It’s an ultra-no-budget “romantic thriller” filled with tons of cheap digital bird effects, brain piercing eagle screeches, scenes of driving, hilarious dialogue, more driving and lots of, how shall we say, “creative” film editing choices.

Okay, it’s a bad, bad movie. But, I can’t deny that it is incredibly fun to watch—especially with a rowdy midnight movie audience. Much of the film’s charm is the sincerity and enthusiasm of its director, James Nguyen. He seems to be loving the attention he is getting, and, despite the howls of unintentional laughter, Nguyen has the guts to stick to his guns regarding his seriousness his film and its mangled message. I highly encourage everyone to check this film out while it is still in theaters and bring as many friends as you can!

Leave it to Generation-Y2K to take something that was once cool, convert it into a stupid Internet meme, and ruin it for everyone. They are doing it to zombies just like they did it to Rick Astley, bacon and pirates. Well, pirates were never cool, and that whole “talk like a pirate day” crap was never even mildly funny, but you get where I am coming from. It’s been thirty-plus years since George Romero defined the zombie genre in film with Night of the Living Dead and what do we have? People dressing up in rags and pancake makeup and running 4K zombie fun runs, zombie themed weddings, zombie themed cakes, zombie themed wedding cakes, zombies in cereal commercials, Hello Kitty zombies, hip blocky “designer” zombie toy figurines, and don’t get me started on the reams of spiral notebook paper dedicated to inane ‘tude rife b-boy style art:

Without even having to resort to a Google search, you can bet some jackasses are busy making preparations for a rival “Talk like a zombie day.”

Okay, I guess I’m glad that there are people out there being creative in showing their love for the zombie, but, as a result of all this pop culture saturation, people are losing sight of what was so great about zombies of the past. Compare the crappy illustrations above with this awesome clip from the third-rate Italian zombie movie, Burial Ground:

The makeup is cheap but effective. No CGI. Just a couple of lumps of clay, some maggots and old burlap convey a sense of stinking death, decay and supernatural dread that is mostly absent in modern takes on the genre. Modern filmmakers are always trying to give us a rational explaination behind the existence of the zombies—it’s a highly contagious virus that makes everyone super aggressive  (Zombieland and 28 Days Later). I’m sorry, but if that monster isn’t a reanimated corpse and just some dude with a really bad 24-hour flu, it’s not a zombie. Personally, I have always thought that Fulci’s notion that the zombies are the result of a more biblical apocalypse worked best. Woe be on to him who opens one of the seven doorways to Hell! I miss those iconic images of a rotted corpse digging itself out of the ground for no good reason at all. I gather that the real purpose for all these contemporary “zombies” being extreme cold-sufferers is that the producers need to have fast-moving zombies. Zombies lurch, stagger, scratch and crawl. They don’t run! Their power comes from their numbers and not their totally rad parkour skillz.  And since when were zombies all about brain-eating? It was a cute joke in Return of the Living Dead, but I thought zombies weren’t that particular about what cut of meat they ate. Okay, now I’m just making myself so upset that I am forgetting to add paragraph breaks…

Ah, that’s better. I should just chill and watch a little Burial Ground: Nights of Terror. It’ll relax me.

Here’s the mighty Dolph Lungren from the movie Showdown in Little Tokyo. I highly recommend it for lovers of bad movies. This movie just reaks of super-awesome-tude. In the above scene, Dolph looks like he is doing a little stand-up at the Improv. He is, in fact, getting connected with his Japanese cultural roots by dressing like a Karateman and then machine gunning pony-tailed Yakuzas who wear double-breasted suits.

Best Book

• Flying Colours by C. S. Forester – I’d ran out of Aubry/Maturin Napoleonic era novels so I guess Hornblower had to suffice for this year. This series has its highs and lows, and never quite matches O’Brian, but this book in particular was very good.
• Honorable Mention: Twisty Little Passages – An Approach to Interactive Fiction by Nick Montfort – This one is probably a bit too nerdy for the average reader, but I really enjoyed this academic analysis of text adventures.

Best Movies

• The Dark Knight – Really? This is the best film I saw this year?!
• Sukiaki Western Django – At least this one had some indie cred to it.

I guess it was a pretty lame film year for me. I have a pretty big back list of films yet-to-see, so hopefully 2010 will fare better.

Best Video Games

• Braid was my highest ranked game this year.  A wonderfully inventive platform game.
• I also have a couple of honorable mentions in this category as well: Fallout 3 and Mirror’s Edge were both incredible games.

All of these games were bought using Valve’s Steam download service, and all were very cheap! PC rules!