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Saturday, September 09, 2006 ( 9/09/2006 02:09:00 PM ) Bill S. WEEKEND BARREL PIC – It's a busy weekend, but that won't stop me from posting a second Kyan barrel pic:  THE USUAL NOTE: If you wanna see more dogg blogging, check out the weekly "Carnival of the Dogs" at Mickey's Musings. And for a broader array of companion animals, there's Modulator's "Friday Ark." # | Friday, September 08, 2006 ( 9/08/2006 12:58:00 PM ) Bill S. W & W – From newly discovered blog, The Horn Section: a consideration of Wheeler & Woolsey's Diplomaniacs that's posted under the ongoing blog title, "Why The Hell Isn't This on DVD?" Haven't yet seen this 'un, but it sounds like I've been missing a choice bit of Thirties Pre-Code Comedy. (Thanks, Aaron, for pointing it out!) # | ( 9/08/2006 09:40:00 AM ) Bill S. THE FIFTEEN-MINUTE COMIC – Best of Jellyfish is playin' on the Sony boom box; a small pile of mainstream comics are waitin' to be reviewed, the dogs are sittin' in the study with leather chew rolls in their maws; I'm runnin' out of apostrophes – so let's just haul out some snapshot reviews:
Thursday, September 07, 2006 ( 9/07/2006 03:39:00 PM ) Bill S. "THE WORLD IS NOT BEAUTIFUL; THEREFORE, IT IS." – Me, I've gotta wonder what Tokyopop is specifically talking about when they refer to "the beauty in life's imperfections," but this contest over at ADD's blog for what looks to be T-Pop’s new line of teen fantasy novels is worth noting . . . # | ( 9/07/2006 02:34:00 PM ) Bill S. "SUMMER IT'S GONE, AND I DON'T KNOW" – Time was summertime used to be the suckiest season for teevee viewers. But ever since teevee execs realized that plenty of us lazyass Americans didn't want to leave the house at night even when it's still light outside (Man, I've already taken off my shoes! And, besides, there are mosquitoes with West Nile out there!), that dire situation has happily changed. With new packages of original programming popping up to fill the basic cable dog days, there plenty of stuff equal to (and some cases, superior to) the fare offering during the prime television season. In many cases, the compact nature of the summer bloc (12-13 eps to the traditional 22) works to these show's benefit: less filler, more great taste. And now that summer has unofficially passed with the Labor Day Weekend, let's consider five series that I found indispensable this year.
Summer also had its share of total suckiness, of course, but I tried to steer clear of it, focusing on House and The Wire reruns when the going got really bad. I honestly wanted to like ABC Family's Three Moons Over Milford – we could do with a decent whimsical small-town dramedy, I thought – but the show's writing and acting proved so far from convincing, it was like watching the community theater troupe from Waiting for Guffman put on their own syndicated series. Caught five minutes of Sci-Fi's Who Wants to Be A Superhero while recording the 11:05 showing of Eureka one night – and found just that small dose excruciating. Has any man pissed on his legacy as thoroughly as Stan Lee? Watching "The Man" ask the self-titled Fat Mama if her plus-sized self made an appropriate role model for the kids, I could only sigh and think back to Tracy Turnblad's Council interview in the movie Hairspray, where a variation on the same question was put in the mouth of Amber Van Tussle, the movie's spoiled brat teenaged bitch. Just damn sad, sez I, sadder than the end of summer . . . # | ( 9/07/2006 04:40:00 AM ) Bill S. NETWORK PRACTICES – While I don't consider it kosher to comment on a telemovie that I haven't seen (and don't really plan on watching, for that matter), I do find it telling that ABC – after letting a bunch of conservapundits into an advanced screening of The Path to 9/11 – refused to offer the same courtesy to Bill Clinton or any other Clinton Administration officials who are reportedly targeted in the flick. # | ( 9/07/2006 04:14:00 AM ) Bill S. A DONATION PLEA – Though everybody else in the comics blogosphere has already written about it, I figured it can't hurt to add mention of comic artist Lea Hernandez's devastating house fire here. Donations through PayPal (to divalea@gmail.com) to help Lea and her family get through this have been set up, while Lea herself has written about the aftershock on her LiveJournal blog, Dangerous Beauty. And, while you're thinking about it, why not do a double-check on your smoke detector batteries? # | Wednesday, September 06, 2006 ( 9/06/2006 02:38:00 PM ) Bill S. BOTTOMS UP – A question from last night's season premiere: okay, we accepted young Matt's temporary(?) conversion into a skin-headed gay basher in last season's nip/tuck, but isn't Christian Troy a little bit old to start in with the adolescent homosexual panic? (I liked how writer/director Ryan Murphy messed w./ the character's long-established positional preference, though. . .) # | ( 9/06/2006 07:27:00 AM ) Bill S. ONE LESS ANIMAL ON THE PLANET – I'm mainly with Sean when it comes to considering the cut-short life and works of "Croc Hunter" Steve Irwin – though I personally found his Animal Planet show and persona quickly grew wearisome. If a good chunk of his teevee shtick was nothing more than an updating of the big top putting-yer-head-in-a-lion's-mouth act, he surrounded it with enough edumacation to make the sugar go down. Wonder which cable net'll first be showing that goofy movie of his? # | Tuesday, September 05, 2006 ( 9/05/2006 01:51:00 PM ) Bill S. "BUT YOU'RE NOT EVEN SURE WHAT IT IS" – To go alongside the recent release of Modern Times, here's a YouTube vid from Have Mercy's deservedly best-known track: # | ( 9/05/2006 11:55:00 AM ) Bill S. TUMBLIN' & ROLLIN' – Though I've very much enjoyed the two Bob Dylan studio releases that preceded his newest, Modern Times, neither one of 'em really managed to grab me by the ears and shout, "Pay attention, Bub!" the way my favorite Dylan elpees did. Yet listening to his latest disc, I found myself getting pulled into the music in a way I haven't been since – oh, Blood on the Tracks, maybe? Stylistically, it doesn't sound much different from Time Out of Mind or Love And Theft: our man's still singing his blend of country blues, old-styled r-&-r and Tin Pan Alley in the leisurely croak he's adopted in his later years, while his band largely stays dutifully behind him. The secret lies in the words – of which there are once more many – which Dylan slings onto his basic musical constructions with dogged faith in his audience's willingness to follow 'em wherever they might circuitously lead. Results: a freakin' great Dylan album! # | Monday, September 04, 2006 ( 9/04/2006 08:16:00 AM ) Bill S. SIXTY MINUTE MANGA – (This Month's Episode: School is in.)  Blame Jog (of the Blog fame) for this 'un. It was his review that sparked my interest in Kazuo Umezu's The Drifting Classroom (Viz Signature), a "Mature" horror manga originally (as the helpful selected bibliography tells us in the back of the book) run in 1972-4. Like Tokyopop's Dragon Head, Umezu's series tells the story of a group of schoolchildren who suddenly and inexplicably find themselves trapped in a space far from home. But while Mochizuki's Dragon Head works hard at deliberately conveying a believable sense of doom and dread, Classroom bounds into energetic outlandish melodrama. This difference in approach is suited to the ages of each series' leads: where the hero of Dragon is a teenager, Umezu's Sho is a somewhat hyperactive sixth grader. But my suspicion, based on just one volume of this series, is that Umezu is by nature a much louder cartoonist than Mochizuki.The first book opens with a series of boisterous arguments between our hero Sho Takamatsu and his overly serious mother: Sho rushes off to school with the fight (in part spurred by the fact that his mother has tossed away a drawer full of childish toys) unresolved. "If it weren't for what happened next," Sho tells us in narration, "the whole fight would have been quickly forgotten . . . just another part of our daily lives." But, instead, catastrophe strikes. With a large sonic boom, the entire Yamoto Elementary School grounds disappear, leaving nothing but a large gaping hole. (We're shown this from the perspective of one of Sho's schoolmates, who is late for class.) Sho, the rest of the student body and their teachers have likewise disappeared with the school, gone to who-knows-where, an object lesson in why you should never leave your loved ones on a harsh note. Yamoto Elementary has, mysteriously, shifted to a dark and desolate alien landscape. Cut off from family and the rest of the outside world, Sho and his classmates are on the verge of panicking. Their adult teachers don't seem to be faring much better, struggling to maintain order over a group of children that run the gamut from first through sixth grade. In one memorable moment, a teacher grabs his own son and cuts him on the arm with a piece of broken glass in order to shock a group of freaked-out kids into calming down. When once the lines 'tween teacher and student were more routinely friendly and forgiving (just before the catastrophe, we see the sixth grade teacher excuse those students who didn't bring their lunch money to class), the school setting has immediately become more polarized. To make matters worse, our unwilling castaways seem to be stranded inside the school: when one of the students makes a dash across the foreboding landscape, he collapses just out of sight and doesn't appear to get up. There's only a limited amount of food since lunches are delivered daily, and Sho – who raced to school after an unresolved fight with his mother, remember – didn't even have breakfast. Desperate to reach his mom, he attempts to reach her by phone (a thought that doesn't appear to have occurred to any of the adults yet); he runrunruns to the teacher's lounge but to no avail since the phones are out of order. To keep the rest of the school from panicking, Sho's teacher convinces him to act as if he was able to get through to his mother. But the rest of his classmates don't buy it, in part because reluctant liar Sho does such a poor job lying. In this you can see the seeds of a conflict between students and teachers already brewing: the adults are willing to say and do anything to maintain even the semblance of order – even if it doesn't really help the situation – even if it's at the expense of one or more of their charges. While the American publication is rated for a "Mature" audience, Umezu's art is beautifully keyed into capturing a pre-teen point-of-view. Though relatively realistic in his figures, cartoonish expressions and physical movements are largely the order of the day. Even during the violent moments (and there are several of 'em), I found myself thinking of the sardonic horror art of Jack Davis & Johnny Craig. (There's a two-page panel of the school principal holding his bleeding head that looks like it could've been a cover to The Vault of Horror.) Just the sort of comics that a sixth grader like Sho would've dug, I bet . . . A promising horror series, methinks: between this and Monster, Viz's older readers Signature series looks to be one to watch . . . NOTE: This entry was originally supposed to be about Atsushi Kaneko's Bambi And Her Pink Gun, but as I note down below, that ultra-vi comic hitgirl series has reportedly been snuffed by its American publisher DMP after a mere two volumes . . . Labels: sixty-minute manga # |Sunday, September 03, 2006 ( 9/03/2006 08:50:00 AM ) Bill S. LABOR DAY WEEKEND PET PIC – A Kyan Pup head shot:  NOTE: If you wanna see more dogg blogging, check out the weekly "Carnival of the Dogs" at Mickey's Musings. And for a broader array of companion animals, there's Modulator's "Friday Ark." # | ( 9/03/2006 06:24:00 AM ) Bill S.  "A PSYCHIC FREAK-OUT IN TRANS-ETHERIC VISION" – Some flicks – as most devotees of psychotronic cinema know and love – are so removed from mundane constraints like competent moviemaking that to watch 'em is like hotwiring yourself into someone's 18th nervous breakdown. One such inadvertent postcard from the edge is the 1972 horror sexfilm, Psyched by the 4D Witch, a startling piece of cut-&-paste psychedelic ineptitude that can presently be seen as the bottom half of a DVD double bill with Herschel Gordon Lewis & William Rebane's MST3000 fodder Monster A-Go Go courtesy the obsessive cheeseheads at Something Weird Video. The sole feature credited to the clearly pseudonymous Victor Luminera, Psyched tells the non-story of a pimply-nosed junior college student named Cindy (Margo), who accidentally conjures up the spirit of a vengeful witch named Abigail (the delightfully named Esoterica) by basically sitting on the floor of her apartment nekkid and waving a couple candles around.Abigail, who was once put to death in Salem for engaging in "sexual witchcraft," utilizes Cindy as a vessel for her own gratification. Inhabiting the fourth dimension with a "host of astral demons" who look like they wandered in from a Kenneth Anger short, the witch prods the virginal (so virginal, she’s never even had an orgasm while masturbating) Cindy into a series of sexual fantasy adventures that grow progressively more debauched (her mystic incantation: "Let's fantasy fuck now!") Duped Cindy agrees to indulge in these dream adventures because Abigail assures her she'll remain pure (our heroine's response – "I'll still remain a virgin for my daddy!" – is profoundly disturbing), but it soon becomes clear that these sexual adventures are also having an effect on the real world. Her best friend Jan (Sandra Lane), forced to copulate with a snake on the astral plane [insert not-so-topical joke here] while Cindy helplessly watches, ends up in a coma. When our heroine fights back against the mind-controlling sorceress, Abigail retaliates by turning the girl's brother Mark (Tom Yerian) into a "sex vampire" with awkwardly protruding fangs. Told entirely in voiceover by a trio of non-actors (poor Margo stumbles over her lines more than once), Psyched combines city travelogue footage, scenes from soft-core sex flick (all you see are head shots of characters in the throes of poorly acted sexual ecstasy and a lotta bare breasts) with shots and overlays that look like a student attempt at recreating a sixties era underground feature. Sinisterly masked creatures regularly loom into the camera like they were auditioning for the orgy scenes in Eyes Wide Shut; a snake puppet bobbles in and out of the frame; scratched film and solarized light shows are used to suggest sexual arousal and mind-blowing climax – all very faux trippy. (More than one character makes reference to this being "just like an LSD trip.") Stock classical music like "Bolero" and "Night on Bald Mountain" is frequently used to clumsily ratchet up the drama – at one point, we hear ominous orchestration as the camera shows a dog watching ducks in a pond – like some Music Appreciation Class from Hell. Even cooler is the movie's garagey theme song, which gets repeated so often that it's impossible to get out of your head afterwards. (Why haven't the Cramps ever recorded this baby?) Like H.G. Lewis' Jimmy, the Boy Wonder, Victor Luminera's masterwork appears to have been sloppily pasted together from several uncompleted movies: the tacked-on "sex vampire" subplot in the film's final third has no real connection to what we've seen before – and is so poorly night-filmed that we can barely see what's taking place, anyway. The voiceover dialog used to limply tie things together is hysterically clunky ("My heart pounded even faster as I watched what ensued," chirpy voiced Cindy tells us as her sex vamp brother starts foaming at the mouth) and the music so raggedly inserted that it often cuts off mid-note. "Could this really be happening?" a voiceover asks in full Shatnerian mode. "Or is it all a nightmare . . . I'm dreaming?" I'm guessing the movie theater audience had pretty much the same question back in 1972 . . . Astral slut Cindy ultimately escapes the 4D Witch (or does she?) by experiencing a "real flesh-and-blood climax" (or does she?) at hands of her best friend's psychiatrist father, who perishes (or, etc.?) as the two come together (or do they?) Lady Chatterley-style. "If my daddy could only see me now!" Cindy squeaks in voiceover, making us all really wonder about the never-seen old man. The movie ends with an ominous warning from Abby. The etheric dimension is real, she states, and you out there in the audience might be her next victim. "Not me," most of the audience thinks, "I've had an orgasm once!" UPDATE: Psyched fan Aaron Neathery, writing in email about Something Weird's decision to release the film beneath Monster A-Go Go, sez: I find it amazing that something so off the wall and unique takes a backseat to Bill "Giant Spider Invasion" Rebane's nearly unwatchable Monster A-Go Go on the SW DVD. The big question in my mind is whether or not a film can be deemed inept if the filmmakers weren't trying to achieve "ept" in the first place. PBT4DW knows no laws of filmmaking and seems perfectly happy with that.Considering that SWV got its company name from a Herschel Gordon Lewis film, it's not surprising to see 'em pushing A-Go Go up front, even if Lewis' involvement in the film was reportedly rather limited. Me, I'm glad to see Something Weird packed its DVD with so much psychotronic goodness: in addition to the two features, there are three horror shorts of plus a gallery of drive-in movie trailers. I can only hope those Fangoria readers who bought the disc to complete their collection of Lewis marginalia had their minds totally blown by the 4D Witch . . . # | |
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