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Saturday, November 25, 2006 ( 11/25/2006 01:34:00 PM ) Bill S. WEEKEND PUP PIC – It's birthday pup (one year old today) Kyan with old man Ziggy Stardust right behind him. This foto was taken just this afternoon.  Hard to believe this is the same little sprout we were jpegging just a few short months ago . . . ALMOST FORGOT 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." # | ( 11/25/2006 08:28:00 AM ) Bill S.  "YET ANOTHER CELLULOID SICKIE" – Most Americans away from the West Coast only have a modest sense of Elvira® , Mistress of the Dark™ – from her appearances in an occasional Halloween beer commercial or her role in a pair of low-budget horror comedies, perhaps – but her longest running gig has been as the hostess of Elvira's Movie Macabre, a somewhat syndicated (though it's never aired anywhere near this writer) horror movie showcase featuring the busty actress making commercial-break quips about the cheapies on display. This year, Shout Factory released three DVD sets of her show for Halloween, each featuring two movies. Of the offerings, the one that looked most promising to this cheesehead was the two-disc package featuring Count Dracula's Great Love and Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks. The first is a 1972 Spanish horror flick featuring South of the Border horror megastar Paul Naschy, while the second stars South Pacific lead Rossano Brazzi as "Count" Frankenstein in a '73 Italian bare breasts showcase. Guess which one I watched first?Freaks is an engaging piece of nonsense centering around Frankenstein's experiments with the body of a Neanderthal man who has inexplicably been found roaming around the countryside. Holed up in his castle, the good doctor is assisted by a quartet of assistants – most notably Michael Dunn, playing the sinister dwarf Genz. Every other one of Frankenstein’s assistants loathes Genz, for reasons that aren't entirely made clear, so when the group of 'em go out a-grave robbin' one night, major-domo Hans ("Alan Collins") makes sure that one of Genz's footprints is not erased in the dirt. This catches the keen eye of the investigating Prefect Ewing (a clearly slumming Edmund Purdom), who at one point brings a wax copy of the print to Castle Frankenstein to show to the Count. "The resemblance is perfect," Frankenstein sez, but by then Genz has already been kicked out of the castle to hook up with a second Neanderthal man named Ook (the movie's American distributors actually gave this Italian actor the name "Boris Lugosi"!) hiding in the caves nearby. There, Genz has been instructing Ook in the gentle art of kidnapping and raping village girls. Also ensnared in this web of horrifying events: Frankenstein's beautiful daughter Maria ("Simone Blondell") and her even sexier friend Krista ("Christine Royce"), who spend their days skinny-dipping in a cave hot spring – much to the peeping Genz's delight. Krista, unbelievably, turns out to be a medical student with an interest in the Count's experiments. He shows off his revived and strapped down specimen, a hulking creature unimaginatively named Goliath (Loren Ewing), and, in a strange attempt at "civilizing”"the creature, openly kisses Krista in front of the jealous Neanderthal. Naturally, Goliath beats the tar out of Frankenstein when he finally breaks free. All in all, a fairly typical early seventies exploitation horror flick: there are plenty of topless shots (including an early bit where Genz gets his hand slapped for fondling the breasts of a recently excavated dead girl who we never get to see again), a small amount of blood in the flimsy lab scenes and lotsa amusingly cheap moments. (Were the breast shots shown when this flick aired on syndicated television? Somehow, I doubt it.) The English dubbing is particularly comical when it comes to the minor characters, many of whom sound like they're heavily dosed on valium. Good fodder for our snarky Mistress of the Dark™, right? Shout's small-frills discs offer two ways to view the "Movie Macabre" features: with or without Elvira's taped interstitial appearances. I watched Frankenstein about half-way per format: as fun as Elvira (a.k.a. Cassandra Peterson) is to watch, delivering her combo Mae West/Valley Girl sinnuendo shtick, the videotape format is distractingly fuzzy. Makes you appreciate the work that went into Mystery Science Theater 3000, which also blended videotape with movie film, only much more smoothly. The non-Elvira version looks a trace less jagged, though occasionally you can see the movie blacken longer than necessary to accommodate a commercial cut. Still, Shout's two-disc sets are pretty inexpensive (running in the range of $14.95), so I can't much complain. Would've been nicer to get some crisper footage of the Mistress with the Mostest, though . . . # | Friday, November 24, 2006 ( 11/24/2006 03:50:00 PM ) Bill S. "COME ON OVER, COME ON OVER . . ." – Had a low-key Thanksgiving this year: watched about fifteen minutes of the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade (liked Martin Short's filmed aerial tour of the parade route), then drove to Peoria and the Radisson (formerly Jumer's Castle Lodge) where we did holiday buffet with spouse Becky's family. Not a great meal, but we had a good time afterwards at her Aunt Martha's, so it balanced out. Made it home in time to catch Ugly Betty and do crackers, cheese 'n' fruit for dinner. But before we ate, my wife and I had a holiday bonfire to burn the paint-spattered clothes from our months working on the house next door. My pagan spouse claims that doing this was a form of sympathetic magic, since we symbolically burned away all the bad stuff from the past year; me, I saw it as a way to celebrate and give thanks for the fact that we'd gotten rid of a draining financial burden . . . Hope y'all had a great holiday. # | ( 11/24/2006 08:40:00 AM ) Bill S.  "I THOUGHT I SAW THE MAYOR THERE, BUT I WASN'T REALLY SURE" – Much like it recently did with Cheap Trick, after years of sitting on its corporate rock ass, Sony Records has finally issued remastered versions of the bulk of its Electric Light Orchestra catalog. Now, it's long been fashionable to pooh-pooh poor ol' ELO (heck, Randy Newman once wrote a song mocking 'em) – and, to be sure, any band that willingly allowed themselves to be a part of the roller disco movie musical Xanadu deserves its share of hard mocks. But at their best, they were a mighty pop-rock unit with a string of great singles to their credit.To my ears, the band's peak came in the middle of its Jeff Lynne-led era (the first ELO disc was overseen by the quirky Roy Wood) with Face the Music and A New World Record. Picked up a remastered copy of the latter this week, and was happy to hear that it still held up to my estimation. The hit singles – "Livin' Thing," "Telephone Line" and "Rockaria!" – are all great (on most days, that third would classify as my favorite ELO song), but most of the remaining tracks are equally enjoyable. Lynne (and, to be fair, Wood, too) took the orchestral pretensions of prog rockers like Emerson, Lake and Palmer and made 'em enjoyable in ways that probably never would've even occurred to ELP. What a difference one letter makes . . . As with so many remastered sets, Record concludes with a largely disposable set of bonus tracks (four of which are "instrumental Early Rough Mix"es of cuts on the album.) The one exception: "Surrender," which is not to be confused with the Cheap Trick classic, but is instead a previously unfinished track that was recently completed by Lynn and is currently being released as an iTunes download. Nice Motown-y rhythm on that 'un, so don't skip it if you're playing the new disc and you know you've reached the end of the original elpee . . . # | Thursday, November 23, 2006 ( 11/23/2006 07:31:00 AM ) Bill S.  "WHAT THE HECK'S A 'ZOMBIE SHOP,' ANYWAY?" – (A "Sixty-Minute Manga" Exploration): Reiko Himezono, the title lead of Rei Mikamoto's awkwardly titled manga series, Reiko the Zombie Shop (Dark Horse Manga), is a teenaged girl with powerful necromantic abilities. Brandishing a palm emblazoned with a "summoning circle," invoking the name of Satan, the shapely high schooler (she's rarely shown wearing anything but her school uniform) raises the dead for a sliding fee. This only occasionally appears to work out well for her customers, since the dead typically rise with some serious unfinished business on their zombie minds. And though our heroine advises her clients to secure their to-be-revived dead ones, this advice is typically ignored. Gory mayhem is the inevitable result: always listen to your necromancer, kids!As you might guess from the above, Mikamoto's horror manga is over-the-top and campy, short on logic and long on blood-&-guts. I dug it, but keep in mind I'm a guy who watches Herschell Gordon Lewis flicks on a Sunday morning. Book One of Dark Horse's English translation of this eleven-volume series contains seven stories – one of which apparently was initially serialized in three parts – most of which are given the simple title of "Act." In "Act 3," for instance, a science teacher/mad scientist who has been attempting to clone the body of a girl suicide hires Reiko. Unable to revive her clone because "her desire to die was so great that those desires were imbedded all the way into her DNA," he enlists our heroine's necromantic abilities to zombify the clone. Unfortunately, Reiko's powers also extend to all the other bodies in the general vicinity, which leads to the revival of two decades' worth of failed experiments that the obsessed scientist had walled in his lab. Gory you-know-what ensures, with Mikamato upping the ante on his already outlandish premise by telling us that the cloned girl was pregnant – and so is her clone! (So how does that work, anyway?) Nasty? Wait 'til you see that panel of the zombie fetus bursting out at its "daddy"! This is clearly not a series that's gonna be embraced by the professional culture scolds. Though some small gestures are made toward establishing a supporting cast in the first book (there’s a girl with big glasses who'd appear to be Reiko's "friend" in two of the stories), the primary focus is on our young mercenary necromancer. We're not told much about Reiko except that she's no-nonsense when it comes to business and quite loud about her refusal to do any work for free (though we do get to see her revive a dead puppy). She's unfazed by any of the grisly sights thrown at her in the course of day's work – which in this series can be plenty grisly indeed. In Volume One, we're treated to the sight of a pedophiliac father getting torn in two by a vengeful zombie daughter, several beheadings and a bloody guitar impaling. The book's three-act story centers on a serial killer who searches the city for a new little sister, then slices-&-dices them when they understandably balk at the prospect. When the police call in Reiko to revive one of her victims, Mikamoto shows several close-ups of the little girl's head with an eyeball dangling out of its socket. To be sure, the ultra-gory antics of the book are more Itchy 'N' Scratchy cartoonish than believable. More disturbing are the smaller character details: the girl who kills herself to avoid being further molested by her father or the ambitious reporter who winds up sacrificing bother herself and her daughter in pursuit of the serial killer story. Reiko may be campy, but the material it's playing with is so raw that it occasionally can't help hitting a nerve. Mikamoto's art is slick and effective. He rarely misses an opportunity to contrast his shoujo styled female figures with the gory story action – when the "little sister" killer's identity is revealed, of course, she turns out to be a schoolgirl like Reiko – and his use of shading in the atmospheric sequences is particularly fine. His vengeance-driven zombie attacks (and there are several) are dynamic, and there's a final confrontation between Reiko and that serial that is as knockabout as anything Sam Raimi could concoct. When the battle and the first volume ends, we have to wonder how our heroine is even gonna make it back to Book Two, though obviously she does or the series' title would have to change. But how does Reiko get her head back onto her acid-ravaged body? # | Wednesday, November 22, 2006 ( 11/22/2006 08:07:00 AM ) Bill S. "ALL OVER HER AMERICAN FACE" – For this week's YouTube vid, what better than Ray Davies doing "Thanksgiving Day" (from last year's Conan O'Brien Thanksgiving show)? # | Tuesday, November 21, 2006 ( 11/21/2006 01:57:00 PM ) Bill S. ANOTHER LONG GOODBYE – Just read that director Robert Altman died early this week at age of 81. Altman is one of those directors who blossomed just as I was growing into a full-blown movie geek. His first big commercial breakthrough (M.A.S.H.) came out when I was in college and devouring as many elective cinema history courses as I could cram into my putative English teaching major, and I was heavily attracted to his style of storytelling – which blended communal improvisational acting and overlapping dialog with a strong sense of visual control. Of the flicks generally considered to be Lesser Altman (and there are many in his roller coaster career), I have to confess to a strong fondness for The Long Goodbye (Philip Marlowe as a burnt-out 70's Californian), Cookie's Fortune (a great small-town ensemble piece) and even the much maligned Popeye (primarily for Shelly Duvall and that great Nilsson score). But the Undeniably Great Altmans – M.A.S.H., McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Thieves Like Us, Nashville, The Player, Gosford Park – are all such wonderful works that I can only hope some budding movie nerd is discovering 'em right now in an elective film history course. Rest in Peace, Bob . . . NOTE: Haven't had a chance to see what looks to be Altman's final completed film, A Prairie Home Companion yet; from what I've read, this backstage comedy about the final days of a radio program may have been just the right note to go out on . . . NOTE 2: Roy Edroso, unsurprisingly, has an eloquent appreciation of Altman up - along with a few brief words on those conserva-bloggers who (as with Arthur Miller) have taken the occasion of his death as an opportunity to slam an artist they perceive as an unrepentant Liberal. # | Monday, November 20, 2006 ( 11/20/2006 10:54:00 AM ) Bill S. "AH, HE WAS A CLEVER MAN – A TRAIT THAT IS KNOWN TO SKIP A GENERATION!" – The 23rd century Earth of Skyland, the new Nicktoons sci-fi animated series, isn't as solid as the one we know. Broken into millions of jagged "blocks" that orbit around the planet's core, the world is ruled by an evil dictatorship called the Sphere, which uses its robotic military and some powerful telekinetics called Seijins to control the planet's water supply. Niggling against the Sphere, hiding in a cluster of uncharted blocks, is a ragtag group of pirates – the last vestige of the rebellion against the Sphere. A pretty familiar set-up to anyone who's watched even a smidgeon of sci-fi in the last thirty years (for Seijins-with-telekinesis read the Force; for robotic military read Cylons; for pirate rebels read space cowboys in a Firefly, for water read water, etc.) – though the pleasure, presumably, resides in the details. As produced by Canadian animators using motion capture and a host of other computer generated techniques, Skyland is a visually splendid concoction, especially when its animators focus on the floating blocks and simultaneously futuristic/archaic looking hardware that its heroes and villains pilot. That it's much less impressive focusing on people, all of who appear to have hair composed of solid chunks of plastic, is symptomatic of this genre fare. Skyland's protagonists are Lena and Mahad, young sibs who are forced to flee when their Seijin mother Mila is discovered found by the robotic Brigadiers. Sphere Commander Oslo, a bald-headed Seijin with a Eurotrash accent (even the 23rd century still has its regionalist speaking patterns, apparently), has a thing for Ma Mila, who he sees as half of a prophecy (oh yeah, we just had to have a prophecy, didn't we?) that foretells of a power of light changing the world. Since Seijins get their power from the sun, Oslo's conclusion makes some sense, but it's possible that he has the wrong Seijin since 12-year-old Lena shares her mother's abilities. He sends out Diwan, his Seijin second-in-command, who looks like Annie Lennox with a red tattoo (or perhaps a forelock of red hair – it's difficult to tell) on her shaved head, to retrieve the brother-&-sister, who have hidden in the territories. Ma Mila, meanwhile, is sent to Kharzem Prison, where she's kept caged away from the sunlight. Her only respite is provided in those necessary expository moments when Oslo brings her back up to fill us in on more back story. Brother Mahad, a teen, is a fledgling pilot with mad skills that he's not afraid to boast about. When we first see him in the series' one-hour pilot, "Dawn of A New Day," he's racing against a buddy through the canyons in a sequence clearly meant to recall the Star Wars speeder bike races. Later, when our two sibs find a legendary craft called the Hyperion, we know our boy is destined to fly it. He's also adept with a boomerang-y type weapon that is capable of lopping off the heads of a row of robots without losing an ounce of momentum yet safely returns to his palm without slicing his hand in two, so mebbe his arrogance is earned. Our sibs take refuge with the pirate rebels of Puerto Angel, who prove to be a fairly iconic bunch: there's the gruff fatherly figure who regularly has to be persuaded to do the right thing against his "better instincts," the tough girl pilot who really wants to take Mahad down a peg, the spunky little boy with advanced technical know-how – and the grandfatherly mentor known as Vector who's there to help Lena learn to control her budding Seijin powers. Everybody speaks in declamatory fashion ("I'll never be a part of your evil schemes!") in the manner of really early scientifiction, so that even the occasional quips sound forced. To a young pre-teen viewer, though, I suspect the dialog will do the trick: it's certainly no less clunky than Lucas' was in the Darth Vader trilogy. MTV Networks, the company behind Nicktoons, is promoting the daylights out Skyland as a "revolutionary animated series," though I've gotta wonder if a generation weaned on animé will really find it all that startling. The visuals are admittedly fun, but aside from the computer-generated faux 3-D effect, they're not much different from the images in such elaborately scaled Japanation features as Metropolis or Steam Boy. The characters – as in much rushed-to-meet-a-deadline computer animation – often move like they're underwater (unless, of course, they're in fight scenes when they get to zip about really speedily). Which, if nuthin' else, made me appreciate the time and resources it takes to make a flick like Chicken Little move convincingly. Nicktoons Network followed its hour-long origin story Saturday with a half hour regular episode entitled "Manipulations." In it, Oslo – his Seijin powers enhanced by a "solar surge" – takes over the body of the tough girl pilot so he can learn the coordinates of the hidden pirate block. While in control, he forces pilot Dahlia's body to frame Lena for an act of sabotage, a pointless distraction since once he gets the coordinates he plans to send Diwan out to capture the sibs and destroy the pirate city, anyway. Still, it gives the writers a chance to indulge in some X-Men-y alienation when a previously unseen member of the pirate community tries to get his peers to line up against Seijin Lena. That his bigoted calls to arm appear to fall on deaf ears is, perhaps, one small reason to feel optimistic about the 23rd century . . . # | Sunday, November 19, 2006 ( 11/19/2006 05:13:00 PM ) Bill S. TALLY HO – Picked up a copy of Evan Dorkin's latest Dork (#11) and read it while fighting a cold that made me wanna nap mosta Saturday & Sunday. Found its collection of one and three-panel jokes to be right in tune with my fever-induced spaciness: Dorkin's a cruelly funny s.o.b., alright. Not including the covers, I counted over two-hundred separate jokes in this book (even if he does repeat a few of 'em) – better than most professional strippers kin concoct in over a year . . . # | ( 11/19/2006 08:45:00 AM ) Bill S.  PERIL GREETS THE UNWARY TRAVELER – When you think about it, one of the messages of old-fashioned horror tales was that traveling beyond your own personal comfort zone is something you do at your own risk: think of Renfield visiting Dracula's castle in Transylvania and turning into a bug eater or those intrepid infidel tomb violators from the mummy movies. Yet ever since Brad Davis got slammed into a Turkish prison for ineptly trying to smuggle dope, the stakes have risen. In Hostel, for instance, a trio of doltish young men find themselves trapped in a hellish factory death 'n' torture chamber – all for the crime of being outsiders.As written and directed by Eli (Cabin Fever) Roth, the movie's a grueling experience for both its characters and the audience. Though it takes a good forty minutes to spring its trap, once it does, Hostel refuses to let you go. Roth's set-up is simplicity itself: three tourists (two Americans plus a shiftless Icelander who has glommed onto the duo along the way) are traveling Europe for a last chance to go wile. In Amsterdam, they're told about a hostel located in Slovakia where the girls are all gorgeous and ready for anything. On the train to this stately pleasure dome, they encounter a creepy Dutch businessman (Jan Vlasák) who provides the foreshadowing much the same as that hitchhiker did in Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Our heroes kick the creep out of their compartment, but we know we'll see him again. The hostel proves to be everything as advertised, but visible in the distance is the smokestack to a large former plastics factory where all our horny Hansels and Gretels are taken to be tortured and killed for the sport of jaded wealthy business types. Cost of each victim, we learn, is dependent on their nationality – with Americans being the highest priced commodity. When one of our threesome escapes his businessman captor, we're treated to a long and lurid tour of this gruesome facility, and lemme tell you, it definitely put me off the idea of ever touring any former Soviet block countries. Per this type of genre exercise, characterization is minimal – so much so that when one of our trio is given the tiniest patch of personal back story, we (wrongly) assume that he'll be the one to survive the excursion. When, early in the hostel visit, we see a dubbed version of Pulp Fiction being played in the background, we can't help wishing that Roth shared Quentin Tarantino's knack for sketching character. Still, the Pulp Fiction connection is an apt one: in a lotta ways, Hostel is an extended riff on the Bruce Willis story from that flick. As promised, the torture sequences are plenty intense, though the moment that most lingers for me involves two escapees and a dangling eye. There are plenty of moments of very black comedy – some involving an American customer (played by ever-ready character weasel Rick Hoffman) visiting the factory for the first time – but the primary tone is nowhere near as goofy or calculatedly low-budget as Roth's first feature Cabin Fever. None too surprisingly, Roth's name shows up as a producer credit on 2001 Maniacs (currently running via Showtime-on-Demand), a broad sequel to Herschel Gordon Lewis' 1964 pioneering gore film about a southern American ghost town that appears once a year to trap and kill Yankee tourists. As written by Chris Kobin & Tim Sullivan (and directed by the latter), Maniacs works the same range of overly broad comedy and splattery fx that Roth's first film did (the producer even briefly reprises his role from Cabin as a hitchhiker), though to those who are familiar with Lewis' unsavory original, there's something disconcerting about seeing its sequel made with so slickly. In place of the totally inept acting and direction from the original, we get hammy Robert Englund in a confederate eye patch, Lin Shaye as a cannibalistic Granny, lotsa drawling yee-hawing from the secondaries and a passel of southern vixens in Victoria's Secret lingerie that you know wasn't around during the mid-1800’s. Body count is upped from Hostel – with eight young and largely unlikable young adults getting offed in progressively more inventive ways – but unlike the original, which was just badly enough made that it got you wondering about the mental health of all those involved in it, the follow-up proves to be little more than a disposable footnote. In certain types of exploitation fare, even a modicum of professionalism is not necessarily a good thing. Watching Maniacs on a sunny weekend morning, I still couldn't help comparing it to the tourist nightmare that is Hostel. Pleasant Valley, Georgia, may not be a picturesque European village, but it proves just as deadly to the innocent visitor . . . # | |
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