I Get By With a Little Help From The Thing

Last Saturday we had a snowstorm in Massachusetts. A snowstorm in October. It was fairly close to being dubbed as the worst in my 'Things That are the Worst' book. Luckily the midnight screening of Suspiria that I attended that night managed to fix things mostly. However. The snow reminded me of things like death, anger, and gloom. Don't be alarmed, these are normal thoughts that flow through my head during the winter season. If you don't know by now it's high time you did---winter can suck it.

So on that dismal night of the October snow I began recalling among other things, the unpleasantness of being cold, angry and scared. It was then I realized that I was long overdue for another viewing of The Thing. Naturally, if I can't love the snow, I can at least love Kurt Russell in the snow.

The thing about The Thing is that it kind of breaks my heart. Watching it is both the best and worst experience of my life. It's the worst because it's like having a party with all your friends and them watching them all die one by one---which makes you sad. You also have to watch dogs die, and you find out that people you have trusted, really aren't who you thought they were. It's a lot to handle okay?

I mean, you straight up are building relationships with these people. You're seeing MacReady through his alcoholism and bad chess playing.

You're spending time with Nauls by rollerskating and jamming to Stevie Wonder in the kitchen.

You're feeling sad and gloomy with Clark.

You're making sullen faces with Garry.

You're trying not to upset Childs.

These people ARE your family. It's almost certainly a lesson on how to imprint the feelings and surroundings of your characters on your audience. Our characters are in a sense trapped with each other so they become each other's family and essentially---their life. We get that same feeling even by knowing them for only an hour and 40 minutes. Alright, so maybe I'm one of few people who takes things so directly when watching this. I can't help it if I have a soul.

Also, fuck you guy who wrote that article about The Thing's special effects not holding up nowadays. What movie were you watching? I'm still continuously wowed by how awesome and absolutely putrid everything looks in this. And to think that it's all practical effects, that somebody created those effects completely blows my mind away. Go back to your modernized head filled with CGI blood and laziness you bastard.

Well now I've lost my train of thought and that's just great. I guess all I wanted to say was that this viewing of The Thing made me feel sad deep down inside. I miss my friends, but I suppose I can always see them again whenever I want. BUT then if I do want to see them, I'll just have to see them die all over again and again and again. Why is the world so cruel? Also, can someone please make a parody of the theme song of Friends but with characters from The Thing? Thanks.

The Ward: Broke My Computer

The Ward is not a very good movie. In fact, it's a terrible movie as evidenced by the fact that once I was done watching it, my water bottle, acting out of its own free will, decided to douse my Macbook with water and destroy it. Now because of The Ward, I have no computer and am forced to use Emmy Doomas' Dell which likes to randomly highlight things and also the keys are too close together so I'm typing like a 4th grader or a really really old person. Seriously, thanks a lot The Ward. Thanks.

In all honesty, I knew that John Carpenter's long awaited return to horror in the form of The Ward, was not met with a lot of happiness. I however like to give things a chance and therefore I decided that before I refused to ever hang out with The Ward, it would do me good to get to know it on my own terms. My own terms have now been achieved and the verdict is of course that The Ward totally stinks. Here is why.

The Ward centers around Kristen, a girl who gets picked up by police after burning down a house. She has no idea why she did it and has no memories of anything prior to the house. She gets put in a mental institution with other girls and soon finds out that a mean corpsey ghost is haunting the ward and killing off the girls one by one. Who is this corpsey ghost and wait a minute, aren't we supposed to be finding out why Kristen is there?

See, that's one of the main reasons The Ward does not work for me. We are set up thinking that we are watching a movie where little by little we come to find out the truth of our heroine's past. This however gets immediately shoved to the side by the existence of a ridiculous and stupid "ghost". Suddenly, The Ward falls from being an eerie psychological thriller, to an Asian movie with a ghost. This is forgive me for saying, stupid.

Stupid because the parts with the ghosts AKA the entire movie are centered around the very idea of cop outs. There is NOTHING scary about The Ward and we know this because the "scares' are represented by jumps and things that force us to be scared. Instead of building up the creepy atmosphere of the ward, the corpsey hands and stupid face of the ghosts are crammed down our throats. It's so disappointing. Any movie that completely wastes the atmosphere of a creepy mental institution is an asshole in my book.

Additionally, the acting is entirely unconvincing, complete with lines like "No! Noooo! Not that!" really awful stuff. The ghost also apparently studied torture at the school of nonsense because honestly--why is a ghost taking the time to strap someone down and use various forms of psychotherapy to kill them? It doesn't make sense.

Which brings to my final point---The Ward does not make any sense. Once the twist is revealed, the Ward becomes one of those movies that suddenly loses all of its creditability. It almost seems to come as a sort of disrespect for the audience in a way--to completely negate every single thing they have just watched. It's so ridiculous that it makes you laugh out loud. If you want to talk ridiculous involving the plot twist, do so in the comments section and I will join you.

So in closing---The Ward is horrible. Please do not watch it unless you want to waste an hour and 30 minutes of your life. And since The Ward is so sucky and because it destroyed my computer, you can expect posting to be minimal until payday when I can buy a new computer. I'm not sure how much more of this Dell I can take...............

Prince of Darkness: This Is Not a Dream...Not a Dream.

I have a sneaking suspicion that people are hiding John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness far away from the prying eyes of popularity. Maybe this is one of those things that people pretend is bad so that other people won't like it. You know like, Kriss Kross,

brussel sprouts

and Baby Boom.

Things that are secretly good but if introduced to the masses will become not good because too many people like it. It's basically, exactly what happened to the Black Eyed Peas.

Anyways. As one of my good friends put it, Prince of Darkness is a movie that you feel you're not supposed to like. It's strangely unconventional for a horror film, makes little sense when actually dissected and is kind of racist. But somehow you end up falling head over heels in love with Prince of Darkness and all of its liquid Satan glory. 

Before we get into a discussion of metaphysics, differential equations and atomic theory, I would just like to point out how difficult it is to assess WHICH Prince of Darkness, Prince of Darkness refers to. Clearly I sorted it out whilst watching, but beforehand I was all prepared to watch a film about Dracula. I was also not positive that it wasn't a film about Ozzy Osbourne, Miles Davis, Jared Leto or General Sir Mike Jackson either (Chief of British General Staff and commander of KFOR in the liberation of Kosovo for all you people not in the know) (Keep in mind I looked that up on Wikipedia and am not actually smart). So yes, The Prince of Darkness is a nickname that applies to just about anyone but in this case we are talking about Satan.

In Prince of Darkness, a mysterious cylinder filled with green liquid is discovered in the basement of an abandoned church.

After discovering a deceased priest's diary, priest Donald Pleasance enlists the help of Professor Howard Birack and several academics to assess the situation. What they find is that the liquid inside the cylinder is actually Satan and spewing out tons of smart things, and codes that is slowly taking control of people and turning our world into an apocalyptic hell. Even scarier than this is the discovery that Satan may not even be the biggest threat after all... !

As liquid Satan's power grows, so does his ability to take over the academics and professors. as well as the strange gang of street dwellers outside. It soon becomes very apparent that the world is turning over to the devil's control. Dun dun dun.

So yes, Prince of Darkness is worlds apart from "conventional" means of a demonic, religious-ish horror film isn't it? How often do we find the world of religion at ends with the world of science? Perhaps if I had to name something bad about the film it would be that it doesn't make sense. Or does it? Hopefully I'm not alone in voicing my overall confusion on...well, just about everything. Satan was sending signals of world domination into the future? Or something? What? Is that even right? I don't know! I don't get any of it--but it really doesn't matter. OR I should say, it doesn't really matter to me. I'm sure one of the main reasons this film is not elevated to the highest level of awesome is because it seems kind of convoluted and well....ridiculous. But come on. Satan is in liquid form! Does it get any better than that?

If you put away the fact that the science, math and theorizing is all confusing and stuff, you should still be able to appreciate Prince of Darkness for the startling amounts of spookiness and strangeness. This film may be one of the best representations of subtle scaring that I have ever seen. The best example is of course the unusual street gang dwelling outside the church. They do this thing where they just stand outside and look at you and watch you.

It's probably one of the creepiest things I've seen in a while. Plus, they crucify pigeons and shit...

Also creepy is Alice Cooper and his abnormally pale skin. I know you're Alice Cooper but do you have to look dead ALL the time?

There's also a lot of strange, unexplained phenomena not far from the likes of the beginning of The Fog. I LOVE this kind of stuff. Bugs everywhere, people talking in weird deep, demonic voices, tables moving, electrical stuff doing funny things.

Man, it doesn't get any better than that. It's simple, it's subtle and it's creepy and scary without shoving a bunch of crap in your face.

Even when people are "possessed" by Liquid Satan, no one turns into some scary, raving mad version of an Evil Dead-like face. Everyone still looks the same, only they're all weird and standing and staring.

It's brilliant! As far as I'm concerned, the mark of a truly brilliant horror filmmaker is the ability to make things scary without really working at it. Forget special effects and buckets of blood. Forget jump scares---this is what horror is about. Pure, unadulterated fear.

I also love the simple fact that something is amiss here. Even though we are given kind of an explanation as to what is happening, we still don't entirely know the ultimate agenda. We are actually a lot like the academic students, who are brought to a church without really being told what's going on. But we're on edge because we can sense that something bad is happening. We know that whatever is in that mysterious cylinder, isn't good and that simple fact is enough to keep us on our toes as we wait for shit to go down.

But shit doesn't come crashing down does it? No! John Carpenter--that brilliant maestro of horror shows true restraint by keeping the uneasiness rampantly flowing for almost the entire film. There's no huge *dun dun dun* moment of reveal, no startling discovery, no plot twist. No one is actually a demon in disguise (Although I was secretly banking on Donald Pleasance turning around being all like, "HAHA fooled you all, I'm the father of Satan bahahaha...but you know...he didn't) The film simply continues on its merry way of slowly but surely, delivering us the goods--the goods of an eventual apocalypse and that my friends, is impressive.

The film however also has its moments of entertainment. There's old squinty McGee over there.

Killing people with chopsticks and beer and taking names.

There's the odd pairing of two students who literally met the night before, had sex and are now in a serious relationship.

There's the surprise of finding out that Liquid Satan actually has quite a high typing speed. I'd guess at least 90 WPM and with a 0% error rate. I mean, give it up to Satan everyone, taking secretary classes on the weekend, he works hard for the money yeah!

And then there's of the course the insanely awesome and disgusting evolution of leprosy, as exemplified by the reincarnation of Satan himself.

Gross man, gross.

"Satan" as I like to call him, freaks me out with those black teeth. Possible membership may be granted into the Scary Face Club in the near future--just letting you know.

Yes, Prince of Darkness is all kinds of awesome. It makes me sad that it isn't talked about more but it also makes me glad. I prefer to keep this one in a small closet, locked and away from all those people that won't appreciate it. Me and my friends who love this film can open it up from time to time and smile and cry and give it a kiss on its little head. Oh Prince of Darkness....we will shield you from that awful, horrid world out there, don't you worry.

So in closing DO NOT see this movie. Just kidding, you should definitely see it--but not if you think you won't like it. And if you don't like it, just turn around and walk away. We can stay civil but just know that I will be burning down your house the second that I get some free time.

Who Let The Fog Out? 10 Reasons To Watch The Fog

I guess no normal person really needs a reason to watch The Fog. But on the off chance that someone is not normal and does in fact need reasons to watch one of the most atmospheric horror films of all time, I have decided to make some. Some are obvious, some are random and some don't really make any sense at all--but that's the beauty of The Fog--there's so many wonderful things about it.

1. Campfire stories

I think I've mentioned this before, but I was never a camp kid. This makes for two really sad things that I have missed out on because of it--getting killed by a serial killer AND hearing spooky ghost stories while sitting around the campfire. The opening story in The Fog is so delightful. It perfectly sets the mood and tone for the eerie occurrences we are about to witness. The story of the Elizabeth Dane is riddled with old ships, disaster and the wide eyed looks of the kids huddled around the fire. Trust me, I've asked the age old question of why I can't have a spooky old man tell me and my friends campfire stories when I'm bored, a million times and I can never come up with a good answer--except that I'm horribly unlucky, and that also there is a shortage of creepy old men who are not also pedophiles. Oh well.

2. Unexplained Spooky Phenomena!

I love how the first few minutes of The Fog is filled with all these spooky things happening. Glass breaking, chunks of wall falling off, dogs barking at nothing, bottles shaking, TV static, chairs moving, car alarms going off. It's the kind of stuff that ghost stories are made of and yet until I re-watched The Fog last night, I had practically forgotten that The Fog WAS about ghosts. Sure, they are a different kind of ghost (ghosts with leprosy--impressive) but they are still very much ghosts, and The Fog is still very much a ghost story. Plus, I love that the townsfolk refer to all these happenings as the town "falling apart".

3. The Strange Sexuality of Tom Atkins

Women are powerless against it! Men probably too. In fact, it's almost as strange and unexplainable as the spooky phenomena happening. Is there a good reason why Tom Atkins can bed a woman in less than 5 minutes? Other than the fact that he's Tom Atkins? No. I still don't get it. I've tried math equations, tea leaves AND I asked Jeeves. Nobody knows! I always find it so hilarious that this is Jamie Lee Curtis' and Tom Atkins' second scene after meeting each other and they are already naked. Previous to this they were making hitchhiking jokes and freaking out about spontaneous car windows bursting. Recipe for love I guess.

4. Drunken Sailors

Whatever happened to drunken sailors? OR better question--is there such thing as a non drunk sailor? I'm not sure. And even though the crew of the Sea Grass is only around for a few seconds, this scene is one of the most memorable. The drinking, the lines and of course..............

The George "Buck" Flower!

George "Buck" Flower victory fist pump!

5. Red Telephones

If there's one thing in life that I've always wanted--it's a red telephone. I mean, red telephones are so cool. This is because usually when you pick them up your call goes directly to someone important like the President OR maybe Kurt Russell. Naturally, Adrienne Barbeau's red telephone probably isn't that cool. But still one day--I'm going to get a regular phone and a red phone and then when people come over they'll ask me what the red telephone is for. And then I'll just get all serious and be all,"You don't want to know". Red phones are so mysterious!

6. Polite Ghosts

Hands down my favorite thing about the ghosts in The Fog is that they are polite. They knock before entering! I don't know any other ghosts that would do such a kind thing, do you? Granted, when you come and answer the door they then gut you with their hooks and drown you and gouge your eyes out--but hey---you didn't have to answer the door Mrs. Kobritz. Just sayin'.

7. The Music!

I'm obsessed with this theme. Listen my children and be transported to the foggy and majestic landscape of Antonio Bay.

8. Janet Leigh

The Fog has a few Hitchcock throwbacks that I absolutely dig. The first is of course the appearance of Janet Leigh who nicely reunited with her daughter Jamie Lee Curtis. I love her and I love that she is in this and that she's a crazy committee woman. The other cool thing about the Fog is that at one point Tom Atkins I think, mentions something about Bodega Bay--which if you recall is the place of action in The Birds. Now, in The Birds, all the bad stuff starts happening once Tippi Hendren comes into town. In The Fog--the bad stuff happens when Jamie Lee Curtis comes to town. Coincidence? I think not.

9. Possessed Wood

I promise I wasn't intending for that to come out dirty, but now that I think about it--it would be a wildly hilarious and appropriate title for a horror themed porn. Hmmm. Anywho--I'm going to swear so I apologize but I fucking LOVE when that piece of wood from the Elizabeth Dane sets itself on fire after the words 6 must die magically show up.

And also it's leaking all this nasty dead water on everything and man.....I just love it. I'm not 100% on this but I'm pretty sure we need more inanimate objects to do cool shit like this.

10. Adrienne Barbeau

So her breasts aren't as delightful as they are in Escape From New York--but she's still Adrienne Barbeau and she's a DJ. I've never told anyone this before but sometimes when it's really late, I pretend to talk like Adrienne Barbeau in her sexy DJ voice. Do you know what happens? My voice hurts! How does she do it? I'll tell you how--because she's Adrienne Barbeau damn it. Ugh. I just tried to do it again and it hurts! It hurts so much! There goes my dream of being a sexy DJ broadcasting from a lone lighthouse...boo.

BONUS

11. SOLID GOLD CROSS

No explanation necessary.