Near Dark

Lil hux and I watched Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker last week.  Great date movie!  Brutal, powerful.  Stays with you.  Though, oddly, the image that sticks in my mind days afterward is that shot of the limping cat.

I was lucky enough to see a movie Kathryn Bigelow made twenty years ago in a real theater (in Times Square, no less).  I've been touting it as the best vampire movie ever made since.  It is, though it's sort of a western/vampire hybrid.  These vampires aren't dreamy tween fantasies.  They're mean, and bloody, and hungry.   The excellent Bill Paxton is in it, chewing some serious scenery.  Lance Henriksen is predictably menacing.

Worth watching for the bar scene alone.

Beware the Stare

It's Monster Monday!

Yes, I am aware it's not actually Monday. Monster Monday, like love, art, sexually transmitted diseases, betrayal, and epiphany, adheres to no schedule. As a thief in the night, just like a certain popular Messiah.

Anyway.

I was reminded of this movie after encountering those sullen, Alpha-female cheerleaders who will no doubt go on to fulfilling careers as trophy wives for Congressmen and ex-football stars (can you tell I'm still a little angry?). But I suppose that scary death-stare of the children of Midwich can be a metaphor for lots of things. Status-crazed tweener girls are merely what occurred to me.

This is one of my favorite movies ever. From a very good book too: "The Midwich Cuckoo" by John Wyndham.

Destroy All Monsters!

Was there ever really any doubt?

I love this movie. It was the first movie I ever posted a clip of on the Cloud. It's got all the greats: Godzilla, his son (daughter?) Godzookie, who blows smoke rings, Rodan, Mothra, King Ghidrah. Eleven monsters in all! Gamera, sadly, is not in it, as the Godzilla and Gamera universes do not intersect.

The plot: all the word's monsters are rounded up and sent to Monster Island. Those zany Japanese Space Babes let them loose to destroy Earth, and control them from the moon. After their moonbase is destroyed, the Babes unleash King Ghidrah, but the Earth monsters unite to conquer Ghidrah and save the day! Yay!

The movie uses a lot of stock footage from other movies, but my guess is if you're a fan of Japanese monster movies, you're probably not a big stickler for continuity.

Happy Halloween!

The Fearless Vampire Killers

The Halloween countdown continues.

This one’s kinda bittersweet.

It’s Roman Polanski and the stunningly beautiful Sharon Tate trading rather tame sexual innuendo in The Fearless Vampire Killers, which Polanski directed before he got famous directing Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby.

It’s bittersweet because Sharon Tate died a few years later (while pregnant with Polanski’s baby) in the gruesome Manson family murders. I won’t go into all the details, or any details, actually – you can look em up on Wikipedia - but it was a pretty horrific scene. Surreal. What a strange time.

I haven’t seen this movie for decades, but I remember thinking it was very funny and very good when I was a kid. It used to get shown once or twice a year on TV, usually late at night. Its tragic history, along with Sharon Tate’s abundant cleavage, made me run to the TV set every time. Moth to a flame. Perfect fodder for a pre-adolescent boy.

I don’t know why they don’t show it anymore.

Gamera vs. Guiron

Okay, now we're getting to the good stuff.

I gave this movie to my younger daughter for Christmas last year. It's easily the stupidest Gamera movie ever made, and that's saying something. For the culturally challenged, Gamera is the jet-propelled flying turtle hero, Guiron is the little knifey guy he's fighting. Guiron is controlled by two brain-eating Japanese Space Babes bent on destroying the Earth. Needless to say, Gamera and his little friends save the day.

We own two versions of this: the regular one (US title Destroy All Planets) and the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version, which is very funny. This is the MST3K version. (note: they pulled my original clip from Youtube, so I substituted another)



And because I can't resist (and because there's like ten thousand hours of MST3K on Youtube), here's Joel and the Bots performing the Gamera theme song. It's a classic.


And what the hell, this is Mike Nelson channelling Michael Feinstein singing the Gamera song. This makes me laugh every time I see it. Just insanely funny.



By the way, you can get Mystery Science Theatre DVDs at mst3k.org for 6 bucks each. 5 bucks if you get ten of them. Which I did. It's linked over on the sidebar as well.

Death By Unicorn

A fast, funny clip from The Abominable Dr. Phibes, a weird and very campy Vincent Price movie from those crazy 70s. I saw this at the drive-in (it's shocking how many of these movies I first saw at a drive-in) with my sister and her boyfriend. They were not amused that they had to drag me along. I, on the other hand, was delighted. They kept disappearing for long stretches to "go to the snack bar," but inevitably returned empty-handed. Just shocking.

There is an equally good sequel: Dr. Phibes Rises Again. If you have Netflix, you can get them both on the same disc. A Halloween double-feature!


The Abonimable Dr. Phibes - The best bloopers are here

The Haunting

Happy Halloween! Assuming I can find the time, I'll try to post bits of my favorite Halloween movies all this week.

There's a truly dreadful remake of this movie that came out a few years back, but ignore it. The original 1963 version is wonderful. Lotsa lesbian subtext in both versions (and in the novel). If you're into that kinda thing.

The source material is Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, a really good, really scary read. Here's the first paragraph:

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone."

I love that "not sane," hiding in the second sentence. So understated, and thus so effective.

Hammer Horror

Mona's word of the week is "taste."

I got nothin.

Luckily, Hammer films leap into the void. They made a million gloriously weird horror movies in the 60s and 70s. I saw most of them on Friday night Creature Feature. Usually I was fast asleep by the end, as the bat wings flapped into the sunset and the credits rolled.

Feel the cold grip of his presence. Sense the clammy excitement of his evil. Taste the blood...of Dracula!

Bangkok Rules

Okay, it's not Monday, and Snake Plissken isn't really a monster. But I'm declaring a Monster Monday nonetheless, because Escape From New York is making the rounds on late night TV these days, and I love that movie. And because we painted the house over Labor Day weekend, and my mind and body are exhausted and I am unable to come up with an original post to save my life.

Luckily I don't have to.



Yes, I realize this clip is from Escape From LA, not New York. Get a life.

The house looks great, by the way.

They're Here Already! You're Next!

Can't you see? They're after you. They're after all of us.

The climax of one of the best sci-fi movies of all time. It's always been considered to be a thinly-veiled criticism of the McCarthy era (which it certainly was), but it's a pretty malleable metaphor for lotsa things: conformity, religious extremism, fascism, hyper-commercialism. Take your pick.

Girls, Grow Giant Psycho Desert Ants In Your Basement!

I am easily besotted by fatherhood, as the 2 or 3 regular readers of this blog likely already know. We've had a couple deeply memorable Father's Days over the last few years - Sands Dunes, AAA baseball games - but this year was low key and merely fun. Which is fine with me. Greeted with presents in the morning - homemade cards and pictures, silk shirts, a camping hammock (dibs!) and a grill brush so large and sturdy it could be used as a weapon. And probably will be used as a weapon by one of my daughters before the summer is over: the kitten-inspired ceasefire is long over. They are once again fighting like cats and dogs. Sunnis and Shiites. Mets and Yankees. Matter and antimatter.

Presents were followed by swimming at the State Park (and a waterslide charging an unconscionable $1.75 per slide). Swimming was followed by eating tasty NY strip steaks with my own Dad as we watched Pedro pitch his best game of the year (6IP, 1ER, 1BB, 4K), making the hapless Rangers look like helpless little kittens at the plate.

Nice day.

Thanks Dad. For making me a better Dad, teaching by example. Among many other things.

---

The girl's new kittens got out of their room while we were gone. They had all day to explore the house, get lost, rip furniture to shreds, terrorize our other old and boring cat. And yet when we got home they were both within six feet of the bedroom door.

I thought cats were supposed to be more curious than that.

---

More pet news: we got a fancypants antfarm on Christmas (filled with weird transparent gel instead of sand). We sent out for mail-order ants, and when they came half were dead. The survivors built maybe 4 inches of ant tunnels before they died as well. Wimpy. S and I went out this weekend and got eight - just eight - of our homegrown giant psycho desert ants. They've already dug to the bottom of the antfarm several times, and are now digging across the bottom, with tunnels heading back up interspersed every few inches. They've disposed of the corpses of their wimpy precursors. I'm not sure how. I'm not sure I want to know.

I fear what will happen when they run out of gel...



p.s. - Extra credit for spotting the Bradbury reference.

The Beast! The Beast! The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms!

Impossible? Unbelievable? Fantastic? But I tell you it could happen...it could happen...it could happen....

Ray Harryhausen again. Everyone have a memorable Memorial Day.

Moth-u-ra...yah! Moth-u-ra!

This is one the odder corners of the Toho Studios mythos: the two tiny twin girls (the Peanuts) who summon Mothra to rescue mankind from some monster or other.

It's weird and cool that so many Japanese monsters are harmless creatures like moths, turtles (Gamera), lobsters (Ebirah), cuttlefish (Gezora), birds (Rodan). That would never fly in Hollywood. Some of the Japanese baseball teams have similarly gentle names: swallows, carp, blue waves.



There are so many Japanese monster movie clips on Youtube. It's bottomless.

Come on, Space Monsters, bring it on! Let's cut and poke! Okay, go, go, go!

As I think I've mentioned before in this blog, our two little girls are adopted (not from across the world, Angelina Jolie style, but from here in our town). Neither could speak when they came to live with us, and we know very little about their lives before us. We used to comb every word they said about their pasts, sifting for clues. Their memories have slowly moved from realism to fantasy, however, and now they are less a source of concern and more a source of, well, amusement.

For instance, KK told me last week her "other Papa" is Gamera.

So this is for her, and for anyone else hungrily yearning to know the actual lyrics to the Gamera theme song.

Earth vs. the Flying Saucers

More Harryhausen. I remember stumbling onto this movie on the little black and white TV in the back room of my grandparent’s house in rural Oklahoma. It scored a perfect 10 on the Argonaut scale. The flying saucer cutting through the Washington Monument is classic, as is the saucer crashing into the White House (both at the very end of the clip). They’re still potent images (and ones Independence Day stole decades later, to great effect).

My grandparent’s house had chickens out back we checked for eggs every morning, and cows out in the pasture. The occasional horse. There were woods out back as well, containing the legendary “tickle-tongue tree,” which I will leave for another post. I spent a lot of time fishing with my Dad and Grandpa when we visited them. My Grandma would give me as much root beer as I wanted. They let us play with firecrackers. On moonless nights it was black as pitch, as there were no streetlights or neighbors around. The stars shone like first love.

Come and play with us, Danny.

It's Monster Monday again.

Warning: this one's genuinely scary. Although you've probably seen it before. Stick around for the Danny-Tony dialogue bit at the end.

Monster Monday

The gold standard against which all films were judged when I was growing up. I watched this countless Saturday afternoons on the static-y black and white TVs of my kidhood. Scared the f*uck out of me every time. Especially this scene. I have a very vivid memory of taking out the garbage one night and being scared sh*tless those skeletons were gonna come rattling around the corner and stab me with their big scary swords. Ran back inside as fast as I could.

The scariest bit is when they're all marching, slowly, step by step, then suddenly scream and begin running, swords held high, ready to chop up little kids like me.

All that gorgeous stop-motion animation is by Ray Harryhausen.

Monster Monday

Zira: What will he find out there, Dr. Zaius?
Zaius: His destiny.

One of the best movie endings ever. God bless Rod Serling.

Monster Monday

I've actually seen this. Twice. Watch for the perky suburban housewife offering up the flying blood-sucking alien parasite like a plate of cookies.

Monster Monday

The oceans should be controlled by beautiful life-forms such as myself.



Dig that crazy theme song!