I'm Lazy. So Sue me. Its my Birthday. FILLER FUN!

So yeah, We got filler, folks! Lots of filler!
Why?
Because it's my birthday and I felt like I am entitled to one day of being insanely lazy.
That and my brain refuses to work currently.

ANYWAYS, I figured since I'm being lazy, what better way to show my laziness than to make other bloggers work FOR me!
So here's a list of some fun stuff to read. Check em out!

Cracked.com has two insanely hilarious articles up that you really should read if you need a cheep laugh. I loved cracked. Even if I don't agree with what they're saying, its always a great read.
The 5 Most Unintentionally Gay Horror Movies Ever
And yeah..I agree with quite a few of them.
The 5 Most Half-Assed Monsters in Movie History
I must hunt down a copy of Death Bed: The Bed that Eats now!

And here's a couple of blogs to check out that I stumbled upon this week.
For you entertainment junkies out there, we have:
Reel Maniacs which covers not just horror but just about all genres. I enjoy Brad's article on the Oscars, being an Oscar junkie since high school....yes, I'm sad.
And a shout out to one of our loyal readers,The Bonebreaker and his blog The Mad Ravings of an Entertainment Junkie. He's got an eclectic taste which makes his blog a lot of fun to read! I also want to shout his user name like I'm announcing in the WWF.

For horror blogs we have Cabby's blog Night of the Living Celluloid. Dude, I share your opinion on 80's horror movies.
And a fledgling blog :Terror Firmer which proves to be a really fun blog to read so far. He knows his stuff!

And for the crafty in the kitchen folk, check out this I Make Projects article on how to make your own Cannibal Themed Supper....I so want to try one of those Alien Autopsies.

And in the WTF catagory we have Spitzle the Clown. I can't take credit for finding this. Stac is in charge of the WTF findings around here. I take no responsibility for what this will do to your brain.

And as usual, thanks to you all for reading and staying with us. Stac and I have had a blast writing this blog and a lot of that has to do with that fact that everyone has been really welcoming and awesome to us. So thanks!

Next Cins article will probably be either on The Exorsists sequals (believe it or not, two of the four were actually pretty good!) or why I love Clive Barker ....or none of the above because I tend to write on whim. For all I know, Stac may convince me to write about horror peen.

Have a great weekend all! I'm going to go endulge in some birthday cake!

Micheal Myers Beefed Up.

I just finished watching the 2007 remake of Halloween, as done by Rob Zombie, starring everyone and Sherri Moon Zombie's butt. She has a very nice butt, I might add; I hope Mr. Zombie appreciates the booty he married into.

I was fully expecting a cinematic abortion; almost every podcast I listen to denounced this pretty completely. I was expecting something on the lines of suddenly the movie turns into X-Men 3 (which WAS a bad movie, by the way), or suddenly Micheal Myers bursts into song and wails The Marriage of Figaro as he hacks and slashes "teenagers" getting freaky.

Honestly, I liked this movie just fine, and found it to be much more credible than any of the sequels to the actual movie. I like those just fine too (except Halloween 3 because SURPRISE! it sucks), but let's be honest-- they're pretty silly, and get sillier as they go along.

This version of the Myth of Micheal Myers was interesting; the Meyers family is shown as very discordant and dysfunctional. Mom's a stripper, step-dad's got a bad case of needle dick, big sister's got a touch of the Ho Bag, little Mikey likes to butcher his pets and school mates, and the baby.. is a baby. She's cool.

Micheal Myers is played more as a straight forward psychopath, evincing all of the traditional markers of a burgeoning killer. There is no mysticism here, jut a really BIG man in a mask terrorizing Haddonfield in his quest to find his unknowing baby sister.

This version of events deviated a lot from the original 1979 Halloween, but I don't regard that as sacrosanct like a lot of horror fans seem to do. Don't misunderstand-- I love the original version of the film, and have a copy of that as well as the 25 Years of Halloween DVD that came out a few years back. People tend to hold this up as the end all be all of slasher films, but I'm just not that emotionally invested in most of the slasher genre. I enjoy it in a brainless way, but supernatural stories are more likely to scare me.

The original is a beautifully shot movie to be sure, and very moody and creeping. In this respect I think the original is superior to the remake. Rob Zombie is a very competent technical director, if not given as much of an artistic bent as John Carpenter. But Rob Zombie's kill scenes are much more realistic, frighteningly so. Plus, you gotta respect a kid who stabs a nurse to death with a fork.

John Carpenter is hit or miss with me-- on one hand we have Halloween and The Fog. On the other hand, he also did The Ghosts of Mars and produced the horrible remake of The Fog in 2005. So the idea of a remake of Halloween really didn't surprise me, and it was a pretty safe bet that Rob Zombie would get it an R rating, which he did.

I don't know that I would buy a copy of this for full price, but I'll snag it used for sure. It's worth a watch at the very least.

10 minutes of Terror-Dawn of the Dead 2004

Wow! Its been forever since I've done a 10 minutes of terror. This is mostly due to me having trouble finding clips online to show on the blog. Alas, the 28 Weeks Later clip has been torn from youtube...stupid youtube.
Anyways, I managed to find this clip out of sheer dumb luck. I'm a very big fan of the Dawn of the Dead remake. While I do believe it lacks the depth and social commentary of the original Dawn of the Dead, it more than makes up for it with gore, terror, and probably one of the best first 10 minutes of a zombie film ever.

I'm sure most of you know this scene all too well. Its definitely my favorite part of the film. For those who never saw it, or just want to re-visit it, here's the clip!

Unfortunately its not embedable.

All done? Back?
Okay.
Now that 10 minutes there are my own personal nightmare. Seriously. I DO have nightmares like this. This is why the zombie Apocalypse scares the Hell out of me. Waking up to your loved one now a monster, your neighbors wanting to kill you, and complete chaos? The idea makes my stomach drop.

What I love about this sequence is how extremely normal it all starts. It was only a few hours before when Anna was planning her weekend and enjoying some TV with her husband. Its all shot in this very sleepy, quiet way. The lighting is warm and welcoming. The background music is soft or nonexsistant. The actors speak quietly. Everything about the pre-zombie world is inviting us to relax and feel comforted.
That normalcy is what makes the chaos all the more jarring. When Lewis is bitten, the light is harsher, the focus sharper, the cuts much quicker. Also, that bright red blood against her white shirt, the white walls of the bathroom and the "domestic" beige of the bedroom is not only stunning, but another visual wake up call that things are REALLY bad.
I'd have to say my favorite shot in the whole sequence is Anna throwing herself backwards into the bathtub. There's just a moment of stunned silence as she sits there before the insanity begins again.

I really believe the reason why Dawn of the Dead 2004 gives me such a eerie feeling is because I watched it during the very devastating southern California fires. The entire city was in flames and no one was advised to leave their house. I remember the skies were orange and smokey for weeks. It was like the zombie Apocalypse only lacking zombies. For some reason, sharing that sense of dread with the characters in this film was almost comforting.

Also, for a bonus, Johnny, from Freddy In Space has a new fun blog called Win Free Horror Shit in which you can...well...win free horror shit. He posts several contests you can enter so if you want to try your hand in winning stuff, check the blog out!

Thou Hast FORSAKEN me!!!

I have FearNet on demand. This is both a blessing and a curse. The blessings are I can catch up on some horror films I haven't seen yet or watch some of my old time favorites that I don't own on DVD. Unfortunately the curse comes when I decide to randomly pick a film just based on the title. Its like playing Russian Roulette with your remote control. But I was still sick yesterday and feelin' frisky so I decided to pick a movie at random and see what would happen.
The curse struck again.
I picked out this dandy of a film called The Forsaken, or as like like to call it Vampire Hunter Douche. Every male in this film is a douche and every woman in this movie is a blathering idiot, a psycho hose beast, or both. The movie follows a young man (douche #1) who decides to road trip across country to get to his sister's wedding. In the process he meets a vampire hunter (douche #2) who gets him wrapped up in some strange vampire hunting antics involving a blond catatonic and the most obnoxious vampire leader ever (douche #3). There's also some sort of subplot about Douche #1 driving a loaner car across country to some rich woman. And that's....pretty much it.

The movie feels like it was trying to be a John Carpenter's Vampires for the "bro" set. It's wants to be a rough and tumble macho movie. But what it lacks are charismatic characters (and actors) and the hard core brutality that Vampires has. This turns it into a movie about two douche bags chasing another douche bag and slapping a dumb blond around for no apparent reason. Am I using the word douche too much? Probably. But I can't think of any other term that could describe the characters in this movie better other than possibly fucktard. You just don't care about them. You care more about the state of their loner car than you do them. Though most fight sequences I thought "Oh! That bullet will damage the paint! Oooh! The bumper fell off! Oh No!" while one of our heroes was shot, bitten, or beaten to a pulp.

Also, their vampire mythology is all over the damn place. I'm a women who likes it when mythologies are played with. It always presents a fresh take on an old concept weather its zombies, vampires, or werewolves. But I do believe you should attempt to make the new mythology make sense and be consistent. At the beginning of the movie, its established that vampirism is passed on through some form of infection that you get when bitten. You can also take a form of drug that will delay the turning into a vampire. Okay, I can get into that. You have to kill the vampire that turned you, before you turn to go back to being human. Okay, I can get that too though it sounds weird when it comes to fighting an infection. Vampires were founded by a bunch of french knights that sold their soul to the devil, then divided up and started biting people....okay wait...wasn't it supposed to be a medical condition not a mystical one? Right about this time, most of the medical info from the start of the movie was forgotten and dropped. I suppose both medical and mystical can go together if you take the effort to WRITE about it. But it just seemed dropped after the french knight explanation. No mention of any other magical properties of the drugs either. It just didn't mesh. Come on writers, either make and effort to combine the two or PICK ONE!

Now usually when a movie has gaping plot holes, at least we can rely on the idea of the vampires being cool right?....Right? Yeah, not so much. These were the most annoying group of blodsuckers EVER. Even Anne Rice's vampires couldn't hold a candle to these obnoxious, annoying, wannabe bad boys. Here's what they do. They Eat. They Fuck. THAT'S IT. They don't even do either very interestingly. Most of the feeding frenzy scenes are cut away or filmed so erratically that you can't really see much happening. And the sex scenes are the same.Also, our head vampire chews the scenery so much you really can't tell if he's overacting or if he has some form of brain damage. And his girlfriend bugged me. I know they were trying to make her a femme fatal. I know she was trying to be sexy. But her sexy consisted of looking vacant, cocking her hips, and having the vague air of syphilis about her. Oh, and for those keeping count, you do not see her boobs.

Okay, I can go on and on about how insanely dumb this movie is but I should stop now. One good thing is it didn't make me enraged like Jeepers Creepers did. Probably because I had no expectations going into this film. Also, I do believe this would be a hilarious film to watch while completely drunk, though it lacks the complete ridiculousness of Nick Cage's Wickerman.
Overall? Unless you want a mediocre drunk film, or have a douche fetish. Skip this one.

Things to kill time with on the Interwebs.

I have caught the plague! YAY ME!
So while I'm at home coughing and hacking my guts out, I also surf the interwebs for random things.
I'm a huge fan of viral websites and wacky creepy stories during my surfing time. These two sites are my favorites. I still go back to them over and over to keep me entertained.

The Dionea House
What is so great about this one is the amount of work that went into telling this story. Its all done through once sided email correspondence. He uses that to tell the general story then creates character blogs on livejournal and blogger to create other sub stories of the evil house. The story resembles "House of Leaves" but more straightforward. Its a great way to kill an hour or two at work.

Ted's Caving Page
This one isn't quite as extensive as the Dionea house but its still a lot of fun to read. The story is about a caver who encountered some really nasty things on one of his expeditions. Think The Decent with less action and with dudes. Its a quick read and the photos lend to the claustrophobic atmosphere of the story.

Those are the two I like the most. anyone have any fun sites like above to share? I am a total sucker for them!
Sharing is caring, folks!

Saturday... the FOURTEENTH!

That's an actual movie. I loved it when I was a kid.

Quick post-- I saw the new Friday the 13th, and enjoyed the hell out of it! I will give you one word of warning, though: Jason gets PISSED when you mess with pot. I'm just sayin'.

Mr Frost-An Unseen Gem!

I'm about to ask a question that I'm sure I know the answer to.
Has anyone SEEN this movie?
Yeah...I had a feeling. Well if you haven't I highly recommend you saunter over to this link here and give it a watch.
WATCH MR. FROST HERE

Mr. Frost is a little known movie from back in the 1990 when the whole "thriller" genre was taking off. I have my likes and dislikes of "thrillers". Some are wonderful and brilliant but many during this era involved horribly bland things like Sharon Stone.
Mr. Frost luckily is one of those really great thrillers that flew under the radar during the Basic Instinct, Hand that Rocks the Cradle, and Sliver years...note that two of those starred Sharon Stone.
I stumbled across this film when a buddy of mine insisted we all come over and watch it. He had been hunting this movie down for years and finally found an old beat up VHS copy on Ebay. To show the popularity of this movie, is still has yet to be released on DVD, hence the link above instead of me insisting you put it on your Netflix cue.
I was expecting the usual fare of thriller-ness. Some twists and turns, some gasps, some sex, and a neat little ending tied up in a bow. What I ended up with was an hour and forty minutes of pure creepiness.

The gist of the story line is this:
Mr Frost confesses to the murder of 24 people. In fact, they're in his back yard. He is taken to an asylum and he goes silent for two years. Meanwhile, authorities cannot find any records of his existence. After two years, Mr. Frost decides to speak to his psychiatrist, Sarah Day. He confesses he is Satan... and honestly? We're never quite sure if he is telling the truth or not about that.

Mr. Frost stars Jeff Goldblum at his best. This isn't the stuttering, mugging to the camera, "aw shucks" Jeff Goldblum we know from Earth Girls are Easy, and Independance Day. Ooooh no. This is cold, calculating, "I will fuck your shit UP!" Jeff Goldblum. FAR more scary than he was in The Fly. Why? Because at least as Seth Brundle, he was sympathetic. His performance in Mr. Frost is so incredibly creepy, so cold and chilling that you can't stop watching him. I believe he is the reason this movie is so fantastic. He lives up to his name of Mr. Frost. There's an old saying about the banality of evil that rings true in this movie. Mr. Frost seems so normal. He says things like "Well you knew I liked to keep trophies" as if he were talking about bowling, not the severed limbs in his backyard. Yet he is extremely magnetic. By the end of the movie you feel like you want Mr. Frost to like you and ask you to dinner.
The movie is slow moving. Its not a gore fest, or a suspense drenched film full of cat scares. What it is, is creepy. Relentlessly creepy. It builds up slowly, surely, and at the end you're left blinking, your mouth hanging open and muttering "What just happened?" as the credits roll. But all in a GOOD way I assure you! The script is sophisticated and never talks down to the audience. It also never spells things out for you neatly. Who is Mr. Frost? A psychopath? An agent of Satan? Satan himself? A really REALLY bored man? You never really know. It has a mystery about it much like American Psycho where you're never quite sure where its coming from, but you enjoy the ride. It also has a delightfully errie score of shrill synthesizers which in any other movie would come across as cheap. Here? It works.

This movie is definitely worth the watch. And considering that its not on DVD (Damn you studios!) You can catch it for free online. The good thing is its not so popular that it will be yanked off the interwebs instantly. In fact, I don't think anyone is aware this movie exists.
So if you're in the mood for good acting and a lot of creepy feelings, give it a watch!

Ring vs Ringu vs The Ring

I love love love a lot of the Asian horror I've been exposed to. Some is utter crap (Split Mouthed Woman, I'm looking at you, you sucky whore!) Most has been great though, and I'm childish enough (I think I'm in a permanent child-ego state) to like what I like, and I feel no desire to explain it to rude assholes who inform me I'm wrong simply because I disagree with their opinions. Then I probably call them a battery of vile names whilst reading a romance novel, or rereading Twilight for the billionth time. So I can like a remake just as much or more than the original, as I hope to intelligently explain in this entry.

I first saw The Ring, I think on the night it opened, with my friend Malinda. That was so much scary fun, I rode the high for the rest of the night. Malinda and I tend to feed off of each other's fears, so seeing a film together is great. (Except when it's Cabin Fever. I will NEVER forgive her for that one.) I still list The Ring as one of my favorite movies, and have the poster on my bedroom wall.

I saw Ringu, the Japanese original, shortly after it became available in the states. I almost bought it sight unseen, but it was 25$ before tax with no special features, so I reluctantly passed on it. After I saw it that first time I was glad-- I hated it. Sadako was the only scary portion of that movie, and compared the Rachael, Reiko was a pale competitor. I did love the sound track for both, though.

Then, after it was finally translated and available in paper back, I bought Ring, the book that spawned it all, written by Koji Suzuki (who is a very, very fascinating man in his own right).

After recently (in the same night) rewatching The Ring and Ringu, I have decided to compare and contrast all three against one another. How fucking scientific of me. Think Sadako/Samara will decompose in a test tube if exposed to high heat? What will leak out if she does?

The Ring was still awesome-- well acted with some really terrifying effects and timing-- for example, the scene at Katie's funeral when he mother, Ruth, tells Rachael that she was the one who found the dead girl, I looked down, smartly expecting a flash scare, and I was right. Too bad it happened after I looked back up, huh? I think I peed a little when I saw that poor huddled, mangled form in the closet. The kicker was Katie's head falling forward-- Yoinks. (Looking that up on youtube just seriously creeped me out). I also love this movie because I live in Washington state and go to Seattle fairly often. While the area of the state I live in looks nothing like the sections in the movie, I still know it very well, and have lived under the west side's notorious rain cloud at other points in my life.

After rewatching it several years later, Ringu is much better than I remembered. I found myself enjoying it, as well as wanting to throttle Reiko for letting her kindergartner be home by himself. I was also not broken up over the death of her ex-husband. In The Ring I got the impression that Noah, Rachael's ex and the father of her son, Aidan, was a maddening charmer. The kind of guy who could probably persuade his way into your pants; it wouldn't be until afterward that you discovered he also drove you crazy. But the rift between Noah and Rachael played more to me like two stubborn personalities clashing, not that he was an asshole; I was genuinely sad when Noah was killed by Samara.

The same cannot be said of Ryuji, Reiko's ex-husband in Ringu. While a lot of his coldness is explained later in the film-- he is painfully psychic we discover, and I get the impression he has suffered for this in the past, I still find him profoundly arrogant, and an asshole, deadbeat dad who has nothing to do with his own son's life, instead opting to fuck the underaged tail made available to him via his teaching job. I winced when he died, but all of the regret I had was for what Reiko would go through, since for some misbegotten reason she saw something commendable in the cockwhore.

Reiko and Rachael are also interesting characters to contemplate-- I like Rachael because she is a strong, independent woman who will bust through any bullshit to get to what she needs. She's also a loving mother to her eccentric son-- very patient with Aiden, and I get the impression that she reads him better than he realizes. She's also mean, which, hey, I can relate to.

Reiko I strongly disliked when I first saw Ringu. I thought she was weak and ineffectual where Rachael was strong, but on a second viewing I see that I am very, very wrong. She's actually very determined, if subtle character. She's never seen in anything but pants (no skirt, dresses, etc. Sorry to get your hopes up, guys) and blazers, and seems to have a fulfilling career while trying to raise her son to the best of her abilities. She also takes on a bulldog like stubbornness where her son, Koichi, is concerned.

You'll notice here that I haven't mentioned the book at all in these comparisons. The reason is because the set up in the book follows the same basic premise-- death of a high school girl prompts investigation, which uncovers the killer tape, but the characters are very different. The main character in Ring is a married man with a very small (I think 3 years old?) daughter. There's also a strange secondary character who is killed by Sadako. He's a friend of the main character, and he may or may not be a rapist, it's never told for sure what the truth it. There is also a subplot pertaining to smallpox, which takes on a larger role than realized initially. The book is very, very good, and I recommend it, highly-- it builds up some seriously upsetting suspense.

Sadako vs Samara vs Sadako is an interesting view, because all three incarnations are very different. Sadako in Ringu is terrifying. You never see her face, her fingers appear to have too many joints, and her eyes roll horribly in what little of her face you see. But her actual presence in Ringu is very small, and I think the movie suffers a little for that. She's a fascinating character, and I'd personally like to have known more about her other than that her father may not have been human, and she can kill with a thought.

Samara is presented in a slightly different light-- she's cast as an increasingly sympathetic character, a small, strange girl suffering not only under the ministrations of her unbalanced mother and her off-putting, abrasive father, but also castigated by an entire community of superstitious, small-minded fishermen. That was a REALLY long sentence. The fact that she's played very well by a talented child actress (Daveigh Chase, who would also voice Lilo in Lilo and Stitch) adds to her pathos. Sure she's creepy, but she's just a kid. Right?

Right?

I was strangled with an abrupt horror that had previously been sympathy when Aiden awakes to his mother assuring him that she took the little girl out of the dark place. "You helped her?! Why did you do that? You weren't supposed to do that. Don't you understand, Rachael? She never sleeps." That line makes my scalp crawl every time I watch it.

Sadako in Ringu is a terror, and she's open about it. Samara is just as horrible, but she's sneaky about it-- you've helped her before you learn you should not have.

Sadako in Ring is a whole different entity. For starters, she's gorgeous. And she made it to adulthood, unlike her unfortunate film incarnations. She also has a pretty shocking secret, which I won't spill here, since I don't think as many people have read Ring as have seen the movies. She's very much a tragic figure as well as a horrible one, and the cyclical nature of her curse is why the story is named Ring.

All three forms of this story have lived easily side by side, and I have developed at taste for them all. I haven't had a chance to read Spiral or Loop, the book's two sequels, but I hope to once I get an opportunity. I haven't seen The Ring 2, and from what I've heard that's more blessing than curse. I haven't seen any of the Ringu sequels either, either than Ring 0: Happy Birthday, and that was more weird drama with a little bit of horror at the end. I also have yet to read the Ringu manga that's been out for a bit, but I plan on giving that a look, too.

All in all, this is a fascinating story told in three different ways, and I have come to enjoy all three immensely.

Did you make it to the end of my crushing wall of text? If so, give yourself a big hand-- then take some ibuprofen. You probably have eye strain.

I's Back, Bitches!

I hath returned from the grand SCA trip!
And what makes the relevant this this blog?

For I have seen the horror of extremely large women wearing nothing but a few coins on their boobies and a strip of cloth covering their hoo-ha in the freezing cold and very sickly scrawny men running around in what is either a loin cloth or a dirty dish towel found on the side of the road.
The horror..THE HORROR!

Regardless, it was an awesome trip. Will post stuff tomorrow when I've slept the rum bender off.
CHEERS!

More Than Meets the.. Brain?

A thought struck me as I sit here, pondering what social factors would influence where a person would live (other than segregation-- I covered that in the question above). While trying to figure out how to word my answer concerning a family's economic status, a thought came to mind.

What would a zombie Transformer look like? And what would it eat?

Too Much T.V- Brain Fried, Please Send Replacement

I'm currently taking Chemistry 111, (as well as Ethnic Relations 101 and History 144 but those are irrelevant to this story) and my chem professor is a really interesting guy. He's intelligent and personable in a cool way, which really helps with a subject like chemistry.

Dr. R also loves outdoor winter sports, but not mundane things like skiing. The man goes mountain climbing in the snow. On top of that he helped a friend of his get into the Guinness' Book of World Records by helping to invent something dubbed The Snow Pod. It's a cross between a wheelchair and a tank, and his friend, who is a paraplegic, is able to get himself up a glacier at a sixty degree angle! The whole thing is powered by the friend using it-- it has a sprocket like a bicycle's pedals are attached to. Essentially the man pedals himself to the top of a snowy mountain using his arms. It is very, very impressive.

My reasons for telling you this on a horror blog? Dr. looks almost EXACTLY like Doug Jones as the zombie Billy Butcherson in Hocus Pocus.

We are Pre-Dards!

So Johnny, our wonderful idol man from Freddy In Space decided to give us a Premio Dardo award!
WOOO!
Actually its a fun little blogger meme where you get to name five blogs you can't stop reading.
The explanation is as follows:

"The Dardo Award is given for recognition of cultural, ethical, literary, and personal values transmitted in the form of creative and original writing. These stamps were created with the intention of promoting fraternization between bloggers, a way of showing affection and gratitude for work that adds value to the Web."

But blogging meme or not, Johnny boy was nice enough to take the time to say some nice things about us two broads:
"Two females takes on horror. Makes for some very interesting stuff. It doesn't hurt that their blog was created because they liked my blog so much! More updates though, ladies!"

Yeah...we do need to update more.
We suck.
I hope what we lack in quantity we make up for in quality! That and once February is over I plan to bring on an onslaught of reviews...actually I'll probably write one for Doomsday tonight because I need to share in the insanity there.

So without further ado, here are my own picks for the Premio Dardo Awards!

Freddy In Space - Okay, I'm sure I'm creating some horrible Ring like style of meme horror by giving the award BACK to the guy who gave us the award but dude, Johnny KNOWS his horror. Not only knows but eat, breathes, sleeps, and cuts the toe nails of horror. This is my go to spot for all my horror needs. He also inspired Stac and I to start Creepy Kitch. Dude, you rule.

Benevolent Street- Another great go to place for horror. Great writers, great articles, and some hilarious reads. If you have not read this horror blog, what the Hell are you waiting for?!

Dawn of The Dad - Okay, the official name is The Horror Dad Journal but I like to call it Dawn of the Dad simply for the best zombie photo EVAR on his page. Tom G commented on our blog a couple times so I poked around his place and started reading on his life. Tom is a great writer, and his daughter is adorable.

Project Rungay - Not horror related at ALL...unless you consider certain fashion trends complete horror. The blog of Tom and Lorenzo, two bitchy gay guys who have a blog about fashion TV shows. I love camp and I love comedy. This place has both.

Cadaver Lab- Does this count as a blog? No? Eh I don't care. Cadaver Lab is the home of Mike and Sam. The site has some great movie reviews but stay for their Podcast! I started listening because Stac likes to email or call in and do her best to make them blush. Hey Sam and Mike! Beware! Both Stac and I plan to leave you voice mail treats this summer during our annual get together!.

So, gentle readers, to go forth and check these places out!

On a completely different note. Cins here will be away on one of her crazy SCA excursions for the week. The hubby and I are headed to Estrella War to drink and stab people with swords. Oh the fun to be had!

Until then, Stac is at the helm....feel free to kick her ass into posting more creepy weird shit.;)

Chainsaw Waltz Redux

Last night I FINALLY had time to sit down and watch my DVD of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, and it was love at first sight. I had never seen this as I mentioned before, and was initially leery; the first Texas Chainsaw Massacre scared the fuck out of me. I was about twenty, watched the original with Bevin and Malinda at Bevin's dad's house while he was away, and didn't sleep right for about a week. Bevin was so messed up she had to sleep at my apartment for almost the same amount of time.

I was new to horror movies at the time, and was NOT eager to repeat a scare this bad. Now I'm older, more cynical, and definitely more desensitized; buying sight unseen a used copy of TCM2 just seemed natural and right, dangit.

As it turns out, younger me need not have worried; this movie was less scary and far more hilarious. Here we meet another member of the family, Chop Top, the Vietnam vet with an exposed plate in his head, bad teeth, and a penchant for sizzling his head wound with a heated hanger and eating what comes off. Yes; he eats his own scalp.

Seems the Sawyer boys are out and around in more urban areas now, since the eldest brother, Drayton, is an award winning caterer. There's a scene in the beginning when Drayton is given a trophy for best chili in a competition; in the top of his trophy is a bowl, which has been filled with his award winning entry. You can imagine how horrible a bowl of what was probably just Hormel chili looks as everyone licks their lips, trying to taste. I gagged.

Then we have Lefty, as played but what I can only guess was an extremely drunk Dennis Hopper. He didn't have any noticeable signs, but MAN did he ever have a weird light in his eyes this whole movie; he reminded me of several of my former roommates, in fact. Lefty is a man haunted; he is (I think) Sally and Franklin's brother, and a former Texas Ranger who has been searching for the Sawyer clan for some fourteen years. At this point he is the only one who believes Sally's story. In summation he is twitchy as fuck. At one point he goes and loads up on not one, not two, but THREE chainsaws, bought from some old coot with a roadside store. Had I been the toothless codger in question, there is no way in HELL I would have sold anything more dangerous than a soda to Lefty. He never says a word to the man, and then proceeds to chainsaw the living hell out of a tester log, doing his stoic, glassy-eyed version of the crazy Leatherface dance. I really doubt that either chainsaw or log lived to tell the tale.

Finally, we have Stretch and L.G, both employees of a local rock station. They might be the owners, I'm not sure-- I was trying to do part of my Chemistry homework during the beginning of the film. Stretch is young and sassy, and does the deejaying while L.G is the engineer. Two yuppie pricks keep calling in one night, harassing Stretch, and in the process manage to piss off what I assume was Chop Top and Leather Face. Stretch ends up taping the two screaming as they are chainsawed by our boy Bubba, which she then tries to hand over to Lefty.

A few words on the yuppie extermination: that was one of the coolest things I have ever seen, and I think has to go down in personal history as one of my all time favorite scenes. Leather Face puppeting a corpse that has been strapped to his own body, swinging that chainsaw around was like something Jim Henson's doppelganger would have come up with. I am SO going to do something like that one Halloween! All of this is going on atop the roof of a moving pick up truck, and is the coolest thing in the whole of forever right now.

Stretch ends up calling own the wrath of the family, and poor L.G gets killed and taken by Chop Top and Leather Face. I'm sure you can guess what they intend to do with him. This is where we learn that Leather Face does indeed have a libido; sometimes a chainsaw's not just a chainsaw, folks. Stretch is smart enough to parlay Bubba's sexual desire for her into an escape, which leads to some awesome pelvic thrusting while revving the saw, at Stretch. Then Leather Face ran away. Save for most of the blood, it reminded me a lot of grade school.

Amusing to no one but me, I managed to pick out a Cramps song, while Bevin noticed an Oingo Boingo tune. She initially said "Oh! Right! That's Billy and the Boingers." I was bug eyed at her, because I was pretty sure I didn't hear any Bill the Cat in the music in question. Now THAT, dearies, is old.

All of this leads to the most epic of epic battles: a chain saw duel, between Leather Face and Lefty, and frankly, I didn't know who to root for. Dennis Hopper in a ten gallon cowboy hat, singing hymns as he chainsaws the Sawyers' home (an abandoned theme park) down into the ground is truly a striking image, I must say. So is Stretch tenderly putting L.G's face back on him after he saves her. I'm not into recreational drug use, but MAN, I'll bet this is some trippy shit on the right substances. Trippiest of all however, is Leather Face slipping Stretch the tongue. Drayton is NOT pleased that little Bubba's discovered what a hard on's for, and I'm left wondering if they make their own condoms. EGAD.

This was a weird, weird movie, and I am SO glad to have this for my personal collection. I am taking this with me when I go see Cins this summer, and we are going to drink a lot whilst laughing raucously.

Jim Siebold was the only original cast member in this film, playing eldest brother Drayton, though the actor playing L.G was a crew member/ camera man on the original. I'm really glad that they had Drayton-- that was the most foul-mouthed old man I have ever been privileged to hear, and he went off in some truly creative rants, calling his brothers pecker heads and fudge packers, frequently in the same breath. He gets mildly chainsawed in the booty by Lefty, which was deeply funny, but what can I say; the five year old in me still thinks butts are funny.

I recommend this movie, heartily, and I have no idea why this film apparently got shit all over by fans and critics alike. It's way more comedic in tone than its predecessor, but that's not a bad thing. The acting was great, the story was hilarious, and I think this was way more enjoyable than the remake in 2004. (Eventually I'm going to do a contrast and compare between the original TCM and the remake. The original is better.) According to imdb.com, Dennis Hopper lists this as his worst movie ever, which I think is pretty fucking ambitious considering he was in Super Mario Brothers AND Water World.

Give it a watch, drink in the weird! I dunno about you all, but I'm off chili for the next few weeks.

Creeeepy!

I love finding weird, creepy shit on youtube!



TCM 2 review tonight!