Stream a Little Stream: Tales that Witness Madness

Thanks to the 1973 British horror anthology Tales that Witness Madness, I no longer have to refer to this lovely method of transportation as "that bicycle with the big front wheel":

It is called a penny farthing bicycle, FYI.

Also thanks to this Freddie Francis-directed movie, I know that Freddie Francis has directed at least one idiotic movie.

It has a strong opening story, "Mr. Tiger", that involves a boy of about six who is apparently so troubled by his parents' near-constant fighting that he becomes obsessed with the imaginary titular figure, who the boy describes as a red-meat-craving, bedtime-storytelling, parent-loathing best friend.  Mr. Tiger turns out to be quite real, and dispatches of the boy's annoying family in a delightfully nasty sequence that shows the boy providing musical accompaniment to the bloodletting on his toy piano.

If Schroeder had been created by David Cronenberg.

Any sense of foreboding that was stirred up by "Mr. Tiger" is forgotten when we get to "Penny Farthing"...

...which has the audacity to believe that shot after shot of the expression of the subject of a portrait changing from blandly crotchety to aggravated to grumpily inquisitive (complete with side-eye as it observes someone's actions) is going to scare the audience. Everything about this segment, from the overbearing evil spirit of a hapless antique store owner's uncle, to the ludicrously constructed flashback scenes, to the fiery poltergeist blowout at the climax, is unintentionally funny.

"You kids get off the grass!"

Now the wheels are greased (pun intended) for the offensively stupid third segment, "Mel".  Mel is a possessive (and possessed?) felled tree that attracts the attention, and I mean ATTENTION, of Brian Thompson (Michael Jayston), who comes across as a fourth-rate Michael Caine. 

This is just depressing. 

 He stands the tree in his living room and calls it art, then inappropriately dotes on it, to the chagrin of his affection-starved wife Bella (Joan Collins). For all its faults, this movie has the distinction of being the (I assume) only film in which a man caresses a tree's boob. 

"There's a ribbon in my hair, for Christ's sake. You can't give me ten minutes?"

Bella eventually loses the meager patience she had with Mel and tries to lay the smack-down on her with a machete, but is killed for her effort.  One might expect a "death by evil tree" scene to be Evil Dead 2-riffic, but all carnage takes place offscreen, in silence.  Not one drop of blood appears. If an ending sucks in the forest and no one is there to hate it...

The fourth and final segment, "Luau", is about two Hawaiian-god worshipping gentlemen who kill the virginal daughter of a literary agent and serve her roasted corpse at a luau as part of a ritual. The god's name is pronounced "Mammaloo" and hearing actor Michael Petrovich (sleepwalking through his role) passionlessly announce it again and again is a scream.  

"Can I get some extra pineapple with my stabbed teenager?"

The wraparound story involves Donald Pleasance as a psychiatrist trying to convince a colleague that the aforementioned stories are real, and failing miserably. The doctor is declared insane and dragged away, right before his colleague is killed by Mr. Tiger. Tales from the Darkside, this isn't.  Grade:  D+

 

Twikus

In light of the indiscretions of Those I Shall Not Name, I nod to the universe's sense of betrayal through poetry.

Houseguest

Sparkly vampire guy

Weeps against the bosom of

Girl who played Elle Woods

Texting with blog 'scuse me?

(via fanpix.net)

monica: blog scuse me got invited to someone's birthday party!!! We should go, it's this Sunday in Minnesota. You can swing that, right? 9:46 AM

tara: Awesome! I can totally swing it. We both know the drive to Minnesota is two and a half hours max. 11:33 AM

monica: It's about six hours if you count all pee breaks... But still doable! 11:35 AM

tara: Btw i am the worst vegan ever. I made a field horse carry me through the woods on a nature run. There was a lot of peeing and resentment. 11:37 AM

monica: I'm assuming the horse grabbed you by the neck and was carrying you like a baby kitten 2:56 PM

tara: I have to pee and that comment is going to make me ruin a good pair of shorts 3:17 PM

monica: Is that the long form way of saying lol? 3:18 PM

tara: You got it. Ihtpatcigtmmragpos 3:20 PM

monica: I just made that a text shortcut on my phone so any time I try to type laughing out loud in short form it will replace it with this ihtpatcigtmmragpos. 3:31 PM

(courtesy of google voice)

When Does Autumn Start? Soon? Songs of Summer 2012

We've reached the sweet point in the season at which any mainstream artist who wanted to crank out a "summer anthem" this year has already made the effort and is now tucked in the studio prepping a holiday jam; maybe one that sounds oddly similar to Liz Phair's "Why Can't I".

Now that the kids have spent weeks rocking across Dorito-littered beaches to summery Top 40, let's pluck a few turds from the 2012 roster and examine their corresponding music videos. 

1.  Owl City and Carly Rae Jepsen - Good Time



What It's About:  A man who feels the need to refer to himself as "Owl City" and Canadian songstress Jepsen do some clean livin' in the woods with kids who look like they just wrapped a photo shoot for an Urban Outfitters catalog.

Why It Sucks:  Owl City acts like a smug idiot the whole time (I don't think I've ever seen a worse lip-syncher) and seems to be having an issue with muscle control in the "magic by the campfire" sequence.  Also, the gang is obviously having three kinds of a blast but I didn't spot one bottle of liquor. Does not compute.

2.  Katy Perry - Wide Awake




What It's About: Katy Perry puts on her "sexy vampire" costume from last October and mopes amongst corny symbolism. FAME IS HARD. MEN ARE JERKS. MY INNOCENCE IS LOST. I LOOK HOT IN PURPLE.

Why It Sucks:  The scenes in the nightmare hospital are so ridiculous in their attempts to be deep and psychological that I did this upon my first watch:

Also, was the ending supposed to be a surprise?  I've been more surprised at the plot turns of an Adam Sandler movie. Katy, please stop making "art" and go back to shooting sundae toppings from your bra.


3.  Matchbox Twenty - She's So Mean




What It's About:  A beautiful, wonderful, saintly woman does everything in her power to get Matchbox Twenty to shut up.

Why It Sucks:  CG fire.  I've said enough.  But allow me to add:  Wtf is with the drummer's "feeling the holy spirit of the epic lyrics" face at 1:55?  Does he honestly believe the song warrants that?  If he ever got the opportunity to cover some Beatles, would his features collapse into his skull as he urinated confetti?

There have been heaps of serious musical failures floating around since June 20th, so stay tuned for more breakdowns. In the meantime, cleanse your palette with my latest choice for It Song/Video, a HEALTH/Eric Wareheim bit of flashy gory electro.

In Meme-ory of

This all started out with Aaron Sorkin being Aaron Sorkin during an interview with Sarah Nicole Prickett of Toronto's The Globe and Mail.  

First, this gem:
“Listen here, Internet girl,” he says, getting up. “It wouldn’t kill you to watch a film or pick up a newspaper once in a while.”

Then this:
“I’m sick of girls who don’t know how to high-five,” he says. He makes me try to do it “properly,” six times. He also makes me laugh; I’m nervous, and it’s so absurd. He loves it. He says, “Let me manhandle you.” Then he ambles off, hoping I’ll write something nice, as though he has never known how the news works, how many stories can be true.
(See the entire article here)

And then by the mystical powers of the internet, the Hey Internet Girl Tumblr was born.

This Week in Bieber

It has come to my attention that Billy Corgan (best known as the singer of The Smashing Pumpkins) has contracted Bieber Fever after exposure from his young nieces who are "gaga crazy" for the Bieb.
(via contactmusic.com)

The main thing I learned from this article is that there are Justin Bieber dolls!
''Let's put it this way, there's been zero dolls made of me and he's got about seven. So I'm a bit behind on the doll market.'' (Corgan)


 So naturally I went straight to amazon.com to buy myself a few dolls... for the "gaga crazy" youngsters in my life, clearly.  When I noticed something...

It's not that there is a Justin Bieber Backstage Pass Game.

As I sit here sipping from my margarita shopping for dolls of amazon, I realize I AM NOT ALONE!

Stream a Little Stream: The Video Dead

Today I paid myself the courtesy of watching the 1987 direct-to-video horror film "The Video Dead", one of those underground splatterfests for which most of the cast and crew's functions should be in quotes. Don't let the badass VHS cover fool you:  Ineptitude and unintentional laughs run way thicker through this movie than its watery, transparent gore.

Roxanna Augesen, the only member of the cast who actually acts instead of recites lines with the dope-faced falseness of a high school drama club member, stars as Zoe Blair, a "teenager" (she is about to start her first semester of college - majoring in Aerobics and minoring in Music Videos, mind you - but appears to be a fresh-faced thirty-five-year-old) who moves into a house on Shady Lane with her pasty, joint-puffing brother Jeff (Rocky Duvall).  The siblings wait around for their parents to return from doing business in Saudi Arabia.  As Jeff half-assedly rakes leaves in the front yard one day, he is approached by a neighbor girl, April (Vicki Bastel) and the two of them begin a chaste, moronic "romance" before zombies emerge from the supernatural tv set in Jeff and Zoe's attic and commence to slaughtering in a series of embarrassingly incompetent sequences.

To get a decent picture of how much this movie hurt me, consider these nuggets:

• Chocolate, the poodle April had been walking, is killed in the woods by a zombie. April and Jeff find him (after, of course, we are treated to roughly 17 minutes of the two of them walking through the underbrush and yelling "Chaahh-kuh-liiit!").  Bachelor, the poochie pie who stars as Chocolate, is seen resting on the ground, visibly breathing. "Looks like a heart attack," Jeff astutely observes.
• April's maid (Libby Russler, affecting a ridiculous pseudo-Mexican accent) is brutally strangled by a zombie.  I use the term "strangled" loosely because the dubbing presents her as breathing heavily throughout the incident.
• Jeff chainsaws a zombie in half, and two live mice are discovered amidst the grue. Because, as everyone knows from eighth grade biology class, mice have a propensity to traipse around in ambulatory bodies.
• Joshua Daniels, a crass Texan who is an expert on the zombies and aids Zoe and Jeff in their fight, laughs heartily at Zoe's suggestion to call the police because AS IF the police would believe a story about the dead rising to attack people. Well, Mr. Daniels, why the f&$% would Zoe have to tell the police anything about the undead?  Could she not just say there was a group of people trespassing on her property and getting violent?  The zombies are so sluggish that Barney Fife could take them down on an off day.
• April flashes back to her father's murder, which she was not present for.  This sequence, which I will call "Oral Hygeine Gone Wrong", is deeply hilarious and indicative of just how hard Robert Scott (as "writer/director") and Bob Sarles (as "editor") fail.
• The "shocker" ending finally introduces Zoe and Jeff's parents, who have biological children of about 18 and 16 years of age and both appear to be in their late seventies.

All things considered, this movie is a huge waste of time; but for the yuks and Augesen's effort I give it an F+.