People don't say "Excuse me" anymore, they just squeeze past you and maybe just maybe, they'll give a passing glance loaded with a kingly disdain that only the truly assholish deserve to receive. And that's you: the asshole who committed the crime of being in their way and not having the decency to read their minds and curtsy the cunts.

"Provisions!" said the lady with the packed knapsack, to her friends in line in front of the Aero Theater for the American Cinematheque's 6th Annual Dusk-to-Dawn Horrorthon. She wasn't the only one; as usual with these all-nighters, people came loaded for bear -- blankets, pillows, backpacks full of snacks, coolers packed with drinks -- even though the fine folks at the Aero would supply free snacks and beverages, leaving me to feel like Sgt. Elias in Platoon, wanting to tell these groups of Chris Taylors that they're humping too much stuff, but I guess it's fun to do that kind of thing, so what do I know? Absolutely nothing, dear reader, absolutely nothing.

Some arrived in costume; I spotted 3 vampires, a young couple in old couple drag (and a wheelchair), a Bride of Frankenstein, and a group of dudes in full Droog wear -- they walked in whistling "Singin' in the Rain", which amused me for the same reason I was amused watching the departing patrons of the New Beverly Cinema whistle "Singin' in the Rain" following a screening of A Clockwork Orange: they're referencing a scene in the film where A WOMAN IS RAPED AND HER HUSBAND IS FORCED TO WATCH WHILE GETTING BEATEN HALF TO DEATH. There was also a chick dressed like Richie Tenenbaum, there was a devil (or The Devil, if you're not into the whole brevity thing), and even a couple of the concession stand peeps got into the spirit of things; one guy was wearing what I want to say is that mask Max from Where the Wild Things Are had on (but I'm probably very wrong about; Totoro, maybe?), and one girl in an all-black outfit was going as a hot chick. Either that, or she was just simply a hot chick.

Inside, there was music playing on the sound system, but unlike last year's Horrorthon, it didn't make me want to jump out of a building, punching birds and windows on the way down. Instead, I remember hearing "Jump in the Line (Shake, Senora)" from that sleeping-on-live-tv motherfucker, and the theme to The Munsters television show, among others. There's eavesdropping and can't help but hear: A girl passed by me with her date; she excitedly told him "My God! We have so much in common!" and then they discussed college majors as they sat down. Then I overheard one dude telling his bud that he needed to sit on the aisle seat because he was on a low-carb diet, and that plus his heavy H20 intake guaranteed quite a few trips upstairs to R. Kelly the porcelain. I have that same problem too, but I'm not on some diet, that's for fuckin' sure. I probably just have The Beetis.

A particular group of people sat in the back corner of the auditorium, and I bet these award-winners sit there every year, because that back corner has always been the noisiest one in past Horrorthons -- the dreamers who fantasize themselves as The Second Coming Of MST3K. They gave out some warning shots before the film by starting with the Alan Alan Alan shouts. One of them was an older gentleman wearing a Panama hat and I bet he was the leader. I don't know when I became such a fuckin' no-fun-having grouch, but there you have it. I decided to do something about it though; I left my coat on my seat and went back outside to my car, where I proceeded to pack my portable vaporizer with soul-saving sativa and then placed it on my person, in case the shit just got too fun for my no-fun-having ass during the night. As I walked back, I noticed some newly-posted signs on the sidewalk near the Aero, something about Temporary No Parking on Saturday Oct. 29th from 10pm to 10am.

Mr. Grant Moninger then came down to the stage and began the evening with his usual Horrorthon routine; screaming and doing damage to his vocal cords in an effort to set the crazy mood of the event. I used to be absolutely fuckin' flabbergasted (and a wee bit scared) by Grant's extreme delivery, but now I'm more prepared for it, and plus reading this article kinda helped me get more in tune with what Mr. Grant was going for. At least I now know that his is just a performance, not a frightening cry for help. Even his rocket-speed launching of candy and movies wasn't so bad this time -- ending up with 3 bags of M&M's didn't hurt either. Also, you know, the weed.

The lights went down and we watched the latest Horrorthon intro by Mr. Damon Packard; this time it was "Galactica '80" and "The New Adventures of Wonder Woman", and as usual, the on-screen cast credits consisted of a mix of Horrorthon attendees with various other names. I might as well list the other clips, videos and shorts that were shown between features -- the ones I can remember, anyway, since I waited about five days to write about this and my memory of the evening is dissipating like so much vaped bud. Old faves from previous Horrorthons were also included, but I already wrote about those last time, so go here if you want to read about 'em:

-- 2 old Brit ladies trying out reclining chairs on some BBC show

-- A clip from the TV-movie Where Have All The People Gone, featuring James Arness' brother, Kurt Russell's wife from Breakdown, and some other dude eating the fuck out of an abandoned kitchen.

-- Clip from one of Charles Manson's parole hearings. Christ Almighty. Those guys must show up with popcorn if his rants are always this entertainingly bonkers. Anyway, fuck that Steve Railsback-looking motherfucker, watch this clip instead.

-- A clip of some movie where some chick asks this dude if he wants to stick around and watch some motherfucker in a crazy monkey mask dance some crazy tribal dance. The gentleman declines.

-- A bunch of kids in Halloween costumes singing that Mulberry Bush song, led by a kid in a dragon costume, and he's apparently a child actor in his Fat Jim Morrison phase because he's all fucked-up & confused, and the song itself is a slow, dark, drugged-out cover. Dragon Kid is obviously tripping balls, discovering new things about his inner self during this vision quest he's taking while leading his friends on this sing-along jaunt through the woods. Soon, he will Tame The Snake and Become The Dragon.

-- After what feels like five minutes of a computer-animated castle (graphics highly reminiscent of something out of Video Toaster or Amiga) intercut with those evil Wiccans, New Agers and general various Non-Christians, we finally discover that we're watching an intro to a program called Pagan Invasion and today's episode is about Halloween and how evil that fun shit is. This must've been before these guys tried beating those evil heathens at their own game with that "Trunk Or Treat" idea.

-- Creating Rem Lezar. Some blue superhero in NYC is walking with two kids he probably snatched from unsuspecting parents, and along the way one of the kids claims to have seen the Twin Towers while the other kid is like Bullshit, and somehow that leads to this.

-- A clip from a series written/directed by Grant Moninger (edited/sound designed by Damon Packard) titled Olympic Blvd.

-- Action sequence from some foreign flick; a gas station in the country is hit by a group of professional assassins, the kind of professionals who shoot everything and everyone willy-nilly, so it's hard to gauge if they are in fact, professionals. They are effective, though -- they kill EVERYONE, even the kids get it (in fact, they get it the worst, since it appears the child actors were outfitted with adult-sized blood squibs).

-- Another foreign joint. Cops catch some punk-ass rapist and his victim is there to HAHAHA his ass. Then the narrator cuts in and tells us that the rapist still went to jail despite his bigshot father's connections, and the rape victim is, like, a banker or something in New York City and I think the narrator misses the Big Apple, I don't fuckin' know. The End.

-- The first minute of an old Horrorthon favorite, the Homework Hotline show. Pay attention to the dude sitting next to the host; he's about as awkward as I am whenever I'm sober, or when I'm talking to one of the preciously few readers of this here blog (more on that later).

-- A Dog's Love. Holy shit, I thought this was an expertly-made fake joint recreating a silent film, but this is an actual silent short from 1914. Goddamn. Even back then, they were putting out some harsh flicks. The Aero only showed about a couple minutes, but trust me, I've since watched the whole thing and without a snickering crowd all pepped up on WOO! and HAHAHA!, it's kinda tough to watch, in the way that NINETY-NINE PERCENT OF DOG MOVIES ARE HARD TO WATCH. Here it is, if you dare. I'm a pussy, and I'm even more of one when you involve a dog. Thank God for that final shot. By the way, you know they probably beat the fuck outta that dog to get a performance out of him, that's how they rolled back in the 10's. And yet that dog probably got to eat great food in the Whites Only section. Ain't that a motherfucker.

-- "Dracula Live From Transylvania". George Hamilton collects a paycheck hosting a special on these bloodsucking bastards. He interviews some lady who claims to be a vampire expert and ol' Georgie's keeping his best straight-face during that bullshit, like he has been for most of his career.

-- That anti-drug all-star music video Robert Evans produced, as a way to superficially atone for getting caught smuggling Scarface-sized amounts of co-fuckin-caine while making Popeye, because Evans' spinach was that muthafuckin' yeyo. I remember in that documentary of his, Evans refers to this event as "a happening". Yeah, something's happening, all right -- sure as fuck ain't *this* shit.

Anyway, the movies!

First off was Pet Sematary, starring Time Trax, Tasha Yar, and Herman Munster. I'm sure you know what this shit's about; family moves to a new house, which is located right next to a busy road frequented by many a semi -- in other words, the perfect place to live if you have young children who tend to wander off and cats who think they can control automobiles with their minds or something. Guess how that shit works out? Oh well, at least there's that old Indian burial ground (this was made in 1989, you could still call 'em Indians back then) that brings dead motherfuckers to life. I'm sure that's gonna work out well for everybody.

But there's this recently dead dude named Pascow, and because Time Trax tried to save him (he's a doctor) while everyone else was like Fuck That Guy, Pascow figures he's gonna do this dude a solid before moving on to the next world by warning him about that bad Indian burial ground. Man, Pascow has some extra time on Earth and he's gonna spend it trying to help out a stranger? Maybe he doesn't have any higher priority peeps on his list, like family or friends, or maybe he's like Fuck Those Guys because he's an asshole. Good thing they don't know about this shit he's pulling; what wasted unconditional love, on somebody who doesn't believe in the stuff (or a helmet). Oh well.

Unfortunately for Pascow, he's dealing with a man who is now past being rational about anything because, well, because shit happens that I'm not sure I should get into, even though this is a 22-year-old film and I don't want to spoil something so recent. Haha, just kidding -- both the cat and kid get smushed by the semis. NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

No, seriously -- NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!

You know, that scene kinda fucked me up as a kid when I first saw this flick; that was also the only time I had seen it. I didn't like Pet Sematary back then, and I'm sorry to say I didn't care for it last Saturday either. The NOOOOO scene, perhaps it is a strong scene, following up Time Trax's anguished scream with snapshots of the young boy he just lost but when you're in a room full of laughing audience members, well, you know, when in Rome (starring Kristen Bell)....

Even with my fellow Horrorthon-ers laughing, Pet Sematary was still a surprisingly morose & depressing experience for me (for the most part), and since the movie kinda sucks, well, that means it's not the good kind of morose & depressing. I don't know, that's how I reacted both times with this flick. People go on about how scary that whole deal with the Zelda character is, but I was more saddened by it because it made me think of real-life versions of that shit. Mary Lambert directed this; she also directed an episode of Tales from the Crypt ("Collection Completed") that also depressed the shit out of me. I know she recently directed a SyFy movie, and while I haven't seen it, I bet that shit's depressing too. But then again, her Sega CD game Double Switch was all right and I wasn't too depressed with that one. It's no Sonic CD, though, that's for goddamn sure.

The cool thing is that Herman Munster's character is fun to watch with his New England way of saying words like "road", and Tasha Yar is nice to look at in that Androgynous Cabin Boy/Girl way (she also plays tense & confused pretty well), and there's also that hilarious painting in Tasha Yar's parents' crib to look at. Occasionally, they really overdo it with the melodrama, to the point that you can't help but laugh, giggling audience or not. I mean, that scene between the grandfather and Dr. Time Trax during the kid's funeral, they pretty much did that same scene in Scary Movie 3, only that movie was a comedy and this one is a dead serious horror joint -- but they are both damn near the same in idea and execution (albeit one goes like a minute longer, but still, yo). In other words, when I wasn't too busy wallowing in a Pet Sematary funk, I was flying high on Pet Sematary's shitty goofiness. Fuck, now that I think about it, either this movie is bipolar or I am. 

Stephen King wrote both the book and the screenplay, and because of that, he has no right to ever complain about Kubrick fucking up The Shining. Also, he made Maximum Overdrive so he really needs to simmer down now. But I can see what he was going for with the depressing shit, I think he wanted to do what George A. Romero did with the O.G. Night of the Living Dead; King has brought up that movie many times as something that genuinely scared the shit out of him, in particular the scene where the girl does that thing to that character (trying not to spoil a 42-year-old movie for you). I think he was going for that here, with the little boy and fat English cat dying and Tasha Yar's sister getting all fucked up with spinal meningitis, maybe that was supposed to make the audience go all Oh Shit He Went There or something, I don't know, I'm tired. In any case, this movie deserves to have its Achilles tendon slashed open and its throat adorably chomped by a zombie toddler, because it's not that scary and not that entertaining, but I'm obviously the asshole in this equation because the fuckin' thing was a hit at the box office.

The second film was Tourist Trap, and unlike Pet Sematary, this movie was pretty fuckin' tight. That bad muthafuckin' rifleman, Chuck Connors, plays this lonely dude out in the country slash desert, living in his out-of-business museum (nobody comes by these parts anymore, on account of that new highway detouring potential customers). But here comes a group of teens or college students -- whatever they are, it's one dude and three chicks and you Just Fucking Know the guy has at least had 14 passing thoughts of becoming the Mack with these honeys in, like, the past 5 minutes. Anyway, they're on the kind of road trip that these future body-bagees usually take in these flicks, and they have a flat tire. One of their friends has already gone out to find a garage or something, but he hasn't come back yet, so now they're here, looking for this asshole.

Well, they found Chuck Connors instead, checking out the three lovelies swimming in one of them there waterin' holes they have in these country/deserts, carrying his huge phallic-symbol of a shotgun. Like his 6'6 stature wasn't enough. They're understandably creeped out a tad by him, but he appears to mean well, and he's invited them to his little museum, so why not?

I'll tell you why not; way-too-lifelike animatronic dolls, like the kind they have at Disneyland, all over the place. Yeah, it's one of those joints -- and that, coupled with Connors' being way too friendly and helping (and being Chuck Connors), you can pretty much guess this is going somewhere that these characters don't wanna go, but we in the audience wanna see. Specifically, a house located next door to the museum that Connors is very clear about them staying away from; that's because there's a scary dude in a freaky mannequin mask living there. Because it's a scary dude in a freaky mannequin mask, and because this is a movie, you know his deal isn't that he's freakishly private or something (besides, that's my deal), there's something else going on, and it ain't good.

Chuck Connors is great in this, he's Chuck-o-riffic, he really brought some Connors to the table. When I was a kid, I only knew him as the dude from Soylent Green and as the guy Bob Costas had a hetero crush on. But then I caught The Muthafuckin' Rifleman reruns on KDOC-TV a couple years later, and while I still didn't want to be his boyfriend, like fuckin' Costas over here, I gladly had another person to add to my badass file. I'm sure Mr. Connors would've been elated to hear that news, that some little kid added him to a non-existent file that the "writer" of a blog 20 years in the future would make up for a paragraph that had no point, let alone a punchline. But hey, you know what other show Connors was in? Fuckin' Branded. I didn't even know until recently that fuckin' Larry Cohen created that show. Larry Cohen! And Sam Peckinpah created The Rifleman! Back to the movie!

The other cool part of his performance is that on occasion, I swear, he morphs into latter-day Rutger Hauer in both looks and mannerisms. It's uncanny. The chicks are great too, but to be honest, I really wasn't paying attention to what the fuck they were saying, I was just checking them out. It was just BLAHBLAHBLAHWAHWAHWAH coming out of nice lips. Whenever all three stood together in the same shot, I felt like I was at Rekall, picking out my preferred type of woman for my memory implant; Slim, athletic, voluptuous? Demure, aggressive, sleazy? (Be honest.) Tanya Roberts is one of the girls and this is the first time I've seen her with dark hair, and she rocks that look just as well as her blonde look. I don't know who the other two chicks are but they wear the uniform representing their character types very well. The guy with them? He's a douche, exposing his flabby arms like that's gonna get him all the 70's pussy or something. It's almost as bad as Vernon Wells' showing-off-my-lack-of-definition outfit in Commando.

Pino Donaggio composed the score, and it reminded me of his work on the DePalma joints; I know I've heard those breathy female vocals before in at least one of those movies, or at least it felt that way while watching it. David Schmoeller directed this, and based on his other flicks, this is easily his best. But I'm not grading-on-a-curve, this movie is Good Times all the way.. The whole mannequin deal is creepy, making Tourist Trap something like a preemptive antithesis on Mannequin with Kim Cattrall. Hear me out; the latter's gonna leave lonely losers lusting after those dolls in real life, praying to whatever god they pray to in hopes that somehow that fake chick's gonna turn into a real chick. (I'm not speaking for myself, obviously. No way. No way Jose.) But Tourist Trap is gonna leave people kind of wary of those fuckin' things, next time they find themselves at a Macy's or something.

The killer in this particular horror flick is a trip, man. He speaks in one of those old fashioned Evil voices and wears that fucked up mask, while delighting in the harsh shit he does to his victims; my favorite scene involves him slowly plastering up this poor girl, and he's describing to her how she's going to die, the stages and everything (he's obviously done this enough to know). He tells her how the plaster will feel like it's burning her face; that means it's hardening up. Then he says that she won't be able to breathe, but it won't be the suffocation that'll kill her, it's the fear-induced heart explosion that will end her. Tensed me up something awful, that scene. By the way, my band Fear-Induced Heart Explosion is playing the Arby's on Sunset next Sunday night. (Free with a two Beef & Cheddar minimum.)

I'm gonna say this (write, actually) right now: Tourist Trap is a PG-rated slasher flick with no actual slashing and a minimal body count (for a joint like this, at least). And yet, I'd sooner watch this movie than the unrated cut of Friday the 13th (the real one, not that Marcus Nispel bullshit) again. It's creepy, tense, and never boring -- which I hate to admit all the F13 flicks suffer from at one point or another. Also, PG titties.

Directly following the film, either Grant or another volunteer (can't remember) came out and told us that based on a miscommunication from The City of Santa Monica, and Southern California Edison to the Aero Theater -- that was what the Temporary No Parking Signs were about -- it looks like the Horrorthon would be cut short after only two films, because what these SoCal Edison guys have to do involves shutting down all the power in the immediate area, including the Aero. For the rest of the night. This would be a good place to stop.

Click here for the second half of this stupid, badly-written waste-of-time.

It's like doing extra credit homework for a teacher who didn't ask for it, but if it makes you feel better, fine, go ahead

At first, it was looking kinda iffy whether or not there was going to be another one of these deals; I'm talking about the all-night horror movie marathon held every October at the coated-with-awesome New Beverly Cinema for the past three years; the fruits of the laborious Mr. Phil Blankenship, who is no longer with the New Beverly. Because of this, there was a very good chance there wouldn't be another all-nighter. But according to Brian J. Quinn, he of the Grindhouse Film Festival, one particular New Bev'r championed the idea of continuing this shindig, and of course, I can't remember the name of the guy, but he was serving popcorn for most of the night and not looking particularly happy about it -- and neither would you, if you had the long line of munchies-seeking cinephiles who wanted their layered-butter popcorn and wanted it NOW. But hey, them's the breaks, kid -- and besides, I need my butter in the middle and top of the popcorn, unbuttered popcorn's for squids.

So it came down at the last minute; Quinn and company took the reins and went to work booking flicks for the all-nighter. Then Saturday night came, and there they were, and there I was, at the New Beverly Cinema for the 4th annual All Night Horror Show (which everyone still insists on calling Horrorthon, probably because Twitter only gives you 140 characters). As usual, many showed up with pillows & blankets, ensuring them hours of movie-missing sleep, and if that doesn't work, the cooler full of Beck's beer would surely do the job (those guys were gone by movie #4).

Quinn hosted the evening, and he gave props to Mr. Blankenship and Stressed Popcorn Guy Who's Name I Forgot. He also told us about how the trailers were provided by yet another person whose name I can't remember and Quentin Tarantino. He asked that we silence our cell phones and try to refrain from sharing our various bodily functions and odors with the rest of the audience. He then talked about how all the movies we were going to watch were picked because they were Good Times in different respects and that we shouldn't get into MST3k mode and act all superior to them from the very first frame and to that I say A-Fuckin-Men, brother. Not every movie has to be viewed through Everything Is Terrible! lenses, man, you gotta give 'em a chance.

After the trailer reel, the first film of the evening began; Beyond the Door, about some sweaty hobo in a suit (it's the scraggly beard and oily hair that leads me to that judgment) who kept some chick from giving birth in a room full of candles, and I guess that pissed off the narrator who also happens to be Satan, but to make things worse, Satan is some piece-of-shit Ashton Kutcher type who takes pleasure in punking Hobo In A Suit by making him and his car take a flying leap off a fuckin' cliff and then freeze-framing the motherfucker in mid-air, like I Own You Bitch. Also, a woman gets possessed.

Yeah man, Hayley Mills' sister gets possessed by the same punk-ass Satan that is punking Hobo's punk-ass. Because she lives in such a fucked-up little household, it takes a while for the family to notice something is up; the daughter is obsessed with the novelization of Love Story, carrying fuckin' bags and suitcases filled with them and she also swears a lot, like me (I was a sailor once). The young son, he's all right; he's cute but it looks like he's addicted to Campbell's Green Pea soup because he's got cans of it everywhere, he even sips that shit through a straw. As for the dad, he's kind of a dim motherfucker with an Arkansas-garage-worker mustache who is totally disrespectful to his kids, calling them "idiot" and leaving them alone in the apartment with a Devil-possessed woman even though Hobo Without A Shotgun just fuckin' told him not to.

Here's a flick filled with scenes involving Moms spewing out various chunky/viscous liquids from her mouth, doing 360's with her head, and having her face end up looking more and more possessed-looking -- and yet the most disturbing moment involved her giving her son a way-too-long kiss on the mouth. Jesus Christ, woman; if you're gonna go Full Predator and rob the cradle, at least pick a cradle outside your own house.

This was my first time watching the flick and I dug it. It's got that weird, dreamy style to it that some of the better Italian ripoffs feature (in addition to the usual staples of porno-ish music and WTF moments); it's like the director knew that just because he was making an Exorcist ripoff, doesn't mean he has to go through the motions, so why not have some fun with it? He uses freeze frames, repeated loops of certain moments, and then there's that unnerving deal where the soundtrack drops the background ambience and all you can hear is the characters' near-whispering their dialogue with what I swear sounded like a slight echo-y effect to it. Anyway, this flick is like Skynet in that it's self-aware; like that whole deal with the green pea soup cans, that's both genuine eye-tie weirdness AND a wink to the audience, acknowledging the inspiration for this joint. Also, on occasion there are these weird bronchial fart-noises that I assume is the Devil breathing, and that's scary, because I don't even know what the fuck a bronchial fart is.

A raffle was held afterwards and a couple lucky ducks wound up taking home VHS tapes from Johnny Ramone's personal collection, then we watched Bugs Bunny own that furry monster, then we watched one of these fake-ass interviews between this chick named Dorothy and Bela Muthafuckin' Lugosi; it takes place in his backyard and this was back when you can fool a person into thinking that this interview was done all in one real-time take, even though there are cuts and various setups involved. I don't know how much of Lugosi's stuff was scripted, or if his answers were actually off-the-cuff, but he comes off like a pretty decent dude.

Keep in mind that he was flying high off his success from Dracula -- he hadn't reached his Ed Wood nadir yet -- so maybe that's why he seems rather pleasant and charming here. He talks about becoming an American, and keeping up with modern slang -- "the cat's whiskers" was a new one to me -- and how he rarely attends Hollywood parties, leaving more booze for F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West as a result, I bet. He's got this awesome mix of Distant and Interest towards his female interviewer, and I bet you that was his game, and this stud probably got his share of flapper tang back in his day as a result of said game. Or maybe not, because it ends with him scaring the shit of poor Dorothy, and what does he do as a result of her running away all Keystone Kops/Benny Hill-style from him? He laughs. Bela Lugosi rules.

We then put on our 3D glasses for the second film of the evening, Creature from the Black Lagoon, about a creature from the black lagoon that goes around killing South Americans in the Amazon, so it's not like anyone gives a shit, but once he gets the hots for a White chick, it's fuckin' on, because it's 1954 and you're sure as shit not getting away with interspecies dating, let alone interracial. Do you see this, Creature? It means Not Welcome!

The main dude is named David and he's like a marine biologist or something; his raza friend Dr. Maia shows up with a Black Lagoon Creature fossil, the sight of which causes David to get a Major Discovery Hard-on, so he, Dr. Raza, David's hot White girl, and the douchebag money-man financing this endeavor are off to the Amazon in search of ways to get themselves killed in the name of Science.

I'm looking at David's chick Kay and thinking Wow, what a dish! I mean, she's very pretty and her body is very nice to look at, because it's obvious that she eats real food -- in moderation, of course -- but I'm sure she'll occasionally splurge on an extra helping or a dessert, because we only live once, right? Good for her, I say. Actresses today, they gotta look like they dig on the heroin, leaving impressionable girls with little-to-no self-esteem to starve themselves because they think they're fat. Man, I want to know who to blame: Hollywood? The media? Us? I don't know, but whoever it is, they're getting a punch in the fuckin' throat when I find the fuck out.

So yeah, this Creature; I guess back in the day, the sight of this scaly motherfucker was browning many an audience member's seat, but now it's different. Now we look at it and go Oh How Quaint. Maybe back then, this guy was considered an evil murderous monster, but 2011 Me watches this and feels bad for the dude. He's just living his life in the Amazon, and I don't think he's a man-eater, he probably munches on the occasional piranha or two -- good, they deserve it, the jerks -- and he's lonely out there, real lonely. He can be shy too, only popping his hand out of the water very slowly every once in a while, before letting his reticent nature win over and down goes his hand, back into the murky deep.

Sure, every once in a while some native passes by, but those are usually dudes and he's not down with that kind of loving -- it's Creature & Eve, not Creature & Steve. But then here comes this hot White girl with a Black girl's ass, merrily swimming in those savage waters, and I bet you the Creature probably didn't even know he had genitals until they started taking over his brains at that moment. And like most men, the possibility of pussy made the guy lose anything resembling Rational Thought and now it's Killing Time -- and why not, I mean, all those other dudes are potential competition, so off he goes to take them out, as the shutter falls, and we see it all in 3D.

I caught this flick before at the Nuart and thought it was cool; my opinion remained the same during this viewing. The 3D was nice, nicer than you'd expect from a film from that period; I've seen shittier 3D in today's movies. It was pretty impressive; the Creature looks like he's coming out of the screen, it looks like the diver is pointing his spear gun at us, and the audience members look like they're blocking our view as they keep going back and forth between their seats and the lobby. The only problem I had with this overall fun time at the movies is that the pacing is also very 1950's, but I guess back then people were fine with what felt like endless swimming footage, because it's in three dimensions, daddy-o! This and Anaconda would make a pretty cool double-bill. Either that or digitally insert Jon Voight into this flick.

The third film of the evening was Hell Night, starring Linda Blair and one of the Van Pattens, the one who isn't an Emmy-award winning television director or the father from Eight Is Enough. This slasher joint's about your average 80's-era drunk college students, and a group of them have to go into this old abandoned mansion and stay the night in order to get into one of those fraternities/sororities. Of course, this isn't just some regular mansion, there had to have been something fucked up that happened there, and sure enough, the owner was some guy with the worst sperm in the world who eventually snapped and retroactively aborted his four Special Needs children, before doing the same to this wife and himself. Supposedly, no one's been inside the estate ever since, which I guess would explain the hundreds of lit candles all around the house.

It's two chicks and two dudes; one couple is likable (she's a decent girl who worked as a mechanic in father's garage all through high school; he's only pledging this fraternity because of his father) and the other couple represents everything about your standard 80's teen dead meat (she's easy and carries booze & drugs on her person; he's a happy-go-lucky surfer who's probably this dude's uncle). Meanwhile, the main frat asshole and his asshole friends have set up various pranky douchebaggeries like speakers and projectors all around the estate in order to scare the shit out of the pledges. Ah, but what they don't know is that there is Something Out There, and sure enough, heads are getting chopped or 180'd, and various stabbing weapons are being used to weapon stab through much alcohol-pickled flesh.

I guess I can call this a re-see; back in the good ol' days, my sister and cousin (two separate people) brought this movie home on VHS, so I remember vague glimpses and flashes of moments from this movie, but I might as well have been watching this for the first time at the New Bev. Anyway, this was one of the better 80's slasher films, with some creepy moments that I'd rather not spoil, but fuck it, I'll let one go: there's a scene where British Druggy Whore is in bed, sleeping the sleep of the heavily Quaalude'd, and the camera slowly approaches her, closer and closer until her body almost fills the frame -- suddenly, the movie cuts to a wide shot of the bedroom, revealing the fuckin' killer standing right over her. That was pretty tight, yo.

The first half was better than the second half, because it was tighter (there are some scenes involving characters walking through the dark estate that crosses the line from Deliberately Paced to All Right Already, Get To The Fuckin' Point) and because the characters start pulling stupid Because It Was Written That Way In The Script bullshit during the second half. There's a scene in a police station that was just frustrating the fuck out of me, and not in a good way; I wasn't buying anything that was happening there, and while I get the idea of The Horror Of Nobody Helping You, I wasn't buying the way that shit was being presented. That shit felt too fuckin' convenient, which might have worked in the writer's next produced screenplay, muthafuckin' Tango & Cash, but not with this joint.

Mr. Quinn had mentioned how the fourth film -- the secret film -- was a secret because even he didn't know what movie he was going to get. The last minute planning of this caper led to him requesting various prints of movies and hoping that they were available on such short notice, and this one didn't come through until about two or three days before the event. Nevertheless, it was a film he dug and it had a minor theatrical release at the time: Frank Henenlotter's Brain Damage.

Some dude named Brian (ah, you clever Henenlotter, you) wakes up one night in his apartment and finds blood on his bedsheets. Unfortunately for him, the blood didn't come from a severed horse head but from his own body. Turns out this freaky penile creature named Aylmer has chosen Brian as his new host, but Aylmer's not a total leech, he's gonna hook up our boy with some sweet, sweet blue juice that causes the recipient to take a ride on a river with tangerine trees and marmalade skies. Yup, it's the greatest drug ever -- and the only cost for further trips down Euphoria Lane is human brains for Aylmer to eat. It's always something, isn't it?

At first, Brian is too fuckin' lifted to notice that during his nightly trip-out sessions on the streets of New York, Aylmer's attacking people and burrowing into their heads to eat their brains (and gain their knowledge?) -- although in one case, a poor hooker-type (it's never confirmed, but to quote Dave Chappelle, she's definitely wearing the uniform) gets hers sucked out while she's trying to suck off Brian. Now, the print we watched was the cut R-rated version, so those watching the DVD at home get a little more freaky gory goodness.

Keep in mind that I haven't seen Henenlotter's latest, Bad Biology, when I say this: Brain Damage is his fuckin' masterpiece. Yeah, I said that shit. As much as I dug his first film Basket Case, I think this one is even better. Sure, there's a slight deja-vu'ish feel to the proceedings -- both are about young men and the murderous creatures they carry with them, and how that shit is fucking up their lives -- but you know, Toy Story 2 and Toy Story 3 are damn near the same fuckin' movie and that didn't keep the latter from straight-up owning the already damn-good former. So there.

But yeah, man, this flick is pretty awesome in that it's both gleefully nasty/trashy exploitation and About Something, kinda like old-school Romero; this is really a story about a man throwing his life away on drugs, because the results are the same: he misses out on work, alienates his loved ones, commits serious crime -- all in the name of getting another hit from his supplier. Except the drug isn't heroin or crack being pushed by Superfly, it's some Windex-looking shit that you inject through back of your neck and the supplier is a talking slimy phallus.

There's a great shot where Brian runs off to a back alley for some Aylmer Juice-taking privacy, and in the foreground, there's a homeless dude with a bottle of booze -- and the part that kills me is that Homeless Dude is crying, in between taking swigs of alcohol, like he knows he's in a world of shit and the bottle was probably what led him there, but goddammit, he needs it: the fuckin' bottle owns him. So in effect, you have Brian in the background, representing the beginning stages of addiction, and then you have the homeless guy in the foreground representing the final stage of addiction -- total absolute physical/emotional dependency.

This flick is like a Henenlotter best-of; gross-out gags, gore, comedy, drama, way-too-real seedy New York locations. But it also has a couple things that represent some of his not-so-best qualities, like wide-eyed motherfuckers screaming in only the worst, most shrill manner possible; the first five minutes or so were very tough to take, since they feature some old lady screaming and screaming and screaming in that horrific combo of anguish & annoying (if I only knew what was in store for me in about another couple of hours). So I'd probably watch the first five minutes on Mute, next time. Otherwise, damn good flick.

Our fifth flick was another joint that didn't get much theatrical play, aside from film festivals, but I think that was because this was mostly likely always intended for Straight-to-Video (the way-too-cropped top and bottom of the image in this print was a giveaway), since it's a Full Moon production: The Pit and the Pendulum, directed by Stuart Gordon, he of the angry face and friendly attitude. I believe this was producer Charles Band's personal print, but I could be mistaken.

Yeah, it's another adaptation of that underage-cousin-loving emo's short story, taking place in Spain during the Inquisition, only here it's obvious that everybody was expecting that shit, on account of these robed assholes being here for a while already. Man, it sucks to live in 1492 Spain, because Torquemada and his boys are in full effect, jacking up everybody they think is not down with the Pope; they're climbing in your windows, they're snatching your people up, trying to torture them, so ya'll need to hide your kids, hide your wife, and hide your husband -- because they're torturing everybody out here. It's not as hilarious as when Mel Brooks was doing that shit, and if you're too sensitive to watch yet another witch-burning, kid-whipping auto-da-fe in the public square, you get accused of being in league with the Dark Arts. 

There's this chick Maria, she kinda resembles a Spanish Jessica Harper, and she's just trying to make some bread by selling bread with her husband. But once she steps in to stop some poor kid from getting whipped (apparently, he's being punished for crying at the sight of his mother being strangled to death, what a pussy), that's it, man; her beauty causes Torquemada to get all stiff under his robes, and because he has no game, he does the next best thing -- he accuses her of being a witch and has her arrested. Then the fun really begins.

Torquemada is played by national treasure Lance Henriksen, and goddamn, if there was such a thing as a Straight-to-Video acting category in the Oscars, then this motherfucker would've won in 1991 for his performance in this movie. He is that fucking good here. He's always working, but I wish Hollywood would hook him up with more big-budget work, because he's surely got the goods and they deserve to be flaunted to a wider audience. At first, his Torquemada comes off like he's totally hardcore about his beliefs, but once he sees this chick, goddamn. He figures it's nothing a little flogging from one of his boys can't fix, and perhaps that will beat the horniness out of him -- but the cock wants what the cock wants, I guess, and slowly he starts to lose his shit over her.

I liked how most of his crew only appear to be as true to the cause and are really just hypocrites enjoying the ability to torture-porn people with impunity; two of them are played by Gordon players Jeffrey Combs and Tom Towles, and right there you have both sides of the spectrum -- Combs is totally by the book about stuff, and while he's all for torture, that's just because that's what the rules say to do; Towles, on the other hand, is totally getting off on the perks of the job, such as being able to inspect every inch of a hot chick's naked body for Devil marks. There's also this asshole fat dude who would be completely hateable if he wasn't so goddamn hilarious at times.

Pretty much everyone here is tops in the acting department -- the guy from Dinner Rush and Scarface who's also in all of Darren Aronofsky's joints; Happy Gilmore's grandmother; the guy who plays Latin Jessica Harper's husband; Stuart Gordon's wife (once again dying a violent death); and my man, muthafuckin' Oliver Reed, playing a cardinal from Rome who talk-a like-a dis, like-a he's-a fuckin-a Mario from-a da video game. It's a real stretch for him, playing a guy who drinks a lot (sure enough, it's Amontillado he's quaffing on).

I rented this on VHS back when I was 13 years old, because it's not like my parents knew what the fuck I was renting with my allowance money, and I sure as fuck wasn't gonna watch in front of them, but aside from Absolute Nakedness, I didn't get much out of this flick at the time. But upon second viewing, old-ass Me thinks this flick was pretty goddamn awesome. It's just so tense and involving; you boo-hiss the villains, cheer the hero, and beat off to the damsel-in-distress -- Good Times, in other words. There's also a lot of humor that I missed out on the first time, because you know, I was 13 and just wanted to see tits and blood. Since then, I've matured and now expect much more from my cinema viewings -- tits, blood, AND humor.

The last film of the evening (well, morning at this point), was a British joint called Horror Planet -- although a better title for it would be Dumb Motherfuckers Planet, because Jesus Tapdancing Christ, these are the dumbest motherfuckers in the world, dumber than me, even. In fact, I think that's why they're on another planet -- they were too fuckin' stupid to live on Earth, so they got their asses kicked out of this planet and were told to go colonize another one and don't even think of writing back. This was originally titled Inseminoid, but that really just refers to one part of the movie -- a movie that is comprised of individuals succeeding in accomplishing clusterfuck after clusterfuck after clusterfuck.

Officially, they're on this strange planet to do the archeological dig thing, and they can't even fuckin' do that right; one poor woman gets her foot caught through an open floor panel of the airlock entrance while out in the deadly-freezing caves, and because her spacesuit is fucking up and she's only got limited time before freezing to death, she's told by one of the guys inside the base that she must perform some quick wire-patching shit to fix the fuckin' heater or defroster or whatever the fuck was gonna keep her alive. So what does she do? She ignores homeboy, takes her helmet off, exposing her face to the Killer Wind Chill, shoves an oxygen tube in her mouth, and takes what looks like Ramon the gardener's hedge trimmers and slowly slices through her leg like it was Thanksgiving up in this bitch. When her homies finally get to her, they find her dead with an embarrassed look on her frozen face -- as she should be.

Then this other broad ends up getting raped by an alien -- what the fuck is it with these sci-fi movies that involve women getting fucked by monsters, man?! -- which is represented as a hallucination in what appears to be the same set from the opening of Beyond the Door (minus the candles), where she finds the team's doctor making some weird English pervy face as he injects her with his syringe, making me think that's why he became a doctor, to prick all the chicks with his phallic symbol. Then some big clear tube is shoved into her Christmas pudding and what appears to be tennis balls floating in Campbell's Green Pea soup is shot up in there. At that point, I wondered whether I should go to Norms or IHOP for breakfast after the show.

This results in our girl acting all wacky and doing goofball things like slicing up Steve Martin's ex-wife Jack the Ripper-style, because she's a hater, I guess. Maybe she's doing this because now she's down with the aliens -- because once you go xenomorph, you never go back. So our girl goes around, killing her former co-workers by stabbing 'em, slicing 'em, burning 'em -- then she'll rip open their innards and eat them because one good turn deserves another, I don't know. But I don't feel bad for any of the victims, because they're stupid, unlikable, and stupid. I know I used "stupid" twice, but I can't stress that shit enough.

Actually, death is a relief for these dumb assholes because it means they no longer have to hear Crazy Brit Chick scream anymore. Yeah man, didn't I tell you? She loves to scream. Absolutely lives for it. She screams for everything -- she screams when she's in pain, she screams when she's angry, she screams when she's losing, she screams when she's winning. Scream scream scream. The only thing I got from all that screaming -- aside from the urge to jump through the screen Last Action Hero/Purple Rose of Cairo-style and strangle her -- was a good look at her chompers, and based on all the fillings in her teeth, perhaps it's a good thing that she's chowing down on human meat, because she's certainly had enough sugar in her life, evidently.

What we have here is some symbolic/metaphor/whatever shit going on here; this chick got knocked up and now everybody has to pay. Everybody has to put up with her mood swings; one moment she's begging you to help her because she's in so much pain, and the next she's gleefully (and literally) tearing you a new one. Eventually she cannons those alien kids from her cooch -- yay, more screaming! -- and the terror doesn't stop because the dummy in charge of all the other dummies on this planet, Mark, also happens to be her man. And I guess the sight of her man hanging out with the two surviving dummy chicks makes this new mother feel all unattractive and unwanted, so now Jealousy has entered the picture. The last third of the film consists of her doing more of her Stalking Killer thing while constantly screaming MAAAAAAARRRRRRK! like the worst housewife in the world. Over and over and over she's screaming that shit.

I caught Horror Planet (aka Inseminoid) last year on Netflix Instant and didn't think much of it then, but the masochist in me decided to give it another day in court. Besides, the Netflix version was pan & scan and this was a nice-looking print on the big screen. By the way, the ending is longer on the Netflix version; there's an extra scene of some dudes showing up on the planet a few months later -- it was cut out of the theatrical print, yet whoever was in charge of that didn't bother cutting the dudes out of the end credits montage, leaving quite a few in the audience confused, like Who the fuck are the new guys? It's a lightning-paced film that is never boring, but goddamn, that screaming really puts a damper on the whole experience. Which is too bad, because the character of Crazy Brit Chick is otherwise lots of fun to watch; I loved how she'll suddenly make evil faces and wide-eyed expressions whenever going into Exterminate Mode, but I cannot stress it enough how those whiny-screams made that shit unbearable. Horror Planet, Inseminoid, Dumb Motherfuckers Planet -- whatever, it all sounded like Marriage to me.

So the film ended, Mr. Quinn thanked the remaining All Nighters, and off we went. In the end, I decided on Norms. Fin.

Check out Cathie's blog about the event. She says more with less, unlike me, who deserves to be visited by Crazy Brit Chick in his sleep.

Ssssssssssssssssss

So I completely forgot that Don't Ask Don't Tell ended recently, and it was kinda funny (funny ha-ha, not funny queer) that I received The Boys in the Band from Netflix Qwikster in the mail on the same day. By the way, I'm cool with the total buggering that Qwikster Netflix is giving my physical brothers, as long as this means that I will be able to stream those films eventually -- and I mean eventually Now, not eventually Five Years From Now. Anyway, I decided to make it a Gay/William Friedkin double-feature by following it up with Cruising.

This flick is from 1970 and it's an adaptation of an off-Broadway play by Mart Crowley and it's directed by the hardass General of ruthless badass motherfuckers in the cinematic arts, Mr. William "I hate fuckin' Mexican marimba music" Friedkin. I mean, at least that was his deal during his heyday, back in the 70's -- when this guy (according to Jewfro's book, at least) was foaming at the mouth while terrorizing his actors and firing crew members every few minutes, like he was injected with the Chinese Shit from Crank and in order to keep himself alive, he had to be a colossal prick to everyone else on that set who wasn't named William Muthafuckin' Friedkin.

This movie is about a group of gay dudes in New York, and we're introduced to them during an energetic hustle-bustle montage set to Harpers Bizarre's cover of Cole Porter's "Anything Goes", because you know how those gays are with their showtunes. The song features lyrics along the lines of "The world's gone mad today/Good's bad today/Black's white today/Day's night today" and it can all be taken like some fuckin' hetero bitching to his wife about how we have all these homos loving up on one another nowadays -- and blacks can sit in the front of the bus! can you believe that? -- or, since the singers of the song sound slightly sissy themselves, the use of the tune can be interpreted as the film kinda telling us "Yeah, man -- they're into guys. But we're getting into the homestretch of the 20th century, times are changing, and if you can't handle it, then tough titty". Or in other words: We're here. We're queer. Get used to it.

I think right off the bat, Friedkin wanted to let the audience know that while this is a filmed adaptation of a play, this shit ain't no "filmed play"; homeboy's combining French Connection-like handheld camerawork with slick dolly moves and quick cuts. During the opening sequence, we see our main dude Michael and he's busy getting shit ready for a birthday party he's going to throw for his bro-mo Harold. We also see this dude Donald driving his fast penis of a car through the cavernous anal opening that is the Holland Tunnel, we see this guy Larry taking model photographs of Maud Adams, we see Larry's lover Hank playing basketball (played by Sybok from Star Trek V), we see queeny-queen Emory closing up at the antique shop he works at (that sound you hear is me going into total shock at the idea of a gay guy working at an antique shop), and then there's Bernard, working at a bookstore and since this is the late 60's, he's wearing a suit to work.

So we watch these dudes have their fun at the party, they're being bitchy at each other while waiting for the chronically tardy Harold, having some laughs and drinks, and dancing to Martha and the Vandellas' "Heatwave" ("Remember that dance we used to do at Fire Island?" one of them asks, reminding me of the time that I once confused Fire Island with Parris Island -- think about that one for a while) until some fuckin' breeder named Alan shows up to spoil their gay ol' time. See, earlier that evening, Alan called up Michael (they were college roomies back in the day) and he sounded pretty fucked up about something and needed to talk to him about it, but then later on, he called again to say Forget about it, it's cool. But here he is, even though he said he wasn't coming over. Well, what the fuck, Alan? Make up your fuckin' mind.

Part of the Alan problem is that he's straight, and because this play (and movie, obviously) was made/takes place before the Stonewall Riots, all these dudes actually appear to give a fuck about what Ultra White Conservative Man thinks of them. For reals, yo; Michael actually has to tell them about this, that Alan might be coming over and Please Don't Let Him Know How We Roll -- and they all agree/understand! Except for Emory, he's not having that shit, in fact, he somehow manages to go Super Saiyan with his flamboyance despite Alan's presence and in spite of Michael & company dialing it down.

I suspect that a lot of straights would love it for gays to live life like it was the pre-Stonewall era -- behind closed doors, on the down-low -- living as invisible men not worthy of human acknowledgement. But meanwhile, these asshole baby-makers can continue necking each other in the park in front of everyone because they're straight and only straights are capable of true public displays of affection or something. Me, I'm a hater, I don't want to see straights OR gays making out in public, that's some annoying show-offy "we're in loooove" shit, but whatever, that's my hang-up; it's a free country and no one should be kept from necking in front of Whole Foods while you're carting out tonight's lonely supper to your Prius.

The problem of having to keep where you like to stick your dick inside of under wraps is that it eventually makes a motherfucker feel like he is doing something wrong, because if it was "normal", why would you have to hide this part of your life from others? You can only live like that for so long before the self-loathing starts kicking in, and I think that's a big part of what this joint's about.

It's like that movie about the gay shepherds who wish they knew how to quit each other, I think it was called I Wish I Knew How To Quit You; in my humblest of opinions, the characters portrayed by Jake Gyllenhaal and The Joker were born gay and cursed to live in a time & place where people were too ignorant to accept/deal with that shit. It's a good thing we as a society have evolved past that kind of hateful shit and gays no longer have to worry about what others think about them, and more importantly, they no longer have to think that there's something wrong with how they were born, isn't that right, 14-year-old kid who recently killed himself?

Anyway, I bring all this shit up because it appears that our guy Michael is suffering the most from these kinds of feelings about his lifestyle. His problems at the beginning seem to consist of not being able to deal with getting older (don't I know the fuckin' feeling) and his unpaid debts, otherwise he's kind of in control of his shit. He starts off the party drinking only club soda, talking about how he's been off booze and smokes for a few weeks. But somewhere along the way, you'll notice him switching to vodka and downing that wonderful Liquid Amnesia like it was muthafuckin' ice water on a hot-ass day, and after a bottle or two, it turns out this dude can be quite the mean drunk -- mean, man, mean -- and it can't be a coincidence that this starts happening after a talk with Alan and certain assumptions that were made.

Suffice it to say, things get more and more fucked-up between the characters during this birthday party (OK, here's one example: Alan punches that bitch Emory in his Mary-ass face as a response to his fifty-caliber bitchiness towards him, which apparently works because Emory chills way the fuck out for the rest of the picture) and that's even before Birthday Boy Harold shows up.

Oh, but when he does, holy shit, do things get even more ramped up -- Harold's introduced like he's a badass hitman for the gay mafia, and you know why? Because he IS a badass hitman for the gay mafia, only instead of handguns and icepicks, he uses words and body language to take out his targets and watching him do his thing is just as FUCK YEAH-inducing as watching Jason Statham transport a motherfucker into the next life, because Harold, dear reader, is that fucking awesome. This Disco Stu-looking mofo is a genuine Character in a film full of them; he shows up in his queer pimp suit and purple shades, half-burned joint in hand and -- fuck it, check it out for yourself. He's like this during the entire movie and it never stops being anything less than Good Times whenever he's on-screen:


I'm not one for dress-up, but sheeeeeiiiit, I think I want to be Harold for Halloween. That guy and Omar from The Wire are like the hardest homos this side of the Castro district.

This was a good flick; sure, you can say it's dated but then so are flicks about race from that time period; it's expected and hoped for that over the years things would change, so perhaps being dated is a good thing for flicks like these. It has great performances, non-stop snappy theatrical dialogue, and there's definitely that William Friedkin intensity in full-effect here. It's like the drunker Michael gets, the darker this film gets; the lighting gradually changing from low-contrast to high-contrast, and the camera setups changing from wide shots that include everyone to close-ups that make the subject look like the whole world is waiting right out of frame to pounce on the motherfucker.

The thing I noticed the most with Crowley's dialogue is how it stays the same throughout -- mostly bitchy comments & the occasional epithet -- even though the tone of the piece is completely different by the end. I guess it's the context in which you say it -- not to mention the emotion behind those words. I mean, these guys are calling each other "fag" and "fairy" and a bunch of other stuff nonstop -- and that's not counting the additional shit that's being thrown at Bernard (Black) and Harold (Jewish), and it's ostensibly all in fun, you know, the kind of politically incorrect shit that only the closest of friends/most hated of enemies shoot at each other with. But somewhere along the way, the emotion behind those words and harsh statements is no longer the same, and the intention in using those words has completely changed. Or maybe they were always meant that way, and the real illusion was that they were meant in jest.



Next came Cruising. Man, this was an odd film. Some creepy dude with a creepy voice and dressed in creepy vaguely-Nazi leathers is hooking up with other similarly leather'd-out dudes looking to give/receive Man Love, and then he stabs them to death. At least the first on-screen victim managed to get his bang on, before meeting his maker, but the rest literally die hard. What a horrible way to go, with blue balls.

You have Paul Sorvino playing the Charles Durning role, an NYPD captain who's under pressure by the powers-that-be to find the killer, not so much because it sucks that some dude is killing other dudes, but because there's gonna be a political convention in town soon (I forget which party). So he gets police officer Al Pacino to take an undercover assignment that would require him to immerse himself in the gay S&M/leather scene, and his attitude to being presented with this task is surprisingly laid-back, considering what might be required of him. Or maybe he didn't think of that, maybe he was too blinded at the time thinking about the promotion to Detective he would get after the case.

So off he goes, our fair Pacino -- straight into the gay. He hits up the S&M leather clubs, aka the dark side of the Blue Oyster Bar, thinking he can find an In with these non-ironic mustache-wearers. Friedkin devotes long dolly shots to the standing-room-only dimly-lit smoky rooms filled with guys dancing and macking on each other, then there will be the occasional cut to someone getting whipped (I have a feeling little-to-no Black cruisers request for that particular kink) or to a small group gathered around to witness one of these guys getting fisted by a dude who in my uninformed opinion isn't using anywhere near a properly comfortable amount of KY for the job. There's also a special appearance by The Gimp in happier times, before he hooked up with Zed. Me, I have a small acceptable amount of homophobia, so I'd feel uncomfortable to find myself at a place like this, but at least I can dig on the music while sipping on my Diet Coke, wondering why nobody is hitting me up, probably because I'm too fat for the ladies and not fat enough for the bear-lovers.

At first, Pacino is totally lost, really lost; I mean, if you have to ask Powers Boothe -- one of the most macho motherfuckers in cinema -- what the different colors of bandanas mean in the gay community, then you are really out-of-place. But soon he finds himself getting more savvy in all things Male & Sweaty -- by the way, all these leather extras are the Real Deal, doing in front of the camera what they normally do on a Saturday night -- and he even starts getting himself into better shape, giving us a peek into Pacino's acting future as he repeatedly screams while lifting weights, it's hilarious. It's left up to the audience to decide how far he goes to pass as One Of Them; in my opinion, he does indeed go above and beyond the call of booty -- shit, all Keanu had to do was surf convincingly. There's a lot in this movie that's as ambiguous as Ace & Gary, and I'll give Friedkin credit for most of it, but some of it I'm just gonna chalk up to dropping the ball.

The main problem I have is that Pacino's character is absolutely cipher-riffic; there's really not much to this guy when the movie begins, and all we really know about him is what he goes through. That works for flicks like Spartan, where the plot is the character, but I'm not sure that was the intention here -- and the side characters are more interesting than the lead! I mean, it's kinda tough to figure out how much this assignment changes him when I don't even have the foggiest of what he's changing from. Or maybe that's the point; I don't know, maybe Friedkin wanted to tell us that this guy was pretty much an empty vessel going through the motions, and that the Scent of a Man (nature's amyl nitrate) has opened him up a whole new world of excitement and confusion -- perhaps a world he was always meant for. I don't know, but knowing Friedkin, he'd probably call me a moron for needing everything spoon-fed and then I'd tell him "Oh yeah, because Deal of the Century was really fuckin' deep" and then he'd start foaming at the mouth, demanding that I get an abortion, before stopping and apologizing to me, saying that he forgot where he was and had a flashback to being married to Jennifer Nairn-Smith for a second there.

Hey look, there's Karen Allen as the girlfriend! So full of awesomeness and pretty! What is she doing here? Hell if I know. Her role consists of showing up every 15 minutes to hug up with Pacino or get banged by him. By the time we see him show this chick his Big Boy Caprice, he's already exposed his sweet Sicilian ass to The Gay, and he seems to be fucking her rather rough; this is either his fierce way of re-establishing his love of the vagina or maybe he's banging her with yesterday's hard-on, and since yesterday he was knee-deep in Man-Ass, that tells you everything right there, doesn't it?

This flick has a lot of post-production dubbing, which was mostly due to gays protesting/disrupting the shoot and fucking up the sound, but I think it really adds to the creepy feel of Cruising, these voices that match the actor's lip-movements and yet seem...out-of-place. The killer is played by at least 2 different actors, but they have the same voice, giving the impression that maybe it's not the same guy, or it might be various different guys -- the Evil Murderous Spirit Of Homophobia is going in and out of various dudes, Fallen-style, and when it's not entering the closeted self-haters or the straight gay-haters, it's wafting through the air in any room where the term "family values" gets tossed around like so much salad. Jail salad. Whatever it is, it's fucking scary. I mean, these poor guys, they get dressed like a generic bad guy from any 16-bit beat-em-up video game, looking for some ass (or some lips) and the last thing they want is a fuckin' knife to the back. It's already tough enough to be gay in this town, what with fuckin' Joe Spinell and Mike fuckin' Starr fucking with you (right before they demand that you fuck them).

By the way, during at least one of the stabbing sequences, Friedkin intercuts flash-frames of gay porn, and while I'll give him points for Tyler Durden-ing the audience with that shit, I'm not gonna give him a full pat on the back for it either. Because it's not like he's schooling us with his Phallic Knife Plunging Into Flesh = Cock Plowing Through The Valley Of Feels-So-Good bit; anybody who's ever seen Psycho, or a giallo or a slasher movie featuring scantily-clad victims already knows about this kind of symbolism. Hell, I remember watching this documentary about Dario Argento, where the man himself goes into unsettling length about how murder scenes are erotic and that the killer gets off on sticking it in while the victim experiences her "death orgasm". Anyway, my point is that if anything, Friedkin probably thought he was putting it all together for us and I'm like C'mon, we're not that fuckin' stupid -- and by the way, I'm keeping the baby.

Friedkin had to cut out about 40 minutes from the film in order to get an R-rating; he says it was mostly sexual stuff, not plot points. Goddamn -- 40 minutes of more fisting and banging and young Ed O'Neill? Even for a 1980 Hollywood production, it's harsh enough as is, but I wonder how much of this stuff could've passed with an R-rating in 2011 -- or how much more would have to be taken out? I'm not sure, man, I mean, I just watched an episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia that featured two guys engaged in the romantic act of bare-ass hobo-buttfucking, and that's on a basic cable show! But then again, who knows, because as anyone who has seen This Film Is Not Yet Rated can tell you, the MPAA has always been harder on gay sex than on straight sex, and at this point I am fully aware I can't write anything without it sounding like Tobias Fünke was dictating it to me. Oh EFC, you blowhard!

I can understand the protests and hate this film received from gays; mainstream Hollywood finally decides to put some money into a film dealing with gay culture, starring a great actor and helmed by an Oscar-winning director -- and yet they choose to focus on an extreme underground subculture that feeds into every straight's worst suspicion/nightmare about homosexuals? Bitch, are you for real? But I honestly don't think Friedkin was on a I Hate Gays kick with this, because if anything, Friedkin is more of a I Hate All People motherfucker with his celluloid worldview, plus the Sorvino character even states that this heavy leather scene is not part of regular gay life (I watched the slightly Lucas'd version that is missing the opening disclaimer that insists this film only deals with a small portion of the gay community).

It's too bad that the negative buzz gave Cruising a reputation for being a terrible film, when it's actually pretty decent. It's very well-made, and I'd put Friedkin's work on this right up there with his work on The Exorcist and muthafuckin' Sorcerer, and the unsettling tone of the film is right on -- the shit gets genuinely scary at times (great ending, too) -- but it's definitely flawed with Pacino's thin-in-all-respects character and Friedkin's occasional lapse into what feels like inscrutability for the sake of inscrutability (aka The Southland Tales Special) and that's why I'd have to put this on the Appreciate More Than Like list.

But I have to give The Frieds credit for making something beyond the usual serial killer flick, especially when you consider the fact that he was just coming off a couple of flops and could have made things easier for himself (and his career) by making something more audience-friendly. Instead, he said Fuck 'Em in typical Wacky Willy fashion and made a film that features Al Pacino do a hysterical popper-enhanced dance and a big muscular cowboy hat-wearing black dude in a jockstrap giving people the mother of all pimp-slappings -- just because.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to have crazy mad sex with lots of hot women, right after I take this sleeping pill.

Jockin' the bitches, slappin' the hos.

A St. Bernard requested that I ramble about her favorite film, Beethoven. The dog's name is Phoebe and she's a service dog and I've mentioned her and her "disabled and wobbly human" Lauren before, but in case you didn't already know, she and Lauren are awesome. I use that word a lot, "awesome", but that's because it's a great go-to word to display my overly-positive feelings about something, plus I'm an idiot with a small vocabulary. Thesauruses are for pussies -- and comparing those who use important/needful things to pussies is for idiots with small vocabularies.

The DVD came from Netflix and because I stupidly assumed that we live in the age of the 16x9 television, the shit came in 4x3 Full Frame, which ultimately wasn't that bad because the movie looks like it was filmed Open Matte with the intention of having it play un-fucked with on the square box at home for the kiddies over and over again, so it wasn't like I was missing any visual real-estate. The cinematographer was Victor J. Kemper, who probably got the job because one of the movies he shot was Dog Day Afternoon, and this movie, it's about dogs, right? He also shot for John Cassavetes and maybe the St. Bernard in this movie had a reputation for improvising like a motherfucker, so the producers thought Mr. Kemper was equipped for that kind of filmmaking, I don't know.

Doing kind of a full rundown here, so if you want to come into this 19-year-old dog movie fresh, do like you always do and stop reading at this point. If you want to know my opinion, well here you go: it's not a bad movie, it's nice and cute and it brought out the occasional AWWW and the even less occasional HA HA HA, but I'm not gonna go around preaching the Gospel of Beethoven anytime soon. It's OK, you know. Amusing, that's the word I'm looking for -- Beethoven is an amusing movie. Hey, I never said I was a critic, just some asshole with no one to talk to, and blogs are like the equivalent of the barber shops where old men can sit there all day just to ramble their thoughts to a captive audience of people getting a little taken off the top because no one else is around or doesn't want to be around to listen to their bullshit, so, uh, yeah.

The movie begins with Stanley Tucci playing the kind of role he used to play before he Big Night'd his ass into more meaty roles, and Oliver Platt plays his partner-in-henchmanning. They're sneaking in stolen dogs into this warehouse while being overseen by their overseer, and I guess it's supposed to be a surprise later in the film when this Big Bad is revealed, based on the way he's lit during this scene (his eyes are the only brightly lit part), but c'mon, it's still too bright and you can tell who it is because these guys work for Dean Jones. He was in all of these Disney family films (as opposed to Disney porno films) back in the 60's and 70's with titles like That Darn Cat, The Love Bug and Why That Loveable Negro! and he was always the lead, always the good guy. But now in what basically amounts to a 90's version of those flicks, he's the villain, so it's kind of a turnaround or a 180 or whatever you want to call it.

Back to Stan and Ollie; while Platt is wearing coveralls, Tucci's got one of those trendy-for-the-nineties suits on, only he's totally fucking it up with these cowhide boots and to make things worse, he tucks his pants into them. Really, Stanley Tucci? You're not a chick and you're not Rick James circa 1979, so pull your pants out of those boots and cover those motherfuckers up. These characters, by the way, would later reunite in the sequel Beethoven 2: The Imposters, which was a financial failure due to it having absolutely nothing to do with Beethoven and because it tried pulling some Planet-Zeist-in-Highlander II: The Quickening shit by having it take place during the 1930's on some fuckin' boat.

Anyway, why are they jacking all of these dogs, and what does Dean Jones want with them? The movie's sure as fuck not gonna tell you, at least not now, so instead the opening credits begin and we are introduced to our titular St. Bernard, back when he didn't have his titular name yet. We see him as a puppy in a pet store and it seems like a very nice pet store because Melora Walters works there, and she usually plays meek soft-spoken chicks who wouldn't fuck around with animals, not even in Boogie Nights, even though I'm sure that fuckin' Colonel tried convincing her and Jack Horner to maybe dabble in the bestiality sub-genre (and I do mean "sub") because there's money to be made doing that shit.

But guess what? It's all fuckin' connected, man, the pet store and that evil Dean Jones, because after hours Stan & Ollie break into the pet shop and dog-nap some of the puppies -- including our St. Bernard -- and hightail it out of there in their SWAT/bread truck. Our dog, though, he manages to break out, along with his new Jack Russell Terrier buddy. Rather than go on the lam together, they separate and travel completely different paths; Beethoven manages to find a family's house to crash at, while the Jack Russell Terrier tries his hand at being a fuckin' bum who lives off of what I throw away, but he'll just be Jack Russell Terrier, no more, no less.

Yeah, Beethoven finds a house, looking for potential suckers and he definitely finds one in this little girl named Emily Newton, who just happened to be dreaming of a puppy before she woke up. The little doggie starts kissing Emily and in walks Bonnie Hunt (playing the mom), her brother Ted (wearing the kind of glasses that hipster chicks too hardcore for black frames like to wear nowadays), and her hard-up big sister Ryce. These guys, they take the sight of this strange street dog licking the little girl's face rather well; you'd think they'd kind of freak the fuck out because for all they know, this dog could be infecting her with Gwyneth Paltrow Cooties, but alas, this is the way it was written in the screenplay by Edmond Dantes (that's John Hughes to you, buddy) and Amy Holden Jones (the auteur behind The Slumber Party Massacre). I wonder if it was the latter scribe's idea to have the family eat at a kitchen table that has a bowl of live goldfish as its centerpiece; I mean, I'm sure the Newtons dine on fish every once in a while, which is kind of fucked-up for the goldfish, to have to witness that barbaric shit happening to their fellow gill-breathers.

Let's talk about Bonnie Hunt for a second (in the form of a long-ass paragraph); if you've ever seen her get interviewed, then you probably already know that she's a very funny lady who is so overwhelmingly awesome that even that cranky asshole David Letterman probably writes love letters to her mother's vagina for popping out someone so full of pure uncut Win. I was particularly fond of her interviews on The Late Late Show with Tom Snyder -- which was my favorite late night talk show at the time, because Snyder didn't give a fuck and because there was no audience to try to win over -- she was so fuckin' quick and also displayed expert poise in handling Snyder's repeated requests that she one day appear on the show in her old nurses' uniform. Goddamn, I miss that dirty old man, now more than ever. Anyway, it makes perfect sense that someone as talented as Ms. Bonnie Hunt starred in something like 17 different sitcoms and talk shows only to have them end up cancelled.

So Ms. Hunt and the kids try to convince the goddamn paterfamilias (played by that bad Charles Grodin -- also one of my favorite talk show guests) to keep this dog, but he's at the very least, hesitant about the idea. He brings up how dogs drool, smell, make messes, and eventually die -- the same argument I use against having children -- but since the movie is called Beethoven and not No Country For Young Dogs, he relents and now they have to find a name for the dog. Because this movie was shot in 1991 the kids come up with such potential monikers as M.C. Hammer and Ultimate Warrior, but because the movie was released in 1992 this scene is funnier than it has any right to be, because by that point, homeboy dropped the M.C. from his name and soon The Ultimate Warrior would find himself out-ski from the WWE. In the end, the dog reacts favorably to Emily's piano performance of the 5th Symphony, so Grodin decides on the name of....Beethoven. Cue the Dog-Growing-Up-And-Literally-Pissing-On-Grodin's-Hospitality montage scored to Paul Shaffer's rockin' old white man cover of "Roll Over Beethoven" blared in Dolby Stereo (in selected theaters)!

Poor fuckin' Grodin -- this guy comes home from a long day's work running his car air freshener company, trying to impress potential business investors played by Patricia Heaton & David Duchovny (although based on Mulder's performance here, he should've spelled that shit "Doucheovny"), and then has to clean up all of the dog's messes. He was right! He was absolutely right! There's fuckin' drool in his shoes, dog fur all over, dirty floors, wet spaces, paw-printed suits, it's a madhouse he has to live in. At one point, Beethoven is all wet & dirty and he shakes it all off, causing goo, drool and slime to splatter all over Mardukas up in here and it was then that I remembered that Ivan Reitman produced this movie.

I bet you that shit was his idea, because he directed a monster-sized hit movie called Ghostbusters that featured one of the stars getting slimed by a Class 5 full-roaming vapor; he probably brought that up at the script meetings, saying that Grodin's character should get slimed and everyone else was like "Yeah, but dogs don't slime, they get water and mud and drool all over you, but not slime" and Reitman probably cleared his throat and said "It worked in a little $200+ million grossing film called Ghostbusters" and then gave some asshole-smug smile. Then his stupid little bratty kid stomped into the room and kicked one of Reitman's underlings just because and Ivan's all "Oh, Jason! You're so precious!" and little fuckin' asshole Jason was like "You bet your ass, homeskillet!" and Ivan's like "Just where do you come up with these sayings? You are indeed the living end, my child, the living end!" before tossing to Jason yet another fat wad of cash for him to do with as he pleases. Goddamn. GODDAMN.

Anyway, Grodin's kids are reaping the rewards (while he's getting raped by the responsibilities) and they're loving life with this dog, taking him out for trick-or-treating as a horse (fairly easy for this miniature horse-like creature, they just put a saddle on him) and they don't even know that Beethoven's still living the life of Riley when they're not around. Yeah man, after the kids go to school and the mom's out banging the milkman or something, The Beet's being a sneaky son-of-a-bitch.

You see, even though they lock him up in his corral during the day, homedog's like Charles Bronson in The Great Escape or the mythical character who gave eternal cuntface twat Madonna quite the rogering in her song "Like a Virgin" -- he's digging tunnels, specifically one big tunnel under the corral fence and off he goes! Off to roam the mean streets of Happy Clean Town, USA (pop. 3,718 - 2 black, 1 hispanic), where he can continue his daily routine of Always Eating; seriously, it's not enough to snatch the bacon off of Grodin's plate, and if he keeps that kind of Exiled from Contentment diet up, Beethoven's gonna catch some serious 'Beetus. But maybe that's why he's walking all over town -- he works off all those calories with all that cardio, in between liberating leftover food from sidewalk cafes and drinking from the water hose at the local fire station while only a few feet away sits the faggy Dalmatian, parched and unloved.

Like me, Beethoven eats everything but he especially loves him some pastries (he gets the hook-up from the friendly lady at the bakery) but unlike me, he will happily share his treats with others, like his alley-loitering Jack Russell Terrier friend. The little dog munches on this rather phallic-shaped pastry, which I guess is foreshadowing when you consider what happens during the climax of the film.

(He bites Dean Jones in the Tom Jones, that's what happens.)

Because they don't actually have to live with Beethoven, everybody in the neighborhood loves him and they don't fink on him for running around sans owners, even when he's visiting the young'ins at their schools, like Ryce; the poor girl has recently been getting all crotch-perspired whenever this fellow student named Mark (oh hai Mark!) shows up. This threw me off, because based on Ryce's love for M.C. Hammer and Heavy D and the Boyz -- not to mention the poster on her bedroom door of a spotted dalmatian that implies how black & white can co-exist -- I figured she was into the dark stuff, but Mark is a white dude, so what do I know? Ryce is too nervous, but lucky for her, Beethoven's a smooth smooth who will hook a sister up, and he manages to get Mark interested in talking to Ryce.

He gets around, this canine! Because this movie takes place in a time before bullied kids discovered firearms and trenchcoats, Ted's been taking a lot of shit from a group of the lamest group of bullies ever. Well, here comes Beethoven to the rescue, flashing his chompers at the little villains while standing behind Ted, not giving himself away -- thereby making Ted feel like he scared the kids off by himself, giving him some much-needed self-confidence. He also saves Emily from drowning in a pool, which is awesome unless you're a parent who lost his or her kid in a drowning accident, like my aunt & uncle, and boy am I glad I never brought *this* movie over to their place -- can you imagine the awkwardness when that scene comes up, watching this young girl miraculously saved as Beethoven carries her on his back, further advancing the He's Really A Little Horse theory I had going, while my aunt & uncle start doing the whole Why God Why cry/mope, like they're gonna get an answer from that twisted sadist.

Grodin unfortunately doesn't understand the kind of selfless things this dog is doing for the family, since he's already riding the Fuck This Dog train and he's not one to pull the emergency cord. Later on, Duchovny and Heaton show up to have Grodin sign some contracts, only he doesn't know that these two assholes are plotting to fuck him over because that's what you do in Big Business. I thought it was rather bush league of the filmmakers to use these fuckhead characters as an opportunity to spread their foul pro-family propaganda; you find out that they don't want kids and are rather content with that decision and then later in the film, Hunt gives Grodin shit by saying something to the effect of "Your family is going down the drain and you're worried about a dream!" because fuck a dream -- keep popping out kids and live your unhappy zombified existence in order to support them because the more, the merrier in the Keep Consuming game. And what becomes of those who don't agree? They get their asses handed to them by Beethoven when he ties his leash around the chairs they're sitting on and takes them for a fuckin' ride. It is Good Times to see Duchovny's smug ass get dragged down a sidewalk, though, that's for sure.

Because this is a movie for the kids, it turns out Dean Jones is getting paid by Howard Stern's dad to test out some new explosive hollow-point bullets by firing them into the skulls of large dogs. See, that's why Jones is paying Joe Gould's Secret and Ready to Rumble to jack all these dogs -- he either shoots them in the fuckin' head or shoots them up with chemicals and drugs. The best part is that Jones is also a veterinarian, leaving me all disturbed as I wonder how many innocent dogs did this guy yank from his clients, all under the guise of I Had To Put Him Down Because He Attacked Me. So many families destroyed by this guy, just so he can drive his awesome Porsche and pile up stacks of cash in his safe (while his minions stack up just as many dog corpses in the incinerator). But hey, that's capitalism, baby -- you gotta get yours at all costs. Like that mumbly, not-really-talented, bullet-ridden rapper is fond of saying: Get Rich or Die Tryin'.

Somewhere, somehow, a family is at home watching Beethoven on television and some kid is asking his or her mom or dad to explain this particular plot turn; "Oh, well honey, you see, the bad man wants to fire a .357 hollow-point bullet into the doggie's skull, and once he's finished cleaning up all the doggy brain matter and mopping up all the blood and pick up the pieces of shattered broken doggy skull, he will take the written and videotaped results over to his employer, the ammunition manufacturers, where they will then take these results and figure out whether or not they've succeeded in creating a bullet that inflicts the most permanent damage to its target".

Jones thinks he can pull this shit on the Newton family, by visiting Beethoven and then pouring fake blood all over his arm and getting our dog to attack him -- and it works, dear Jesus, it works. Now Grodin's gotta drive ol' Beet to the vet, so he can put him down (but in reality, Jones is gonna shuttle him off to get shot in the head) and the sequence begins with a shot of Beethoven innocently rolling around in his corral that just about broke my fuckin' black heart. Then Grodin's talking to The Beet in the car, feeling all bad about this Green Mile drive he's making with him, and the motherfucker is just crushing it in the dramatic department while Randy Edelman's overly-sappy score is doing its thing.

Then later when they arrive at the vet, I think the reality of the situation has dawned on the dog, and he looks just so fucking sad -- either that or Chris the Dog (the actor who plays Beethoven) was hitting the bong something fierce in between takes, because his eyes are very heavy-lidded, like he has Forest Whitaker Disease, only it's affecting both eyes. As Grodin leaves, he takes one final look at the dog, now behind a cage, and Beethoven responds by barking back the dog equivalent to Harry Dean Stanton's "AVENGE ME!" line in Red Muthafuckin' Dawn.

But calm down, this ain't Million Dollar Doggy, this is Beethoven, so soon Grodin and his family are out to get their dog back -- one of the things Hunt tells her husband is "I know he slobbered and he smelled bad, but he loved us" and I'm like, Is she talking about a dog or an elderly relative? -- and face off with Jones. He tells them that the dog's already been destroyed, but Grodin, he's not buying that shit, so he throws a right cross and knocks his old ass out because the boyz in da hood are always hard, you come snatching their dogs and they'll pull your card. Then he and his family wait across the street under some bright-ass lights, because that's what you want to do when sneakily following someone, you want to make sure that you're in plain unobstructed sight.

They follow him to his Warehouse of Dog-Skull Obliteration and it all goes down like family-movie-climax clockwork; Beethoven breaks free and chases Stan & Ollie around, until he finally catches up with Tucci and chomps on his foot, causing the guy to give out one of those patented Stanley Tucci girl-screams. It was at this point that I can see why Phoebe the Dog considers this her favorite movie, because this flick is like James Bond for dogs, particularly for St. Bernards: you have this St. Bernard who gets to eat everything and have fun with kids and even occasionally chomp on the occasional human or two, and people applaud your actions -- why of course, it's total escapist fantasy to these dogs.

The rest of the dogs escape and the Jack Russell Terrier bites Dean Jones in the junk, and then Jones gets owned Basket Case-style which would've been the most awesome bit in the entire movie, if it weren't for the scene that follows: Stan & Ollie escape the warehouse and are chased by the rest of the dogs. They run through some loading docks full of incoming/outgoing shipments of fruits and vegetables, and one of the dogs figures since he's not gonna get this chance again, he grabs a head of lettuce and takes off with it. I'd post a better pic but my VLC is acting up like a young Jason Reitman at a Beethoven script meeting.

So Jones and his henchmen get thrown into the slam for fucking around with dogs, with the help of the Newton family offering damning testimony. Everything's happily ever after for Charles Grodin, Bonnie Hunt, Emily Newton, Ted "Hipster Ariel Glasses" Newton, and most importantly, Beethoven. But if you give a shit about that chick Ryce, well, check this out: the Newtons end up on the local news, and as a result, Ryce gets a phone call from Mark, which totally makes her night, I'm sure. She thinks he's fallen for her, but c'mon, we all know what's up; Mark called her right after seeing her on television, which obviously means he's a star-fucker. Poor girl, she'll learn eventually.

In conclusion, Vote Phoebe!

If I had an ass that red and irritated, I'd be non-stop pissed off too.

He takes another sip of his coffee and begins to write about Shakma, although he truly feels that the title should always be written in all caps and yelled -- SHAKMA! -- because that's the way it should be.

So I had heard about SHAKMA! since it's release 20 years ago, having seen the poster and having caught bits and pieces playing at the awesome video store that displayed said poster back-in-the-day. I also missed a screening of it at the Cinefamily a couple years ago, but I didn't miss out on one of my all-time favorite tweets about that film, one that displayed the sheer joy gained out of watching a killer baboon doling out raw psycho street-style ownage to a bunch of med students -- and after finally watching SHAKMA! the other night, I'd have to agree with that sentiment wholeheartedly.

See, SHAKMA! takes place in this medical research building located in Orlando, Florida and I guess Shaquille O'Neal was off playing ball somewhere else because I'm sure Shaq Diesel would've stepped in early in the film and stopped these assholes from doing what they were about to do, which is put some poor baboon (the titular SHAKMA!) through a surgical procedure that apparently involved reaching into SHAKMA!'s inner wiring and flicking the setting switch to Evil, because Dr. Shaq's a good dude and he wouldn't have stood for that kind of cruelty to animals in the name of science. He would've given Professor Sorenson (played by Roddy McDowall) and his students a stern talking to, because that's how my boy Shaqma rolls.

But alas, Shaq Daddy was not there to teach these...scientists...a lesson, so McDowall and company go ahead and power-saw SHAKMA!'s head open and fuck with it something awful. So they do what they do, and then cart the passed-out baboon to wherever you put the passed-out baboons. Then the movie introduces who I'm pretty sure is going to be the main dude, a med student played by Christopher Atkins From The Blue Lagoon (that's his official full name, he changed it to include the movie he's best known for). We see him fucking around with his chick, a fellow med student played by Amanda Wyss from Silverado and A Nightmare on Elm Street (but she only goes by the name Amanda Wyss).

Atkins and Wyss have a cool thing going on; he likes to push her buttons, or at least I hope that's what he's doing, and that he really doesn't honestly think that she's a "militant feminist" just because she's not interested in the life of a happy homemaker -- darning the socks, cooking the dinners, making the babies. I mean, c'mon, Atkins, if that's what she really wants to do, then why would she be in fuckin' medical school, ya fuckin' jackass? Better yet, why are you in fuckin' medical school? Obviously you don't have the capacity in your man-animal brain to understand where this chick is coming from, let alone the intricacies of the human body.

He also fails to grasp the idea behind having animals at a research facility, I mean, did he think they were placed there to boost morale? Sorry, chief -- all those rats and monkeys are there to get Hostel'd on in the name of Science. But I guess he didn't know that, because as soon as he finds out that his beloved SHAKMA! is now a bloody baboon who had his brain cut up, he gets all emo about it, which I guess triggers the psychic bond that is created whenever Man and Animal become very close, because suddenly SHAKMA! wakes up and is immediately open for ass-handing-back business. He takes a swipe at some random douche and then another douche hits the alarm, causing McDowall to arrive, dressed like he just came from the local Dress Like Pee-Wee Herman contest, where he placed 11th because the colors and material have to be same, not just the particular types of clothing, I mean c'mon, he didn't even have the right shoes. Anyway, in the end, wannabe Pee-Wee is able to sedate SHAKMA!

Pure fuckin' incompetence -- that's what really sets this party off. McDowall gives Atkins the simple task of shooting up SHAKMA! with a particular sedative (I think it's supposed to kill the baboon, I'm not sure because I was sooooo fuckin' blitzed while watching this) and this fool actually manages to fuck that up; Atkins ends up grabbing the wrong vial because he was looking the other way while grabbing it -- remember, this is a man who is pursuing a career that involves having responsibility for the health and well-being of others. So because he shot SHAKMA! up with what I'm guessing was a very light tranquilizer, or SuperAIDS version 2.0 (commissioned by the CIA), our baboon is only taking a nap for the time being while a group of these wannabe Dr. Houses are setting up for a weird Mazes and Monsters type of game, to be played in the research building after hours. Somehow they got McDowall to take part as the Game Master -- shit, the whole thing might have been his nerdy idea, I don't remember.

So yeah, this game; the building is locked up and most of the lights are shut off, allowing the group to split up and go around looking for keys and clues and shit, trying to either find or stay away from Nemesis, who I guess is like the douchey frat-boy minotaur in the labyrinth that is the research building. This Nemesis guy, he's not the Resident Evil villain or the Albert Pyun movie, he's just one of the med students and he's been asked to take part in the game, and he has to wear a stupid monster mask when playing as Nemesis. Meanwhile, his chick is waiting outside in her car, listening to the most awesome generic jazzy synthesizer music on her tape deck.

The game players all keep in contact with each other, using the kind of walkie-talkies you beg your dad to buy you at Toys R Us, and then you bitch about 'em afterward because you can't hear shit, but hey, at least they came with a Morse Code button that you never properly used and a Morse Code key that you never bothered to learn. Meanwhile, McDowall is chilling out in his office (at this point, he's now dressed like someone who should be sliding me a cold mug of Budweiser with one hand, while wiping down the bar with the other), keeping tabs on their locations with a map on his computer. This is what you did for fun in 1990, I guess. I'm not judging, because to be honest with you, I wish I could play something like that, but I don't know, I'm afraid of people or something.

But I'm not afraid of the bearded med student/computer nerd who's either got a stroke or is gay, based on the way he speaks, because that would be wrong, to be afraid; during a conversation with Atkins, he pronounces "game master" like he wanted to cut it off at the first half of the first syllable, creating a key that would unlock the gates to a whole new world of acceptance and understanding, but he won't. He probably secretly hopes that his lisp will be enough to out him, and his friends will pick up on it and not be hateful dicks to him because of his alternative lifestyle. Or maybe that's just how the actor playing him thinks computer nerds talk. Anyway, he's the first to get fuckin' merked by SHAKMA! and even his death stare is annoying.

There's this young girl, played by a young adult, and she's the Nemesis guy's little sister; she's part of the game, playing some kind of princess who awaits the winner of the game in the top floor, ready to award the person who saves her with underage poon or something, I don't fuckin' know. All I know is that she has a thing for Atkins, and maybe he has something for her, based on the pervy looks they share. But it's mostly her who is doing the staring, usually while Atkins is busy doing something else and not paying attention. Man, that would be awesome to have that happen to me, to be the one lovingly stared at, rather than be the one doing the staring -- and better yet, I'm not being stared at because of my usual freaky/ugly/fatty ways, no, not at all, I'm being stared at because somehow this nice girl looks at all of this fat brown pockmarked flesh and the first thought that goes through her twisted head is not Call The Cops Call The INS, but instead it's I Want That.

So while these assholes are playing their game, SHAKMA! is prowling the fuckin' hallways, being a fuckin' boss and occasionally owning a motherfucker. The first time SHAKMA! does his thing, it's when one of the med students goes into the primate room; he enters, sees a bunch of opened-up cages, blood splattered all over the walls, then turns to find SHAKMA! in mid-monkey-chew. SHAKMA! looks back at the med student, still chewing, all like "'Sup, man? I didn't even know you were coming" and then upon realizing that the med student is not happy with what he's witnessing, SHAKMA! (who hates being judged) jumps onto the counter, knocks over a monkey cage -- with a monkey still inside! -- and gives the dude a look like "Yeah, that's right, I did that shit!" before finally jumping onto the guy to tear him various new profusely bleeding orifices. Orifici?

No joke, man, the actor who plays SHAKMA! needs a fuckin' retroactive Oscar for his performance here. I mean, if that fuckin' overrated shit-stinking Bart the Bear managed to convince the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to let him amble his Harold Perrineau-eating ass onto the fuckin' Kodak Theater stage, then why not Typhoon the baboon? This baboon is awesome; he's either locomotion-ing down the hallways at furious speed, bouncing off the walls like some amped-up basehead who's just tried Crystal Meth for the first time (and took way too much), or he's nonchalantly munching on the flesh of one of his previous victims during downtime. When he's not doing that cool shit, he's doing even cooler shit, like going the fuck off on doors. Man, this baboon hates him some fuckin' doors -- I suspect that when SHAKMA! was young, some asshole old man paid homeless doors to beat the shit out of him, therefore instilling within Lil' SHAKMA! a violent abhorrence for all things Doorknob'd and Deadbolted.

At one point, Atkins tries to defend himself against the almighty SHAKMA! by using a flashbulb to distract him, thinking he's Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window in this bitch, and SHAKMA! gets a full bright flash in his face. But my boy reacts by quickly closing his eyes and reflexively shaking his head, then bounces back with this "No, you did NOT just flash that shit in my face" look/screech before getting back into Killing-mode. It's beauty, eh, the way he kills -- even after it's obvious that you're a goner, it's not gonna keep him from giving you a quick Haggar-style jump kick with both feet, because he's the kind of baboon who likes to break it off after sticking it in, the little screechy bastard.

Let me talk about that screech/growl shit he does -- it is Good Times, people. Right now, it just hit me that the producers of this film really missed out on making some serious merchandise/licensing money with a SHAKMA! car alarm. That shit would've made some serious bank, on account of being so fucking effective; a thief tries to break into your cherry Geo Metro and suddenly triggers a barrage of loud-ass SHAKMA!-screams going at 150 decibels -- putting the Fear Of God into that poverty-driven piece-of-shit and causing him to run the fuck away. Plus, any passerby or neighbors will have extra incentive in notifying the authorities because Jesus Christ Someone Please Turn Off That Godforsaken Alarm. The SHAKMA! alarm also makes a great deterrent, because any thief worth his worthless salt would not try to fuck with any automobile displaying the "Protected by SHAKMA!" label, he ain't taking that chance, because like the slogan for the SHAKMA! Auto Alarm says: "You Mess With The Baboon, You Get The Horns".

I don't think I've made it clear how splendid a job I think this Typhoon fellow did in his role as SHAKMA! The Killer Baboon. He doesn't just Bring It with the killing scenes, he's also got a bit of a Pacino-esque hamminess to him; half the time, ol' Shakee Boy is making these crazy open-mouthed faces and at first I thought he was being kind of an over-actor, but now I'm thinking something else. Like, maybe he's making fun of his co-star Christopher Atkins, who occasionally displays similar wide-eyed/wide-mouthed theatrics in this film (particularly during the scene when he discovers the acid-melted face of one of his buddies -- no joke, SHAKMA! will absolutely fuck you up).

Typhoon probably noticed that shit and when it came time to shoot his coverage during that OMG My Friend's Face Has Been Melted Off scene, he looked over to the crew members (Typhoon's been chummy with them, sometimes even playing cards with them in his trailer between setups, like Tom Hanks has been known to do) and said "Hey guys, check me out -- I'm Chris Atkins!" and then started doing the faces, cracking everyone up, because when you work long hours on low-budget shoots like this one, you need all the levity you can get. Well, the director -- ruthless Eli Cross wannabe that he is -- he had them roll camera during that shit, then later had that shit printed and told the editor to try and use some of that footage somewhere in the movie.

I bet you the director didn't even have the decency to tell Typhoon about this, preferring to let him know when he watches the film for the first time. Boy, did Typhoon feel betrayed upon seeing what was meant to be a private moment between talent and crew, now blown up and presented to everyone on a 40-foot screen. But he knew someone who felt even more betrayed at the moment, and he was sitting only a few seats away: Christopher Atkins. Typhoon knew that he did wrong -- no matter how lighthearted his intentions were -- and he had to make up for it as soon as possible, especially knowing how sensitive Atkins could get. Typhoon couldn't judge Chris on his fragile nature, for he too was once like Mr. Atkins, having had to deal with all kinds of jokes and barbs from producers about how he'd fit in this business since Hollywood is all "monkey business" anyway. Or those lame smart-ass questions from agents asking him if he and a bunch of his fellow simians ever got together with a typewriter and tried writing Shakespeare. Oh, how those "jokes" stung him!

And yet, here he was, dishing out the same kind of hurt to his polite co-star. No, this had to be made right -- and soon! Typhoon decided he would make his move during the after-party, only he wouldn't be too sudden about it, he'd have to drink up at least one flute of courage before working up the nerve to make amends. But he would, and it did -- and thankfully, Chris being the sensitive, positive and trusting soul that he was, forgave Typhoon, and all was well again.

I spoil shit all the time here, but I'm going to spoil something particularly big here so SPOILER BITCHES, but yeah, I want to talk about how surprised I was by the fact that the love interest gets dusted in this flick. I thought I had it pegged: Amanda Wyss will live and so will Nemesis' Little Sister, because there's no reason to kill them off because why be different from every other movie ever made? I figured Atkins wouldn't survive because three's a crowd in the survivor game, plus, he needs to atone because it's kinda his fault that this shit happened. I mean, yeah, it's McDowall's fault for Tampering In God's Domain with whatever the fuck he was doing to SHAKMA!'s brain, but it's also Blue Lagoon's fault for not paying attention to what drug he was injecting SHAKMA! with. Seriously, Atkins -- that's a dangerous killing machine that you were told to put down and you decided that it wasn't Top Priority for your eyes to pay attention to the fuckin' label? What an asshole!

But no, they don't kill off Atkins, so in his place they kill off love interest Amanda Wyss! Wow! It's a pretty fucked-up sequence, and the way it plays at first, you think she'll get away from SHAKMA!, but no. She manages to hide out in a bathroom stall, standing on the toilet while trying to pull off an air vent cover. The end of this scene is shot from the outside of the stall, so we only see the top half of Wyss as she tries to make a jump for the air vent -- but then you hear my homebaboon doing his screech thing and down goes Amanda, out of frame and into a world of shit (literally, if the last occupant of that stall forgot to flush). The sound of screams and bloody murder follow...until...out pops Amanda into frame again, barely hanging on (both figuratively and literally). Everything's quiet now as she slowly tries to make an attempt at crawling up onto the air vent. A few beats pass, and then -- SKKKRRRREEEEEEEE!!!! SHAKMA! pulls her back down and finishes what he started.

Now, I was wondering what happened in that brief period of non-violence; was SHAKMA! being a sadistic fuck and fooling Miss Wyss into thinking that she might escape this ordeal? I only wish it were that simple. I'll tell you what fuckin' happened, but first I have to fill in some details for ya: throughout the movie, upon closer inspection, you'll notice that SHAKMA!'s dong is rather primed during all of his murderous shenanigans. It's disturbing, but maybe it's supposed to be, because watching this hairy, angry creature running rampant with his penis hanging out, killing everything that he doesn't agree with, well it's like SHAKMA! is the male id personified.

So when you consider that, along with where SHAKMA! is located during his attacking of Miss Wyss -- on the floor, looking up at the girl standing on the toilet, leaving her ass in full prime view -- well, it doesn't take the proverbial rocket scientist to figure out that when you're as Horny As Fuck as this pent-up creep is, you take advantage of the time a quick break gives you and you beat that meat, son, you beat that fuckin' meat. Unfortunately for poor Amanda Wyss, my boy SHAKMA! is like The Flash when it comes to Turning Japanese, so she didn't have time to escape before he finished and now he's back to giving the lady a hands-on lesson in How To Die Slowly.

By the way, it's thoughts like these that keep me from ever wondering why I'm doomed to die alone.

At first, I thought the filmmakers justified her death for committing the crime of being a smart, assertive woman who could get along just fine without a man's help -- whereas Nemesis' Little Sister is allowed to live because she's dumb and needy and therefore Not A Threat To Man's Dominance. But no, they kill the little sister off too because this movie is like Judd Nelson in that it's just so goddamn relentless and way harsh. Each woman's death is mourned in similar ways by Atkins; he picks up each woman's SHAKMA'd-up body and does that slow, traumatized Riggs-in-Lethal Weapon 2 shuffle-walk as he carries it down the hall, only with Wyss he does this extra bit where he leans in and gives her one final kiss on the lips -- which is still OK by the rules, because as my late beloved grandmother was fond of saying, "It's not necrophilia, if no fluid is involved".

One by one, the team of potential Marcus Welbys and Meredith Greys are taken out, even McDowall (who is last seen dressed like he should be running on top of Mt. Rushmore with Eva Marie Saint in tow) gets it in the end, leaving only one man to fight the deadly terror, with only cunning, booby-traps, and an overall sense of I Don't Give A Damn Anymore at his disposal. So basically, this is Predator for the Scrubs crowd. But ultimately, what this film really is, is a scorching indictment on the severe damages to society caused by Man's stupidity -- particularly one man's stupidity, Christopher Atkins' stupidity. I think it's a harsh way for one man to learn his lesson, but short of having the dead bodies magically awaken and having SHAKMA! reveal himself to be a dwarf stuntman, then having George Bluth Sr. and his one-armed friend come out and say "And that's why you always read the label!" -- short of doing that, I think this was the only way for homeboy to learn.

After what I'm about to write, you might think that I got a free trip to New York and was invited to the premiere screening of SHAKMA! at the Radio City Music Hall, where everyone in the audience was hooting, hollering and bouncing beach balls around, but I honestly thought SHAKMA! was a good flick. First off, I like everything, so there's that -- and second, I thought it was a pretty well put-together low-budget scare joint. The idea of a crazed baboon skulking around dark corners of a practically abandoned building that you are trapped inside of, well shit, that's pretty scary to me. Hell, being in a well-lit, wide-open space with an even-tempered baboon would scare the shit out of me. It's an effective B-movie thriller, is what I'm saying. But I'm also saying that I was as high as Harrison Ford giving a rare friendly interview when I watched it, so there's that too.

I'm disappointed that they didn't make more SHAKMA! flicks because that baboon was awesome and I would've seen ten more sequels devoted to his flank-steak ass running around, killing doors and people. Don't give me that "But SHAKMA! got burned to death at the end" bullshit, because as the late Moustapha Akkad taught us, Evil Never Dies (as long as there is money to be made off of it). Seriously, this guy could've been the next Freddy Krueger and it's too bad they never got around to making SHAKMA! 2: SHAKMA!'s Revenge, where the ghost of SHAKMA! can torture some young innocent baboon and possess him, and it's all ladled with thick servings of homoerotic subtext.

It's not too late though; everyone's remake/reboot/sequel/prequel crazy nowadays, so why not call that crazy fuckin' kraut Werner Herzog to direct and since Typhoon's probably dead now, get Nicolas Cage to play the fuck out of SHAKMA! and together they can call it The SHAKMA!: Port of Call Orlando if they want. Then the press can call up Abel Ferrara for his opinion and he'll be like "Whaddya fuckin' talkin' about? I didn't direct no fuckin' movie called SHAKMA!, I was too busy hustlin' and lookin' like a filthy deranged drug addict to be fuckin' with some fuckin' monkey, Jesus fuckin' Christ, ya fuckin' killin' me with these fuckin' questions! Lend me five dollars."

In conclusion, there's a black guy in this movie and while he isn't the first guy to die, in retrospect, he probably wishes he was the first to go because homeboy is rockin' some hair and clothes that make this New Jack look like he just came back from doing background work in House Party 2: The Pajama Jam! because that was the style back when this movie was made, the early 90's -- which I miss dearly, actually, because the present day sucks a dick, until it becomes the past and then suddenly you're missing that shit with all of your heart while at the same time going What The Fuck.