The video for You Look Familiar, the single from Belgian’s Team William, featuring — as DRAWN!’s John Martz points out — some fantastic and decidedly Fleischer-esque visuals by the directing duo Joris Bergmans and Michélé De Feudis. The song’s not bad either.

It seems that, no matter how many times we are warned about them, human beings cannot resist a creepy, dark, and empty storefront. We appear hardwired to look into the dusty and grimy abyss of a shop devoid of another person (or, at best, one so wizened that they may as well not be human at all) and immediately ascertain that, yes, indeed this is a place we must enter. Ladies and gentlemen, please, stop doing this. Should you be presented with such a choice, let me assure you that you will only bring upon yourself a swift, painful, and perhaps ironic end. Really, just walk away.

Alma, the titular main character in the short film by Rodrigo Blaas, received no such lecture, I’m afraid. Her parents were negligent in educating their child about the dangers of unmanned counters and stores with a distinct lack of helpful salesmen. Alas, Alma is naive and tragically ignorant of such places, a combination that, as previously mentioned, can only get one into trouble. All the more so when dolls are involved. No, dear reader, no good can come this. No good at all.

via Super Punch

I’m not sure if it’s telling that Takashi Miike’s best film is also, by all accounts, his most conventional. It may be more telling that, considering the content of today’s FAM, Audition, it is one of the director’s less bizarre offerings.

Based on the novel by Ryu Murakami, Audition is the story of a single father looking for a wife. Shigeharu Aoyama’s wife has been dead for seven years and, urged by his son Shigehiko, he begins the now alien process of dating. To help in this matter, Aoyama’s film-producer friend Yoshikawa concocts a grand plan, in which they will hold mock auditions, telling applicants that they are vying for the role of Aoyama’s wife in an upcoming film. In the course of the auditions Aoyama becomes entranced by Asami Yamazaki, a seemingly soft-spoken and reserved 24 year old. He will learn, in due course, that she is anything but.

Audition really shines in its pacing, and thereby, its atmosphere. Something is not right with Asami. When we first see her on her own she is sitting in her apartment. It is an empty apartment, furnished only with a sack and a telephone. Asami sits in the empty apartment, staring at the phone and when it suddenly rings she does not move. Not even a twitch. The sack, however, is a different story.

This scene sets the tone for the rest of the film. We know that something is going to happen. We are waiting for it, mulling it over, guessing at it, and yet we could not have imagined what would finally happen and that terrible occurrence happens in one explosively brief moment of release, so brief that we are barely given time to understand its entirety before it is over and done and, in the end, we are left just as clueless and hurt and bewildered as Shigeharu Aoyama. This, then, is the genius of Audition and Miike, a director whose oeuvre, so rife with a frenetic insanity, belies the talent required to maintain such a perfect cadence. I look forward to the day when he tops it.

Saved for a rainy day or, decease in this case, cheap one in a long line of bitterly cold days, thumb I present for your inspection, these animated promos for two Parliament-Funkadelic albums, the surprisingly literal The Motor Booty Affair and Funkentelechy Vs. The Placebo Syndrome. P-Funk always had a great sense of mythology in their music, meaning that both Dr. Funkenstein and his arch-nemesis Sir Nose D’Voidoffunk are in attendance here; more like the chapters of a sci-fi serial than albums. They appear almost alien in contrast to the slick, overproduced (and quite limited) promos that are shown on, say, MTV between episodes of People Acting Awful Towards One Another.

Sparrow Songs is a project in which filmmaker Alex Jablonski and cinematographer Michael Totten make and exhibit one short documentary per month, every month for one year.

Episode 3 – Porn Star Karaoke

Every week porn performers, fans and others from the adult industry get together at a bar in the San Fernando Valley to sing karaoke.

Jablonski and Totten’s third short documentary functions as an almost perfect microcosm of pornography, encompassing nearly all sides of an industry whose existence remains more, shall we say, problematic than most. It is a subject so rife with moral, emotional, and intellectual landmines that I fear even treading near it, especially when there are people so much more qualified to wrestle with it (a prime example being the always smart and stunning Susannah Breslin, from whom this clip was pilfered and who has written extensively on the matter). It’s a powerful piece of film and I present it to you here, then, with limited comment. Feel free to draw your own conclusions.

Every holiday has its traditions and New Year’s Day is no different. In fact, New Year’s is littered with traditions mostly involving copious amounts of alcohol, weeping, and deep, unspeakable shame. However, there is a more modern tradition indelibly etched in my mind: The Twilight Zone marathon. Once hosted, on the East Coast at least, on channel 11 WPIX out of New York, now on the hideously renamed SyFy, it was a chance to absorb all of Rod Serling’s brilliant series in one, gluttonous 48 hour period. Of course, the FAM cannot play host to all 156 original episodes so today we present the less impressive Twilight Zone: The Movie from 1983.

Twilight Zone: The Movie is a sort of greatest hits, it’s four stories, directed by John Landis, Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante and George Miller based on episodes “Kick the Can”, “It’s a Good Life”, and “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”. Only Landis’s segment is original, based loosely on the episodes “a Quality of Mercy” and “Deaths-Head Revisited”. Landis’s segment is also responsible for the film’s infamy as it was during filming of this that actor Vic Morrow and child actors Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen (age 6 and 7 respectively) were killed when pyrotechnics caused a helicopter to spin out of control and crash. Morrow and Le were decapitated by the rotor while Chen was crushed by one of the skids. The accident and ensuing trial, led to new regulations regarding child actors and, supposedly, the end of Landis’s and Spielberg’s friendship.

It’s a shame then that the resulting film is, as previously mentioned, unable to meet the high standards of its source material. While it’s a thrill to hear series veteran Burgess Meredith’s (uncredited) turn as narrator, the rest falls fairly flat. One wonders why original stories were not drafted as even the best retelling would not have been able to overcome fans’s memories of the television show. Still, it can at least function as an appetizer, something to entice you to delve into the original series. It’s a truly fantastic body of work and you would be doing yourself a great disservice by skipping it. So go, while there are still a few hours left.

My original thoughts for a post today involved something about the lurking new year. This, plainly, is not that post. No, this is a clip of Ricky Gervais torturing Elmo with sleep deprivation on Sesame Street. If it wasn’t so well done it might be mistaken for a C.I.A. training video, something like “Human Intelligence for Kids!” I’m not sure what Mr. Gervais is trying to get from Elmo, but whatever it is, it is of vital importance. That, or he’s a bit miffed that Elmo didn’t know who he was.

Alright, this is it. This is the last Christmas post. Maybe. I think. Alright, at least from me it’s the last Christmas post. Either way, let it be known that the FAM stops for no man, woman, child, or holiday. The FAM is an intractable juggernaut; a force of nature. While the mighty wheels of Industry may grind to a halt on this day, the FAM is unwavering.

“Agnes, it’s me, Billy.”

Yes today’s FAM, in keeping with the holiday spirit, is Bob Clark’s Black Christmas, starring Margot Kidder. On the face of it Black Christmas seems like a typical slasher flick: sorority girls, creepy phone calls, and plenty of screaming. But it manages to overcome the limitations of it’s genre, making for a genuinely unsettling experience. Most of this is no doubt due to the masterfully crafted character of Billy. Never really seen, except for a brief shot of his eyes, the girls are only aware of his presence through the aforementioned phone calls; horrible, growling, squealing phone calls; his mood constantly shifting; pleading, threatening, angry, pitiful phone calls. Meanwhile, the viewer is much more in tune with Billy, his every deed played out from a first person perspective. Indeed, that may be Black Christmas’s greatest trick. We are complicit in these terrible acts. We are, in some ways, the perpetrators. It is only afterward that we are startled awake, left to the realization of what we’ve done, when that awful voice is heard through the receiver.

Black Christmas has achieved rightful cult status. In fact many may only know it from Bravo’s 100 Scariest Movie Moments. Clark himself is, of course, better known for another holiday classic, 1983’s A Christmas Story. His first Christmas outing, though, deserves more. It’s easy to dismiss Black Christmas as a simple slasher but to do so would ignore the superb sense of dread that he manages to achieve; to overlook all the subtleties and ambiguity that Clark was smart enough to include. So much is left unfinished and so little closure is provided to the viewer and justifiably so. After all the horrible things we’ve done to these girls, what solace do we deserve?

At least, malady as imagined by the late illustrator Ed Emshwiller. A future in which a twisted and mutated Santa Claus, an extra pair of arms sprouting from the sides of his torso — no doubt due to prolonged exposure to radiation — looks down upon the horrible, alien carolers that have come to serenade him in his fallout shelter. A future where robots, those accursed machines, soil the holiday in another sick attempt to replicate their creators by erecting a cold, joyless approximation of a Christmas tree. It is a bleak, bleak future dear readers. Let us hope it never comes to pass.

via retro_futurism

Christmas is almost here, that dark time when a filthy, gluttonous fat man acts on a years worth of planning. He’s been watching, waiting, and now the moment has arrived.

“Hello Katie. I’ve been thinking about you. Did you know that? You’ve made my list.

My special list…”

The Winter Stalker comes from the twisted minds of artist Alex Pardee, writer/director Stephen Reedy, and the crew at Zerofriends