Lee Evil and Dougy Gyro in his “Nautilus” costume.
The tenth Edwardian Ball crept up upon us unawares, while we were still sleepy from holiday overeating and adjusting to our regular work schedules again. All of a sudden everyone seemed to say “This weekend? But I haven’t a costume!” And thus began the yearly scramble, with last-minute runs to the fabric store and safety pins carefully tucked away inside as-yet unfinished garments. The Edwardian Ball is one of those rare events where everyone–not just the performers and regulars–dons a costume. For some of us this means little more than our everyday wear, while others brainstorm for weeks.
“Call me eccentric I haven’t a doubt
I’ll labeled a whole lot worse and far out
When I roll down a springtime grassy green hill
You think I won’t but I betcha I will
Cause I’m over 21 considerably
and I’ve earned the right to be no one but me.”
“Rad Anthem” by Rad Omen. Directed by Nicholaus Goossen.
Gack! What a disgustingly perfect, perfectly disgusting piece of work. Very “Dick in a (Happy Meal) Box”. One of those indelible wee slices of cultural tongue in stripper cheek that makes ya want to spit, laugh, cry, vomit, and masturbate all at the same time.
The four reigning icons of American fast food (Ronald, Jack, The Colonel and The King) get together for a boy’s night out and proceed to rampage up and down Sunset Strip like the douchiest of all popped collar, Entourage-aping broheims, gorging on drugs/booze/casual sex before retiring to Carney’s for late night refueling and condiment abuse. (The only thing missing is a cameo from the “yo quiero Taco Bell” chihuahua. Thankfully, comedian Nick Swardson‘s appearance as Wendy the stripper more than makes up for that omission.)
As Steven Gottlieb at Video Static puts it, “why wouldn’t fast food mascots live fast? After all, if they actually subsist on the shit they’re selling, it only stands to reason that they’d be just as tasteless with other aspects of their lives.” He goes on to state that the video “dry humps the line between parody and defamation” and I’d have to agree. It’s not as full-on chaotic neutral as “Smack My Bitch Up” or as viciously intelligent as “Windowlicker“. I’m giggling, but also left feeling the same vaguely irked “YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG” sentiment that I get watching a mindless sausage-baster like “Country Girl“. Displays of entitled douchebaggery + vapid disco shitbeats + the unbidden, deeply personal olfactory memory of being accosted with the stench of other people’s McDonald’s = INSTINCTIVE WRATH.
So. Is this conscious social commentary, or just another music video that –more cleverly than most– panders to the lowest common denominator? Either way, it got a strong response from me (I sure didn’t intend to ramble on this long about it)! Kudos. Now I’m off to alleviate this emotional hangover by fixing myself a huge, healthy salad.
It’s a little sad, how the advent of CGI rendered much of the animatronics industry obsolete just when cinematic robotics were starting to get so intricate, so lifelike. But the technology retains its place, and under certain circumstances, there’s still a definite advantage to using animatronics instead of CGI or stop motion. Some truly badass robotic FX artists have continued to find plenty of work. Take British wunderkind John Nolan, for instance:
Squeee! Although a relative newcomer, Nolan’s already worked on everything from Hellboy to Where the Wild Things to Doctor Who to Harry Potter. You have to check out his entire show reel. Incredible stuff.
Hey, guess who else was born on Jan 8th? World-renowned theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking. He turns 68 today. Here’s a small assortment of reverent (and not so reverent) clips and quotes concerning a brilliant and resilient man whose mind is arguably Teh Sexiest human organ on this entire planet:
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.
Chances are good you’ve already heard tell of Mike from Milwaukee and his 70 minute long YouTube video review of The Phantom Menace. But have you actually taken the time to sit down and watch this vitriolic magnum opus?! I’m not gonna say “you haven’t lived” or anything, but this has got to be one of the funniest, most devastating blockbuster smackdowns in the history of cinema, let alone the internet.
Post-holiday depression can be a bitch. Let heathenish laughter cure what ails you, and pass the pizza rolls.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year… for watching holiday fare with lapsed copyright. Betcha can’t channel surf right now without stumbling across earnest ol’ Jimmy on his existential quest for redemption. Many of us know this movie by heart by now.
Or do we?
Not that you really need context, but this is a scene from 976 Evil 2. Despite featuring astral projection and Brigitte Nielsen, it’s a borderline unwatchable film. But this bit is pure genius: a busty sorority babe’s up late watching TV, trying to choose between Night of the Living Dead and It’s a Wonderful Life, when a Satanic, co-ed stalking college dean turned serial murderer possesses the remote and somehow traps her in the most horrific public domain mashup imaginable.
Soon enough I will have made Coilhouse a repository for the Complete Works of John Carpenter. Certainly this was not the intention when I started the FAM, but it seems to have turned out that way. In this case, however, it is with great sadness that I post his cult favorite, Dark Star.
As Mer detailed below, Dan O’Bannon, one of the creative forces behind one of the greatest science fiction/horror movies in all of cinema, died yesterday. Alien is almost a mythical movie at this point, a landmark piece of film of which thousands of words have been written and which has been numerated on countless lists. It is, by dint of its prestige, almost completely absent from the internet, swept away by the watchful eye of Twentieth Century Fox.
What we are left with, then, is Dark Star and here I must make a confession: I hate this movie. Well, hate may be a strong word. I have seen this movie exactly once. It was rented, long ago in the days of my long forgotten youth, under the impression that, like the box proclaimed, it was a laugh out loud comedy, a rollicking good time. It was, in my memory, none of these things and by the time the credits rolled my parents, brother, and I felt that we had surely been tricked; the victims of a cruel bait-and-switch.
Watching it now I find myself appreciating it more for what it represents rather than what it is. Since that day so long ago my taste for irony and absurdist humor has matured, but even so I find few parts of Dark Star to be funny with the exception of O’Bannon’s rightfully lauded turn as Sgt. Pinback/Bill Froog. No, as a comedy it fails, at least for me. What it does do is foreshadow the arc of O’Bannon’s career and hint at just what he was capable of conjuring up from the depths of his brain. Dark Star is the seed from which Alien sprang and, regardless of whether you love it or hate it, for that reason alone it is priceless.
