A protracted moment of emetic zen:
via JWZ
This one goes out to all of the members of our beloved Coilhouse Magazine staff who’ve been relentlessly toiling over final Issue Six revisions, all the while wondering “HEUGH GAAAHHHHD, when will it END?!!”
Bless you, thank you, and whatever you do, don’t try the Soup of the Day.
Friday! It is now! At this very moment! Time for the FAM! GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Today’s Friday Afternoon Movie is 1991’s Blood in the Face, directed by Anne Bohlen, Kevin Rafferty, and James Ridgeway, based upon Ridgeway’s book Blood in the Face: The Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazi Skinheads, and the Rise of a New White Culture. You may assume from the title of that book that this film may be about white supremacists. You would assume correctly. Blood in the Face, filmed mostly in Cohoctah Township, Michigan, is an encounter with the ultra-right, lunatic fringe — at least as it existed 20 years ago.
What makes the movie work, I think, is how casual, for lack of a better word, the entire encounter is. The directors eschew the usual tropes associated with exposés and documentaries. There is no narrator, there are no experts being interviewed in order to provide commentary or context. By and large the filmmakers stay out of the actual film (with the exception of Michael Moore, who makes an appearance around 7:12 in part one, interviewing a uniformed neo-Nazi). The majority of the interviews are conversational in tone, giving the disturbing illusion of actually being amongst these people. Oftentimes it feels like it’s just you and a bunch of crazed racists; an uncomfortable experience, to say the least.
Courtesy of the wonderful, search talented tykylevits, producer of fine Finnish nonsense for four years and counting.
I got far too little sleep last night. For what reason, I do not know, but I was simply unable to get more than two or three hours of real rest and, as such, I am not all here at the moment. And while this is normally a bad thing, it does allow me to at least place the blame for this week’s FAM upon my delirium.
With that out of the way, allow me to present Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky from 1991, directed by Lam Nai-choi and starring Fan Siu-wong as the titular hero. Truthfully, that is all I would like to say about it, letting those who have not seen it just stumble in blindly but that would be, perhaps, irresponsible of me. So, as far as plot goes: The year is 2001 and all government institutions have been privatized. At the beginning of the film our hero, Riki-Oh Saiga, martial arts master, arrives at a prison to serve a ten year sentence for manslaughter, for killing the man indirectly responsible for the death of Riki’s girlfriend.
That’s all you get. However, I must warn viewers that the draw of this particular film (besides the amazing/bad dubbing) is, frankly, its outlandish violence. Saying The Story of Ricky contains some blood and gore is like saying Bill Gates has a few bucks. The movie is soaked through with gallons of fake blood. It is an orgy of ludicrous, cartoonish violence. If you aren’t down for watching a man punch the jaw off a laughably fake head, then don’t click the play button. If, however, that level of disgusting camp appeals to you, and you haven’t already seen this fine movie, then prepare yourself for an hour and a half of the most ridiculous martial arts mayhem ever recorded.
“Oh la la”
“I paint my demons. I paint nightmares. To get rid of them. I paint my fears. I paint my sorrow. To deal with them.” – Mia Mäkilä
Mia Mäkilä, a self-taught artist who lives and works in Sweden, describes her art as “horror pop surrealism” or “dark lowbrow” and further illustrates: “Picture Pippi Longstocking and Swedish movie director Ingmar Bergman having a love child. That’s me.”
Her work consists of digital paintings and vintage photographs manipulated and distorted to produce nightmarish mixed media portraits. The creations borne of Mäkilä’s artistic process are both uncomfortably horrific and unaccountably humorous– demonic entities lurk in the form of gash-mouthed, leering Victorian families staring from within a tintype void. Fire-breathing/ennui-stricken and dandified gentlemen ejaculate from the precarious heights of a Parisian rooftop. All manner of flaming Boschian hells overflow with cavorting fish and flamingos and God knows what else.
“Holiday in Hell”
“We all saw it scrawled across the blackboard the second we stepped into Miss Lovecraft’s class…”
A disturbing and darkly humorous commentary on burgeoning adolescence and coming to terms with “the other” that is the opposite sex, Craig MacNeill’s short film, “Late Bloomer“, devotes a horrific (and hilarious) thirteen minutes to the obscene revelations that stem from biological discovery. Written and brilliantly narrated in true Lovecraftian style by Clay McLeod Chapman, this tale of a “7th grade sex-ed class gone horribly wrong” chronicles the destruction of innocence in pulpy prose worthy of the old gentleman himself.
How to describe these grotesque mockeries of natural law? Clearly hovering at the edge of sanity, both awe-struck and terrified by the frenzied hormonal horrors to which he has become an initiate, the film’s narrator recounts the events of that eldritch classroom in an eerie, quavering voice while a murky, droning soundtrack by One Ring Zero provides appropriate ambiance. It is said that MacNeill was inspired to make “Late Bloomer” while shooting a documentary on the film’s writer; one cannot view the result without imagining the horrors to which that pale, untried youth may have borne witness in the classroom.
Via EnglishRussia:
It seems that some couples find their wedding moments not vivid enough. They believe that photo editing can make the memories of the wedding day even much more impressive and close the boring gaps with the help of the powerful Photoshop. It’s not recommended for people with highly sensitive nature to look at the pictures.
Damn, hospital Russia… damn. More horrifying wedding photos after the jump, pharm and even more over here.
It’s Friday again, and there you sit in your stale, air-conditioned office linking all your paper clips together. It’s fun, right? The end result is just really, satisfyingly uniform. I wonder is anyone has made jewelry that looks like linked paper clips. Maybe you should make some. You could sell them on Etsy. People would buy that, right? It would at least make you a couple of extra bucks to help with rent. Oooo, maybe you could make wallet chains too. The kids will eat that shit up! Maybe not. Probably not, right? I mean, even if they got popular they’d probably just get ripped off by Urban Outfitters and sold for twice the price. Man, we’re never gonna get out of this place. Oh well, at least there are still movies on the internet.
Today the FAM presents the 2007 Spanish found footage horror movie [REC], directed by Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, which was remade in the US (because, as everyone knows, Hollywood will always do a better job) as Quarantine in 2008. [REC] follows TV reporter Ángela Vidal and her cameraman, Pablo, who are following a group of firefighters for a show called While You’re Asleep. At first all is normal until a call is received concerning an elderly woman trapped in her apartment. When the crew arrives they find the police have been called as well and soon break down the door. There they find the woman who looks decidedly unwell. This point is driven home when she attacks one of the officers, biting him. Not long after the building is locked down, and so begins a mad scramble to stay uninfected and find out the cause of this strange outbreak.
There have been enough found footage/shaky-cam horror movies at this point to elicit a groan from many, but of all of them, [REC] may be one of the best. Between its claustrophobic setting and constant state of confusion, [REC] does an admirable job of keeping the viewer off balance. I liked the use of a reporter as the main character, allowing for the kind of mystery solving usually ignored in this type of film in favor of jump scares. And while [REC] keeps much of its plot concerned with the immediate problems of survival, I enjoyed the slow unraveling of the greater mystery. That does lead to my one big criticism, that being the ending. The reveal of the virus’s origin and subsequent outbreak inside the apartment building seems to come way out of left field and, while functional, isn’t particularly satisfying. Overall, however, it remains a gripping experience, one which deservedly stands out in a field of increasingly drab entries.
Cyriak never fails to amaze. (Or nauseate.)
“The Killer” is, sickness as indicated, ambulance not a game. It was inspired by the brutal genocide perpetrated in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. In “The Killer” there are two figures, rx two stick figures, one whose ovoid head is white. This stick figure is the one you control, though, really, you control both, for this white-headed figure is in firm control of the figure in front of it, being as this white-headed figure is the one holding a gun.
At the beginning of “The Killer” these two figures are standing in front of a hut, silently, the only sounds are the sounds of the birds and the insects echoing through the trees and you are instructed to “Hold space to start walking.” When you finally do the white-headed figure pushes the figure before it and only then does the music begin and you, both of you, begin to march.
You march through jungles and you march over beaches. If you stop, you, both of you, are informed that you have not gone far enough, that you must reach the fields, that the fields are beyond the beach. So you push the space bar again and, once again, the whited-headed figure pushes the other with the barrel of its gun. And when you finally reach the fields, and you stop, you are told to aim you gun, and that clicking the left mouse button will fire. And there, in the field, you have a choice to make.
Via Game Trekking, Thanks, Matt!