Glibertarians.com 2017 Archive

Category: Opinion

  • UnCivil Reviews – Dawn of War III

    Hello, my name is UnCivilServant, and I have a problem with Plastic Crack – I simply don’t have enough time to assemble and paint the thousands of dollars worth of miniatures I’ve acquired. But that is not important right now. What’s important is that the latest entry in the long-running Warhammer 40k video game series Dawn of War has recently dropped. The first entry was released way back when I was still in college, and I own the whole set. It was the gateway by which I took up the tabletop game. Entries came out fairly regularly until Dawn of War II: Retribution. After which things went quiet, and the publisher THQ went bankrupt. Not because of Dawn of War, but because the people running the company were a bunch of gits.

    For those of you unfamiliar with Warhammer, here is a quick exposition dump of backstory. In the beginning, there was a company that made miniatures for fantasy roleplaying games. Citadel looked at their books and went “We need to find a way to sell more miniatures.” Someone had the idea of writing a ruleset to fight tabletop battles with their miniatures. And thus Warhammer Fantasy Battles was born. People who wanted to have bigger armies would have to buy more miniatures, and most of their existing stock could be worked into the product line. At some point around here, Citadel changed their name to Games Workshop but kept the brand for some of their products, like paint.

    So they looked at their books and said: “We need to find a way to sell more miniatures.” Someone had the idea of “Let’s do more Warhammer, but IN SPACE!” And so Warhammer 40,000 was born. Being the eighties, there was a lot of cocaine-fueled insanity included, including outright rip-offs of other works given a new coat of Citadel paint, and it was good. Over the years they fed the Space Dwarfs to the Space Bugs and introduced the Space Weaboo Communists, but it developed an aesthetic distinct and yet familiar.

    So they looked at their books and said: “We need to find a way to sell more miniatures.” Someone had the idea of licensing their totally original and not a shameless amalgam of ideas to these newfangled video game producers. After all, gamers were the same geeks who buy their main product lines, so there was money to be had. And if there is anything Games Workshop likes, it’s money. Dawn of War was not the first of these titles. But it is a contender for having the most entries. It depends on how you count expansions and DLCs.

    Let’s get to talking about this particular entry.

    I open it up and find out that the opening cinematic was used as the announcement trailer. Disappointing, but it’s still fun to watch an Imperial Knight knock a Wraithknight off its feet like a linebacker that took a wrong turn and broke a referee in half. And then it asks me to either sign in to or create a Relic account. Being an antisocial git, I refuse and see if there’s a way to ignore it. Fortunately, this proved to be optional, and it hasn’t asked me again. Finding out there was a tutorial, I decided to start there. I always play the tutorial missions as it gives me an idea of the developer’s attitudes. We start out telling some Blood Ravens to wander about.

    After bossing around the generic, nameless tactical and scout marines for a bit, I get told to summon Gabriel Angelos to the battle. Gabe first appeared way back in the original Dawn of War. Where he proceeded to make an awful mess of things that the Imperial Guard had to come in and clean up. To be fair, he did try to make things right, but he got beat down by the mess he made. But since he was the last Captain left not interred in a Dreadnought or self-demoted to the chaplaincy, he became Chapter Master by default. Anyway, we teleport him in and he arrives wearing a shiny suit of Cataphractii armor – and he’s freaking huge! Now Cataphractii armor is bulky, but this is not Cataphractii big, he’s the size of an original XBox. Compare him to the regular tactical marines:

    I mean his head is bigger than their helmets. He’s supposed to be able to wear that same armor.

    I thought maybe this was part of the new visual direction for the game. Make the hero units bigger so they stand out. But here’s the Eldar hero:

    She’s the same size as the rest of her people.

    Maybe the artists Relic hired mistook Gabe for an Ork. Orks do allot authority by size, so it’s perfectly reasonable for Gorgutz to be three times the height of the boyz around him.

    This Git – Gorgutz

    Since I brought them up, let’s talk about the Space Elves and Space Orks. The Eldar are like politicians, they lie and change sides so much that no one trusts them. They’ve even been known to lie when the truth would have worked better. They also have a tendency to get eaten by a Chaos god after they die, so it evens out. The Orks are the exact opposite. They are direct – engineered for fighting they’re happy to fight anybody, including each other. There is one batch of Orks stuck on a Daemon world that gets resurrected each morning to fight an eternal battle against the native inhabitants. They’ve gone to Orky heaven.

    A thousand words in and I now get to the game proper. Outside of the fact that Gabe is fuckoff huge and somehow able to make giant leaps in Cataphractii armor (a suit which in the tabletop has the special rule “Slow and Purposeful”), I haven’t yet really had much to complain about. The first real irritant was in finding that you get one active campaign at a time. To start from scratch you have to delete the existing one. But there is not much reason to do so, since you can replay levels at will, and your advances are independent of the campaign. Indeed you can even get them through skirmish and multiplayer games. This still irritates me. It means that if you have a computer shared between more than one person, they don’t get to keep separate save games and thus separate progress. I don’t personally have this problem now, but I remember when I did.

    Anyway, on to the campaign. The next irritant is that it is only one unified campaign that rotates between factions. It had started with the cycle “Space Marine – Ork – Eldar” but on chapter seven, it skipped Space Marine and went to Ork. So I’m not even sure if there is a pattern. You can’t play just a Space Marine campaign or just and Ork campaign. The story bounces around between the factions and you have to play the other guys to unlock the next mission for your chosen group. Fortunately, it doesn’t pretend to be anything but linear. Despite being called a “Campaign Map” in the game, here is what pops up:

    The units depicted change by which faction the selected mission is for.

    Each of those flags is either a mission color coded to the faction or a cinematic. It’s not so bad since they admit it’s linear and don’t try to pretend otherwise. The interface remains consistently meh as we progress through the mission briefing to choosing which elite units we’ll be able to deploy.

    I have no idea where this room is.

    The screen is not terribly intuitive, and it took a while to figure out how to unlock the other elite options for each faction. Definitely a place for improvement. We’re finally to the gameplay proper. Base building is back, but there is a dearth of defensive turrets. And they screwed up the cover system. I didn’t want to complain about the bubble system, but there’s not even an in-game excuse for capturable cover locations. Earlier incarnations had dynamic cover systems where objects on the field could be used depending on where the enemy was. Now you have to capture a cover point, and it soaks up some incoming ranged damage. Anything else on the battlefield is just there to obstruct movement. Bolt shells will fly through it without a problem – for the shooter at least.

    The basics are stock standard RTS mechanics, with the attempts to be “more tactical” in terms of unit special abilities. The problem is the actual fights degrade into blobs of combatants. Figuring out who was in the correct position to use a special ability tactically is not terribly straightforward, so it ends up being hero abilities and items like jump packs for mobility assists. Personally, I don’t take umbrage at it, as even in earlier iterations I found that problems went away when locally overwhelming numbers were applied to the enemy positions.

    Why yes, I am an Imperial Guard player in tabletop 40k, why do you ask?

    The story is well, no more or less deep than other Dawn of War titles. The voice acting is middle of the road to decent. The change in voice actors for Gabe from the previous game is the most noticeable. But it’s not that the new guy is doing anything wrong, he just doesn’t sound right. In all, the game is just all right. The worst thing I can say about it is that it was too easy to get up and walk away. There have been times where I’ve had to call into work on the day after a release because I got hooked and could not rip myself away. There was no risk of that here. Given the addictiveness of other entries, this is a bit of a letdown. A low mark in the franchise, but not beyond salvation.

    I give it seven of ten skulls for the skull throne.

  • Anarchy is the Communism of the Right

    Time to piss off a bunch of anarchists! Hopefully, you’ll take it in stride and disembowel me in the comments.

    Anarchy is quite the opposite of Communism when it comes to political structure and social order. However, when it comes to the relation of these ideas to their respective political segments, Anarchy is the Communism of the Right (or if that’s too harsh for your sensibilities, it’s the Communism of the Libertarian movement). How so? There are three major similarities: 1) The likelihood of long-term, stable implementation, 2) the resultant social order, and 3) the big lie that must be believed in order to accept the philosophy.

    Stable Implementation

    We’re very quick to trot out the old cliche that Communism has failed every time it was tried. When the accusation is turned back to us, we quickly disavow Somalia and begin thinking through history for a good example. However, the search through history ends very differently when looking for a successful minarchy versus a successful voluntaryist society. There are certainly successful examples of both, but the difference is in scale. History is rife with examples of empires controlling a city or region with a small military presence and a minimal government. Sure, the occupiers tended to plunder the occupied lands, but in comparison to today, such plunder would be considered libertopian. Anarchic societies are comparatively rare and quite fleeting. Usually, they are either quite small and isolated (nomadic tribes), or extremely volatile (territorial California). In essence, an anarchy does not have what is required for a stable society: protection from conquerors, safety from bad actors, and normalization of trade.

    As much as we all wish the world worked more like theory, it usually doesn’t. This is because we ignore or misestimate some of the factors that significantly affect the result. Such is how it is in a voluntaryist society. These societies are unstable for many reasons, especially because they are bad at protecting their citizens from conquerors and from bad actors. With limited recourse available, regulating and normalizing trade is outside the reach of an anarchic society of any real size. As such, any anarchic society would necessarily subdivide into small tribes with an extreme distrust of outsiders. It’s hard to imagine the amount of devastation that would be required to create these small anarchic tribes in the modern world. The sheer population density of modern cities would render it impossible sans cataclysm.

    Resultant social order

    Communism requires the deaths of millions in order to be properly implemented. In essence, instinctual self-preservation needs to be beaten and bred out of a populace before they are able to accept communism. The New Soviet Man was always a generation away because the commies could never kill off that self-preservation instinct that is endemic to all nature. The resultant social order was extremely distorted and self-focused. When staying alive meant selling out the next guy, the next guy ended up in the gulag and you slept soundly that night.

    Similarly, anarchy requires massive upheaval to be implemented, and the resultant social order has invariably been harsh, unjust, and lacking in technological growth. Despite the immense gold reserves in mid-19th century California, it was a horrible place for many of the adventurers looking for a boon. Although there was a nominal military government in place, it was wholly unable to police the vast expanse of California territory. In cities like Los Angeles, Monterey, and San Francisco, murders in the streets were common. Theft, fraud and violence were daily hazards. There was such a vacuum of power that vigilance committees were formed on a regular basis, enacting their form of justice, usually politically based and manipulated such that the leaders were enriched at the expense of the citizenry. Rather than the idyllic picture of small virtuous tribes scattered across the countryside or the progressive image of a futuristic city filled with happy prostitutes, heroin vending machines, and no taxes, the history of California shows a dystopian mix of these two images. There were small islands of virtuous, justice-seeking families floating in an ocean of rights-violating horror.

    Much like the communists’ aggression borne out of survival, the bad actors aggressed against citizens. However, unlike the communists, the bad actors were aggressive because they could get away with it.

    The Big Lie

    Acceptance of communism requires belief in a faulty premise. Namely, the premise that individuals do not have agency. Government is greater than the individual and thus can appropriate the property and labor of its citizens. Much of the horrific nature of communism derives from this faulty premise.

    Likewise, acceptance of anarchy also requires belief in a faulty premise that there is no valid authority over an individual.  In reality, people are quite unstable when completely given over to their own devices. Both outside conquerors and the less savory elements of society show the results of solely individual authority: the complete inability of society to protect citizens from outside conquerors,  make citizens safe from bad actors, and normalize trade.

    We can always have discussions of what level authority we rightfully have over one another, and, in extension, what authority society and its civil government legitimately have over us. However, the idea that the individual is not subject to any authority (whether legitimate or not, virtuous or not), results in similar absurdities like when the government is fully authoritative. Might makes right. Exploitation over altruism. Vulnerability in the face of outside threats.

  • What are we reading? April 2017

    SugarFree

    I am about halfway done with Operation Chaos by Poul Anderson. Although published in novel form in 1971, it is actually a fix-up of four short stories that appeared in various magazines between 1956 and 1969 that are held together by a thin frame story.

    I’ve been hunting down reading antecedents of Charles Stross’ Laundry series and Operation Chaos is fairly interesting so far. Unlike the Laundry universe, the use of magic is a widespread and civilian-led affair rather than the province of secret government agencies. (The same setup explored briefly by Robert A. Heinlein in 1940’s “Magic, Inc.“) In Anderson’s world, magic is studied as just another branch of science and is increasingly seen as working on scientific principles. The leads are a werewolf and a witch that meet in an alternative World War II where the continental United States is invaded and occupied by a jihadist Caliphate–weirdly similar to ISIS but with afreets and magic carpets at their command. The novel moves along at the brisk pace of 1950s magazine science fiction. Although Anderson published a sequel in 1999, Operation Luna, I wish he had spent more of his prime years in the Operation Chaos universe. There is a lot of potential in his world-building that I would have like to see him explore.

    Closer to the Laundry universe in both tone and style was Tim Powers’ 2001 Declare, which is so similar that Stross talks about it in the afterword to The Atrocity Archives.

    Declare follows an operative of a secretive branch of the British secret services that are focused on occult threats that was created (or maybe just revealed itself) during World War II and was thought to be disbanded after the cessation of overt hostilities. In 1963, an agent of the service is reactivated and sent to Mount Ararat to relive a disastrous mission from 1948 that may or may not involve Noah’s Ark.

    I finished Declare a couple of weeks ago and I’m still not sure how I feel about it. It mined a more esoteric vein of welding together Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Elder Gods than the Laundry series but it was somewhat unsatisfying. There was an elusiveness to the text about exactly what was going on that left me unfulfilled. But it is something that I have experienced in Powers’ other novels, so it wasn’t surprising.

     

    jesse.in.mb

    I’m currently chipping away at three books:

    • Arturo Islas’ The Rain God, a bildungsroman and family drama about three generations of a family set on both sides of the US/Mexican border. I first came to this novella in high school when I borrowed a copy from my English Lit teacher with all of his college notes in it, which I kind of miss in the current copy I have. I was distracted enough by the book the first time I read it to have to be pulled out of a swarm of bees;
    • Palm Trees in the Snow by Luz Gabás is another trans-generational and cross-cultural family drama consisting of twinned narratives about a Spanish family’s experiences in colonial Guinea and a daughter’s attempts to figure out what was left behind when the family was driven out in a post colonial revolution;
    • Dan Simmons The Terror is the SugarFree recommendation on my list. If you like monsters dismembering mid-19th century British arctic explorers (and I know you do), you might enjoy this epistolary novel. I’ve enjoyed the action and personal drama so far, but while there’s been plenty of rum there has been very little sodomy and the lash, but I’m only about half way through, so there’s still hope.

     

    Riven

    I used to be a huge reader when I was younger. As I’ve gotten older, I find that my reading is very seasonal–unless I’m laying out on our deck working on my tan with a tropical drink and a smoke, it just doesn’t happen as often as I would like. That said, I do have three books on my reading list right now that I mean to read…soon…ish. SugarFree gave me a copy of Dead Witch Walking, which is apparently part of a huge series called The Hollows. Definitely looking forward to the whole set if the first is worthwhile, and I have it on good authority that it is. Additionally, my sister gave me two collected works for my birthday: an H.G. Wells anthology and a collection of Sherlock Holmes capers. Everything in both of those books is new content for me, so that should be a good time, too.

     

     

    JW

    Bullshit IT service delivery certification, invented by the British. Tedious, unnecessary and dull, dull, dull.  Eyes started bleeding from the dull walls of text. Kill me. Kill me. Kill me.

     

    Old Man With Candy

    I can only dream of having as much reading time as SugarFree. Nonetheless, I still have a few on the burner. I’m nearly finished Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, an alternative history novel premised on Charles Lindbergh defeating Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election, and keeping the US out of World War II by reaching an understanding with Hitler. It is creatively told from the POV of a young (((Philip Roth))), who knows that everything around him is changing and not in a good way, but doesn’t really comprehend why and where things are headed. If it were just released, you’d think it was a tired allegory about Trump, but it’s a bit more prescient than that. Assuming he doesn’t piss me off at the end, it’s a wonderful novel.

    I have a childlike fascination with magic, and Corinda’s 13 Steps To Mentalism is a classic text. As with most magic tricks, once you understand the basics of mentalism and the repertoire of classic illusions, you’ll be simultaneously struck at how simple the tricks are and awed by how wonderfully they’re performed by the masters.

     

    Brett L

    E. William Brown’s first foray into Sci-Fantasy, Perilous Waif. If you’ve never heard of Brown, he’s a self-published guy in the kindle unlimited sphere. I find his stories fascinating even though his main characters all suffer from what I call the Dresden effect. In order to fight tougher and tougher opponents, your main character essentially becomes a god. I first encountered it in Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files, and I know Charlie Stross is actively trying to avoid it in his Laundry Files — and more failing than not, honestly. So there it is, I’m outed as a total Sci-Fantasy geek. Brown’s Daniel Black series isn’t bad either, although there are times you can see why it wasn’t picked up by one of the big houses.

     

     

     

     

    sloopyinca

    Working on The Neverending Story. I’ll report back when I’m finished.

  • Reviews You’ll Never Use: Suspiria

    Greetings once again, my fellow travelers in the transgressive, to another installment of Reviews You’ll (Probably) Never Use.

    Last week as you’ll recall, we explored a little of the background of the wonderful Italian crime and horror genre called giallo. This week, before getting to our feature review, we’ll explore three of the main personalities which shaped and defined the giallo over the years.

    Barbara Steele in the original, and still best, “Black Sunday”

    Undoubtedly the father of giallo, and indeed of Italian horror in general, is Mario Bava. Born in 1914, Bava got his first taste of directing in 1956 when, as cinematographer for I Vampiri, he was asked to finish the film when the hired director walked out on the project. He later went on to direct the gothic horror masterpiece Black Sunday (not the one about the football game, this one is better) and began directing what are widely considered to be the first true giallo films in the early 60s. Bava’s start as a cinematographer and special effects man provided the early shape of the genre as being primarily concerned with the immediate visual impact on screen and the relegation of other aspects to subsidiary status. His son also made films, but aside from a promising turn with Demons, has utterly failed to live up to his old man.

    Next, we have the great Lucio Fulci. His film Zombi 2 was the subject of last week’s review (not linked here because linking to my own posts seems weirdly like masturbating), and if you watched or read that, you know his game. While his wonderful Don’t Torture A Duckling showcased a fine directorial ability, in general, he became known as the king of Italian gore. Despite getting his start in comedies, eventually his films were watched with a grim fascination by folks eager to see just how much brutal violence someone could get away with putting on screen. Seriously, if you have a problem with a slow close-up shot of an open eyeball having a straight razor dragged across it, don’t watch The New York Ripper. But really you should to you know, not be a pussy. His Gates of Hell trilogy (City of the Living Dead, The Beyond, and The House by the Cemetery) are all good to excellent and worth watching for any serious fan of horror. The Beyond is probably my personal favorite Italian horror film from this era.

    Finally, we come to the director of tonight’s film, one Dario Argento. He managed to have both a prolific and influential directorial career and to produce a pretty decent-looking daughter. He will be appearing at Texas Frightmare Weekend, and I will share a photo of the gentleman after I obtain my signature and regale him with stories of how much I love his movie because fuck knows he hasn’t heard that a thousand times from rando overweight white bald misanthropes. He started off as a screenwriter for Sergio Leone on spaghetti westerns but came into his own when he moved to giallo. In fact, his nearly flawless masterpiece, Deep Red, is considered by many critics to be the supreme expression of the giallo form. No less a personage than John Carpenter has frequently cited its influence on him when making American slasher innovator, Halloween. He’s fallen off recently (seriously, I bought his Dracula starring Rutger Hauer sight unseen, and returned it, it was that fucking bad), but man, when the guy was in his prime, he could make a fucking great movie experience. One thing I’ve always thought a bit off, however, was his willingness to direct his own daughter in nude scenes. How does that go? “OK sweetie, that was a good take, but now I want to see your titties a little bit more to the left, and rub that nipple a bit more sensuously. Yes, that’s the way…rub it slowly for daddy.” I mean, I know they’re Italian, and so their mores are going to be less “the corporation bought us lunch today so we can meet a deadline” and more “fuck it, let’s hit this bottle and sportfuck until the sun comes up,” but shit man, there are limits.

    WHY DO OUR CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS HAVE TO BE SO DAMN BRIGHT?

    Anyway, that brings us to our feature tonight, Argento’s Suspiria. The film was inspired by Suspiria de Profundis, a series of short essays by English author Thomas De Quincey. Argento thought to make three films out of the three Sorrows recounted in the essay: “Mater Lacrymarum, Our Lady of Tears,” “Mater Suspiriorum, Our Lady of Sighs,” and “Mater Tenebrarum, Our Lady of Darkness.” Argento would indeed go on to complete his plan with Inferno in 1980 and The Mother of Tears finally in 2007, but let’s not digress onto those paths and ruin future reviews.

    The film follows American dance student Jessica Harper as she attends a prestigious academy in Freiburg, only to discover that it’s a front for witches, just like all Arthur Murray Dance Studios in real life. Suspiria is pretty much the only famous thing Harper did, though she apparently was in Minority Report in a role I don’t recall just from reading the name.

    She’s feeling a little blue.

    Jessica’s introduction to the academy is seeing a student flee from it while ranting during a storm. The fleeing student is then murdered in most satisfying fashion. She goes to her friend’s apartment, and a random hairy-armed intruder stabs her so damn many times in the sternum that her heart is exposed, then we get a nice close-up shot of the knife being stabbed directly into the beating heart. Then she’s hung from the skylight, the shattered debris of which falls and buries itself in her aforementioned friend’s skull. It’s easily the best opening to any movie ever made, and if you disagree, you can fuck right off with your incorrect opinions which can be disproved mathematically.

    Seriously, how can you not love a movie that ostensibly takes place almost entirely at night, but is still so full of glorious colors?

    So Jessica meets the various eccentrics who staff and study at the academy. Creepy things happen, people die, and she starts to get suspicious. There’s a great scene where the blind pianist’s guide dog is possessed and rips out his owner’s throat, and tears chunks of meat out of him until a couple of polizei come running over to chase him away. Her friend Stefania Casini tries to run away from an unseen murderous fiend with a straight razor, only to fall into a storage room filled entirely with razor wire. WHAT THE EVER LOVING FUCK? It’s giallo, it doesn’t matter or need any explanation! But seriously as she’s struggling with the razor wire and getting cut up she gets her throat slit with the straight razor. Very tragic.

    Oh shit, I jumped into a room full of razor wire! I hope that guy with the straight razor who was chasing me doesn’t take advantage of this situation and come slit my throat!

    Eventually, Jessica discovers that the academy was founded by an old evil witch, and after parsing out the meaning of the opening runaway’s rant is able to find the secret passage where the academy staff congregate to perform black magic. The main baddy animates poor Stefania’s corpse, crucified on a coffin and now with needles in its eyes for some reason, to attack Jessica, but our brave Final Girl is able to see through the witch’s glamour and kill her, which causes the other witches to apparently suffer cranial bleeding and migraine headaches while the whole house tears itself apart.

    Honestly, the plot isn’t as convoluted as some critics make it out to be. You do have to pay attention and give the usual allowance for a giallo film’s somewhat blasé attachment to narrative flow, but that just comes with the territory. The real sparkle of this film is in the visual realm. The entire thing is shot in imbibition Technicolor, which was seen in films such as The Wizard of Oz and Gone With The Wind but was no longer widely used at the time. It produces a more vibrant, vivid color palette, almost to the point of garishness, though of course, that’s only a good thing in certain circumstances, of which this happens to be one. There is heavy emphasis on strong primary colors as the background in many scenes – the academy walls are deep blue and red velvet, and in a scene where sheets are set up as a screen so the ladies can sleep without a horde of maggots falling on them through the ceiling (watch the damn movie), as soon as the lights are out a nightmarish red backlight pulses through everything. Even in a bedroom, at night, there will be what looks like bright green or blue spotlights shining onto the actor’s faces. The damn skylight the initial victim is hung from is an enormous mosaic of bright colors. The entire thing is like a kaleidoscope given form and is really quite remarkable, and I can’t recommend it enough. Lord only knows how great it would be to watch it blazed (note to self: what am I doing this weekend?). Maybe the best part is what I have lovingly dubbed the Disco Peacock in the main witch’s bedroom. I desperately want one of these, and it also would be suitable for extended viewing while blazed.

    I wasn’t kidding. I present to you: Disco Peacock.
    I also wasn’t kidding about the camp-out sheets having glowing red backlight. And nobody comments on this or thinks it sinister in any way.

    Again, though, this is very much in the realm of art for the sake of art, so don’t go expecting some kind of Tarantino-esque dialog or Oscar-nominated stories of black folks overcoming oppression. It’s all enhanced with a great soundtrack by Goblin, long-time collaborators with Argento, and mentioned in my previous post. It’s less accessible to a standard horror audience than Zombi 2, but is ultimately superior. I award Suspiria 13 Sexy Witches out of 15.

     

     

     

  • Ritual. Uniformity. Ceremony. Sacrifice. Brotherhood.

    By: Anon Anon

    A group of grown men stand around in an otherwise empty schoolhouse.  Out in public, you wouldn’t be able to spot them as cohorts.  They rarely wear their uniforms out in public, and they come from every walk of life.  Some have dirty hands and torn dungarees.  Some have meticulous spectacles and Italian loafers.  In here, standing under a trifecta of flags, standing in the anonymity of their uniforms, this paramilitary squad happily show off enough pins, dangly medals, and patches to make a third world dictator lift an eyebrow.

    Once everything is in place, the youth squad is led in.  The boys have their own uniforms.  They are a little bit different from the men’s.  But a little bit the same, too.  The men stand ready when the youth come in.  Patriarchal traditions are passed on best when men present a united front, and these men look prepared and competent.  

    Ritual.  Uniformity.  Ceremony.  Sacrifice.  Brotherhood.

    These are ideas that have always motivated boys, sometimes to gleeful bloodshed.  Knowing this, these are the ideas that these men use to mold the minds of the youth.  The ceremony starts.  The rituals begin.  A flag is saluted, allegiance is pledged, prayers are invoked, oaths are repeated.  Next, a new round of indecipherable pins are given to select youth who have shown sufficient vigor.  The youth are split by age and led apart.  Small cliques are easier to control than large groups.

    What authoritarian Hellhole is this?  A Hitler Youth rally?  A Southeast Asian secret police meeting? Some African boy-army training?  No, this is America.  Trump’s America.  And it is happening right under your noses.

    It’s your local Cub Scouts.  Please buy popcorn.

    Today, I am one of those men.  A few decades ago, I was one of those boys.  Somewhere in between I picked up Heinlein, filed my first income tax return, and decided I was going to teach myself economics by reading the stilted English of a few peculiar Austrian authors.

    How’s that for some cognitive dissonance?  Paramilitarist on the streets, libertarian between the sheets.  I was raised Catholic, so I know how to hold two mutually exclusive ideas in my head at the same time.

    But really, there isn’t any dissonance.  Scouting as a youth was good for me.  Scouting was something I chose to do.  When I said the pledge every week, it was because I chose to.  When I humped a backpack through a downpour with my best friends, it was because I chose to.  When I connected with the other scouts and made a community, it was because I chose to.  When I had a personal crisis and leaned on my Scoutmasters, the way any boy should lean on his father, it’s because I chose to.  

    And those Scoutmasters made a choice to be the man in my life when I needed it.  The father that Mother Nature gave me wasn’t good for much more than introducing me to occult rock and teaching me the value of cynicism.  A boy should have more than that out of a father.  Fortunately, I had a very peculiar volunteer community that gave me what I needed.

    Then I went to college and grad school.  I focused on me, not a community.  That’s OK.  That’s what college is for.  My engineering classes hammered home some libertarian facts – bridges fall if you design them wrong and no one can argue them back up.  An A really is an A.  At the same time, my autodidactic education was directed more to some classic libertarian past times.  I read Rothbard and Hayek and Smith and Rand.  I made friends with progressives for the first time.  I learned that I wasn’t really a political conservative after all.  I started voting strategically in local elections and writing in “Fuck You” for national elections.  I rolled my eyes at the pledge and stayed silent when they played the National Anthem at hockey games.

    I thought I was an individualist.  I knew how to shoot and do laundry and cook and all those things Heinlein said to do except that bit about the sonnet.  Sure, most of those skills I learned in scouting.  But that was behind me.  It was a ghost of a memory that only rattled a few chains when I used those skills.  I had a small handful of good, deep, solid friendships with people who didn’t agree with me on anything political.  I was my own man, living in the city but apart from any real community.  I knew I was standing on my own beliefs and I didn’t need anyone with me.  I was a libertarian.  I was a lone wolf.

    What a jackass.

    After school, I moved to a new city, took up a new job, and got to know a few people.  A very few people.  I mostly lived my life alone with just my wife and later a cat and two small humans.  I spent all my time in my apartment or in the office.  I didn’t spend much time with anyone else.  I barely knew anyone I didn’t work with.  Which is OK, because I’m an individualist, I told myself.  Over, and over, and over again.  I almost believed it.

    A few years go by, the oldest kid comes home from his government school with a blue and gold flier.  “I wanna do this,” he says.  Three years later, and I’m running the kid’s Cub Scout Pack.  I struggled for all of seven minutes trying to decide if putting on the uniform, saying a pledge, and reciting an oath would constitute turning my back on everything I have come to believe.  

    No, you jackass.

    Seems like *someone* has an unfair advantage here…

    You are a big hairless ape and God made you to function in a community.  Didn’t you say you read your Hayek and Smith?  And really, this is the ideal libertarian community.  There’s no government thug making me say the pledge.  There’s no qualified immunity that attaches when I put on my uniform.  There’s a couple dozen families that set aside two or three hours every week to come together to form a community.  Arts, crafts, and watered-down juice mix are also often involved.

    We say our oath because we want to.  And it is an oath to ourselves, not to some outside authority figure that lords over us by an accident of birth.  We say a pledge to a flag of an imperfect country that, warts and all, is still the greatest engine for freedom devised by man.  We don’t pledge to land or a nobility.  We have a law, and the only enforcement mechanism is our reputation with our peers.  We work together to make a wooden cars and to make a community and to make our youth better men some day.

    For me, that’s as libertarian as it gets.  Forget the lone wolf crap.

  • Reviews You’ll Never Use: Zombi 2. Or is it Zombie? It’s Both!

    Greetings fellow marvelers of the menacing and macabre, and welcome to another installment of what is indisputably at least the eighth best weekly recurring article on this site. For the next several weeks, we shall be exploring your humble wordslinger’s favorite single genre of horror, giallo.

    I will preface the reviews with a brief history of the genre itself, the horror directors most well known within it, and its larger impact on American cinema.

    First, lettuce define our terms. Giallo is greasy wop-talk for “yellow,” like the color of my wife’s skin, and refers to a particular style of Italian-produced murder mystery film which often includes elements of horror fiction (such as slasher violence and eroticism). The genre developed in the mid-to-late 1960s peaked in popularity during the 1970s, and subsequently declined over the next few decades. This description is copied entirely off of the beginning of the Wikipedia article, but if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, says I.

    Is that a zombie riding a shark? MAYBE. Read on!

    Without getting too into the weeds on the subject, the genre covers a fairly broad range of films, from pulp murder mysteries to straight supernatural horror. There are some common elements. First, there is almost always a psychological element to the films, some insanity provoked by trauma in one of the main characters. There is always killing, and it is always very violent and very much center screen – this is not a genre of happy fluffy bunnies. There is very (and I do mean very) little focus on the cohesiveness of plot or dialogue throughout the film. Don’t get me wrong – it isn’t the purposeful insanity of, say, House, or the purely so-over-the-top-it’s-weird-ness of Zardoz. More of a…benign indifference to strict logical flow. There is, essentially, just enough of a storyline to ensure that one event leads to another, and that’s about it. There is a great focus on cinematography, on capturing interesting or provocative or just plain unusual shots. The soundtracks are usually awesome, as in, done as if the keyboardist from an early 80s synthpop or electro funk band was on some mellow acid and just decided to score some movies in his spare time. There’s even a band, called Goblin, most well known for their movie soundtracks. I could go on and on, but this gives you the gist of it. Seriously though, if any of you guys want to just meet somewhere and listen to me wax philosophic about this genre and all the movies that I love in it for six hours while drinking beer, I am always up for that.

    One of the many different posters for this film. Collect them all!

    We begin our exploration with one of the seminal works of the great Lucio Fulci (more on him next week), Zombi 2. Or as it was known in America, Zombie.

    Italian copyright law (pre-EU) was a funny thing. Any movie could be marketed as a sequel to any other movie, without having any direct relationship. We of the superior Anglo-Saxon lineage understand that George Romero’s masterwork Dawn of the Dead was a direct sequel to his groundbreaking Night of the Living Dead. As the science of phrenology teaches us, Italians aren’t nearly as intelligent as we are, and so were ignorant of this fact. Personally, I blame all the out-race breeding. Dawn of the Dead was released in most European markets titled Zombi, and the audiences thought it was simply a stand-alone. Ever one to try and turn a quick buck on the cheap, the Italian movie industry decided to cash in, and Zombi 2 was green-lit. The title Zombie is for the American release since over here, it is not a sequel.

    As a brief aside, this started a bizarre and, for the collector, irritating trend of any movie involving supernatural cannibalism to be labeled as a Zombi sequel in Europe. So there are a shit-load of movies that all have multiple titles, but if you’re hunting them down, they might be known as one thing, or might be known as Zombi 3, 4, 5, etc., depending on which production company is doing the release at any given time, and varying according to release region. In two weeks I’ll review one such, chosen to show just how far afield this trend can go. Though not one of the chief offenders of appropriating the Zombi moniker, Non si deve profanare il sonno dei morti (I Do Not Profane the Sleep of the Dead) is one of the worst, having been released with over 15 different titles. My personal favorite of the titles for that film, and the title on my copy is Let Sleeping Corpses Lie.

    Anyway, I won’t go into a great deal of background on director Fulci, because I’ll cover him some in next week’s installment of giallo background since he is an important figure in the genre. Suffice to say the man has some kind of obsession with eyes. I own six of his films, and I’m fairly certain I remember seeing eyeballs punctured or mutilated up close on camera in every one of them.

    That started with Zombie. After a brief opening scene in a hospital where a doctor shoots somebody wrapped in a sheet in the head, we cut to an abandoned boat drifting into New York City. Officers variously described as either Harbor Patrol or the Coast Guard find somebody dead inside, and a zombie, which bites one of the cops in the throat (they look like harbor patrol to me, though one of them makes a crack about getting a big bonus for bringing this ship in, so maybe they’re some kind of salvage crew mercenary harbor patrol cops?), killing him. His partner blasts the zombie back into the sea, and his dead partner is taken to the city morgue.

    One of the “zombies” promised by the title of the film.

    The daughter (Tisa Farrow) of the man whose boat was found adrift teams up with a reporter (Ian McCulloch) investigating the ghost ship, and they trace its route back into the Caribbean. There’s a hilarious scene where the cab driver on the island they fly to tells them there aren’t many boats about to be hired, and then we see them walk along a dock which is literally cluttered with civilian boats. There they meet Al Cliver (who was born Pierluigi Conti – cultural appropriation!) and Auretta Gay, who are just about to set out on vacation on their yacht and agree to take our investigators with them to try and find a sinister island that the natives are rumored to avoid.

    Here’s where this movie gets fucking awesome. Auretta strips down to just a thong bottom and goes scuba diving. She encounters a tiger shark, which is attacked by an underwater zombie that keeps trying to bite it. This scene is pure cinematic gold. There was a diver, done up in water-resistant zombie makeup, and he actually fights a tiger shark they doped up so that it wouldn’t be too aggressive. When you see the guy biting on the shark, he’s actually doing that. Man, they just don’t do movies like that anymore, and it’s a goddamn shame.

    So awesome it deserved another look.

    While fending off the shark before the zombie showed up, the boat was damaged, and so the protagonists fire off some flares. On the island, doctor’s assistant Lucas sees the flare and asks if it’s the Devil. Yes, Lucas, the fucking Devil is firing off bog-standard emergency flares from just off shore. This is why a white guy is in charge of your island.

    The foursome are rescued by Doctor Richard Johnson, who was also in one of the great all-time classic horror films, The Haunting. I’ll review it someday – it’s really superlative. A complete sense of dread built up with almost no effects whatsoever. Also, it lent the opening sample to a great White Zombie song.

    Once ashore, we learn that Richard Johnson was friends with Tisa’s old man, and they were researching why the dead are increasingly returning to life on the island. The film never makes a definitive statement, but voodoo is mentioned several times, so I guess we’re going with “magic” in this one. He agrees to help the stranded newcomers but first asks them to check on his wife up the road while he tends to more zombie research right quick.

    Of course, the fucking gardener was left in charge of security at the house, and he blew it. You already know the wife’s dead, because of a fantastic scene earlier in the film where she’s showering (yay, more titties!) and a zombie breaks into the house and kills her. Here you have another one of the great moments in horror history: for the first time in a major release, you get an agonizingly slow, up close, center camera shot of a big splinter of wood jamming right into and bursting her eyeball, no cutaways or wide angles to lessen the impact. I remember seeing a brief interview with Tom Savini for Bravo’s 100 Scariest Movie Moments where he recalls watching that scene building, and wondering if Fulci had the guts to do what even he hadn’t dared in Dawn of the Dead (for the tragically ignorant amongst you, Savini did the effects for that film).

    See that spike on the right edge of the frame, just below the zombie’s wrist? It’s about three seconds from going straight into that eyeball.
    Don’t worry though, she has bigger problems to worry about than her missing eye. She gets eaten.

     

    Fleeing in terror from the scene at the house, our protagonists are making their way back to the hospital when they stop to catch their breath. For some reason Tisa and Ian start making out when it turns out they’re in a Spanish conquistador cemetery, and the remarkably still meaty former Spaniards begin to reanimate.

    Fight fight fight people die, eventually, we have a last stand at the hospital, and I won’t spoil the ending for anyone who decides to see it. But New York City at least gets overrun, so I’ll leave it at that. Serves all the progressives who live there right! If it wasn’t for major cities, there’d be no national democratic party! Down with urban dwellers! REEEEEGION WAAAAAR!!!

    Look, everything I write about these movies is going to be biased because I love them all so very, very much. I could seriously sit down and watch this shit all day. The barely-there storylines, the garish, brutal on-screen killings with bright red pulsing blood, the horrifically rotting zombies dropping piles of worms out of their eyes, I even love how you can’t tell what language the fucking things are shot in (pro-tip: most of the time they’re shot without the dialogue being recorded at all, and dubs are put over it in post-production for each country that it’s going to be released in. Hell, in Zombie, half the cast were English speakers who had no Italian, and the other half were the reverse. This is because they were always filmed with an eye towards international release since none of the European nations were large enough to guarantee good gross receipts by only catering to their own native audiences). So don’t take my word for it, because I’m going to tell you to watch every one of these.

    I picked this one first because I think it’s a good way for those of you unfamiliar with the glory of low-budget 1970s Italian splatter-horror to segue into the genre with a fairly familiar motif. Everybody knows zombie movies and has seen at least a few, so the transition from American “don’t show anything too graphic and try to make sense” movies won’t seem so jarring. The bottom line is, if you like horror, you will like this movie, I guarantee it. If you don’t like horror, then what the fuck are you doing reading this anyway? Fuck you too, buddy, and just get on with posting all your endless goddamn “hurr durr let’s all give HuffPo more advertising money by hate-sharing their posts” OT links in the comments below. Always remember how much Zardoz loves you all, my children.

    I rate Zombi 2/Zombie six decayed heads out of seven.

     

  • The Grand Unified Theory of Progressivism

    This post is based on a talk by Evan Sayet some years ago called “Understanding How Modern Liberals Think.” After giving his talk, Sayet received numerous comments that he had discovered the grand unified theory of liberalism. The talk is good, although he goes off on a few too many Team Red tangents for my taste. So this is my modified version of his idea.

    When hearing prog opinions, the natural reaction of everyone else is to think that progs must be evil or stupid to believe such things. True, some of them are. But there is a problem here. For example, whatever you think about Michael Moore, he is definitely not stupid. Stupid people don’t make millions of dollars with documentaries. And whatever else you think about Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, they are not evil. They make ice cream with silly names.

    Alright, so if they aren’t evil and they aren’t stupid, what is going on? As it turns out, the heart of it is an extremely convoluted thought process that goes like this: of all the different systems people have tried over history, none have created a society devoid of crime, poverty, war, and so on. So, the modern prog concludes from this that the desire to be right is the source of evil. For if no one thought they were right, no one would argue or fight or go to war and so on. If people gave up the search for truth and right, we could all join hands and live happily ever after in the Kindergarten of Eden.

    So if no one is better than anyone else, if someone *is* better than someone else, it must be because that they cheated somehow. Therefore, the prog will always side with what is evil, failed, and wrong over what is good, right, and successful. It’s like life is a big roulette wheel, and if the same number comes up over and over, it must be that the wheel is biased.

    And the more successful a person or group is, then the greater they must have cheated to get there. This is explains the great hatred most progs have for the US. Only a prog could look at the US, the most prosperous society in history, and see nothing but poverty. Only a prog could look at the US, the least racist society in history, and see nothing but bigotry. Only a prog could look at the US, the most technologically advanced society in history, and see nothing but ignorance. Only a prog could look at the US, the least sexist society in history, and see nothing but misogyny.

    How did such an idiotic idea gain widespread adherence? Well, for most of history, you had to be smart and/or lucky to avoid hunger, disease, and poverty. After WW2, these things were largely banished. An entire generation in the US grew up under the illusion that the near paradise they were born into was a fallen world instead of the result of thousands of years of intense effort and numerous setbacks. And even more incredibly, they thought that this state of affairs was so bad that it had to be demolished. That generation has been in charge of the the US government, media, and academia for about 30 years now.

    There is hope however. Since progs will inevitably make a mess of things wherever they have control (Sweden, California, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Detroit, Greece…), it is only a matter of time before their rule crumbles.

    So take heart, my friends. For though the progs may seem mighty now, they planted the seeds of their own destruction long ago. And those seeds are beginning to sprout.

  • Reviews You’ll Never Use: The Monster Squad

    Greetings Boils and Ghouls, and whatever other gender you may be currently identifying as. For the next three weeks, I’ll be reviewing films from that wonderful splendiforous genre, my personal favorite, giallo. I’ll be doing this due to the presence of several well-known giallo guests at Texas Frightmare Weekend, coming up May 5th-7th. I’ll choose three different films from three of the genre masters. And don’t worry, my beloved readers, you’ll get a full report of Texas Frightmare after it’s finished and I’ve recovered from my biggest drinking & spending weekend of the year.

    But since most of you probably either haven’t heard of that genre or don’t care for it because you are philistines with no taste, who drink knock-off Colt 45 in paper cups drawn out of a large plastic bag being sold by that elderly Mexican fellow pushing it around in the little cart, I won’t subject you to four straight weeks of the best 1970s Italy had to offer. This week we’ll go with a popcorn goofy horror film, one of my favorites from my woefully mundane childhood, Monster Squad. Or more correctly, The Monster Squad. But seriously nobody calls it that in casual conversation, and if you do, you’ll stand out as being that guy.

    The movie poster. Pretty much does what it says on the tin.

    Monster Squad is a 1987 creature feature with a set-up so ludicrous you can’t help but love it. Dracula is trying to take over the world, and to do so, gets the old band back together. Only our impetuous band of child heroes can stop him.

    Monster Squad was directed by Fred Dekker, a man who writes much more than he directs. His few other directing efforts are…hit and miss. You have RoboCop 3 (boo, hiss!), but also Night of the Creeps (huzzah!). More interestingly, the film was written by Shane Black. Now if that name doesn’t ring a bell to you, see if this does: “Billy. Billy! The other day, I was going down on my girlfriend. I said to her, “Jeez, you got a big pussy. Jeez, you got a big pussy.”

    That’s right, Monster Squad was written by fucking Hawkins.

    Seriously though, check out his IMDB. In addition to being Hawkins, he’s written Lethal Weapon, Iron Man 3, and is directing the upcoming The Predator film. Nuts, huh?

    Aside from that, Monster Squad is peopled largely with actors that you may probably kinda sorta recognize, but probably not (depending, of course, on how big a film fan you are). Mary Ellen Trainor (RIP), mostly known from the Lethal Weapon series. Leonardo Cimino, who plays the weird little bald guy with an accent in every movie which called for that role (also RIP). Jason Hervey, who played asshole older brother Wayne on The Wonder Years. Tom Noonan, from all sorts of things like Last Action Hero, and decent little Satanic Panic throwback horror film The House of the Devil. The IMDB photo for the main protagonist, Andre Gower, kind of has a rapey murder vibe going on. Finally, Drac himself is played by Duncan Regehr, whom our friends from north of the border will recognize as also being Canadian. He was in several episodes of DS9 as a Bajoran dude getting to occupy Major Kira’s wormhole and was also the ghost-but-really-it’s-an-alien-who-likes-fucking-Dr. Crusher-and-lives-in-a-candle-for-some-reason on that one episode of Next Generation where they go to Planet Scotland. You know exactly the episode I’m talking about, you fucking nerds.

    ANYhoo, our story opens 100 years ago, with Dr. Van Helsing botching an attempt at killing Duncan’s Dracula – Dracan…Duncula? I like Duncula, let’s go with that.

    Cut to present. Duncula has set up shop in Red Stick, Louisiana, and has recruited The Mummy (who escapes from the local museum), The Creature from the Black Lagoon (whom I could totally see living in Louisiana), some poor schmuck who has been turned into a werewolf, and even managed to rob Frankenstein’s Monster from an airplane carrying it God-knows-where. Does Red Stick even have a museum that would be fancy enough to host an actual mummy as part of an exhibition? I dunno. Suthenboy, what of it? You’re the closest one I know to that area.

    The Jackson Five, as re-imagined by…well, me, I suppose.

    Turns out, Mary Ellen Trainor just so happens to buy Van Helsing’s diary at a fucking garage sale (not making that up) and gives it to Rapey McMurderface as a gift. See, he’s really into monsters and has an after school club where they go up in a treehouse and talk about monsters. The only problem is, the diary’s in German.

    So off we go to Leonardo Cimino, playing a Holocaust survivor, who translates it for them. Turns out there’s an amulet that balances good and evil in the world, and once every hundred years, you can bust that shit up and then evil will rule the world. So this is Duncula’s plan in a nutshell.

    Our plucky protagonists manage to defeat the monsters one at a time (the mummy never does a goddamn thing except shuffle around and then get destroyed) and even recruit Frankenstein’s Monster onto the Good Team. Finally, we’re left with only Dracula, who, in a pretty badass scene that somewhat presages what you see at the end of Rogue One, purposefully strides through the middle of town casually massacring the entire police force as they run up to him one at a time.

    Of course, in the end, a hole is opened to Limbo by having a virgin read some words (that’s how Limbo works, right?), and the mean monsters are sucked into Purgatory forever. Frankenstein’s Monster is also banished, punished for looking weird regardless of the morality of his behavior. Just like in real life. Being an 80s movie, there is, of course, a bitchin’ training montage, and a contrived rap song for the final credits.

    Look, the movie has tremendous heart. And the monster effects, particularly the Gillman, are honestly quite good (thanks to the wizardry of Stan Winston). I also personally have always preferred the half-man, half-wolf bipedal werewolves to the “he just turns into a big wolf” variety. And there are some background scenes that still warm my nerdy child heart (one of the characters wears RoboTech pajamas. I wish I had RoboTech pajamas as an adult!). It’s genuinely great for kids, or even for adults just looking for a cotton candy movie on an otherwise boring Saturday night. But ultimately, there are just too many plot holes that you can drive a bulldozer through. How the hell do all these monsters manage to converge in Red Stick? Actual non-monstrous humans have a hard enough time converging there. Why the hell does the US Army show up at the end entirely in response to a letter written to them in crayon by a little kid? Why does Duncula have so much fucking dynamite on him at all times? He casually tosses dynamite at people that he just pulls out of a pocket on his tux at least twice – I don’t remember that as being a known method of attack, and I’ve read a lot of vampire lore.

    I have no clue who this guy is wearing the shirt, but he’s pretty fucking awesome, I can tell you that.

    Still, it’s impossible not to like this movie down on some level, in the cockles of your heart. Just don’t go into it expecting it to be anything more than it is. The film didn’t do well when it was released but became a “cult classic,” and when the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin held a screening featuring many of the cast & the director in 2006, it sold out with lines around the block. So if you’ve got an hour and a half to kill and want a little old-style Universal Monster action updated to mid-80s standards, give it a shot. You’ve really got nothing to lose except time, which if you’re a frequent guest of this site we all know you have plenty of, and you may find yourself smiling here and there.

    Two quick anecdotes: first, there’s a scene where one of the characters (a fat kid who died of pneumonia in real life in 1997; I can’t help but feel it would be more tragic if he wasn’t so goddamn fat) remarks to Leonardo Cimino that he knows an awful lot about monsters. Cimino says that he supposes he does and closes the door to his house, where we see a concentration camp number tattooed on his forearm. As a kid, I had no idea what that was and thought it was Dracula’s phone number. Why else would he be saying he knew a lot about monsters, with the camera then focusing on those numbers with menacing music playing?

    The Mummy, right when he realizes he’s about to be vanquished after accomplishing exactly Jack and Shit towards Dracula’s goal.

    Also, Rapey McMurderface wears a shirt through the first portion of the film that’s just a red t-shirt with yellow screen-printed letters that say, “Stephen King Rules”. My wife loved that shirt so much she found it at Texas Frightmare Weekend three years ago and wears it around all the time. I think maybe only two people have gotten the reference in all that time, though lots of people just think it’s a pro-Stephen King t-shirt and comment on how much they enjoy that author. I love my wife. I love having sex with my wife. I think I’m going to go have sex with my wife right now while you’re reading this. Think about it.

     

    I rate Monster Squad 15 Weather Penises out of 27.

     

  • Reviews You’ll Never Use: Gargoyles (1972)

    Greetings once again, fellow intrepid interlocutors of the insidious and the incredible, it is I, your humble author, once again delving into his personal DVD archive to bring you only the finest is bizarro horror filmmaking.

    This week we take a look at the largely forgotten 1972 made-for-tv movie, Gargoyles. I’m afraid I don’t have much to regale you with in terms of production information; such is lost in the sands of time. And in the sands of New Mexico, where this beauty was filmed on a single camera in 18 days.

    Opening title card. It’s always promising when they go with “day-glo slime” font.

    No dear readers, this film is remembered for one reason, and one reason only: the exemplary practical gargoyle effects, made for zero dollars and whipped up over only a few days time. Now when I say, “exemplary,” understand that I’m grading on a curve here. Obviously, they don’t touch what is seen in much larger budget films. The costume designer was a fellow named Tom Dawson, who also did the wardrobe and costume effects for Blazing Saddles and Arnold Schwarzenegger crap-fest End of Days. It is interesting, however, to note that one of two people tasked with creating and applying the gargoyle makeup is Stan Winston, in his first credited special effects role. If after perusing that link you find yourself still unimpressed with the fine work of Mr. Winston, then you can go right to hell – my reviews are not for the likes of you.

    Our story begins with a voice over explaining that gargoyles are actually the earthly spawn of Satan himself and that they arise every 600 years to try and take over the planet. However, it appears humans whip dat azz pretty badly every time because the creatures are now on the verge of extinction. However, it does result in many of the world’s myths about monsters.

    Cut to anthropologist Cornel Wilde (who, fun fact, was blacklisted during the HUAC era) taking a drive through the desert, with daughter Jennifer Salt in tow (Salt would later touch again on the world of the macabre as a producer for sometimes-great-sometimes-dumb FX staple American Horror Story). Interestingly, throughout the film, Jennifer always seems to wear her shirts tied up to show off her stomach, which is, I suppose, something of a welcome diversion. Coming across a barely-functional roadside tourist trap run by lovable old Uncle Willie, the drunken coot ushers them out back to show them his prized possession: a gargoyle skeleton hung up in his shed out back. Willie proceeds to tell the anthropologist (the character has a name, but does it really matter?) about how the Injuns in the area used to have a lot of stories about these and….you know what, it’s just the usual hokum spun out in crappy horror movies. I’m so damned sick of people acting like/assuming that a bunch of freaking dudes dancing around smoking peyote have some kind of magical powers or great insight into the universe that I lack because I wear pants. Fuck that noise.

    Bernie Casey is a Critical Monster Studies Professor

    Anyway, the titular monsters attack, killing Uncle Willie and driving Generic Anthropologist and Hot Daughter to seek refuge at a nearby roach motel run by horny drunk Grayson Hall (best known for her long-running stint as Dr. Julia Hoffman on the original Dark Shadows). Having escaped with the gargoyle skull from Willie’s shed and with audio recordings of the attack, our protagonists try to make sense of all the shenanigans and goings on. They are attacked again by two of the creatures trying to retrieve the skull, and once they have it, they flee across the road only for one of them to be hilariously run over by a semi. It comes out of nowhere and is really quite funny, because normally when you see the creatures running or attacking, they director uses a kind of weird slow-mo, so it cuts straight from that, to a damn truck coming out of nowhere and smacking one of them.

    “I don’t remember you from the faculty meetings at UCLA…”

    Running to the police station to report the latest attack, Hot Daughter pleads with the cops to believe her, and to release several dirt bikers they caught at the scene of Uncle Willie’s earlier that day (the lead biker being played by Scott Glenn, who is one of those guys whose name you don’t know but you’ll recognize him when you read through his IMDB). On her way back, she’s kidnapped by King Gargoyle…Bernie Casey?! I think that’d be racist today. You may know him from his work in Revenge of the Nerds or Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, but because I’m me, I’ll always remember him from Suzanne Somers and Stacey Keach eco-horror film, Ants. Yes, I have that on DVD as well. Anyway, the actually pretty awesome looking head gargoyle takes Hot Daughter back to their cave, where he explains that 1) they’ve only been woke for a few weeks, 2) he’s taught himself pretty good English in that time, and 3) he likes to have chicks read stories about 15th century rapes out of scholarly books to him. We also see the gargoyle hatchery, where eggs literally half the size of the adults hatch the creatures, and we learn that the ones with wings (such as Casey and his female gargoyle consort) are “breeders”.

    A close-up of the really quite good monster makeup used in this film

    Generic Anthropologist convinces the cops and the local dirt bikers to help search for Hot Daughter, and the group is eventually assaulted by the gargoyles. The humans manage to kill a lot of them with shotguns and pistols, which really makes one wonder how the whole, “We’re going to exterminate humanity” thing is going to work out for the monsters. Scott Glenn goes in to throw gas around and burns the hatchery, and upon seeing him beset with gargoyles, Generic Anthropologist declares him dead and flees (he did the same to Uncle Willie earlier – seriously, the guy will decide you’re a lost cause within seconds of you running into any adverse circumstance). The supposedly thousands of eggs burn up from the two gas cans splashed around one room, and Bernie Casey, along with his consort, try to fly away with Hot Daughter to, I guess, rape the shit out of her, since it’s pretty clearly established that the monsters only produce offspring with each other. However, Generic Anthropologist makes a Quick Decision and uses a handy rock to bust the consort gargoyle’s wing, forcing Bernie Casey to abandon Hot Daughter so that he can fly away with his basic bitch. And…that’s it. They get away, they end.

    Bernie Casey: Critical Monster Studies Professor’s breeder counterpart. She actually gets jealous of Hot Daughter and helps Generic Anthropologist to escape at one point, dooming her entire race because she can’t control her womanish cattiness.

    The movie basically sucks, but really, if you have the 74 minutes to spare, it is honestly remarkable how good they do with the gargoyle costumes given what you know must have been incredible time and budgetary constraints. So kudos for that. Director Bill Norton went on to acclaim *coughbullshitcough* as the director of such masterpieces as More American Graffiti, and Hercules and the Amazon Women. If any of you have seen either of these, sound off in the comments.

    Actually please don’t, nobody gives a shit.

    On a parting note, apparently it’s not safe to trust the TCM website’s user-generated movie ratings, because holy hell, check this out. The lowest one is 4.31  out of 5.

    Personally, I award Gargoyles 10 Pubic Hair Cartoons out of a possible 30. Keep track of the percentages here; 10 isn’t very good.

     

     

     

  • Straffinrun Tours

    Tō-ji, a Buddhist temple of the Shingon sect in Kyoto, one of the many beautiful attractions in Japan you aren’t visiting.

    Welcome to Straffinrun Tours.  Do you want to go around and see some of Japan’s oldest and most visited shrines and temples?  Experience the subtle beauty of a tea ceremony?  Try your hand at the wondrous art of ikebana?  Yes?  Get the f*** out of here because you bore me.  Use Google and save yourself a couple grand.  My tour is focused on exposing you to the concept of 本音 (pronounced honne) and 建前 (tatemae).  For that we will need to meet and watch real Japanese people doing mundane things in their daily lives.

    Have you ever laughed at a bad joke your boss or customer has made because the social situation called for it?  If yes, you have practiced tatemae.  The Chinese characters 建前 translate literally as “constructed front” and can be seen as your social persona that we put up to keep us from beating each other to death.  Some people say it’s basically lying, but, well, they’re idiots.

    Ever fantasize about slamming you boss’s head into the corner of his desk after hearing his bad pun for the 26th time?  Well, that would be honne.  本音 literally means “real sound” or, in other words, what you are really feeling at the moment.  Hopefully, you practice some impulse control and don’t run around calling a spade a spade.  It can be a bad idea.  Especially in Compton.

    Pachinko parlor

    So now that you’ve gotten the basics of honne/tatemae down, let’s find out what the little Nipponjins are up to.  First stop on the tour is a Pachinko parlor.  Noisy, smoky, and filled with dejected people gambling.  The game itself is ridiculous, but we’re not here to be bedazzled with blinking lights and digital breasts.  Over there!  Don’t look, but look at the woman in her 60s, wearing the tiger pattern blouse.  Her machine just went “reach” which means she has two of the three numbers necessary to win.  Will she?  Zannen (too bad).  She lost.  Did you see her reaction?  She pawed at the screen as if to say, “Oh, you’re a bad boy.”  Now watch the man in his 40s, wearing the suit.  His machine just went “reach”.  Zannen.  He lost, too.  Yet his was a stone-faced reaction despite having a 70% chance of winning \10,000.  The tiger blouse woman showed you her honne and the man, his tatemae.  You’ll notice about 90% of the players react like the man and 10% like the woman.  That’s Japan.  You don’t show your emotions in daily, public life unless you’re a freak.

    Let’s get out of here and grab a drink.  I know a pub down the street.  Yes, it does say “Pub,” but remember that donut you bought at the bakery in the station this morning?  It had “Donut” written on the wrapper, but it had eggplant inside.  This is not your mother’s English.  “Pub” to them means a small bar where, usually, a youngish gal, the one-san, and an oldish gal, the oba-san, fawn over you and you pay through the nose for the pleasure.

    The only pic I could find tagged “oba-san” that wasn’t granny porn.

    “Aah, sutoraifeen-san. Hisashiburi, desu ne” (long time, no see).  The oba-san greets us as we slide into our stools, her 48-year-old bosom defying gravity due to the hiked up obi (sash) of her kimono.  She pours us two Jim Beam Ryes on the rocks from the bottle with my name on it that she pulled off the shelf behind the bar counter.  Talk to her.  She is a master of tatemae.  Your jokes will be hilarious.  You look like Bradley Cooper, and where did you ever find that sweater?  Goodwill?  I’m not familiar with that brand.  Is it a boutique on Rodeo Drive?

    Here’s the rub; she doesn’t care about you other than you’re a paying customer.  She thinks you know that, but you see how good you feel regardless?  It’s dishonest honesty.  The true masters of tatemae don’t trick you into believing what they are saying is true, but rather allow you to bathe in the respect they are showering you with.  This is not your Western, “You look great.  Did you lose weight?” type of flattery.  It’s respect, so soak it in.

    Unless you want to drop a mortgage payment, I suggest we get out of here.  Hopefully, you’re beginning to see from our experiences at the pachinko parlor and the “pub” that honne/tatemae permeate Japanese consciousness.  You get polite, speedy, and competent service at the convenience store because to do otherwise would be disrespectful of not only you, the customer but also of the clerk themselves.

    So when you get back to The States and hear about “trigger warnings” and “micro-aggressions,” think about honne/tatemae.  Are the sensitive souls pushing this nonsense because they want a more respectful discourse, or are they simply forcing people to yield to their superior wisdom?  If it were truly about being respectful, they would show their tatemae and keep their petty grievances in the honne box.  Running around, pointing out trivial offenses is the exact opposite of what honne/tatemae is all about.  And for all the faults the concept has, it does provide a shield which can insulate you from nutjobs.  The next time you’re accosted by a pink-haired slob for using the wrong pronoun, just remember the oba-san from the pub and tell her, “Those black yoga pants really do smooth out the ripples in your thighs.”