Author: Witney

In addition to the wild, costume-encoated geekery on the floor, Comic-Con is also rife with late-night parties with actual booze, actual loud music, real women who know how to dress (a rule that is less hard-and-fast for the men; there are still a lot of jeans and t-shirts even at the classier parties), and, on some occasions classy celebrities. The Geekscape people were able to get me into a late-night party at the top of a swank hotel with all the things mentioned above. It’s too bad I was so exhausted, or I would have enjoyed the party more. As it stood, there were people in ghoul costume wandering about terrorizing the guests. We had some big stars there as well, and I was able to meet (briefly) and take a picture with the wonderfully polite Ray Wise. Amazingly enough the comic book god Stan Le also appeared, but he was, naturally mobbed by fans. I did see his face through the crowd, but I was in no mood to battle my way to him. I left shortly after arriving and passed out on the floor of my hotel room. Floor-sleeping is a familiar practice to those who attend this event. Luckily I only had two roommates (as opposed to the Comic-Con average of eight), so it wasn’t so cramped.

 

On Friday, I attended the panel for Famous Monsters of Filmland, the famous film magazine founded by the late, great Forrest J. Ackerman, that predates pretty much all genre magazines by decades. It was one of the first horror magazines that detailed the making of monster makeup, the cultural presence of movie monsters, and that celebrated the joyous fear of going to be scared in the dark at your local movie theater. As a result, it had a large hand in inspiring the horror luminaries you and I grew up with, including John Landis, Stan Winston, Tobe Hooper, Stephen King, Danny Elfman, et al. FM is old-school, fun, creepy, wonderful. Another gift for my 8-year-old nephew. On the panel were the current publisher of the magazine, Philip Kim, editors Ed Blair and Mark Dooley, as well as one of Ackerman’s old friends, Joe Moe, and, as the surprise guest, Academy Award-winning monster maker Rick Baker. While the panel was a bit dry (it sounded more like a marketing pitch session than an actual celebration), it was still fun to hear grown men talk passionately about monsters, and take for granted that creatures, paintings of creatures, and the proliferation of creatures, was still pertinant to the geek community.

 

Forrest J. Ackerman (nicknamed Uncle Forry) famously amassed a huge collection of movie memorabilia, which he displayed in his enormous house, called The Ackermansion. When he died in 2008 (at age 92!), his collection was in danger of being scattered, and, indeed, much of it was auctioned off to pay some of his lingering bills. Much of it, however, remains either in the hands of his friends, or at the Forrest Ackerman museum in Northern California. A bit of trivia: Forry ghostwrote a number of lesbian romances, and was granted the title of Honorary Lesbian by the Daughters of Bilitis, an early gay rights group. That’s amazing. He was also fluent in Esperanto.

 

Over the course of the weekend, I was able to give a few interviews, which were, I must admit, my first ever. I was nervous, as I didn’t know most of my subject, and since most of the panels at Comic-Con are about promoting upcoming projects rather than celebrating the old, I hadn’t seen the TV shows or movies in question. With what professional aplomb I could muster I dove into the following:

The Vicious Brothers are a young filmmaking team (who, I was dismayed to learn, are not actually named “Vicious” and who are not actually brothers) who directed the upcoming feature film “Grave Encounters,” a found-footage horror film about a ghost-hunting reality program camera crew that finds actual ghosts in an abandoned mental hospital. That’s a nifty idea, and is being compared to hits like “Paranormal Activity” and “The Blair Witch Project,” but with more gore, and more moneyshots of the creatures. The brothers themselves were well-dressed, looked to be in their early 20s, and were clearly bored with this interview process that had been going on for hours. One of the brothers spent most of the interview playing with his water cup. When I asked them about their film, they launched into a well-rehearsed spiel about what it was, and they even gave dates as to when it would be available. They only really ever lit up when I asked them my specially designed warm-up question: “What was the first record you bought with your own money?” When one of them said that they got a Fugazi record at age 9, I came to the sad realization that these two kids, who had already made a horror movie, and who were dressed better than anyone at the con, were way, way cooler than me. Good luck, fellas.

 

I also interviewed the two lead actresses and the two creators of the Canadian cult TV program “Lost Girl,” which, again, I haven’t had the chance to see, but has, if the attendance of the show’s panel was any indicator, already amassed a passionate cult following here in the states. “Lost Girl” has already elapsed one season, which will soon air on the Sci-Fi Channel (I refuse to call it “SyFy”). The show is about a young woman named Bo who has spent her youth in orphanages and on the streets, desperately trying to avoid having sax, as every man and woman she sleeps with seems to die. She eventually learns, from others with the same problem, that she is a supernatural being called a Fae, and that there is an entire underground of succubi and incubi living in big cities. Bo must learn to temper her sexuality and live as a human. While a series about a bisexual succubus casually boinking everything that moves sounds like fodder for a late-night Cinemax softcore exploitation romp, talking to the stars, and especially to the shows’ creators (Michelle Lovretta and Jay Firestone), I learn that a good deal of heart and brains went into the program; this is not a show about titillation. This is a show about using fantasy conceits to deal with deeper issues of human sexuality, and trying to grow into a sex-positive mindset in a sex-negative world. It could just be really good marketing, but I’m sold on this one.

Anna Silk, the show’s star, is shyly gregarious woman whose polite demeanor and soft-spoken courtesy stands in direct contrast to the vamp she portrays on screen. Since I wasn’t yet sure of this show was about mature adult sexuality or tawdry adolescent thrills, I asked her about her sex scenes, and how she felt doing them. She, however, is a professional, and declared that the sex is part of her character, and choreographing the nitty-gritty isn’t so important as how her character feels about it. She also gave a lot of details about her character’s story arc, and how things will change for her come the second season (which is already airing in Canada). Evidently she is going to have a love triangle with the show’s male hero, and the show’s human female lead, where she sleeps with both. How refreshing to have a character in a whose open sexuality is part of the story, and is treated naturally. How many shows can you think of that have this? “Torchwood.” That’s the only one. Maybe “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” but that show was a little too jokey for its own good.

I also interviewed Emmanuelle Vaugier, who plays The Morrigan on “Lost Girl,” the show’s villainess who serves to tempt Bo to The Dark Side. Vaugier was playful and open, and openly declared that she loved playing a villain, as it allowed for some joyous overacting. She talked about how the sex scenes on her part were more about dominance than anything, and she was happy to be a sexually empowered woman. When I finally got a chance to interview the show’s creators, it was clinched that thought and personality went into this project. Michelle Lovretta said that she wanted a show that bucked the conventions of heteronormativity, and approached fantasy and sex with an adult eye. Jay Firestone was proud that creatures like Fae are actually based on real mythologies, and that the other creatures encountered in the show (although the show will remain vampire-free) are also.

So it seems “Lost Girl” is poised to be the next big thing in the underground. It could last ten seasons. Even if it only lasts three, it seems like it’ll be one of those shows that lives on in the cult circuit forever, and the stars will be answering questions about it in 40 years’ time. It’ll be the next “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” but without the flip attitude. Like “True Blood” without the stupidity. I asked both actresses how they felt about being cult icons in decades. They were enthused about the notion, and desperately desired it. I hope they get it.

 

I then attended a press conference for the new show “Femme Fatales,” based on the magazine of the same name, which, in contrast to “Lost Girl,” really is titillation for the sake of it, and will use whatever excuse it can to undress its female stars. No problem. There’s a place for that. Specifically on Cinemax after hours, when it’ll air. I talked to the show’s creators, Mark A. Altman and Steve Kriozere, and they compared it to other anthology shows like “The Twilight Zone,” and famous film noirs like “Love Me Deadly.” They were not lecherous or weird, and have a lot of faith in their product (I suppose they’d have to at a press conference), although they were not apologetic about how glaringly blunt the show it. They tried to eschew that by pointing out how certain characters will occasionally recur throughout various episode, giving us the impression that the stories all take place in the same universe. Sounds to me like one of my favorite guilty pleasures when I was 16.

A few of the show’s one-time actors gave a few words. Robert Picardo (once of “Star Trek: Voyager”) was in a wacky mood, as he would tell jokes and grin and giggle with the press, happy to talk about doing a nude scene, even though he’s not a 20-something young lady. He even took us back in his career to obscure hits like “China Beach” and “Gremlins 2: The New Batch.” I admire people who seem to know where they stand within the pop culture firmament, and Picardo certainly knows. When I asked where we could get his CD (which was an oddball tribute to Trek fans, as he sang old standards with Trek lyrics), he quickly evaded the question, and sopke instead about a sitcom pilot he’s working on about a failing adult magazine. Picardo is actually a very funny guy, so I’d love to see a comedy from him.

Jeff Fahey is a well-known cult actor who has appeared in ’90s horror flicks like “The Lawnmower Man” and “Body Parts,” and, more recently, was in Robert Rodriguez’ brownsploitation flick “Machete.” He is also in an episode of “Femme Fatales.” I was always curious why Fahey, who is a striking actor, and a talented one, didn’t work more often, and it turns out that he’s been out of the country doing humanitarian work in dangerous areas. Some roles he had to turn down because he was in Afghanistan or Darfur. He was calm, quiet, completely collected. Not one to rattle. When I asked him about his cult status, he only remarked that kids like me, who once liked “The Lawnmower Man” are now becoming filmmakers, and hiring him again. What a class act.

Final on the roster for “Femme Fatales” was Vivica A. Fox, as sassy as ever, and more playful than any of my interview subjects. She talked about the Vivica Fox Brand, and how she’s carefully constructed an image for herself over the years, which is why you haven’t seen her as a shrinking violent, or as a weepy wannabe. She wants to be tough, and always plays tough. This is the woman who, after all, had a killer fight scene with Zoe Bell and Uma Thurman in “Kill Bill.” She was pressed in pink, and, even though she’s in her 40s, still looked like she was 25. An enthused young black woman was sitting next to me at the press conference, and she and Vivica spent most of the time trading tales of female empowerment. This reporter was clearly thrilled to be in the same room as Ms. Fox.

 

I was assigned the interview with the cast and crew of an upcoming film called “The Knights of Badassdom,” which, like “My Name is Bruce” and “Paul” before it, envisions a group of nerds using their nerd know-how to deal with a real-life fantasy situation; in this case Steve Zahn and his D&D buddies accidentally unleash a real succubus from Hell, and have to use their knowledge provided by Gary Gygax to defeat it. It sounds cute, and provides justification for living the D&D lifestyle, and I’m sure it’s great. I missed the interview and the panel for this, as I lost track of time at a midday party hosted by a friend of mine. Sorry, Geekscape editors, but the whirlwind of events swallowed me for this one.

 

My favorite part of the Comic-Cons I’ve been lucky enough to attend, however, has been merely wandering the convention hall floor, perusing the various exhibits and booths. And while the enormous studio-backed booths (complete with celebrity autographs, and million-dollar displays) are all well and good, the real soul of Comic-Con lies in, where else?, the actual comics. Only about a quarter of the convention floor is devoted to comic book publishers and retailers, and it is here where you’ll find the highest levels of passion, the weird back corners of the comic form, and the magic that drew you to comic books in the first place. It’s here that I found back issues of The Monkees’ comic book. Where I got to thumb through creaky old pages from the 1960s and 1970s, being sold by chubby 50-something men, willing to haggle with you on the price. It’s here that you’ll find precious bootleg videos of long-unavailable movies and TV shows (I bought a copy of “3 Dev Adam,” the Turkish ripoff flick to feature Captain America and Santo fighting an evil Spider-Man). It’s here that you’ll meet the smaller artists who have attained moderate success, but aren’t necessarily household names. You’ll get your trinkets, your t-shirts and your toys. This is the beating heart of the con. The Hall H panels are just its fancy hairdo.

It was here that I got to meet Doug TenNapel, the creator of Earthworm Jim, and hardworking author of comics like “Tommysaurus Rex,” “Creature Tech,” and “Earthboy Jacobus.” TenNapel is a friendly and lanky fellow who will shake your hand, and is happy to discuss comics with you. I bought a copy of his book “Ghostopolis,” and briefly discussed Christianity with him; TenNapel does indeed include Christian themes in his comics, but he’s not one of those insufferable Jack T. Chick types who preaches and proselytizes, and sets his comic is a bland, bland world of ultra-clean and ultra-boring Christian nabobs. He actually bothers to write intriguing sci-fi stories with magic powers, weird bug monsters, occasional bouts of violence, foul language, and still incorporate prayer. I mentioned I talked to some of the other Christian comic purveyors at the con (I have a twisted fascination with Jack Chick), and he screwed up his face. If the story is boring, he said, then it’s actually anti-Christian, isn’t it? As Hank Hill once said of Christian rock: “You’re not making Christianity better. You’re making rock ‘n’ roll worse.” TenNapel makes Christianity better, and he makes excellent comics.

 

It’s also out on the floor where you’ll see the grand parade of endlessly creative costumes. Some people work all year on entire Iron Man suits, just so they can wear them to con. And while the con is littered with “clever” t-shirts and fans with cat ears, you’ll find a high percentage of people who put detailed and loving attention into their obscure character outfit that was on that one alternate version of that one game from eight year ago that nobody played, but that the people at the con totally understand.

 

For those people, this is home.

Comic-Con 2011 is now over, and as it drifts, ever so effervescently, into the ether dimension populated by my personalized heap of hazy memories, I shall attempt to capture, in brief, all the experiences I had there, and relate them to you, the dear reader who didn’t get to go, or perhaps did, and had a shockingly different experience than I. The Comic-Con experience is like a nightmarish King’s blend of all your favorite comics, TV shows, and secret fetishes all rolled into an event that resembles a combination of Halloween in West Hollywood, and that painfully commercial boat show in “Showgirls.” One minute, you’re geeking out because you accidentally bumped into Joss Whedon, and he was kind enough to pose for a picture with you, and the next minute, a creepy 60-year-old Asian guy, who is clearly not into comic books, TV or movies, is photographing, and pouring nervous lecherous sweat all over, the unsuspecting buttocks of some poor 17-year-old geek gal who dressed as Psylocke.

 

In short, it’s good fun. Here are some of the things I went through:

 

I got to man the Geekscape booth for sporadic periods each of the days I was there, mostly for one- or two-hour stretches. The booth was next to the Fangoria booth, across from the Troma booth, and catty-corner to the Full Moon Pictures booth, so I was in low-budget gore horror heaven. Lloyd Kaufman himself frequented the Troma booth, and while it was fun to see the man, he, like everyone working at Comic-con is there to make money, so he was in full-blown pitchman mode the whole time. He would indeed pose for a picture with you, but he would also shamelessly plug his book, or a Troma DVD. I missed Charles Band at the Full Moon booth, but the wide-eyed, bearded gorehound working the booth did give me a free DVD of “Subspecies” to make it up to me. I gave him the web address of the essay on the “Puppet Master” movies. 

 

While sitting at the booth, I began to notice certain classes of people walking by, so I decided to come up with a tally. The tally after only about two hours read as the following:

 

Fat guys in superhero t-shirts: 5 (fewer than you’d think)

Redheads: 10

Goatees: 9

Wheelchairs: 2

Unidentifiable anime characters on white kids: 7

Asian kids dressed as Japanese characters: 6

Cat ears: 4

Actual black people: 5

That steampunk crap: 2

“Sexy” costumes, whether or not they were successful: 13

“Creative” facial hair: 12 (surprisingly high)

“Clever” t-shirts: 8

Note: here’s a surefire way to make your own geek t-shirt: take any two popular geek objects, however unrelated, and combine them. The DeLorean crashing into the TARDIS? Done. Darth Vader and Captain Picard playing poker? Saw that one. Why not The Green Lantern throwing a pumpkin bomb? Too brainy? Make up your own! Try to be absurdist about it! Draw a picture of My Little Pony stabbing Don Corleone! A picture of Jason Voorhees disco dancing with Gumby! A giant Andy Kaufman eating a miniature Godzilla! If you want to skew really obscure, have a picture of Mallard Fillmore playing kosho with the women from “9 Chickweed Lane,” while Bibleman keeps score. If no one gets your t-shirt over the course of the con’s five days, you win.

 

Also, a word on steampunk. I don’t get it. I really don’t. I mean, it does look cool, and I admire that people put so much hard work, time, and finance into making such detailed costumes, and have actually bothered to sculpt working gears and cogs and movable goggles out of real bronze, but I still couldn’t, for the life of me, tell you where it came from. One day it just started leaking into the geek community, and it hasn’t left. Like furries, they’re lurking about the fringes, getting a lot of pictures from fans, but unable to explain their meaning or origin. Here’s the best I can figure out steampunk: It’s an unexpected combination of the geeks who love to dress up, make costumes, and parade about in public, and the engineering nerds who hang around Radio Shack, and are really into soldering. They make costumes for the sake of showing them off, and not expressing their passion for any existent piece of literature.

A word on redheads: Has anyone else noticed the large, large overlap in the Venn diagram of women with red hair and comic book geekery? I live in a big city, and I see fewer redheads on the street in any given week than I see in an hour at Comic-Con. Not that this bothers me; I’m kind of drawn to redheads. But I’d love to see an anthropological study on the color of one’s hair, and how it relates to loving D&D.

The first panel I attended, I selected for its name alone: Sci-Fi that will Change Your Life, in which the people from a website called IO9 (including Zack Stenz who wrote “X-Men: First Class,” Javier Grillo-Marxuach, who writes “The Middleman,” IO9 editor Annalee Newitz, and a few others) discussed their favorite science fiction, and how it shaped them as writers. They, however, put a restriction on their choices in that it had to have been sci-fi from the last year alone (that is to say, since late July 2010). As a result, we had people choosing films like “Source Code,” (which was plenty good, but not necessarily life-altering), and the much-maligned “Sucker Punch” (which I myself maligned). The be fair, Mark Bernardin, the man who selected it, only cited it because it came close to being the over-the-top camp hit he was hoping for. There were a few good recommendations for the novelty-hungry sci-fi nerd, though, including “Tower Prep,” which is a forgotten and short-lived Paul Dini cartoon show about a bunch of superpowered boarding school students trapped in their Village-like school, and a book called The Quantum Thief about a future where you can control how you are remembered by people on a day-to-day basis, which is clearly a comment on the horrors of social networking.

 

And, since we’re all nerds, and we can’t really help it, the panel soon devolved into discussing the sci-fi that really changed their lives, including, naturally “Star Trek,” and, curiously, “Zardoz.” It was only then that the eyes on the panel really lit up.

 

Later that day I attended the panel for MAD Magazine, always an old standby, and an important piece of literature from my childhood. And while a lot of the people I grew up reading have, sadly passed on (Antonio Prohias, Don Martin, William Gaines), it was still a thrill to see the current staff of cranky Italians and enthused newbies talk about the magazine and how it’s still actually going strong after all these decades. I could write an entire essay on MAD Magazine, so I’ll try to be brief here. Sergio Aragones is still writing for the Magazine, and he is still a powerful presence at every Comic-Con, and Dick DeBartolo is still, to this day, one of the publication’s most prolific writers. Peter Kuper was there, talking about taking up the reigns from Prohias on “Spy vs. Spy,” and they all expounded very eloquently on the mission statement of MAD, in that they had to constantly remind the reader how little they were getting for their money. (i.e. 2.95! Cheap!)

The biggest problem the entire panel seemed to have was making the magazine much more course as the years have passed. William Gaines liked a combination of irreverence, borscht-belt humor, and playful ribbing. These days, the magazine has to compete with other “edgy” entertainments like “South Park” and just about any show that airs on Adult Swim, and have had to become a little more icky over the years. The writers feel they’ve found a balance. Pick up a copy sometime, though, and you’ll see that, even though the humor may be a bit more broad than you remember, it’s still largely in the same spirit as you remember from when you were a kid (and, let’s face it, we nearly all read it). I have decided that my 7-year-old nephew will get a subscription to the magazine come his 8^th birthday.

 

The third panel I attended that day was for the new book Writing Movies for Fun and Profit (with the “Fun and” cleverly crossed off) by Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant from the sketch comedy show “The State,” (which you ought to know about). Thomas Lennon, I have to say, has the uncanny ability to make me giggle just by sitting still, so it was a pleasure to see him in person. He ran out into the audience and gave everyone a high five, and he proceeded to offer a panel seat to someone who couldn’t find a chair. The fellow refused, which baffled everyone in the room, including Lennon and Garant. I guess there are some fans who would rather observe than participate.

The panel was mostly them talking about their job in Hollywood as screenwriters of forgettable comedies like “Taxi,” “Night at the Museum,” and “Herbie Fully Loaded” (Quote on the back jacket: “Lennon and Garant are the reason ‘Night at the Museum’ won so many Oscars.” -Ben Stiller). They do realize that they’re not making hard-hitting, edgy comedies by any stretch of the imagination, and have a very healthy, workmanlike attitude toward the movie business. Their book is fraught with practical advice, and is essentially an important lesson in swallowing your pride. Since they’re Lennon and Garant, though, they give their lessons with a stirring amount of good humor, wise irony, and hysterical flippant remarks. As a special bonus, they also screened a super-secret pilot for a super-secret TV show that has not yet been picked up, and whose content is super-secret. It’s a sci-fi spoof called “Alabama.” Which is awesomely hilarious.

 

CONTINUED IN PART 2…

 

The San Diego Comic Con is upon us, and those of us who aren’t thinking extensively about comic books and superheroes have likely fallen into comas. Discussions about superior superheroes are now easily prompted, and imagined battles are being fought out in many a nerd argument (and, for the more extreme cases, being enacted in a series of complicated strategy games). Yes, it is the season of the superhero, and the annual nerd prom is being celebrated mere miles from Mexico. But I am not here to make yet another codified list of superheroes. Amongst our crowd, it is such a subjective argument, I would not attempt a task so churlish.

 

 Something far easier to wrap our heads around would be the world of superhero spoofs. Superhero spoofs are almost as common as superheroes themselves at this point, and writers of comic books have been subtly mocking the more ridiculous aspects of their own form pretty much since the form began. For every Superman villain with the power to crush planets, you have a goofy little trickster like Mr. Mxyzptlk. For every serious and brooding superhero that spends more time pondering their own existence than actually fighting crime, you have a cartoon superhero that fights clowns from another dimension. I’ve always loved superhero spoofs, as the sub-genre encapsulated the two things I loved most as a young teen: superhero comics and absurdist, Pythonesque humor.

 

So let’s talk a look, shall we, at the goofiest crimefighters to grace our pop imaginations. I assure you, it was difficult to whittle the list down to ten.

 

10) Dynomutt

From “The Scooby-Doo/Dynomutt Hour” (1976)

 

 

Hanna-Barbera would try just about anything. Looking over some of their titles from the ‘70s looks like a spoof article from the back of a MAD Magazine. Among the strangest of their idea were The Super Globetrotters, in which the famed Harlem basketball team would grow superpowers and fight bad guys. There was also Captain Caveman, which I have mentioned on Geekscape before, who would fight bad guys and tool around town with a cadre of sexy teenage rock stars. Heck, even Moby-Dick, I suppose bored of running from Capt. Ahab, teamed up with maiden-voiced little boys to fight undersea pirates, according to Will and Joe.

 

One of their more successful superhero attempts was Dynomutt, a green-caped talking robot dog (voiced by longtime cartoon veteran Frank Welker) that was as intelligent as a particularly filthy Chevy Nova, and about as funny. Dynomutt lived with a Bruce Wayne-type named Radley Crowne (voiced by famous TV announcer Don Pardo), who would occasionally don the tights and fight crime as The blue Falcon. The entire setup was clearly a Batman ripoff anyway (dynamic duo, secret cave under a big mansion, secret identities), but imagine the Batman dynamic of Robin was a dumb, drunken borscht-belt comedian. The effect had a sense of humor that the creators, I suspect, didn’t entirely intend.

 

I wasn’t too keen on most of Hanna-Barbera’s shows, as they were often shoddy, and the sense of humor was a little too Three Stooges for me. But there was something delightfully absurd about this setup that I found irresistible. And if its absurdity we’re celebrating, then Dynomutt deserves a spot.

 

9) Bat-Mite

From Detective comics #267 (1959)

 

 

Not so much a superhero as a wannabe sidekick, Bat-Mite was a little kid in Batman jammies who hailed from the fifth dimension, and had near-omnipotent magical powers. Despite a long tradition of broodiness and dark tragedy, it must be remembered (unfortunately for Batman purists and fans of the Burton and Nolan Batman cycles) that Batman once enjoyed a lighter tone, and it was possible for a bizarre little imp like Bat-Mite to fight alongside him, or perhaps just fight him.

 

Bat-Mite was such a welcome breath of fresh air in the Batmna universe. Just when Batman was about to consider – for the 100^th time – whether or not he should actually take up killing, Bat-Mite would gallivant into the comic cracking wise, openly joking about the absurdity of the superhero concept, and casting spells on poor Batman and Robin.

 

Again, not necessarily funny in himself (although he was plenty funny), Bat-Mite earns major points for being the extreme counterpoint to Batman himself. In the next Batman feature film, I would love to see a super-serious Nolan-like approach to Bat-Mite. Maybe someone who drives Batman a little bonkers by pointing out to him that there is no such city as Gotham City on any map, and that it’s infinitely far and close to Metropolis. Let’s put a flip on Batman.

 

8) Earthworm Jim

From “Earthworm Jim” (1994)

 

 

Earthworm Jim began his life in a video game conceived by comic book artist Doug TenNapel. EWJ (as the hardcore fans call him, even though “EWJ” has more syllables than “Earthworm Jim”) was indeed an earthworm who accidentally climbed into a superpowered costume that imbued him with human intelligence and a strange propensity for lighthearted violence. Also a weird human face. The video game was well-animated, challenging, and gave Jim a good deal of cartoon character just through his goofy movements.

 

In 1995, Fox very briefly adapted Earthworm Jim for television, making for one of the most surreal superhero cartoons ever conceived (a few of the others are below). EWJ lived in Turlawk, CA (a real-life little, barren Modesto-like town) with his pal Peter Puppy (who would turn into a monster when scared) and his staggeringly intelligent pet booger. Yes. I just typed the phrase “pet booger.” The villains in the show were the bosses from the video game, so they were given oddball names and villainous intents. I’ve already written about the Evil Queen Pulsating Bloating Festering Sweaty Pus-filled Malformed Slug-for-a-Butt.

 

Earthworm Jim had a wonderfully flippant attitude, resembling less a worm or a superhero, and more a freakshow-loving teenage happy mutant who spends way too much time reading about UFOs, chintzy American roadside attractions, and, well, playing violent video games. He is a spiritual neighbor to Sam & Max. A superhero for weirdos. A good guy.

 

7) The Mystery Men

From “Mystery Men” (1999)

 

 

“We’re not your classic heroes,” The Shoveler (William H. Macy) gravely intones near the end of Kinka Usher’s fantastic cult superhero movie, “We’re the other guys.” The Mystery Men are a group of questionably heroic crimefighters with questionable powers who are trying desperately to make a name for themselves in Champion City. Led by The Shoveler (“God gave me a gift. I shovel well.”), we also have Mr. Furious (“People who live in glass houses SHOULDN’T! ‘Cause THIS is what happens!”), and The Blue Raja (master of silverware) as they team up with The Bowler (with a floating bowling ball), The Invisible Kid (who can only turn invisible when no one is looking, including himself), The Spleen (who can fart his opponents unconscious), and The Sphinx, whose only power seems to be that he’s very mysterious. Also he can cut guns in half with his mind, or something.

 

What a joyous, absurd and well-made feature film. It took the idea of big-budget superhero movies and turned the concept on ear well before the superhero boom that began with “Spider-Man” in 2001. I was surprised that any studios had the bravery to release any superhero movies after “Mystery Men” so wryly skewered the ideas and made such a powerfully funny comedy. Well, I guess it was safe to do so, as “Mystery Men” was a huge flop at the box office, and now only earn undying praise from die-hard cultists like me.

 

“Mystery Men” has all the trapping of a great cult film: Quotable dialogue, weird characters, a stellar cast of comedians and cult icons (including Ben Stiller, Paul Ruebens, Greg Kinnear, Janeanne Garofalo, Hank Azaira, Eddie Izzard, and, of all people, Tom Waits), and a over-stuffed visual design that seemed to be making fun of “Batman & Robin” while at the same time outdoing it. Michael Bay even has a cameo as a villainous fratboy, which is, if I may say, perfect casting.

 

6) Captain Invincible

From “The Return of Captain Invincible” (1983)

 

 

Imagine what would happen to Captain America if, after the end of WWII, he was unjustly accused by the HUAC of being a communist, deported to Australia, and became an alcoholic, no longer interested in fighting crime, but still possessed of his superpowers. Now imagine he was played by a young Alan Arkin in full-blown wacko mode. And that Red Skull was played by Christopher Lee. And that this entire story is punctuated by songs written by Richard O’Brien of “The rocky Horror Picture Show” fame. Even then, you still may not have absorbed the fun weirdness of Philippe Mora’s 1983 cult musical “The Return of Captain Invincible.”

 

Often paired with “Rockula” and “Phantom of the Paradise” as a weirdo, mostly lost musical flop from ages past, “The Return of Captain Invincible” still has a devout following that insists it’s much better than it often gets credit for. Superhero films are all well and good. Musical superhero films where Christopher Lee bellows his evil intentions to a drunken Alan Arkin are importantly surreal experiences not to be passed up.

 

I’d say more, but a friend of mine, Marc Heuck, has already written a fantastic article on the film on his own ‘blog The Projector Has Been Drinking, which you can read here and marvel.

 

5) Freakazoid!

From “Freakazoid!” (1995)

 

 

I’ll try not to go on too much about Frakazoid, as just last week, I put him on the top of my list for the best of the 1990s Kids’ WB cartoons. I will reiterate, however, that “Freakazoid!” was created by a group of largely unsupervised animators and writers who would throw in whatever gags struck them as funny in the moment, and damn the results. We, therefore, were treated to spoofs of “Hello, Dolly,” curious references to Ed Wood movies, and an entire plot revolving around the woodworking skills of Norm Abram. Funny and absurd, no doubt.

 

The origin story of Freakazoid tried to turn him into the product of too much internet information (a teenage boy was sucked bodily into a digital dimension where the internet corrupted his brain and body and made him a clownish maniac). But the conceit was soon abandoned in favor of ad-libbing, cute self-reference, and asides by other strange characters. Even when the studio began to insist that the show coven entire 30-minute stories in the second season, the writers cleverly included strange asides nonetheless.

 

Freakazoid is like ever id of every true teenage nerd. Not obsessed with popular culture, per se, but perfectly willing to live on the fringe, and indeed, appreciative of the presence way off-center. If “Freakazoid!” were a little boy, he’d be the one who steals your Pez only to shove it up his nose, and you’d be mad, only you’re laughing too hard. Then he’d share his root beer with you, and lend you his comics, and you’d be good friends, despite his odd behavior.

 

4 ½) Captain Klutz

From “The Mad Adventures of Captain Klutz” (1962)

 

 

Any kid worth their weight in gummi bears read MAD magazine, and the hipper of them were keen on the strange, floppy-footed, odd-sounding barrel-chinned human monstrosities drawn by master artist Don Martin. Martin’s work is unique amongst cartoonists, as his style has never been with precedent (with Basil Woolverton coming closest), and has yet to be daringly imitated by anyone. His work was like a neo-cubist version of Ralph Steadman. An abstract look into the mind of middle America’s secrets. A comedy version of tragedy, if that makes any sense.

 

From Martin’s twisted mind came kersproinging Captain Klutz, a character who only appeared in Martin’s solo projects outside of MAD magazine (but still published under their imprimatur). Captain Klutz was kicked out of his mom’s house for reading too many comics. When he tried to kill himself (while wearing his jammies and boxers), he fell out a window, accidentally found a mask and towel, tied them around himself, and became a superhero. Captain Klutz is, as his name implies, supernaturally clumsy, and only seems to dimly perceive the world around him.

 

Like all good blooperheroes, Captain Klutz is defined by his presence halfway in his universe. His mind exists somewhere on another plane where he believes in his powers. He still manages to foil the bad guys’ plans every time, though, due to no small amount of luck. That his nemeses involve wackos like Prof. Barfing, whose bombs don’t go off, he got the job done just fine. Captain Klutz surely wins the obscurity prize, and for that reason, he is one for the ages.

 

4) Forbush Man

From “Not Brand Ecch” (1965)

 

 

Marvel comics has a sense of humor about themselves. When MAD Magazine (and other such spoof titles) started to take off in the mid-1960s, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and all the rest decided to throw off their usual ambition of coming up with their usual superheroes, and created “Not Brand Ecch,” a parody of comics in general, and of the Marvel characters in particular. The mascot of this comic, much like Alfred E. Neuman for MAD, was a short, nebbish-looking superhero type wearing red longjohns, a pot over his head, and using a towel as a cape. This was Forbush Man, a wannabe superhero that had no superpowers, did not fight crime, and indeed, as far as I could tell, never had a real story or life arc to speak of.

 

This was, of course, a satire, and the primary thing it satire was that religious devotion experienced by so many comic book fans. His creators never bothered, for even the briefest instant, that Forbush Man was anything real. He existed in another dimension altogether, and yet still had access to The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man and the Hulk. He was the intermediary between the seriousness of comic book lore, and the bare-faced absurdity inherent in the form. He was a joke, and a damn funny one.

 

In the 1980s, Forbush man became the spokesman for “What The–?,” Marvel Comics’ new spoof magazine that poked fun at their stern “What If…” title. He served sort of as that title’s Watcher, overseeing the spoofs therein. He was an absurdist version of The Cryptkeeper. A keeper of the keys to the true ugly face underneath Marvel’s mask. In 1993, Marvel decided to kill Forbush Man in an effort to spoof the clearly temporary death of Superman. He was killed by Dumsday. Forbush Man may be dead, but his legacy lives on.

 

3) The Tick

From “The Tick” (1988)

 

 

A little internet research reveals that The Tick was originally invented by his creator, Ben Edlund, as a goofy mascot for his local newspaper. We’ve had superheroes based on really viscious animals, the young Edlund thought to himself, like spiders, lions, bats and what have you, but what if a superhero chose a lesser animal? His result was The Tick, a seven-foot-tall, cheerful, righteous simpleton dressed in a blue body stocking, and sporting a pair of cute li’l antennae. Ready to tout his own mightiness, but still childishly fascinated by the shiny object around him, The Tick was a superhero that any kid could relate to.

 

These days, you do have a few self-aware characters who remark on how cool it would be to be a superhero (and not just how onerous and righteous it is), but they’re mostly along the lines of morally irresponsible “Kick-Ass,” or the downright tragic “Super.” The Tick, I think, behaves the way any 10-year-old would, should they find themselves in a position of strength: that is, endlessly fascinated with all the cool stuff you get to do. Forget even the callow self-service that 10-year-olds are known for. You’d be too busy leaping off rooftops, enthusiastically looking for bad guys.

 

The Tick is invincible, or as he said, nigh invulnerable. His only other superpower seemed to be that he found himself frequently transported to the depths of space or to other dimensions in order to battle the forces of evil.  The Tick also possessed a very thin grasp of reality, not bother to ever remove his mask or costume, or even acknowledging that such a costume was strange. The Tick will save you, give an inspirational speech, and leave you feeling dazed and baffled while he laughed into the night. What a cool guy.

 

2) Slapstick

From “Slapstick!” (1992)

 

 

Steve Harmon was the class clown. His room was stuffed with cult film memorabilia, and, even though in high school, his biggest pieces of film education were the Looney Tunes. I could have described myself with that sentence. Starting with an off-kilter sense of humor, Steve found himself sucked into a haunted funhouse mirror which was secretly a portal to another dimension. The transfer, paired with the bumbling machinations of a Groucho-looking space alien transformed Steve into Slapstick, a cartoon-looking superhero with cartoon powers. He could reach behind his back and pull out mallets, stretch his body into cartoony positions, and was largely invulnerable to human tools. He was, essentially, Bugs Bunny on goofball steroids.

 

Here’s what I love about Slapstick, and why he is so high on this list: He took the conceits of ancient cartoons, ranging back as far as the 1930s, and repurposed the physical attributes as superpowers in a superhero universe. Cartoons, as we have all observed from our misspent youths in front of the TV, kind of have superpowers, but they are used for slapstick humor. The superhero Slapstick put those powers next to Spider-Man to see what they would look like in juxtaposition. What we saw was that, on a fundamental level, there was little difference between Spider-Man and Daffy Duck. That sort of cognitive leap was mind-blowing for the Jr. High mind.

 

Slapstick has vanished into obscurity, sadly, only cropping up in snarky anthology projects. I think the time for a “Slapstick!” feature film has arrived. But don’t use CGI. Use traditional cell animation. It’ll be awesome.

 

 

A note: An issue of “Slapstick!” featured a guest appearance from J.R. “Bob” Dobbs, the Grand High Epopt of The Church of the SubGenius, and organization to which I belong. This cameo should not be taken lightly.

 

1) The Flaming Carrot

From “Flaming Carrot Comics” (1981)

 

 

Something that all of the superheroes on this list have shared have been a strong sense of absurdity. They each seem to be openly acknowledging their own ridiculousness, and not really caring one way or the other about it. The Flaming Carrot, however, does all of them one better, by not acknowledging his own ridiculousness, and living ankle-deep constantly within it. The Flaming Carrot is not just a jokey character, thrilled to be strange. The Flaming Carrot is a downright surrealist game. A Dada trick in comic book form. A superhero skin stretched obviously and awkwardly over the skeleton of a creature so weird, it’s almost a philosophy. The Flaming Carrot is about how ideas mutate the world around you. Not necessarily beautiful, but mutated.

 

Creator Bob Burden gave the origin of his bizarre creation a Quixote-like spin: An unassuming comic book fan (like Captain Klutz before him) holed himself up in his room to read 10,000 comics in one sitting, in order to win a bet. The man emerged days later, dazed and legitimately insane, convinced he was himself a superhero. His secret identity was not The Flaming Carrot, his costume consisting of a five-foot tall carrot mask with a flame atop it, swim fins, and a regular button-up white shirt.

 

The world The Flaming Carrot inhabited, though, was one that seemed to form itself around the power of his strangeness. His new-found monosyllabic, childlike view of the world was so sincere in its mutation that it seemed to rip holes in the very fabric of reality, attracting demons, donut-shaped creatures from other dimensions, flying dead dogs, subterranean aliens, and the rest. It was here that The Mystery Men got their start. In terms of an objective look at the tenets of superherodom, The Flaming Carrot exploded, dissected, and immolated all the conventions. That’s no small feat.

 

On a personal note, I once had an internship with the B-film luminary, Roger Corman. This was in 2001, when the superhero feature film craze was just beginning, and the head of development asked me, The Kid, to come up with some obscure superheroes that could potentially be adapted for film, but may not be owned by any major studio. Amongst others, I recommended The Flaming Carrot. When Bob burden and his crew were contacted, they were so enthused about a potential Flaming Carrot feature film, they sent me a complete collection of Flaming Carrot comics, an action figure, and a cigarette lighter. Attention Hollywood: Hire a hardworking and pretentious film student, and get on the surreal “Flaming Carrot” feature film. It has the power to melt the faces of millions.

 

 

Witney Seibold is a film critic and oddity enthusiast living in Los Angeles with his old-fashioned opinions, his aging films on VHS, and his loving and wonderful wife. He spends a good deal of his time talking movies, and will be glad to do so with you, should you come by the Geekscape booth at the San Diego Comic Con. He has his own ‘blog called Three Cheers for Darkened Years!, he is half the voice of the B-Movies Podcast for Crave Online, and he is the ersatz professor behind that same website’s Free Film School. He loves you.

 

 

For many of us, the 1990s were something of a magical time in terms of nostalgia. We’re all of that age around here, right? Who amongst the readers of Geekscape doesn’t have find memories of grunge rock, “Beavis and Butt-Head,” the rise of hip-hop, the explosion of Nintendo, the rebirth of the Disney animated feature, that multi-issue mural of Jim Lee’s “X-Men” #1, and Tim Burton’s “Batman” films? None of us, that’s who. Even if you didn’t necessarily like the things I listed, then you do have some sort of halcyon connection to them. Living as an adult geek has a lot to do with recapturing the magic you discovered as a child.

 

One of the most-loved facets of our childhoods, of course, is the cartoons we used to watch. TV raised us in a way that previous generations could only dream about, and future generations (what with their increased internet use) may not entirely understand. And, having spoken to many of my peers of Gen-Y and a good deal of Millennium babies, one of the most powerful presences in all of our collective imaginations was the cycle of cartoon shows produced by Steven Spielberg, and made by Warner Bros. They either played on Saturday mornings or weekday afternoons, and featured a new, hip, self-aware sense of humor that was not seen in cartoons until that time (most of the cartoon shows from the 1980s were based on toys, previous properties, or were just life wannabe sitcoms for the bland palates of children). Like “The Simpsons,” there was something universal, something ubiquitous about these shows. It wasn’t the marketing of them, necessarily, but their style and their sense of humor that grabbed us and stayed with us.

 

And, since it’s my weekly job on Geekscape to compose potentially controversial lists, and spend my time ranking specialized fields that you may not have heard about (I once ranked secretions, for instance), I have decided to rank the seven big Steven Spielberg-produced, Kids’ WB cycle of cartoon shows. I have ignored a few of the more recent cartoons like “Loonatics Unleashed,” and “Duck Dodgers,” as they are of a decidedly different vintage. I have also decided to excise DC superhero shows of the same era, as they were of a slightly different school of cartoons, despite having shared a lot of the same talent.

 

Here they are, then, from seven to one:

 

7) “Toonsylvania” (1998 – 2000)

This show went unwatched by many children, which is a pity, as it was stylish and spooky, and played less like a dumb, familiar retread of the Universal Monster canon like, say, “Gravedale High,” and more like vintage episodes of “The Addams Family.” Surely lesser than “Mad Monster Party” or “The Groovy Ghoulies,” “Toonsylvania” was, despite it all, an earnest horror comedy for children, and there are all too few of those. The show’s premise was kind of thin: The main characters were the hunchback Igor (Wayne Knight), Dr. Frankenstein (David Warner), and the creature Phil (Brad Garret), and their wacky adventures.

 

There were, in the tradition of “Animaniacs,” many asides featuring supporting characters like a goofy-looking zombie family, etc. What “Toonsylvania” tried to do was re-create the success of the earlier shows in the cycle, but with a Halloween theme.

 

For whatever reason, the show didn’t catch on. If you find old episodes, you’ll find that they are occasionally funny, very nicely designed, and somewhat clever, and featured some good voice work. You may not be impressed by it, though. There were much better shows out of the same stable.

 

6) “Taz-Mania” (1991 – 1993)

This was a truly weird idea that worked way better than it ought to have. We all remember The Tasmanian Devil from the old Bugs Bunny cartoons, which is odd, as he was only in two of the vintage shorts. He has, however, like Marvin the Martian, entered into the WB character “canon,” (for whatever that’s worth), and is often listed alongside heavy hitters like Bugs and Daffy and Porky as a central character from this universe.

 

In 1991, Warner Bros., in a bid to bank on the Taz character, gave him his own sitcom. In it, Taz now had a well-spoken, clothed family of Tasmania Devils, living in the yellow-skied Tasmanian outback, and constantly battling sitcom wits with dingos, wolves, platypi, and kiwis. The humor was hardly edgy, falling into the usual sitcom traditions that were old when “The Honeymooners” did it, but there was something pleasantly offbeat about the show. Perhaps it was the odd setting, or the unexpected detour from traditional anthropomorphic barnyard animals we had become used to…

 

Or maybe it was the fact that the show’s star, Taz (played by experienced voice actor Jim Cummings) was a semi-literate, grunting monster with a propensity for eating through tree trunks dropped surreally into the middle of a typical, somewhat bland children’s sitcom. That one little twinge of weirdness carried the show a long way, and provided the bulk of the show’s humor.

 

5) Pinky and The Brain (1995 – 1998)

A weird concept, originally intended to be a simple recurring gag on “Animaniacs,” “Pinky and the Brain” was one of the better cartoon ideas to come along in a long while. A pair of laboratory test mice (who rarely have any interaction with their human captors) would regularly break out of their cage, and go on nightly quests to conquer the world. It sounds like a simple idea sprung from a one-liner (“What do you want to do tonight?” “The same thing we do every night: Try to take over the world!”), but the idea gained a surprising amount of traction, leading to this spinoff series in 1995.

 

The show wasn’t necessarily well-written, but contained plenty of wonderful oddball moments to keep it buoyant, and the concept was just interesting enough, and proved easily stretchable. How do lab mice take over the world? Some of their schemes involved stink bombs, country music, weepy TV movies, and winnings on “Jeopardy!”

 

Adding to the show’s class was the brilliant voice work of Maurice LaMarche doing his best Orson Welles impersonation, in the role of The Brain. This is no cackling super-villain, but a calm, smug asshole who probably would make an intelligent world leader, were it not for his hubris, his backward thinking, and the constant fumbling of his dippy sidekick Pinky (Rob Paulsen). It’s been said that Ren & Stimpy were supposed to be Peter Lorre and Larry Fine, respectively, and that the dynamic between these disparate celebrities was the source of much of the show’s humor. Pinky and The Brain had a similar dynamic, only picture Orson Welles paired with a dumb Peter Cook.

 

4) Histeria! (1998 – 2000)

This may be an odd one to include so highly on this list, but I feel that “Histeria!” is the great under-appreciated gem in this particular crown. It went unwatched by many, and lasted as shortly as “Toonsyvania” (as well as my number one pick), but was an exemplar of what this cycle of cartoons was known for. You see, each of one these shows was marked by a level of sophistication rarely seen in Saturday morning cartoons. They contained adult pop culture references, self-deprecation, and self-aware humor to bring a brilliant and slightly ironic light to a medium previous consigned to boneheaded sitcom plots and overblown toy ads. During their more sparkling moments, these shows were clearly being made by a group of hard-working animators and writers who were mostly in the game to amuse themselves. They knew they needed the stamp of approval from the higher-ups, but for the time being, they would just write whatever weird stuff that amused them. In that regard, they resembled the old-school Termite Terrace of the 1940s, which produced the Bug Bunny cartoons (and hundreds of others) without much of a watchful eye from the studio heads.

 

“Histeria!” was a cheaply-animated little educational program that sought to teach children about the finer details of world history. Like Peabody and Sherman before them, they would get in a WABAC machine, and visit historical figures. But this was no adventure series. It played a lot more like a cheap Vaudeville variety act, including songs, jokes, and hopelessly obtuse references to borscht-belt comedians that your parents barely even remember. Nostradamus had a Yiddish accent. Abe Lincoln sounded like Jack Benny. Ernest Hemingway was played by Adam West.

 

What’s more, the show was not earnest or heavy in its presentation of raw information, putting them in the mouths of a bizarre menagerie of supporting characters, including Miss Information played by Laraine Newman, and a group of oddball children that don’t resemble anything in the human world. It was an information show from another dimension, and deserves a second look. I think it’s better than the likes of “Pinky and the Brain.”

 

3) Animaniacs (1993 – 1998)

We now take a giant leap forward in quality to what is perhaps the most beloved of the cycle, “Animaniacs.” No one I have spoken to between the ages of 20 and 35 did not watch this program, and does not occasionally quote it to peers. This is a cult phenomenon like none of the others on this list, and, having said, that, I understand that I’ll probably get a lot of flack for only including it at number three on this list. Why so low? Let me explain.

 

When “Animaniacs” was on, it was really on. It had some of the sharpest writing of any show. It has references to “GoodFellas” right after a cantankerous cartoon about a retired actress squirrel. It birthed the weird idea of “Pinky and the Brain,” and was culturally relevant in ways that cartoons rarely even aspire to be. There are some brilliant references to Jerry Lewis, to the Stooges, to “Apocalypse Now,” but in a significant way; the jokes will only make sense and be all the funnier if you’re familiar with the source material. As a result, college kids watched this show just as vehemently as young children. It made everyone giggle. The producers of the show even thought to cast Broadway legend Bernadette Peters as the voice of a singing cat. Kids don’t know who she is, but the grown ups can appreciate the golden pipes of a talented musician.

 

And the music was great. I know several people who bothered to memorize Yako singing the names of all the countries.

 

What’s more, many of the characters were brilliant constructions. I’ve already talked about the mice, but there was also the bitter Slappy the Squirrel, and the titular maniac, Yakko, Wakko and Dot, who were, as far as I can tell, a vague reference to the early days of Warner Bros. Cartoons when all the animals resembled white-faced rodents of some kind. Their humor wasn’t exactly the same as the old cartoons; they lacked the appropriate level of chaos, instead paying lip service to it. But they did have a flavor all their own which was still fun to watch.

 

I did, however, get the occasional feeling that the writers were phoning it in. However clever Yakko Wakko and Dot were on the surface, there seemed to be something slapped-together and lazy about the writing. Like they went for their first, sloppy ideas, and then played it out, hoping that it would eventually gel, which it didn’t always. This is a mild tonal complaint, but it’s still something that distracted me. I occasionally felt pandered to. Of course, I was in high school when the show first aired, so maybe I was already too old for the show.

 

Also, when the show was off, it was really off. For every brilliant and sublime comic moment, there were two completely misguided attempts at humor. For every Pinky and the Brain there was a Katie Kaboom, a Chicken Boo, and the human sunburn that is Mindy. Mindy was a little girl who would fecklessly wander into danger only to be rescued by her loyal dog Buttons. Buttons would, in turn, be punched for letting Mindy get out of her playpen. It was a cruel setup, and Mindy was so cute that she made me want to strangle her. Her cute little catchphrases and big, babydoll eyes have infected a generation of girls, and my eye twitches every time I hear a full-grown woman squeak out “O.k., I luv you, buh-bye.” Entire episodes of “Animaniacs” could unspool without a single funny moment, leaving you angered, and questioning why you’re watching this drivel. And that they would repeat, incessantly, every joke they came up with, only exacerbated the matter. When they repeated a funny conceit, it became more brilliant for the repetition. When they repeated a bad joke, it only got worse.

 

Like I said, a great show. But there are others I place above it.

 

2) “Tiny Toon Adventures” (1990 – 1992)

O.k. O.k. I realize that “Tiny Toon Adventures” was not always well-written. Indeed, a lot of the day-to-day gags they had were outright limp. But the advantage “Tiny Toon Adventures” had over its contemporaries was strength of character. What looked like, at first glace, hip, updated versions of the Looney Tunes (Buster Bunny instead of Bugs, Hamton Pig instead of Porky, Plucky Duck instead of Daffy, etc. ) proved to be a brand new rogues gallery of more fully-realized characters than such an imitation had any right to have. More than mere imitation, it proved to capture that rare quality that all remakes try for and rarely achieve: re-imagining.

 

Our heroes lived in a vast land (similar to Burbank, CA) called Acme Acres. They were all about 12, and were concerned with 12-year-old concerns (like playing games, going to school, gossip). They went to school at Acme Looniversity where they were taught by the actual Looney Tunes stars in matters of cartoon acting (popping eyes, falling anvil, etc.). The Animaniacs lived in the Warner Bros. Lot in Burbank, but would merrily skip through time, giving them show a contrived feeling. The Tiny Toons would navigate a real map, an actual geography, and would, as a consequence, have a stronger sense of reality and humor for it.

 

What’s more, the Tiny Toons were relatable kids. The show debuted when I was 12, but it still reminds me of a halycon childhood of playing the back yard, having squirt gun fights, and making friends with new kids. This was something “Animaniacs” lacked. It was a funny variety show that was occasionally amazing, but never actually reached out and talked to the kids. When they were spinning their wheels, they were just talking at us. “Tiny Toons,” even on their bad days, were at least trying to talk to us.

 

I can describe Buster Bunny using just his character traits. I can describe Plucky Duck. I can’t do that with many other cartoon stars of this era. The rest were wild weirdos who were occasionally cruel for no reason. The Tiny Toons had a soul. What’s more, they had that wonderful straight-to-video movie “How I Spend My Vacation,” which is, without hyperbole, one of the better summer vacation movies ever made. The Plucky Duck story, about being stuck on a long car ride, is amazing.

 

I openly admit that “Tiny Toons” was very occasionally badly written. They very often fell into dull sitcom conceits or stories that turned out to be joke-free. Even their high moments (particularly “Milk, It Makes a Body Spout”) were more laffy than hysterical. But the average was very high because of it, and I feel the show is one of the best the studio produced.

 

1) “Freakazoid!” (1995 – 1997)

But the “Animaniacs” vs. “Tiny Toons” is all academic, as we have the greatest of the shows right in front of us, and that is the truly absurd piece of ahead-of-its-time Dada television that is “Freakazoid!,” the cycles superhero spoof that played less like a comedy or a superhero show, and more like a satire of a Beckett play. I mentioned that the creators of these shows often seemed to be including weird jokes that amused them at the time. The creators of the show have openly admitted that that’s what they were doing the entire time on “Freakazoid!” They would include goofy lines of dialogue, unexpected riffs in the recording booth, and even stuff they never intended toinclude. Indeed, even the shows’ lead star, Paul Rugg, also one of the writers, didn’t even know he was going to be the lead in the show until they used his scratch track as the main thing.

 

The setup was paper-thin and often violated. Evidently, a young nerd named Dexter Douglas accidentally activated a flaw in his computer processor, causing him to be sucked into the internet (and this was the internet in 1995, so largely chat rooms and “Ate My Balls” jokes), and bodily transformed into Freakazoid, a madcap weirdo with blue skin, a red bodysuit, and the voice of Paul Rugg. Dexter found he could transform back and forth, and lived a double life as a superhero, unbeknownst to his bully brother, his stone-face June Cleaver mom, and his dippy dad (“Shut up you two, or I’ll come back there and butter your heads!”

 

Frakazoid has a pal in the form of Sgt. Cosgrove, played by Ed Asner as a tough-talking cop whose primary function seemed to be to distract Freakazoid from the task at hand with mints or spumoni or screenings of “Congo.”

 

But this sort of secret identity/crimefighter conciet wasn’t ever really addressed, as Freakazoid found himself fighting increasingly bizarre villains more often than he would have any sort of angst. It was like the studio was trying to come up with a wry and surreal antidote to their own serious Batman cartoons.

 

The asides all landed. Lord Bravery is a Basil Fawlty-like superhero. The Huntsman constantly found himself out of a job. Even Foamy the Freakadog had a few golden moments. My favorite supporting character was probably Fanboy (Bill Mumy), a super-nerd who glommed onto Freakazoid with a vise-like grip, and spewed pop culture nonsense with the best of them. Look out for when Mark Hamill appeared on the show.

 

The final episode of the show (which was canceled early due to its baffling nature and inability to appeal to little kids) featured a guest spot by Ricardo Montalban and Norm Abram. ‘Cause kids love Norm Abram.

 

The funniest, the smartest, the turest, and easily the best, “Freakazoid!” is one for the ages.

 

Witney Seibold is a writer and film critic living in Los Angeles. He perhaps watched cartoons until too late an age, when he should have been studying for his calculus class. He is erudite and perhaps a bit snotty, but stands by his opinions. You can read his films reviews (over 850 to date) on his ‘blog, Three Cheers for Darkened Years! And you can hear his voice on The B-Movies Podcast on Crave Online, which he co-hosts with William Bibbiani. 

 

Throw a rock, and you’ll hit a film showing some blockbuster action flick or CGI-animated kids’ movie in 3-D. Indeed, 3-D films are so common these days that many audiences are beginning to tire of them; during more than one preview, I’ve heard audiences audibly groan when a preview promises a 3-D presentation. We’ve become savvy to the cheap gimmickry of it, and have finally realized that we don’t necessarily need a cheap gimmick like 3-D to keep up coming back to theaters. What we need is better movies.

 

But this current “Avatar”-inspired wave of the third dimension is hardly the first time Hollywood has rallied behind a theaters-only gimmick to get people away from their home entertainment. There was a time when people would watch the relatively new television technology in deference to feature films, and studios would pack theaters with 3-D films, behaving as if it was the Next Big Thing in entertainment, in order to get people out of the house. Something similar, of course, has been happening with internet use, and Hollywood, being as creative as they usually are (that is to say, not at all) is now dusting off 3-D.

 

As a gimmick, 3-D is first rate. As a serious and important step forward in The Way We Watch Movies, not so much. What will bring us to a film is a well-made entertainment, good stories, interesting characters, and clever writing (the success of turdburgers like “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” notwithstanding). The spectacle is all well and good, but at the end of the day it’s just that: spectacle for the sake of it.

 

But then, there’s something to be said for a good piece of earnest hucksterism. As William Castle taught us, a film, no matter how good or bad, can be a success if you market it cleverly, and add some sort of “hook” to your marketing campaign. When he made a film called “Macabre” in 1958, he offered (illegitimate) $1000 life insurance policies for anyone who could make it through such a terrifying film. I’ve seen “Macabre,” and, frankly, it wouldn’t scare too many people. But Castle made us believe it would, and that is American film display at its finest.

 

So in the spirit of all the recent 3-D films we’ve been seeing, and in the spirit of the late, great William Castle, here is a list of ten of the greatest film gimmicks to have been tried in Hollywood.

 

10) Odorama

from “Polyester” (1981)

John Waters, once called by William Burroughs “The Pope of Trash,” was a huge admirer of William Castle and his all-American film gimmicks, but had not had the chance to really incorporate any of his own gimmicks into his films by 1981; Waters’ films were usually gimmicky because of their chocking content alone. But with his Sirkian melodrama “Polyester,” starring zaftig transvestite Divine and one-time teen heartthrob Tab Hunter, Waters was given a chance to shine, and Odorama was released on an unwitting public.

 

Even though the film was over-the-top soap opera of an unhappy housewife and her terrible family (and not a horror or sci-fi flick, that so often get the gimmicks), we could still smell along, thanks to a special card handed out at the film’s outset. Periodically throughout the film, numbers would appear on the screen, and you would be entreated to scratch and sniff the corresponding number on your card. As audiences probably knew Waters’ shenanigans going in, they were likely looking forward to something kind of putrid.

 

According to Waters, the original Odorama cards still have a strong smell to this day (he has to keep his own out in the garage). If you want to experience this at home, you can; special small versions of the cards have been included in new DVD copies of the film.

 

9) Shock Sections

from “I Saw What You Did” (1965)

Libby and Kitt (Andi Garrett and Sarah Kane) are a pair of average teenage girls, stuck on an average babysitting gig, playing average phone pranks on average unsuspecting victims. One of their victims is not so average. When they call up the bestial Steve (John Ireland), and whisper playfully “I saw what you did!” they unwittingly roused the ire of an actual murderer. Joan Crawford shows up, just to add a little class and a little crazy to the proceedings.

 

The 1965 William Castle film is playful and fun, despite it horror and promises of frights, and is worth a look. Castle’s gimmick for the film, however, was another one of those ideas that made the film seem scarier than it was: he added what he called “Shock Sections” to the movie theaters where it played. The popular seats in the center of the theater were equipped with seat belts. Y’know, so you could buckle up and enjoy the ride. So you could stay in your seat for the scary bits. Only the truly brave got to sit in the Shock Section.

 

Simple, yes, but I just know that I would try to get there early so I could race to the center seats and strap myself in. It was a gimmick that gave kids bragging rights.

 

8) Duo-Vision

from “Wicked, Wicked” (1973)

Not so much a gimmick as a filmmaking device, “Wicked, Wicked,” a 1973 horror cheapie about B-movie luminary Tiffany Bolling being stalked by a man in a monster mask, featured two movies that ran side-by-side. One gave the perspective of the victim, the other gave the perspective of the killer. During the kill scenes, we would see the face of the bad guy on the left side of the screen, and the suffering face of the victim on the right. This is fine as a filmmaking device, but some marketing genius decided to give the device a name, and, for one film and one film only, Duo-Vision was born.

 

Also in 1973, Brian DePalma was to make his classic “Sisters,” which employed a similar device, this time unnamed, and Duo-vision’s life ended as soon as it started. DePalma would go on to use the device in several of his films, all the way up to “Femme Fatale” in 2002. While it may not be named anymore, I still think that this counts as a gimmick, albeit one co-opted mostly by one filmmaker.

 

British filmmaker Mike Figgis, however, did, in 2000, try to revive the gimmick legitimately with his experimental digital film “Time Code,” which featured not two, but four separate movies playing simultaneously, each following a different character, and each without edits. Figgis would appear in theaters, and he would mix the films’ sound himself. This is something to brag about having seen.

 

7) Hypnovista

from “Horrors of the Black Museum” (1959)

The story for “Horrors of the Black Museum,” unseen by most people including myself, sounds delightfully lurid. Evidently a true crime novelist (the wonderful Michael Gough), frustrated by his lack of success, decides to hypnotize a young woman into committing crimes merely so he can write about them. This sounds like one of those old b-movie plots that can be (and probably has been) used several times over the years. According to some of the reviews I’ve read online, this film traumatized many a youngster back in ’59.

 

The film’s director, Arthur Crabtree, however, wanted to get more than a B cheapie out of “Horrors,” and added a gimmick that made watching the film akin to attending a magic show. He hired a series of actual hypnotists (or, more likely, hard-working actors to play hypnotists) to stand up in front of every show, and hypnotize the audience into feeling more afraid. I don’t know if the hypnosis would legitimately work on anyone, but for me, I’d love the lurid, spooky appeal of being mock hypnotized. I would certainly add the gimmick into my experience of watching the film. In a way, it would work on me.

Hypnosis would be used as a gimmick again in 1976 by Werner Herzog when he made his “Heart of Glass,” where he apparently hypnotized all of his actors before each take. Wow.

 

6) Smell-O-Vision

from “Scent of Mystery” a.k.a. “Holiday in Spain” (1960)

Famed Academy-Award-winning cinematographer Jack Cardiff (“The African Queen,” “The Red Shoes,” “Conan the Destroyer”) directed a whole slew of B-movies in the 1960s, among them this unknown little piece of schlock about a traveling Brit (Denholm Elliot from “Raiders of the Lost Ark”) who discovers a plot to kill an American. Peter Lorre appeared in the film as the heavy. Leo McKearn from “The Prisoner” had a small role. “Scent of Mystery” is, by all accounts, an underwhelming film, and is known only for its gimmick.

 

Its gimmick, you see, was “Smell-O-Vision,” which was a massively technical system that outfitted theaters with enormous tubes and fans designed to blast scented air out into the audience at key moments. How cool would it be to see a picture of a Spanish beach, and you get to sit in a theater smelling the sea air, the suntan oil, the cigarettes? In theory, Smell-O-Vision is a neat idea.

 

It’s a pity, then, that it didn’t work. The tube-based system for delivering smells was frightfully ill-designed, and the scents would be unsmellable to people sitting in certain areas of the theater. Some would nearly pass out due to their close proximity to the smell blasters. The smells would be horrifying, and misplaced, and the theater would end up smelling like a weird mixture of all the planned smells. Too bad. It’s a neat idea. Maybe its time is still coming.

 

5) Emergo

from “The House on Haunted Hill” (1959)

Another Willaim Castle film (and we’ll see at least one more on this list), “The House on Haunted Hill” featured Vincent Price as a wicked widower who invited a group of friends to stay the night in a haunted house. Anyone who lasted until dawn would win $10,000. Where are the eccentric millionaires like that today? I would love to take part in such a challenge.

 

William Castle had the idea, though, to outdo 3-D with this one, and set up special rigs in the theater to present what he called “Emergo.” I’m still not sure of that word is pronounced with a hard or a soft “g.” Emergo was essentially a skeleton attached to said rig, that would be hoisted across the theater at a key moment in the film. It would dangle precariously above the audience, and the characters on the screen would scream.

 

When picturing our own local multiplexes, this sounds a bit limp, but when pictures in large, single-screen theaters as it did, Emergo takes on a spooky character all its own. The skeleton would have to travel an awfully long way, making sure its trip lasted a good long time, and gave the audience ample time to be scared/amused/cynical about the experiences. Some local L.A. theaters have been recreating this gimmick around Halloween time. I’d seek them out.

 

4) D-Box

from “Fast & Furious” (2009)

While it’s a pity that Hollywood currently feels the need to retrofit just about any film they can with 3-D and other gimmick technologies (they’re not designing films to carry the gimmicks like they used to), there are certain big-budget exploitation and genre films that can be cannily retrofitted with certain gimmick technologies. The prime example of this is a new gimmick technology that’s not in widespread use yet, but is the perfect thing to watch a middling car chase film like “Fast & Furious” with. I refer to the notorious D-Box technology.

 

The D-Box is a moving, vibrating, dipping swerving theater seat with hydraulic lifts, designed to toss the viewer about in their seat over the course of a film’s action scenes. It’s the same technology used on “Star Tours” at Disneyland. This can, I admit, cause nothing but headaches when you’re trying to concentrate on the screen, but it does have the spirit of a good old fashioned carnival ride, which is in keeping with the spirit of the film gimmick. Film sucks? Worry not. You can sit in the moving seat and get an amusement park ride instead.

 

If you have the opportunity to see a film in a D-Box seat, I would ordinarily encourage you to pass it up entirely. But D-Box gets a spot high on this list for its pure gimmickry, and for its potential. If an ambitious B filmmaker decided to make a goofy genre film with the D-Box in mind, they might have a chance at recapturing the soul of William Castle for a modern age.

 

I don’t know why it’s called “D-Box.”

3) 3-D

from “Man in the Dark” (1953)

So few people have seen “Man in the Dark.” It’s a stupid crime flick involving brain surgery and rehabilitation. It is, however, notable as the first major feature film to be released in 3-D. At the time, the technology was criticized for being unclear and unimpressive. That same year, however, would see the release of 3-D first big hit “It Came from Outer Space,” which I have seen in a theater, and was impressed by. 1954 would see Universal’s classic monster flick “Creature from the Black Lagoon,” which, some have said, kicked off the decade-long first wave of 3-D feature films. For years, all good moviegoing kids would have a special pair of red-and-blue 3-D glasses in their homes.

 

I don’t need to describe the way Hollywood has been leg-humping 3-D into the ground these days. Indeed, the technology has become to sophisticated that theaters have felt the need (or the greed) to charge extra for the 3-D glasses (which you can keep if you’re feeling larcenous). And while most films are better without 3-D (as they have been retrofitted after the fact), there are a few recent 3-D film that use the technology to their advantage. “Step Up 3D” did it well. “Drive Angry” did it well. Any film that has no illusions about how gimmicky and exploitative it is will use a gimmick well.

 

If you have a choice on the latest kids film or action blockbuster, go for the 2-D. “Transformers” doesn’t need to have sticky-outy scenes. If you’re seeing something fun, go ahead and pay the extra. To mention him again, Werner Herzog made a documentary film in 3-D. I think that one might be worth the glasses rental.

 

2) Psychorama

“Terror in the Haunted House,” a.k.a. “My World Dies Screaming” (1958)

This is a gimmick so insidious, it was actually banned by the government. “Terror in the Haunted House” is a gentle, cheap, and kind of forgettable film about a woman (Kathy O’Donnell), forced to live in a spooky house she’s had nightmares about, being terrorized by ghosts, or who might be going mad, or who might just be trapped in a dumbed-down ripoff of “Gaslight.” It’s the kind of film that not good enough to be remembered with any clarity, but not back enough to be fodder for “Mystery Science Theater 3000.”

 

But what it did have was “Pyschorama.” Psychorama was the film technique of cutting in single frames of “subliminal horror” during the fright scenes, ensuring that the audience would be terrified, even if they missed the image. We all saw Tyler Durden do it in “Fight Club,” but there was at time when a minor studio release tried it legitimately.

 

I couldn’t find any word as to the actual effect Psychorama had on audiences at the time, but I do know that the use of subliminal images were considered too manipulative by the Fed, and were banned from movies and TV altogether. To this day, the use of such tricks is not allowed, although a savvy viewer can spot other subliminal tricks used all the time.

Thanks to Rhino Home Video, “Terror in the Haunted House” can be enjoyed in the comfort of your home, and, thanks to the almighty pause button, you can catch the single-frame images and make them liminal. The images are actually a lot goofier than you’d think. There are silly painted monster faces and demon heads that look like they were copied from a 7^th grader’s sketchbook. They have captions like “Scream now!” and “Die! Die! Die!” The good folks at Rhino also clearly have a sense of humor, as one of the home video frames says “Buy Rhino videos every day!” Those cut-ups.

1) Percepto

from “The Tingler” (1959)

I adore “The Tingler,” and recently made a claim that it can be considered one of the Great American Movies. I stand by that claim. Of the gimmick films, “The Tingler” is the granddaddy of them all, and was also made by William Castle, perhaps the greatest showman in Hollywood’s history. If you’re at all interested in horror movies, and you haven’t seen “The Tingler,” your education is officially incomplete. The story is simple. A pathologist (Vincent Price) is using LSD as a control substance in his fear experiments. He finds that when someone is afraid, a centipede-like creature bodily grows on their spine. When you scream, the creature is killed. He wishes to capture said creature and store it in a cage. The film’s tone falls somewhere between a low-rent Hitchcock thriller and an episode of the old “Batman” TV series. Scary,,fun, campy, and sometimes legitimately disturbing, “The Tingler” is an undisputed classic.

 

But Castle added to “The Tingler” with a series of two gimmicks. For one, he had covered cages placed in theater lobbies. The cages had tape recorders inside, so you could hear the eerie clicking and buzzing of The Tingler emerging from within. Only the brave dare peek under. Once you sat in the theater, you’d get the ride of your life, as certain select seats were equipped with vibrating buzzers, effectively giving certain viewers a little goose during the film.

 

Yup, Castle officially buzzed the asses of a generation of teenagers. During the film’s ifamous finale, Vincent Price would declare that “The Tingler is loose in the theater! … Scream! Scream for your lives!” The lights would go out, the seats would buzz, and the entire theater would shriek in camp ecstasy.

 

If I had a time machine, one of the first places I would visit would be the premiere of “The Tingler.” What a beautiful experience it must have been.

 

 

Witney Seibold is a writer living in Los Angeles. He watches old movies, reads old books, and is, himself, getting old. When he’s not writing nostalgic articles, he is adding film reviews to his ‘blog Three Cheers for Darkened Years! He is also one half of The B-Movies Podcast on Crave Online, an honor he shares with one William Bibbiani. He was also recently tapped to write a series of articles for the same website called Free Film School. 

Michael Bay’s “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” was released this week, and we are once again faced with the baffling continued success of an action director whose output is pretty consistently overblown, loud, dumb, and difficult to watch. Sure, many of us have a weakness for one of his films or another (I have met several defenders of “The Rock,” some people like to pair up “Point Break” with Bay’s “Bad Boys II,” and more than one of my peers has said “The first Transformers movie wasn’t that bad!”), but many agree that he’s largely a director of clunky, melodramatic operas with dumb love triangles, bad performances from good actors, and hundreds of explosions. His ability to blow shit up real good seems to be his only virtue.

 

And while I have a modicum of faith that one day he’ll make something a bit more soulful and personal, he seems to be stuck in a mold of a very specific kind of action flick. I understand that a man like Bay is essentially an industry in himself; he can’t make a movie without having to hire the same 800-person team of effects technicians and military consultants, but his so-called Industry films are all very similar in their level of technical competence and visual confusion.

 

And every one of his films to date (he has made nine features) has contained the following cliches, whether by design, or just by Bay’s own subconscious interests. Most directors have a visual flare, a style all their own, that they bring to each of their films. The better directors (or at least the more interesting ones) have a unique vision of the world, that they’re constantly trying to share with the world. Bay’s interests and style seem to skew in the following directions:

 

Power Ballads 

In “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” there seem to be no scenes at all that are entirely quiet. If the scene is even remotely warm or emotional, the soundtrack will drop to its knees like a Christian rocker, and wait away on its microphone about the pain it has in its heart. The layered guitars and high-pitched white guy power rock is ever-present in each of Bay’s film, with the exception of “Pearl Harbor,” which, to be fair, took place in the ’30s and ’40s.

 

I do have to admit, I often have a weakness for a good power ballad, and I am guilty of being the one to take the stage at karaoke and sing “Come Sail Away.” Indeed, Bay’s inclusion of Aerosmith’s song “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” on the soundtrack to “Armageddon” was kind of a brilliant move, earning Aerosmith an Oscar nomination, and effectively bringing them back into the public eye. I support this move.

 

However, Bay is so fond of the screamy version of power rock, that he stuffs it into every possible scene that doesn’t have an explosion in it. This is typical of Bay. Why have a quiet, subtle, moment of real human connection, when it can be EFFING HUGE?

 

Women as objects 

I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, and refrain from calling Bay a misogynist, as he got his start with Playboy Magazine, shooting documentaries about monthly Centerfolds. Whatever you think of the people who shoot softcore smut, this was Bay’s original idiom. And I’ll give him this: he sure knows how to shoot a woman’s body. Early in “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” when we first see the film’s lead actress (former Victoria’s Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley), Bay gives us a loving close-up of her tawny thigh and high, firm buttocks.

 

A fellow critic called this loving close up “date rape with a camera.” And while Bay is certainly not the worst director about objectifying and hurting women on camera (look to Lars Von Trier for that), there is a level of discomfort in the way he depicts the fairer sex on camera. In “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” Shia LeBeouf’s character goes to college for the first time, and the college campus looks like a cattle call for a Maxim Magazine shoot; each of the women is a professional model, who wears tight, skimpy clothing, and seems capable of shooting a beer bong with the fellas. When we first see Megan Fox in “Transformers,” the camera leers at her like a lecherous old man. Even Lisa Boyle in “Bad Boys” spends the bulk of the film parading around in a flimsy outfit.

 

I understand that these are films for teenage boys, and including sexy ladies in sexy outfits is a b-movie trope as old as cinema itself, but I would appreciate it if Bay included some female characters who were well-rounded human being, rather than mynx-like whores, or blushing virgins.

 

Too many closeups 

You’d think that a director known for action would be more keen in including long, distant shots of the action’s scenario. Like extended effects shots where we can see the car crashing, the building collapsing, the robots fighting. It’s like the difference between a long, single-take dance scene in an old musical, and a 100-time-edited dance scene in a more recent one.

 

But rather than let his action scenes play themselves out organically, Bay seem hellbent on including extreme closeups of his heroes faces, usually at an obnoxious Dutch angle, to imply intensity. The closeups are intended to, I suppose, convey that our hero, while in the midst of a noisy battle scene, is having a moment of panic, of real human emotions. But the way he incorporated them only shows a jarring edit to something outside the action.

 

Even when they’re not in an action scene, Bay seems to put his camera a little bit too close to his actors for comfort. Watch “Pearl Harbor,” and note how many mid-close-ups there are. The number is less than ten. Instead, he has over-the-shoulder shots aplenty, and extreme closeups that cut off the actors’ skullcaps and chins.

 

Bad editing 

Bay has hired mostly different editors for each of his films (indeed, there were three on “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” and “Armageddon,” respectively), but each of his films seems to be edited in the same way: incoherently. While the action scenes are edited in such a way that we can see cars being pulled in half, Japanese bombers hitting ships, and trains rolling off of enormous trucks, the editing throughout the rest of the films all seem to have the same frantic, bombastic quality that the power ballads do.

 

Note to Michael Bay: Not every scene in your film has to be a climax. Climaxes only work when they are spaced out. When they have been punctuated by drama and a slow build up. Not when they’re loud and fast, and thrown about any which way in your film. I recall a scene in “The Island” when Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson are going to kiss for the first time, and the scene gives up some weird obscuring edits to make sure the tender moment of two being discovering their sexuality for the first time is completely toothless.

 

It’s one thing to edit an action scene like an action scene (the weird close-ups notwithstanding). It’s another to edit your entire film as if it’s an action scene.

 

Vehicle fetish 

“Bad Boys II” had that scene where the Hum-V crashes through a slum. “The Island” had that train thing on the back of a truck. “The Rock” had another Hum-V. “Armageddon” was all about drills and ships and spacecraft. And what are the “Transformers” movies if not a prolonged fetishistic look at our cars and planes? Michael Bay has the biggest hardon for cars and trucks in the history of the entertainment industry, and I include David Cronenberg in that statement.

 

It’s been said that action directors make noisy and explodey films in order to sort of restack the mental deck away from actual sexuality, using a kind of ultra-violent substitution. Rather than showing people having real sex, we’ll have our release in the form of a car flying to pieces, a tank crushing a truck, or, most embarrassingly, the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

 

Even when they can’t turn into talking robots, the cars and trucks in Bay’s films are all noisy, powerful, heavy, metal monstrosities that seem all-powerful. Bay gives the same loving attention to shiny cars, speedy jets, and bulky cargo planes that he does to women’s thighs and buttocks. Perhaps he’s just trying to hit all the bases, and make sure he films all the things teenage boys are interested in (loud cars and lithe bodies are often equal passions to young men), but the Venn diagram, in Bay’s case, seems to overlap to a discomforting degree.

 

Military fetish 

Even more than his loving, sexual attention given to cars and planes, Bay seems to have a powerfully sexual interest in the military. Every single one of his feature films features the military in a prominent role. Seriously. A;ll of them. Large, burly men in black-ops outfits, running in teams, making formations, giving hand signals, and leveling their weapons at whatever the bad guy is today… this seems to be Bay’s version of foreplay.

 

Again, a gunfight is all well and good, but Bay ratchets his gunfight scenes up to such a degree that they take on an orgiastic quality. He doesn’t sexualize the men like a more sexual director would (Paul Verhoeven, for instance, would make sure to show the military guys with their shirts off), but seems much more interested in the details of military tactics, the shape, gait and fighting stances of the men when they’re in the heat of action. It’s essentially pornography, featuring only men, intended for straight guys, and only incidentally having no sex.

 

Any film to feature the military often needs direct co-operation with the U.S. armed forces. How else are you going to get access to real tanks, planes and uniforms? It’d cost a lot to rent such things. So many film producers merely ask for help from the actual USMC. As a result, the films have to be slightly pro-military by default; it’d be hard to work with real general and tank marshals if you’re making a film about how horrible those men are. Bay not only makes sure the military is depicted as a heroic force of big-biceped badasses, but goes one step further, showing that they’re the only REAL men in the world.

 

Helicopters at sunrise 

Every single one of Bay’s films (again, every single one, without exception) features the following shot: A group of helicopters swits silently by (in slow-motion), while the warming orange glow of the sunrise (or sunset) filters through their spinning blades. It’s said that most directors have a shot they like to return to, or an angle they’re kind of fond of. If Bay has any trademark, it’s the helicopters at sunrise shot.

 

Indeed, I was so familiar with this shot, that when I went into “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” I was looking for it. It only happens briefly in that film, but there is a shot of circling helicopters against an orange sky. It’s like clockwork with that guy.

 

It was one of the first shots in “The Rock.” It was used at the launch in “Armageddon,” The “Bad Boys” movies are almost completely orange. My goodness. It’s like Bay saw “Apocalypse Now” at an early age, and fell in love with it to an irrational degree. This is a shot that no other director has taken, and no other director would have the chutzpah to take. This is distinctly Bay’s, and always will be. 

 

Witney Seibold is a film critic and theater worker living in Los Angeles. When he’s not writing bitter, troll-baiting articles for Geekscape, he’s writing equally bitter film reviews over on his ‘blog Three Cheers for Darkened Years!, or being the more sour half of The B-Movies Podcast on Crave Online. He’ll be going to the San Diego Comic Convention in a few weeks, so keep an eye out for him, as you’ll be able to insult him to his face, and likely make him cry.

 

I have a curious relationship with film director Michael Bay. Back in 1996, I went to see his film “The Rock” in theaters, and, even though I was 17 years old at the time, and smack in the middle of the film’s intended demographic, I found myself hating the film to an irrational degree. It was the first action film where I began to see small logical errors, where I began to notice overblown overacting, where I began to notice ridiculous plotting and melodrama as actual detriments to my enjoyment of the film. I was so put off by “The Rock” that I began to be wary of any film with a car chase or a gunfight. I was put off of action films for a few years. The entire genre began to seem trite and uninvolving to me. It was about this time I began to ignore most action films entirely, and watch obscure European films and kooky extreme horror flicks almost exclusively.

 

After a painful (and socially awkward) period, I eventually came around to action films, luckily, and can enjoy them once again; my prejudices are few these days. But, despite the alienating experience I had at age 17, and my stubborn temporary swearing off of all things explodey, I have, without trying, seen most all of Michael Bay’s films. He’s like an abusive relationship I keep returning to. I know it’s going to hurt, and my levels of hope of things working out this time are nil, but I still keep getting dragged back. Thanks to a bargain I made with a friend, I have seen “The Island” in theaters (but I made him sit through “Eraserhead” and “The Apple” in exchange; he feels I got the good end of the deal). Thanks to an Oscar-night tradition, I have seen “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” (after the Oscar telecast, my wife and I hunker down in front of the film to have won the Razzie the previous night). To date, I have not seen “Armageddon,” supposed to be Bay’s opus magnus, but I sense a day will come when I relax enough, and my camp knob will be cranked to high enough levels, that I will voluntarily watch it of my own volition. And it will hurt me, juts like all the others.  

This brings me to “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” Bay’s latest incomprehensible mess masquerading as an entertainment. This film, the third in the series of high-budget, 145-minute action spectaculars based on the series of 1980s Hasbro toys, is just as over-stuffed and as jarring and as thuddingly dull as its predecessors. The plot makes no sense at all, and the gigantic transforming robot critters still have no personality at all. Their dialogue consists of lines like “Autobots, retreat!” and “Activate the pillars!” which are all delivered by veteran voice actors like Peter Cullen, Frank Welker, John DiMaggio, and Jess Harnell who, despite their talent and years of wok in the business, can’t seem to bring any sort of dimension to the ridiculous dialogue. The result is a group of characters that have about as much personality as a ten-year-old Toyota Corolla, but don’t look as nice.

 

Yes, I still have that horrid problem with the design of the robots as I did with the previous “transformers” film, in that they all look like a swirling mass of unconnected gears and car parts. Watching two Transformers fighting is a miasma of banging, clanking fractals with no center or shape. It’s just a bunch of random moving parts. In a few scenes, at the very least, Bay managed to color-code some of the robots, but since none of them had any real function or personality, it didn’t much matter which one was which. All we needed to know is that the red one wanted to blow up Earth, and that the red-and-blue one (that was sometimes a truck) wanted to stop him/it. They seem scuffed up in robot form, but the scuffs disappear when they turn into cars or planes.

 

The human characters don’t fare much better. Bay has an uncanny ability to make his actors overact, and still, somehow, manage to display no emotion whatsoever. Lines are delivered either with a teeth-gnashing gravitas, or are screamed at the top of one’s lungs (Drive! Drive! Shoot ‘im! Shoot ‘im!). Shia LeBeouf is the lead characters but his only personality trait this time is that he’s a bit embarrassed that he can’t get a job. He’s not really noble or good-spirited or anything. Indeed, he doesn’t seem to have much motivation beyond rescuing his perpetually-imperiled girlfriend Carly (British model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, who can read lines o.k., I guess). There are supporting roles from some curiously-cast Coen Bros. veterans as well. John Tuturro plays a conspiracy theorist of some kind, and seems to be having a lot more fun than I was. Frances McDormand showed up as a ball-busting CIA exec who gets to snap at people and gleefully threaten burly marines with guns. In what is the film’s most surreal performance, John Malkovich plays a man-tanned, compulsive office CEO who, in one seen, gets to giggle like a school girl, and roll around on his back, while a gigantic yellow robot tickles his tummy. For that one brief moment, we get a wacky reprieve from the stupidity of the world around us. 

JFK must have led a much richer life than we originally thought. In “X-Men: First Class,” the president had to conspire with superpowered psychics and mutants during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In this film, he started the space race merely to retrieve a crashed alien space vessel on the moon. Indeed, we see younger versions of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin creeping through a vast Transformers spaceship. Later, we see the real-life Aldrin addressing Optimus Prime (Cullen) in person. This is either a grand fulfillment of a generation’s childhood fantasies, or an incredibly crass disrespect to the achievements of real-life astronauts. Take your pick.

 

The story: Sam Witwicky (LeBeouf) is living in Washington DC with his hot British girlfriend, and dreams of getting a big-time job. He received a medal from Obama, but that doesn’t help him. He feels emasculated and weak. His girlfriend’s boss (Patrick Dempsey) is much more handsome and rich than he is. Sam’s parents (Kevin Dunn and Julie White) are in town to embarrass him. Simmons (Tuturro) is still around, and now has a bafflingly broad gay German butler (Alan Tudyk), who minces as well as he fights. The character is so pleasantly out-of-place and so weirdly appealing, that I wish I could have seen a film entirely about him.

 

Meanwhile, the Autobots, the race of intelligent transforming robots, have heard final word that, ever since 1972, their old leader Sentinel (Leonard Nimoy) has been deactivated on the moon. They retrieve him from the moon, resurrect him, and bring him up to speed on their war with the Decepticons, which is largely over. The bad guys, led by Megatron (Hugo Weaving) are living in the Australian outback, and scheming to teleport a dormant army of Decepticons to Earth, and then to teleport their home planet into Earth’s orbit. They’ll also need human slaves, although it’s never really explained why a race of robots would need tiny, fragile human slaves for anything.

 

If the army is on the moon, and the Transformers can get to and from the moon so easily (they do seem to shuttle about with ease), why do they need to steal a teleporter to get the bad guys to Earth? Can they not transform into spaceships?

 

The action scene are ugly, graceless, drab, noisy, dull. After a mere 20 minutes of everything being played at a horribly loud pitch, the audience will be beaten down and pressed into their seats by the oppressive noise. The images will lose cohesion, and the finale will play like a random series of digital images that have no connection to reality. The robots grind and pound and shoot and burrow and slice and dismember, and don’t seem to have any sort of weight, heft, imagination or reality. They also don’t seem to communicate very well: when the bad-guy robots have located the brave humans, only one or two robots at a time try to kill them, despite the fact that they have hundreds in the area, including a robot that can crush buildings like a snake. Luckily, our heroes survive through the magic of plot convenience.  

I will say this: A part of my pop-culture nerdiness winced when I heard Nimoy repeating his famous line from “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” in Transformer form. “Transformers” doesn’t have the clout, adult behavior, cogency or reality of a “Star Trek” movie.

 

Bay also seems to have a bad habit of glorifying the military to a fetishistic degree. No five minutes can pass without a group of heavily-armed marines running past the screen, their biceps, pectorals, and quadriceps glistening in the orange, orange sun. Men scream, shoot, ‘splo stuff up, shouting hoo-rah. Tanks, planes, trucks, jeeps are all given the supple and loving close-ups usually reserved for human genitals in a porno film. This film, almost as much as Zack Snyder‘s “Sucker Punch,” seems to be using explosions and violence as a direct substitution for any sort of real human sexuality. It makes me dread the potential bedroom antics Bay must get himself into. Or perhaps he’s content to polish a car, running his hands over its warm, unyielding chassis, quietly sighing in sexual ecstasy.  

When I wrote my review of “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” I was veritably beset by a hyperactive cadre of internet defenders, who accused me of slamming a film out of hipness, and giving into the wolfpack mentality. They proceeded to explain that the film was mindless popcorn entertainment, and that I was bringing undue analysis to something that was meant to be dumb. I take exception to the hipness and wolfpack accusations, and I make no apology for my opinions. However dumb they were intended to be, they are not entertaining. They are noisy and stultifying, and completely lacking is style or grace or wit. I don’t understand the vitriol that the defenders have. “Transformers” needs no defense. What it needs is for people to stay away, and perhaps seek out better, more interesting action films, that offer edification, thrills, emotions, and style.

On Friday, Pixar’s “Cars 2” will be released, and my criticism of the franchise remains: Where are the people? This universe of intelligent cars is a creepy, creepy universe, as I can’t tell where these talking, thinking machines came from. It doesn’t take too large a leap of imagination to picture “Cars” as a post-apocalyptic parable where the cars killed all the humans in a gory war, and took over. What’s more, Michael Bay (who, for some reason, has not yet been killed, dissected, and harvested for his teeth and inner pockets of unguents) is going to release the third of his live-action “Transformers” films the following week, making for a summer veritable full of talking, intelligent cars.

 

I have even seen ads for a new car model that has sensors in its bumpers, allowing it to stop suddenly should it sense danger. Yes, we’ve reached the point where we can program our cars with a Spider Sense. These same cars can parallel park themselves. Does anyone else see this less as a brilliant and convenient innovation, and more as a hugely creepy step toward machine domination?

 

In honor of the crawly feelings we feel watching talking cars flirt with one another, I have compiled a list of talking and/or intelligent cars from movies and TV. There are actually fewer than you think.

 

10) The Gadgetmobile

from “Inspector Gadget” (1999)

Here’s a warning: If you loved Don Adams’ 1983-1986 cartoon show “Inspector Gadget,” for the love of God, don’t go back and revisit it. Let your cherished childhood memories stay where they are. If you go back, you may find what a bad show it was, how awkwardly animated it was, how poorly written. It was cute and funny as a child. It may prove horrifying and abrasive as an adult.

 

In 1999, in an early grab for the nostalgia buck (long before Hollywood was adapting every single available property), Disney made a live-action film version of “Inspector Gadget” starring Matthew Broderick, which was every bit as sloppy and abrasive as the TV show. The two or three seconds of funny material and generally good production design weren’t enough to offset the weird editing and general crumminess of it. What the film did have, though, was an updated version of The Gadgetmobile.

 

In the TV show, the Gadgetmobile was merely a sedan that could transform into a sports car. In the movie, it’s a full blown robot life form, complete with a cute face, a wonderfully insane attitude, and a human voice (played by comedian D.L. Hughley). The dialogue it spewed wasn’t clever or anything, but I recall it being a refreshingly self-aware creature in a miasma of weirdness.

 

9) Wheels and Roadie

from “Pole Position” (1984)

 

If you’re any age, I think you’ve been exposed to the “Pole Position” video game at some point. It was the arcade game most often found in rec rooms and pizza parlors, and was one of the first arcade games to featured a steering wheel and stick shift right on the machine. The steering wheel would spin freely, and you could fling that thing as hard as you wanted, making your video car crash in a fiery fireball of glorious pixels. I still have memories of the low-tech recorded voice saying “prepare to qualify” at the game’s outset.

 

In 1984, DIC Entertainment adapted the low-concept game into a high-concept TV series for Saturday Morning consumption. The show was more than just racing, as it followed the exploits of a group of children and teenagers, as they followed in the super-spy footsteps of their unseen (and dead) parents. Each kid on the Pole Position spy team was given a secret identity, one was given a raccoon-monkey hybrid pet, and two of them were given talking, thinking cars (a la “Knight Rider”) to aid them in adventures and missions. The two cars were names, perhaps uncreatively, Wheels and Roadie.

 

Wheels was a 1965 Mustang with a grumpy voice, and a careful disposition. It seemed smarter than the kids. Wheels was played by Melvin Franklin from The Temptations. Roadie was a bit more bland in comparison, but was a much cooler, super-sleek future car. The “Pole Position” TV series gave us more than just childhood fantasies of being able to drive cars, but gave us talking, intelligent cars to help us on our way.

 

8) Mustafa

from “Ruby 3” (1990)

This one wins the obscurity prize. Mustafa was the aircar of Ruby, the Galactic Gumshoe, star of a series of radio dramas beginning in the 1980s, and continuing today (there are eight “Ruby” series to date). I do realize that I’m one of the only people in the world to care about radio drama, so bear with me on this one.

 

Ruby lives on the distant planet of SummaNulla in the distant future, when Earth has been bought by Disney, and weird, spiritual crises are cropping up everywhere. Ruby is sassy and tough, and usually can fight her way out of a group of Slymies just as well as she can outwit the mob. She has the ability to slow time, and is never without her Smith-Hitachi-Godzilla Blunderbuss Blaster.

 

Also with her is Mustafa, her talking aircar. Mustafa looks like a 1940s Mercury with stubby wings and a tail, and is equipped with a cannon in his trunk. Mustafa seems like an old soul, however, preferring to offer Zen-monk-like advice (“The tongue is soft and remains. The teeth are hard and fall out.”), and saying things like “I hear and I obey” in his Indian accent. Easy in a scrape, and calming on those long flights, Mustafa is the car to get.

 

7) Click and Clack, The Tappet Bros.

from NPR’s “Car Talk” (1977-present)

These guys are cars, right? I mean, they talk about cars all the time, and they make funny car noises on their show. They must be cars. These guys are cool, ’cause they’re they only real-life intelligent cars that you can actually call and talk to. If you have questions about your ailing vehicle, they’ll offer advice on what’s wrong and how to fix it. They should know. They’re cars. I hear their real names are Tom and Ray Magliozzi. I think that’s just a rumor. Their names are Click and Clack. They are cars. They are. Just call 1-888-CAR-TALK

 

The real 7) Speed Buggy and Schleppcar

from “Speed Buggy” (1973-1983) and “Wonderbug” (1976-1978) respectively

There was a curious subculture in the mid 1970s that revolved entirely around dune buggies. White suburban kids would buy offroad-ready buggies, soup them up, stock them up with camping equipment, beers and prophylactics, and head out into the wilds. If you’ve ever been watching a low-budget, late ’60s sexploitation film, and wondered why there was a long, long sequence of kids off-roading, know that it linked up to what kids were really doing at the time.

 

Not to be outdone by the trend, Hanna-Barbera developed one of their longest-running, limited animation series “Speed Buggy,” about a coughing, sputtering, talking dune buggy and his cadre of teeanage sleuths, gadding about, playing in a band, and solving mysteries. It was like “Scooby-Doo,” but with a car instead of a dog. And longer lasting. The show ran a curiously long time, despite its thin premise.

A show that shared its premise almost identically was the Krofft’s “Wonderbug,” about a trio of teen sleuths who drove around in a living dune buggy they called Schleppcar. Schelppcar didn’t speak, but could kind of mutter and sputter. When they blew the horn, Schleppcar would transform into Wonderbug, and had the ability to fly and to go underwater. I have a theory that Wonderbug and Speed Buggery – I mean Buggy – were actually the same vehicle, and would moonlight with different groups of kids. My theory give the car a rich, devious double-life that’s fun to contemplate while you’re high, and watch re-runs of either.

 

6) Benny

from “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” (1988)

Benny is a talking taxicab, built in 1910, and still working decades later. He’s a street-wise New Yorker, displaced to L.A., always quick to give a ride, and able to instantly appear anytime you stick out your thumb. He’s a good buddy, willing to chat you up like any good cabbie, and able to elude anyone who might be tailing you. If I were embroiled in some devious intrigue, and evil ‘toons were on my tail, I’d definitely want Benny on my side.

 

Benny does have a few weaknesses, sadly. He can be impounded like any car, and if he drives through The Dip, he’s outta luck. And, even though he’s a ‘toon, he can still get into real crashes like any car, and, like any car in the 1940s, isn’t equipped with seat belts or any safety devices. Despite his cunning in escaping bad guys, he’s still something of a death trap.

 

Watch “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” again sometime, and marvel at the special effects in Benny’s scenes. They had to make it look like a human actor was driving around in a cartoon car. The result is amazing.

 

5) MegaWeapon

from “Warrior of the Lost World” (1983)

MegaWeapon is the strong silent type. A gigantic truck with cannons, guns, and a cow-catcher on the front, MegaWeapon is an intelligent bloke that can crush anything he’s hired to crush. When we meet MegaWeapon, he’s in the employ of an evil corporation that would enslave the reamining human population after the apocalypse, so we’re not necessarily supposed to love him, but… well… he’s just so damn cool.

 

We know in our heart of hearts that MegaWeapon has a life outside of the corporation, and probably looks at his destructo job for this company as just another paycheck along the way. If MegaWeapon were a person, he’d be a grizzled, alcoholic, ex-army badass who still wins arm-wrestling competitions in his spare time, and dreams of reuniting with his estranged daughter.

 

Today, I think MegaWeapon lives in Wisconsin with his sister, and is a good uncle to his sister’s kids. If there was a killer, 900,000-pound death machine that I’d want to knock back a few brewskis with, it’d be MegaWeapon. If I met MegaWeapon in a bar, I bet he’d really like me. MegaWeapon! MegaWeapon!

 

4) Alex

from “Turbo Teen” (1984)

Alex gets in on a technicality, as he is actually just an average white suburban teenager most of the time. He goes to school, he eats junk food, and he tries to crack wise with his various friends. He would hardly be worth nothing on any list, were it not for his strange, strange, strange accidental ability to turn bodily into a Corvette whenever he gets hot.

 

Yes, Alex is Turbo Teen. I used to watch “Turbo Teen” and wonder how much say Alex had in the driving. He required a friend to drive him, but he could also occasionally steer the car himself. I wonder how he felt about that. Was it a violation if friends drove him against his will? If he got in an accident as the car, would he bruised and beaten up when he turned back into a human? His flesh turned into metal. Did his blood turn into oil? If he was low on gas, could he turn into a human and eat a heavy meal to fill up? Would the gas in the car make Alex feel full? The mysteries were endless.

 

Also, the ultimate mystery: What if Alex moved to a hot climate? He’d be a car all the time. He’s no longer be a human who turned into a car, but a car that, very occasionally became a man. In a weird way, he could achieve immortality, provided he took care of himself, and replaced his parts with regularity. Turbo Teen would become The Turbo. Alex will live forever.

 

3) Christine

from “Christine” (1983)

What a badass. What a horrible, horrible lady. Christine, a 1958 Plymouth Fury, is a jealous, demon-possessed succubus who gloms onto the gearhead boy who takes care of her, and kills anyone who insults him, or threatens to take him away from her. She has had a long series of owners over the decades, as she manages to lose all the boys she protects. She doesn’t speak, but can communicate through her radio, which still manages to pick up radio signals from 1958.

 

When Arnie (Keith Gordon) adopts Christine, she falls in love with him, and proceeds to bring him into their toxic and controlling, pseudo-romatic relationship. When he makes eyes at another woman, Christine will try to smash her car. When bullies try to separate them, Christine will kill them y running them down in the night. And, most shockingly, when bad guys smash her up, Christine will magically repair herself. She’ll even do horrid damage to her own chassis just to run down a thug in a narrow alleyway. That’s the kind of scary commitment you simultaneously want and don’t want from your mate.

 

If you haven’t seen John Carpenter’s film (adapted from a Stephen King story), I implore that you do. It’s rich, atmospheric, and really, really scary. Stephen King has always notoriously had a fear of loud noisy machines (“Maximum Overdrive” nearly made it onto this list), and Carpenter managed to capture that fear, and give to to wide audiences in the form of his 1983 classic.

 

2) Herbie

from “The Love Bug” (1968) and others

At first glance, an ordinary Volkswagen Beetle. Upon further inspection, a superfast racecar that can zip along more quickly than any formula racer. Upon even further inspection, a friendly human soul named Herbie, trapped inside a car, complete with the ability to think, reason, and drive himself. Herbie is a wise old soul who knowns good from evil, and will always help out a friend in a pinch. He’s like Benny, but friendlier, more efficient, and silently placid. I always pictured Herbie like a playful, laughing Buddha, willing to get into scrapes, but always at peace. He may be sad at time, but his default position is cheer.

 

Growing up, I saw Herbie movies on TV all the time. “The Love Bug,” “Herbie Rides Again” (1971), and “Herbie Goes Bananas” (1980) were in the heaviest rotation, although “Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo” (1977) made its way thin there occasionally. As kids, we all have fantasies of driving cars, as we see our parents and guardians doing it all the time, and we long for that kind of control. Little boys especially long to get behind the wheel. Herbie made that dream feel real. If the car could kind of drive for us, we’d have a friend.

 

Herbie made a reappearance in 1982 with a short-lived TV series. He then took a hiatus until 1997, when he appeared in a TV movie starring Bruce Campbell. I haven’t seen it. Nor did I see the 2002 feature film “Herbie Fully Loaded” with Lindsay Lohan, although I understand it’s a tolerable film. I’d be willing to give it a chance, as my childhood is infused with cheerful memories of a living VW Bug.

 

1) KITT

from “Knight Rider” (1982-1986)

The granddaddy of them all, KITT is a prim, mannered, well-read, intelligent superspy who just happens to be a car. KITT was developed by Knight Industries, and given to Michael Knight as a means to help fight crime, but the dynamic between the man and the car was quickly established to be one of a crime-fighting team, with KITT often making the best decisions, and doing a god deal of the grunt work. Sure, Michael was needed to sneak inside buildings and hide under bushes and stuff, but when it came time to whip out the heavy artillery, KITT was your man. Er, car.

 

What’s more, KITT looked awesome. He had a shiny black paintjob that never seemed to scuff, a sleek sportcar body, and a badass flashing red light on the front of his hood. He could do everything that every single one of James Bond’s car could do and more. And his voice (played by William Daniels in the original series, and Val Kilmer in the 2008 reboot) sounded like the voice of reason.

 

There was a time when you could go to Universal Studios in Hollywood, and sit inside KITT and converse with him. Very occasionally David Hasselhoff himself would come down and pose for pictures with you. The “Knight Rider” series lasted four seasons, but has left an indelible mark in the minds of the little boys who watched it.

 

Plus, KITT has a cousin. Knight Boat.

 

 

 Witney Seibold got his driver’s license when he was 21 years old, and currently drives a 1997 Geo Metro with a dent in the front and slightly misaligned wheels. He really need to take that thing to the mechanic. When he’s not writing about cars, or compiling all kinds of wacky lists for Geekscape, he’s working on his own ‘blog Three Cheers for Darkened Years, and co-hosting The B-Movies Podcast with William Bibbiani over on Crave Online. He also just started a series of Articles called Free Film School which you should check out.

Martin Campbell‘s “Green Lantern” is a pretty dumb film. It seems that as we work our way down the list of known comic book superheroes slated for film adaptation, we’re dipping ever deeper into the B- and C-list, giving big-budget Hollywood treatment to superheroes that may have a loyal and stalwart fan-base, but who are increasingly far-fetched. We can all understand Batman, as he’s a masked vigilante, getting revenge on all criminals for the death of his parents. We can all understand Spider-Man, as he’s just a nerdy kid who had bug powers accidentally gifted to him. It’s a little harder to get behind a concept as admittedly strange as The Green Lantern, who was given a magic ring by a space alien, and who was drafted into an intergalactic military, but is still named after, oddly enough, a green lantern.

 

This new film version bothers to explain, only in the most cursory fashion, just how the Green Lantern Corps works, but it’s still rather confusing. Evidently, the color green is the color of pure will. Pure will is the strongest source of energy in the universe. The Green Lantern Corps acts as the peacekeepers of the universe, and their magical rings allow them to temporarily create just about anything they can imagine. They imagine things like rocks and swords and guns and chainsaws. The rings also, somehow, select whom they want to be worn by, and there’s a lot of portentous readings of the line “The ring chose you!” The rings require batteries, in that they need to be charged up using a green rock that looks like a lantern… Y’know what? It’s all too convoluted.  

But Martin Campbell’s film commits even more grievous cinematic sins, in that its not the least bit emotionally engaging, and, indeed, is even sloppily made. There are scenes where our hero, Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) is on a distant planet, learning how to use his new superpowers and taking lessons from the pink-skinned Sinestro (Mark Strong in a prosthetic forehead), and in the next is sauntering through his apartment door, dropping his keys as if nothing had happened. There are no transitions from one scene to the next, making for some jarring jump cuts. Later in the film, during a climactic battle between the Green Lantern and a psychic rival named Hector (Peter Sarsgaard), a colossal negative space wedgie named Parallax breaks in through the windows of the warehouse where the battle was taking place. We knew that this Parallax was coming to Earth, but we didn’t learn until that moment that this gigantic cloud of evil, about the size of a major city, had made its way through the atmosphere, and had collected around that particular warehouse. Again: jarring. There’s another scene where Hal leaves one locale during the day, and is instantly transported across town where it is suddenly night. This is such an elementary mistake, I’m surprised to see it in a big-budget Hollywood action film.  

The story for those who aren’t familiar with Green Lantern lore: Hal Jordan is a test pilot for the military. He flies with his one-time lover Carol Ferris (Blake Lively, woefully miscast as a jet pilot, who only looks comfortable during the scenes where she has to wear a nice dress at a fancy ball), and works for the usual set of glad-handing suits, represented by Tim Robbins. These scenes are a bit bland, but only serve as prologue to the superhero mayhem. While Hal is flying planes and getting into trouble, a la “Top Gun,” an alien crash lands on Earth with a magic ring looking for a new owner. The ring selects Hal to be a member of the Green Lantern Corps, and Hal is transported through a wormhole to the other side of the universe where he meets a collection of alien begins, all of whom have their own magic rings, and who have sworn to stop evil. There’s an evil yellow, soul-swallowing cloud working its way to Earth, as it wants revenge on the ring that sent it to prison. The rings select people based on their courage. The Green Lantern Corps are rules by a group of big-headed purple elders who seem to offer no practical advice.

 

Hal is shown around by a mugwump-looking creature named Tomar-Re (voiced by Geoffrey Rush), and is trained, ever so briefly, by Sinestro. With a name like that, he sounds like he, perhaps, ought to be watched closely. It turns out that Sinestro is a villain in the comics. Fitting. The scenes on the distant planets and the scenes on Earth are so tonally different, and the transitions so jarring that they feel like they come from two different movies altogether. I wish more filmmakers would spend less time designing the look of their distant CGI-constructed planets, and more time constructing their tone and pace and sense of place. I had a similar complaint about Asgard in the recent “Thor.” I didn’t really ever feel like we were in a real place. Computers let us construct images and places, but not tones or environments. That takes a level of artistry.  

Oh yes, Peter Sarsgaard plays a nebbishy xenobiologist named Hector who has been drafted by the CIA to do an autopsy on the corpse of the crashed alien. While poking through the alien’s wounds, he becomes infected by an alien virus of some kind that makes him slowly mutate, and gives him psychic powers. Sarsgaard is such a good actor, and seemed to feel so aware of his place in this silly superhero movie that he came across as the most sympathetic and believable. It’s sad when your best character is the “B” villain. 

When Carol learns that Hal has green superpowers and can fly and create things out of thin air, she only looks at him in a disappointed fashion. Well, fine. You have the most extraordinary abilities any human has ever had. But do you ever call? What does a glowing space marine have to do to please you? Although I did like that his little green Robin-sized face mask does literally nothing to hide his identity. The film at least acknowledges that a little mask won’t do much.  

I suppose kids might like “Green Lantern,” but anyone over the age of 10 will be disappointed, unmoved and confused. In recent years we’ve seen some pretty serious superhero treatment given to Batman, Spider-Man and Iron Man. The Green Lantern is given a CGI suit (the suit was animated onto the actor, giving his body a weird disconnect from his head), the most advanced movie animation, the biggest of budgets, and the most portentous of line readings from some talented actors, but it’s still not serious, emotionally realistic, or even respectful to the admittedly strange source material.

 

I have predicted in the past that the superhero trend is already on the wane, and big-budget superhero films will cease being made relatively soon. The pull-out of major film studios from the yearly Comic Con in San Diego is one sign. If my prediction that “The Avengers” will tank proves true, that’ll be another. This “Green Lantern” film is definitely a sure sign. If this sprt of thing is all we’re going to get from here on out, then perhaps we should be glad.

Special thanks to my wife Angie and William Bibbiani for crucial input on this list.

 

Opening this weekend is the anticipated superhero blockbuster “Green Lantern.” I did see the film, and I did review it, but, I must admit, I knew very little about The Green Lantern going in. The only thing I can really distinctly recall (from a childhood glued to a random assortment of superhero cartoons) is that he once fought his arch nemesis, The Yellow Lantern. The Green Lantern seemed to have a weakness to anything that was colored yellow.

 

Is it me, or is that a bonkers weakness to have? The color yellow? Can the Green Lantern be brought down by yellow legal pads? Polka-dot bikinis? Marshmallow peeps? I understand that the “green” part plays into his superhero identity, and that he could easily dispatch me with his greeny superpowers, but if he can be blocked by the color yellow, anyone with a supersoaker full of Rit dye could bring the guy down.

 

Most every superhero, alien, or otherwise extraordinary being typically has a single weakness – something simple, something so elementary that it becomes unexpected – that their foes can easily have a McGuffin to slow them down before they are taken out. Superman has chunks of crystal from his home planet, to cite one clear example. But as aliens and superheroes have become more numerous, the weaknesses involved have only become more outlandish. In honor of The Green Lantern’s weakness to yellow, I ave compiled this list of the strangest weaknesses in pop culture.

 

Let’s marvel, shall we?

 

10) Milk

in “Ernest Scared Stupid” (1991) 

Ernest (Jim Varney), the stalwart and clear-thinking, if not somewhat dull, blue-collar hero, has gone to camp, escaped from jail, saved Christmas, gone to Africa, played on the NBA, joined the army, and, yes, was scared stupid. In his 1991 feature film, Ernest, due to his bumbling with some taboo magical artifacts, accidentally unleashed a troll onto the Earth, right around Halloween. Ernest is clear-headed enough to want to releash the troll, and save Earth, but his misinterpretation of the sacred scroll had him looking for “miak” on the night in question.

 

Luckily, he untangled his mistake just in time, and found that the troll can be harmed and recaptured using ordinary cow’s milk. The scenes of Ernest and his pre-teen titans spraying milk on the trolls is a bit dizzying, not to mention borderline pornographic. Why are trolls weakened by milk? I dunno. Perhaps because it was slightly more poetic than Yoo-Hoo.

 

9) Water

in “Unbreakable” (2000) and “Signs” (2002) 

It must be remembered that, before he established a hateful reputation for directing self-aggrandizing fables like “Lady in the Water,” tepid thrillers like “the Village,” and loathed cartoon adaptations like “The Last Airbender,” M. Night Shyamalan presented us with a steady stream of solid and entertaining thrillers with unpredictable endings and fraught tension. Two of his better films, “Signs” and “Unbreakable,” however, share one conceit that is a little strange: Water as a driving, harmful force.

 

In “Unbreakable,” David Dunn (Bruce Willis) slowly comes to the realization that he hasn’t ever been harmed, that that he indeed cannot be harmed. While he slowly works his way into a pseudo superhero role, he finds that he is also subject to some of the trappings of the position: he has an arch-enemy, for one. He has powers that he doesn’t understand, of course. And he has a single weakness to be exploited. It turns out that David is weakened by water, which does him no favors when a bad guy pushes him into a swimming pool.

 

In “Signs,” Shyamalan gave us what is probably his best film, tracing the details of an alien invasion through quick glimpses, all framed by a Presbyterian minister’s (Mel Gibson) recovery of faith. While the aliens remain off-camera for much of the film, when we see them, they’re kinda scary. Luckily, water seems to act like acid for these beasties, and Joaquin Phoenix has a grand time batting glasses of water into a monster, melting its skin.

 

Water is plentiful on Earth. Wouldn’t it suck to be allergic to it?

 

8) Chai tea with cream

in “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” (2010) 

Twentysomething Canadian Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) is an unemployed venal douchebag who is desperately trying to dump his 17-year-old girlfriend in favor of an ultra-cool, pink-haired American chick named Ramona (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). He’s less concerned with actually charming her or even really relating to her, preferring instead to impress her with his coolness, a quality that he possesses in dubious amounts. His quest to win her also has him having to meet and emotionally overcome Ramona’s multiple ex-boyfriends, visualized in Edgar Wright’s 2010 movie as fantasy video game battles. Through the battles, Scott will learn to be less of a douchebag, and actually carry on a proper romance.

 

One of Ramona’s ex-boyfriends is the handsome Todd (Brandon Routh), who is tall, good-looking, a talented bass player, and, gasp, a vegan. In Scott’s mind, these qualities not only make Todd cool, but give him extra superpowers in his imagined fights. Todd is able to call upon the powers of a vegan diet to defeat Scott.

 

Scott, however, duped Todd, mid-battle, into drinking a chai tea with a small slip of real cream in it. The act not only weakens Todd, but causes Vegan Police to appear and de-power Todd for violations to his diet. I understand that the fights in “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” are all metaphorical, but I think most non-vegans can relate to Scott’s mild resentment against the vegan lifestyle, and the arrogance that sometimes comes therein. Don’t you wish you could secretly feed meat to some snotty, superior vegan health nut? Surely it would be Their One Weakness.

 

7) Salt Water

in “Alien Nation” (film 1988, television series 1989-1990) 

The 1988 feature film “Alien Nation,” its two-seasons-running TV spin-off, and even its multiple TV movies, are, I feel underrated pieces of sci-fi, and are too typically underrepresented in the geek world. Its premise – of a slave ship of human-looking space aliens crashing on Earth, forcing them to climatize to human culture – is clever and relevant. It’s like “District 9,” but for Americans.

 

The Tenctonese, often called “Newcomers,” faced the usual problems of culture shock, including, most damningly, racism. Or I suppose it would be specism. But they discovered something even more horrifying about Earth: a large percentage of the planet is coated in salt water, a substance that acts like acid on their skin. Their overseers used to burn them with salt water guns. To land on a planet covered in the stuff had to be uncomfortable.

 

They did also discover, however, that humans have produced sour milk, a substance that acts like fine booze on their systems. I suppose it’s not a total loss.

 

6) A double-decker boloney sandwich

in “Troll 2” (1990) 

The denizens of Nilbog are all secretly goblins in disguise. If you eat their alluring meals, you yourself mutate into a plant, and are then eaten by your hosts. The goblins, you see, are vegetarian, and will not touch a meat human, but seem to love planet humans. They also love popcorn. Disturbing, sexual popcorn.

 

Claudio Fragasso’s seminal cult classic has been called the Best Worst Movie ever made (I even wrote a list about Best Worst Movies once), not least of which for its bizarro vegetarian monsters. The monsters seem to be led by a wicked librarian (Deborah Reed), and are powered (?) by an ancient stone monolith kept in the local church. A ghostly dead grandfather has armed the film’s 10-year-old hero, however, with the one thing that vegetarian goblins hate: a double-decker boloney sandwich.

 

As Josh (Michael Paul Stephenson) noshes hungrily at his sandwich, the goblins fall on the floor, gasping in pain. The smell of processed meat seems to sicken and kill them. And while some off-the-rack processed meats can be pretty vile, this seems like a kind of backward way to kill a monster. Remember kids: every time you eat a boloney sandwich, a goblin dies.

 

5) Slim Whitman

in “Mars Attacks!” (1996) 

Otis “Slim” Whitman was a country music powerhouse, whose folksy country tunes, paired with his unmatched yodeling abilities, kept him in the charts for decades, despite any accusation of hip chilren that he is stodgy and old-fashioned. Between the years of 1956 and 1984, he made 45 albums. His first hit song, “Rose Marie” from 1955, managed to stay at the number one spot on the UK Billboard charts for 36 years, a stat that is still listed in the Guinness Book. Mock him if you will, he’s a rich man.

 

“Mars Attacks!” was a lurid series of gory and sexy trading cards put out by Topps in 1962. They had painted depictions of big-headed aliens mutilating livestock, mutating bugs, killing people, and molesting women. If you’ve never seen the trading cards, find them. In 1996, Tim Burton made a feature film based on the trading cards, and he wisely cleaved close to the cards lurid and wacky tone, making his feature film a stylized spoof of all thing alien invasion.

 

And one of the best jokes in the feature film? The Martians, hellbent of zapping the celebrity cast with laser guns and stomping on cars with giant robots, are ultimately defeated by the most unlikely weapon: the music of Slim Whitman. It turns out that Slim’s falsetto yodeling (specifically in “Indian Love Call”) causes Martian heads to explode. Wacky, weird, and fun, that is a brilliant weakness.

 

4) Drugs

in “The Faculty” (1998) 

Kevin Williamson’s subtly intelligent screenplay of his alien invasion flick “The Faculty” is, like “Alien Nation” undeservedly omitted from too many geek conversations. The way the film plays with popular teenage archetypes in playful, intelligent, and bothers to make sure that, however archetypal the students are, they still have personality and individuality. It’s a strong little genre film from the 1990s that is too often forgotten.

 

The story: A group of students at a mid-American high school have noticed that their teachers and school staff are acting even more cruel and horrible than usual. Ordinarily, they would chalk this up to the usual war between the generations, but the kids discover, through a series of increasingly creepy revelations, that their teachers are indeed being possessed by body-snatching space aliens, bent on world domination. The aliens are amphibious and need water to survive, and our heroes, thanks to the use of a garage-bound homemade drugs lab, discover their one weakness.

 

Yes, evidently, by snorting a few ounces worth of caffeine pills and getting pleasantly high, you can prove that you’re not a space alien. The aliens, you see, will dry out and melt and crumble if they have even the slightest amount of drugs in their systems. Not only in this a weird weakness to have, but it gives “The Faculty” a strange and unexpected pro-drugs message that adds an edge of camp to proceedings. It’s o.k. kids. Do drugs. If you get high, it means you’re not a flesh-eating hellbeast from space.

 

3) Stairs

in “RoboCop” (1987) 

In the future, Detroit will be overrun with crime. Street violence will be the primary concern on the minds of the people, and the minds of the politicians. The police force has now been privatized, and their newest crime-fighting gimmick is a series of poorly-thought-out and incredibly well-armed robot warriors, called ED-209s. The ED-209 is about twelve feet tall, nine feet across, and looks like a walking tank, only with more firepower. After an unfortunate demonstration (wherein an executive was shot to bits), the private police rethink their strategy.

 

Their new answer is RoboCop, a dead police officer resurrected, brainwashed, and put in a cybernetic body. This one is less prone to bouts of unneeded violence. RoboCop is, in fact, too good; He finds that the private police force is rife with corruption and manipulation, and have the local gangs on their payroll. In response, they send the ED-209 after RoboCop to kill him. Luckily, RoboCop was able to give the ED-209 the slip by taking advantage of its one weakness: a small flight of stairs.

 

Yes, OCP made a gigantic tank-sized robot monster, with stompy feet, huge guns, and a pre-programmed bloodlust… that can’t descend a staircase. Much has been made of this cute little foible of the ED-209, to the point where they referred to its inability to take stairs on “Mystery Science Theater 3000.” What a stupid robot.

 

2) Logic Problems

Several times throughout “Star Trek” (1966-1969) 

Nomad is a robot concerned with perfection. It invades The Enterprise and “deletes” anything it considers to be imperfect. Capt. Kirk manages to find a weakness in its programming: confront it with its own mistakes, and it’ll have to destroy itself. It does. Easy peasy. In another episode, an army of evil androids is made to explode when the crew of The Enterprise decides to behave strangely and illogically in front of them. In yet another episode, Kirk confronts yet anotehr machine, this one controlling the bahavior of the local residents, by pointing out its mistakes to it. The threat of illogic, it seems, is a grave threat to any mechanical life form.

 

In “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” the examples are even more numerous. The Borg, for instance, are able to be destroyed by a logic problem with no answer implanted in their brains in two different episodes. A logician is defeated at a strategy game by Data who “out-logics” him.

 

The conflict between will and reason has long been a staple of sci-fi in general, but it’s no more obviously and glibly put forth than in “Star Trek,” where machines, who cannot think in any other terms than the purely reasonable, are destroyed by the power of will. This teaches us an important survival lesson: if you’re ever confronted with an evil robot bent on destroying you, be sure to ask it the square root of 2. It’ll freeze up until it finds the end. You’ll be able to saunter away quietly at your own pace.

 

1) The Common Cold

in War of the Worlds (1898) 

The twist ending to H.G. Wells’ sci-fi classic is now so well-known that it’s often taken for granted. Space aliens invade, try to kill all the humans for unknown ends, and are ultimately undone by the presence of germs in our atmosphere. While Wells clearly intended this as a statement of hubris (the most powerful forces in the galaxy are taken out by something innocuous and largely harmless to man), it’s become something of a cliché in the sci-fi world, to the point where it can serve as an inspiration to every item on this list.

 

And while the book, and subsequent films based on it, also serve as a political allegory, or perhaps allude to the Hobbesian fear of war, it still has to be admitted that a weakness to human viruses is a strange, strange weakness for aliens to have. Are you telling me, Mr. Wells, that a race of space aliens has been watching us from afar, envying us and planning their evil schemes this whole time, building gigantic death machines and craft capable of interplanetary travel, and they haven’t bothered to look into our biology or the salience of the atmosphere? Those are some dumb aliens.

 

Maybe the aliens were so mad that they didn’t bother to think about such things. Whatever the reason, our would-be alien oppressors were taken out by a sneezing child. If I ever see an alien, and I even suspect it’s going to take over the world or try to kill me. I’m going to sneeze on my hand and wipe it on him. That’ll learn him.

 

Honorable mentions 

Achilles and his heel.

 

Samson and his hair.

 

Water (for The Wicked Witch of the West)

 

Car horns in “R.O.T.O.R.”

 

Head and Shoulders brand shampoo in “Evolution”

 

Bad pop music in “Robotech”

 

The blood of a cured vampire in “Daybreakers” (that’s pretty strange, right?)

 

Laughter, from that fear monster in the third Harry Potter story.

 

“Puberty Love” in “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes”

 

Carrot cake for SuperBabs.

 

 Witney Seibold has a weakness for William Castle movies, ’90s grunge, and peanut butter cracker sandwiches. He lives in Los Angeles with his beautiful wife, where he occasionally stares wistfully out his back window, hoping to see strippers fighting in the parking lot across the way. He maintains a movie review ‘blog called Three Cheers for Darkened Years! where he has published over 800 articles to date. He is also half of the voice of The B-Movies Podcast on Crave Online, which he co-hosts with William Bibbiani.

I think the first big success in the current wave of porn parodies was “Not the Bradys XXX,” which was, at the time, a rather clever conceit. How many porn-fancying Gen-Xers, if they were honest with themselves, didn’t want to see Marcia and Jane getting it on? “Not the Bradys,” which could legally use all the famous names and iconography from their source material, provided they used the word “parody” on the box, became a massive success, and the porn industry reacted with aplomb. All of the pop culture sex fantasies you could imagine were finally at our fingertips, so to speak, as film after film hit the shelves of your local seedy adult boutique. In a production blitz the likes of which rarely seen, everything from “Batman” to “Star Trek” to “Scooby-Doo” started getting their own porn parodies, and it wasn’t long before the prolific industry started having to stretch to find pop culture iconography to mine. There are also porn versions of “Twilight,” “The Incredible Hulk,” “The Simpsons,” “Glee,” “Slumdog Millionaire,” “Fox News” (!), “Psycho,” “Deal or No Deal,” and, perhaps most disturbingly, “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Indeed, the list can now extend into the hundreds. In a way, this wave of porn parodies can serve as a microcosm of the over-bloated and painfully uncreative Hollywood remake machine.

 

Here’s a great site that actually details all of them:

(I miss the days when porn companies would simply retitle popular movies with dirty names. Gone are the days of “The Wonder Rears,” “Cliffbanger,” “Forrest Hump,” and “Men in Black Men.” C’est la vie. So it goes.)

 

Now we have “Scream XXX: A Porn Parody” to contend with, and, like its namesake, it seems to have an intense desire to deconstruct and tear down, and perhaps eliminate, the popular film trends in which it exists. Which is not to say that it’s incredibly clever; pornography is, after all, not known for its wit. But it does bother to make some cute cognitive leaps in between its long, occasionally sexy sex scenes.

 

The conceit within “Scream XXX” is this: Axel Braun, the mastermind behind the porn parody trend, is producing a porn parody of “Stab,” the horror film franchise within the “Scream” franchise. See, so we’re already one step removed. “Stab XXX” follows a killer who is stalking and stabbing his victims with a steel dildo. One of the jokes of the film is that, since it was probably too messy and too expensive and too time-consuming to use, there was no blood in any of the stabbing scenes. Maybe Braun felt that bloody murders weren’t appropriate for pornography. The steel dildo they use, by the way, is not a cheap off-the-rack tool that can be purchased at your local smut shop; it looks to be a really classy and immensely expensive toy. You can tell because they clearly only have one, and they actually never use it for its intended function.

 

Anyway, on the set of “Stab XXX,” the actors, Scarlett Fay, Lily LaBeau, Jessie Andrews, Evan Stone, all playing themselves, begin to be picked off by the killer from the movie-with-the-movie. The killer is dressed in the same killer outfit from “Scream,” but wearing a clown nose and clown eyebrows. It’s a little odd-looking. Of course the studio has plenty of dark back corners that are good for boning. In a way, this porn version of a horror film shows us the actual sex that is usually covered up or edited away from in usual slasher films.

 

There is a Gail Weathers character, named Gail Storm, played by Zoe Voss, who, curiously, doesn’t have sex with the Deputy Dewey character. There is a metaphysical sex scene, however, where Gail Storm has sex with the woman who plays Gail Storm in “Stab XXX.” Following all this? Ron Jeremy also shows up, like an elder statesman of the industry, to, I suppose, give his blessing. I think he’s in a position where he has to give a certain number of porn film cameos in a year, or the entire industry will be cursed to fail.

 

Eventually the killer is revealed, and, to sustain any small amount of suspense there may be in a pornographic film, I will not reveal who it is. I will, however, say what their motivation is as it’s really kind of cute: evidently the killer was doing their dirty work to halt production of “Stab XXX,” and, my extension, “Scream XXX.” If people die on the set of a porn parody, then perhaps the industry will stop making porn parodies. “How long,” the killer asks of their final victim, “before they get to your favorite show? Is nothing sacred??”

 

That’s kind of brilliant.

 

Pornography, as we all probably are intimately familiar with, has grown to such a ubiquitous place in America that we have now entered a place where even porn needs to strain for creativity and compete all the harder for your attention. And while it’s fun and exciting and kind of goofy to see all you favorite films and TV shows pushed through an x-rated filter, there’s a weird kind of desperation to the trend. Like the producers are doing all they can to keep porn fun and relevant in a world where sexting and digital filming technology has turned every other randy couple, drunken teenager, coked-up celebutante, and cheating politician into an amateur pornographer. Perhaps we’ll come through on the other side wiser about sex, and more open-minded about sexuality.

 

Until then, we have clever and sexy films to keep us entertained and horny.

Now that Summer Vacation is in full swing, and last week’s article on Great Fictional Teachers already has to dreading to inevitable return of your school year, I figured I’d try to depress you even further by not only continuing to talk about school, but to run down a list of the ten most horrible teachers you could possibly get. While we can always dream of getting that really cool teacher who will take the class outdoors, perhaps play you a song on their acoustic guitar, and teach you edgy things that are way off the syllabus, it’s more likely that you’ll get a teacher that is dull, inattentive, unengaging, or just downright cruel. Welcome back to school, you little maggots, now real this immensely difficult and boring book (it’s usually Silas Marner), and be sure to do all of the assigned homework that I’m going to assign on the first day of school.

 

What’s more, Jake Kasdan is releasing a movie next week called “Bad Teacher,” starring Cameron Diaz as the title teacher, so it seems that hellish classroom dictators are hanging in the air like summer lovin’. Let’s continue that spirit, shall we?

 

Here then, from 10 to 1, are the worst teachers in fiction. Hope you’re enjoying your summer reading list. Just to let you know, Bless Me Ultima is way overrated. Bwa ha ha ha.

 

10) Mrs. Tingle

from “Teaching Mrs. Tingle” (1999)

Leigh Ann (Katie Holmes) is one of those obnoxiously overachieving high school students that you outwardly resented, but secretly admired. She’s pretty, successful, and poised to get into a good college, where she will, no doubt, continue to achieve, and become even more popular. She is hellbent on become this year’s valedictorian, and needs to pass her final class, taught by the harsh taskmistress, Mrs. Tingle (Helen Mirren).

 

Mrs. Tingle is one of those teachers who grades you not just by your achievements (should she find any), but also by what she thinks of your personal character. She has already judged Leigh Ann to be shallow and undeserving, and will likely not give her the high grade she needs, partly out of stubborn integrity, and partly out of gleeful spite. Mrs. Tingle knows she’s smarter than the teens she lectures to, and berates them and fails them to keep herself alive.

 

What’s even more frustrating is that, when Leigh Ann kidnaps Mrs. Tingle with the hopes of torturing her into a better grade (this is actually a lot funnier and more practical than it sounds; the film was written by ’90s-teen-genre-film impresario Kevin Williamson), Mrs. Tingle only manages to berate her further, and use her stirring intellect to talk Leigh Ann and her two compatriots into more drama than they bargained for. Manipulative, hateful, and stubborn, Mrs. Tingle is some kind of archetype that is all too familiar to us.

 

9) Ms. Bitters

from “Invader Zim” (2001-2003)

You can often tell if a schoolteacher resents their job. It may be the (unjustly) low pay. It may be the constant clashes of character with stubborn asshole teenagers. It may be the repetition, year after year, of the same simple material, or it may be a general disinterest in their assigned subject, but often you’ll find a man or woman who will grunt and snort about how much the school sucks, how little they get paid, and, as a result, will belittle students as a form of sport; a small, resentful respite from the nightmare of their job. Some teachers can mask their resentment in such a way that it become entertaining for the students, and you feel you can get on their side in hating school. Too often, though, the resentment will boil up into a general hatred for all students.

 

No teacher seems more outwardly hateful than Ms. Bitters, the wraith-like ghoul who teaches at the twisted school attended by Invader Zim, star for Jhonen Vasquez’ cartoon show. Zim’s school is already a stinky cesspit of secrets, villainy and general disorganization, but, thanks to Ms. Bitters, it’s also teeming with outward, unhidden hatred.

 

“Hello, you stupid children,” she’ll growl as she enters her classroom. She’ll proceed to teach things way beyond the children’s ability, just so she can yell at them for getting stuff wrong. She’ll move about the classroom like a serpent, hissing and crawling and threatening, potentially catching you committing some imagined infraction. Sometimes, math class can resemble Hell.

 

8) Edna Krabapple

from “The Simpsons” (1989 – present)

And speaking of teachers who feel defeated and stymied by their local public school system, we must not forget Edna Krabapple, the 4^th grade teacher at Springfield Elementary. Randy, alcoholic, stern, depressed, Mrs. Krabapple will often indulge the students in stifling stories of her stalled marriage, her hatred of teaching, and her general frustration with life. She won’t rant or outwardly tell downer stories, but she’ll drop hints here and there, giving her unwitting 10-year-old charges frightening glimpses into the darker recesses of adulthood. She’ll then sneak off to smoke as often as possible.

 

It could be said that Edna Krabapple is a saint, as she has to put up with hellions like Bart Simpson and Nelson Muntz in her class. And, given the way the show’s chronology works, she’s been teaching the same class of unaging students for about 22 years now. But she never finds a way to engage her kids. She just slumps over her desk, a glaze over her eyes, angry, defeated, horrible, depressed.

 

You know that weird feeling you got as a kid, when you realized that your teacher had a life outside the classroom? Like when they would show up at your house for some reason, and you’d experience a weird cognitive dissonance? Edna Krabapple is the living embodiment of that cognitive dissonance.

 

7) Mrs. Gorf

from Sideways Stories from Wayside School (1978)

Not as bitter as Ms. Bitters, as defeated as Mrs. Krabapple, or as cruel as Mrs. Tingle, Mrs. Gorf, who teaches at Wayside School is still a huge presence to be reckoned with. Wayside School was intended to be a one-story structure, but, thanks to a blueprints mishap, was accidentally constructed as a thirty-story tower. Everything that happens at the school is, hence, a little off, mostly proven by the hiring and continued tyranny of the evil Mrs. Gorf, another teacher who is full of hatred and wickedness.

 

Mrs. Gorf, you see, with her pointed ears and long skinny tongue, was able to invoke a secret power of turning students into apples. A student would speak out of turn or get a question wrong, and zop, they would be fruit. She would line up the apples on her desk as a pointedly ironic display of how good a teacher she was. The school’s principal would never question her due to all of the gifted apples she received.

 

Eventually the remaining students of Mrs. Gorf retaliated, and brought down her reign of terror, but a reign of terror it was. Mrs. Gorf wasn’t just a screamer, she seemed to be outwardly demonic. I recall reading the story as a kid, and feeling queasy and a little scared. Thank goodness your teachers can’t change you into apples.

 

Or can they??

 

6) The Economics Teacher

from “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” (1986)

Apart from being downright wicked, one of the worst sins a schoolteacher can commit is to be utterly, stultifyingly boring. It’s one thing to berate a student into succeeding. It’s another to smooth their brains into puddles of uncaring mush. A mean teacher can still be a good teacher. A boring teacher will always be bad.

 

And no teachers are more boring than the stone-faced economics teacher at Ferris Bueller’s high school. First off, economics is a dull subject to begin with (my own high school economics teacher, Dr. Desrochers, admitted in the class that economics is a dull and unengaging subject, and he needed to show us movies and question our values to keep us alert; it worked), but the econ teacher, played iconically by Ben Stein, compounded the problem by droning the dull subject is a bland, flat monotone that hypnotized his students into placid-paced, spineless sea creatures.

 

Indeed, his droning monotone was so insidious, it pacified his students during the roll call. He would repeat names, lessons, and lecture endlessly, blissfully unaware that his students were not playing the least bit of attention. Some students would sleep. Not one of them could tell you the first thing about economics.

 

5) Michael “Tiger” Magrew

from “Pretty Maids All in a Row” (1971)

Mr. Magrew (Rock Hudson) is the greatest teacher in the world. He’s both the faculty adviser and head coach at his Venice, CA high school, where he raps with students, and has an open door policy in his office. He’s warm, charming, and will give you private lessons on the side just because he cares. If you need help with the ladies, why he’ll even help you out in that regard too, pointing one timid student (John David Carson) toward the charming new substitute teacher (Angie Dickenson). And, if you’re a charming young co-ed , he’ll give you a little sexual tutoring on the side himself. Charming, irascible, sexy, smart.

 

Not to mention morally irresponsible (boning students? Really?), caddish (he is married, after all), and criminal. Yes, to keep his numerous, numerous affairs a secret, Mr. Magrew has taken to killing many of his students, and quietly disposing of the bodies around campus. Some people see that the evidence points to him, but are disarmed by his sociopathic charm. A true serial killer if ever there was one, Mr. Magrew is a horribly sexy psycho, just waiting to bed you and then murder you if you either threaten to expose him, or simply become too attached.

 

Roger Vadim’s “Pretty Maids All in a Row” is kind of obscure, but should be considered a modern camp classic. Rock Hudson chews into the role with as much effervescence as he can, and it rides a creepy line of student/teacher sexuality that has become taboo. Seek it out if you can.

 

4) Erika Kohut

from “The Piano Teacher” (2001)

Some schoolteachers are warm and charming and inviting, to the point of seducing you. Some are so cold and stiff and passionless, well, they still might seduce you, as is the case of Erika Kohut in Michael Haneke’s harrowing and excellent 2001 film “The Piano Teacher.” Erika Kohut, as played by the steely, intense, indespensible Isabelle Huppert, is a passionless and frigid monster who will berate her piano students for not playing with enough emotion, when she herself seems incapable of any real-life human feeling. She will insult them and offer no helpful input at times, and then, in a passive-aggressive move, put broken glass in their coat pockets when they’re not looking.

 

One of her students (Benoît Magimel) felt she was masking something deeply emotional and definitely sexual with her sadism, but his flirting and sexual advances only served to reveal that she was just as cold and cruel in her sex life, frequenting late-night nudie booths, and peeing outside of the cars of necking couples. She also, curiously, still shared a bed with her mother. There is something deeply damaged about Erika. Something that cannot be repaired.

 

And now imagine that this cruel, cold, unhealthy human being was standing over your shoulder as you tried desperately to play the latest assigned etude. Imagine her cold, stiff body leaning past you to turn the page. Imagine her glue-smelling breath penetrating your nose. This is your teacher, and she has no soul.

 

3) Mr. Bryles, Ms. Connors, and Mr. Hardin

from “Class of 1999” (1990)

In the future, 1999, the youths of the world will all be organized into dangerous, murderous gangs. All urban areas are now under martial law, and youth crime is the cause of an outright downturn in civilization. Luckily, they still feel they have to go to school, which may say something positive about their need to be educated, but spells out disaster for school officials, who have to come up with creative ways to keep these little criminals in line. Luckily, we have the white-mulletted Bob Forrest (Stacy Keach, giving the strangest performance of his career) to give us a solution: build disciplinarian robot teachers who cannot be harmed.

 

The teachers he builds are not just stern and indestructable, but able to give out corporal punishment to students on a whim. Mr. Bryles (Patrick Kilpatrick) spanks a few of his students on the first day. Ms. Connors (Pam Grier) threatens to shoot them, and Coach Hardin is, strangely equipped with missiles. As is the case with any story about robots, they eventually turn against their masters as well, threatening to blow up the school.

 

It’s one thing to have a bad teacher who threatens to hit you with a ruler. It’s quite another to be dodging their missiles and they cackle horrible through their robotic voice boxes. Evil robot teachers from the future. Every kids’ dream come true.

 

2) Any of the teachers from “Harry Potter”

from the “Harry Potter” series (2001-2011)

Dolores Umbridge was a cat-obsessed, giggling horror of a Hogwart’s teacher, who would literally mutilate her ill-behaved students, and blissfully deny the presence of danger. She eventually used her acumen at manipulation to take over the spot of headmistress. Severus Snape purported to teach defense against the dark arts, but seemed far more interested in teaching the dark arts themselves. He would eventually murder the school’s headmaster, and ally himself with an evil wizard. Arsene Lupin was mild-mannered and caring, but was secretly a werewolf. Sybill Trelawney was a kook whose subject wasn’t taken very seriously. Guilderoy Lockhart was a charming fake who didn’t know anything about the subject he was assigned to teach. Even Prof. McGonagall seemed like a strict taskmistress who was eager to punish students.

 

Hogwart’s seems, at first glance, like the ideal school for a young kid, eager to learns spells and become a wizard. As time passed, though, we kind of learned that this is probably the world’s most horrible school, rife with monsters and dangers, and the producer of one of the most evil wizards of all time. A wizard, mind you, who hated the school so much that he went on a jihad to destroy it, it’s principal, its teachers, and its star pupil whom he hadn’t even met.

 

While there seemed to be a good number of caring teachers at this school, it seems that they spent way too much time with interpersonal battles and petty squabbles. Eventually, they would be the iones responsible for putting their students in harms’ way. Good job, there.

 

1 ½) Mr. Garrison

from “South Park” (1997 – present)

A borderline child molester, Mr. Garrison is a pop-culture obsessed, eternally distracted wonk with no life experience, no insight, and no teaching skills. While he did try to engage his 3^rd grade students with a hand puppet named Mr. Hat, he would mostly give impassioned lectures about episodes of “The Facts of Life,” which celebutante was the sluttiest, and how dumb his students were. He would openly swear, share increasingly inappropriate sexual details of his life, and tell his students they were going to Hell.

 

How Mr. Garrison managed to keep his job after relationship drama, sexuality shifts, outright sex changes, and including his gay leather slave in his classroom is beyond me. Even the innocent Mr. Hat became something of a second personality, absorbing all of Mr. Garrison’s gay panic. The man was a bundle of psychosexual problems, and he’s in charge of your children.

 

“Remember children, there are no stupid questions. Just stupid people.”

 

1) Agatha Trunchbull

from Matilda (1988)

Agatha Trunchbull was such a horrible teacher, she was practically inhuman. An elephantine, fire-breathing monster, she would beat children, break plates over their heads, insult them, beat them again, and shove them into tiny closets for extended periods. She seemed motivated by (indeed only capable of) one simple emotion: pure unadulterated rage. She was unable to speak quietly or calmly in any context. Why merely speak when bellowing can cause so much more intimidation? The Trunchbull resembles less a teacher, and more a particularly evil Nazi death-camp overseer.

 

And, that one time a girl knocked a ball over the fence, The Trunchbull picked up the girl by her braids, and chucked her bodily after it. At home, Trunchbull would stalk about in darkness, keeping an eye out for invaders. She also has the honorable and sweet Miss Honey under her care, and would treat her just as poorly as she would her students, with the added bonus of embezzling and committing inheritance fraud.

 

Roald Dahl’s books, while clever, imaginative and wonderful, were all possessed of a decidedly dark streak of villainous cruelty. Willy Wonka, remember, was kind of an abusive weirdo at times. And while each of his stories featured some sort of horrible Dickensian villain, no one seemed more wicked and horrible than Mrs. Trunchbull. She was as evil as a human could get without resorting to actual murder, child rape, or transforming into an inhuman creature. This is a the archetypal evil teacher we all had nightmares about.

 

Honorable Mentions:

The Headmaster from “If….”

 

“The Faculty”

 

Julius Kelp from “The Nutty Professor”

 

Miss Goggins from “Jim Copp Tales”

 

Jim McAllister from “Election”

 

Trevor Garfield from “187”

 

Bradley Cooper in “The Hangover” (Remember? He embezzled school funds)

 

Count Olaf from A Series of Unfortunate Events, book 5: The Austere Academy)

 

The teacher from “The Wall”

 

 

Witney Seibold is an AA holder, onetime theater major, onetime film major, living in Los Angeles with his wife, his books, his videos and his collection of lectures on CD. He writes film articles on the days when he’s not feeling lazy, and maintains his own ‘blog, Three Cheers for Darkened Years! where he has posted over 800 articles to date. As of a few days ago, he is the proud owner of over 1 million hits! Hooray! He is also half of the voice of The B-Movies Podcast, which he co-hosts on CRAVE Online with William Bibbiani.

School typically starts in late August or early September, but, thanks to the horrible, horrible marketing gurus, you’ve probably seen your local office supply store hocking “Back 2 School!” merchandise as early as, well, May or June. Right when Summer Vacation is starting, the world would remind you that it will soon end. Thanks a lot, Staples. You just took every last bit of fun I was going to have in my three months of completely non-constructive down-time, where I was going to eat candy, watch cartoons and play video games for hours at a time, and turned it into a horrible existential miasma, where I get to contemplate all the things I hate about going back to school, whether I want to or not.

 

But then I think of the pleasant things about school, and I don’t seem to mind as much. Taking tests sucks, but passing them is a relief. You’ll get to harbor crushes on a who new set of classmates, make new friends, and, most importantly, meet new teachers. Good schoolteachers are saints, and great schoolteachers can actively change the course of a young person’s life for the better. Weird or eccentric schoolteachers are also a plus, and they give you years of stories to tell friends, and they will also assign the best reading lists; why read “Romeo and Juliet” for the 10^th time, when you, at age 12, can be reading Charles Baudelaire? Or Thomas Pynchon?

 

In honor of those teachers you remember fondly, or the ones you wish you could always have, I have once again whisked through my cobweb-caked brain, and come up with the following list of excellent fictional schoolteachers. Some are friendly and fun. Some are intense and challenging. Some are merely crush-worthy. But all of them are going to remind us of how much fun school could be.

 

A rule: I have included no coaches, librarians, or people who were once schoolteachers, and are now spies or soldiers or superheroes. I also had to nix from the list any real-life people who were adapted for fiction. Sorry Jaime Escalante. You were a wonderful man and perhaps the best teacher a kid could ask for; you do not belong on a frivolous list like this one.

 

Without further ado:

 

10) Mr. Shoop

from “Summer School” (1987) 

Freddy Shoop (Mark Harmon) is a gym teacher, yes, who prefers the life of a beach bum, drinking beers in the sun, occasionally surfing, and copiously boinking his beach bunny girlfriend. His summer is interrupted by the sudden requirement to teach a remedial English class to a group of failures and misfits desperate to graduate. He is such a shallow horndog, that Freddy only agrees to take the job when he sees that Kirstie Alley will be teaching next door.

 

Mr. Shoop’s class is full of fun students, of course (there’s a hot Italian exchange student, a hunky male stripper, a ditz, and, most notably Dean Cameron and Gary Riley as a pair of horror-obsessed weirdos), but it’s the teacher himself that would make this lass so fun. Shiftless, uncaring and lazy, he’s often hungover and naps in class. When it comes time to actually teach, he manages to talk about subjects the kids are interested in, and allows for screening of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” in class.

 

By the end of the film, naturally, all the kids are on his side. This is the kid of guy I wish was in charge of summer school. He teaches lessons while still remaining true to the spirit of summer, is perhaps slightly resentful of his admittedly low-prestige job, is completely girl-crazy, and manages to actually teach. Let’s hear it for adolescent partyboy teachers.

9) Roy Hinkley, MA, BS, PhD

from “Gilligan’s Island” (1964- 1967) 

I like the Professor. He always saved their butts.

He could build a nuclear reactor from a couple of coconuts.

She says “That guy’s a genius!” I shook my head and laughed.

I said “If he’s so fly than tell me why he couldn’t build a lousy raft.”

 

-lyrics from “Isle Thing” by “Weird Al” Yankovic

 

While endless jokes have been made about how The Professor (Russell Johnson) had no talent for shipbuilding, it has to be admitted that the bumbling teacher always managed to keep his cool, and approached his desperate situation of being lost on a desert island with a wacky group of weirdos with complete professional aplomb. Yes, yes, yes, he couldn’t build a boat. But the materials were admittedly limited, and he still managed to build a radio out of fruit. This is not something that should be sneezed at.

 

On a show whose stock and trade was broad caricatures and ever broader slapstick humor, The Professor provided a much-needed practical and empirical point of view. Russel Johnson was a strangely firm presence in the face of his co-habitants. A single straight-man to a group of clowns. And you just know that he was the only one suave and good-looking enough to charm the movie star and the Mary-Ann.

 

8) Mr. Van Driessen

from “Beavis and Butt-Head” (1993 – 1997)  

Mr. Van Driessen came across as a clueless hippie wimp, more interested in playing acoustic guitar and postulating vaguely about the nature of the Earth Mother than he was in actual teaching an engaging his students in any sort of active way. He was milquetoast, prone to backing down, and clueless as to the aggressively violent and horny adolescent tendencies of his borderline-retarded charges. He could never offer any real practical advice, preferring to quote from New-Age self-help books, and preaching peace love and understanding to a group of kids who knew little more than masturbation, homemade highs, and MTV.

 

But I always thought that he was probably the best teacher one could hope to get under the circumstances. Mr. Van Driessen, you see, despite his wimpiness and inability to connect with Beavis and Butt-Head, was possessed of a God-like patience for their antics. He saw their attempts at theft, sex, and tendency to do damage, and saw it all as the hormone-induced stupidity that it was. He actually bothered to reach out to these unreachable kids. His failure to actually reach them only serves as a subtle tragedy. He is the tragic martyr of Beavis and Butt-Head’s tiny, prurient universe.

 

His singing of “Lesbian Seagull” in “Beavis and Butt-Head Do America” (1996) is the perfect balance between his good intentions and his ridiculous failure. And yet, he is unshaken. He will forever be mildly patient. Forever be willing to endure another year with these two boobs. He deserves some respect for that.

 

7) Ms. Frizzle

from “The Magic School Bus” (1994) 

I know I’ve written about Ms. Frizzle before (in my article on authority figures you don’t want disappointed in you), so I’ll be brief. Ms. Frizzle was the best possible teacher. I’ve had teacher like her: a little bit kooky, very well-dressed, always happy, and so eager to teach, she didn’t care how “cool” she looked to a room of cynical 10-year-olds. But, what’s more, she had access to the best teaching tool one could possibly have: the Magic School Bus. Rather than just lecture on microscopic organisms, she could actually pile her kids on board a bus, shrink them, and show them said creatures close-up. Why talk about ancient Rome, when you can go there almost instantly?

 

She was essentially a fun, wacky teacher who could arrange, at her own whim, a series of the best field trips imaginable. Her miraculous machine was tempered by her unending enthusiasm. Her weird attitude was tempered by the lessons she taught. What an amazing teacher.

 

6) Mr. Feeny

from “Boy Meets World” (1993-2000) 

“Boy Meet World” was only one of several hundred kid-friendly sitcoms, dealing with the angst of high school life and the wacky antics of your silly peers, but it seems to be one of the most believed by a generation. We can all snicker at the milquetoast conceits of “Saved by the Bell,” or wallow in the lurid, lurid melodrama of the Degrassi kids, but “Boy Meets World” seemed to strike that perfect balance between rock-stupid sitcom predictability, and earnest emotional drama.

 

The central teacher in “Boy Meets World,” Mr. Feeny, started out as a mere English teacher, soon became the school’s principal, and eventually ended up a professor at the local college, effectively tracing the same group of students for a seven-year period. Mr. Feeny was a wise counselor, a caring father figure, and a smart teacher. He was a benevolent and stable presence in the whirlwind of the students’ personal adolescent dramas. Real-life teachers will often say to troubled students that they may come to them with any problems they may have, but students will likely be too embarrassed or too proud to actually do so. Mr. Feeny actually seemed approachable.

 

Mr. Feeny also had the heartbreaking final line of the series: “I love you all. Class dismissed.” In a series that focused on Mr. Feeny’s struggle to remain professional with kids he clearly cared about, this admonition struck deep into the hearts of the show’s viewers.

 

5) Prof. Arthur Chipping

from “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” (1939) 

One thing that most British schoolchildren dread, and something American schoolchildren can’t even contemplate, is the need to study The Classical World. To this day, most British boarding schools require that students learn a smattering of Latin, become familiar with the oratory of Cicero, recite the poetry of Catullus, and read all about the conquest of Gaul. American students, especially those in the more unfortunate public school districts, rarely had to endure this sort of thing. It’s enough to make a Yank envious.

 

The best Classics teachers, though, are the super-nerds who are passionate about their subject, and no one was more passionate, who taught ab imo pectore, than Arthur Chipping, the title character from Sam Wood’s 1939 feature film. He was bookish and disarmingly friendly. The notoriously difficult British schoolchildren, were caught off-balance by his unassuming naïvete, and he was able to engage them not only in the lessons of the ancient world, but in his sweet romantic life.

 

1939 was a banner year for American film “The Wizard of Oz,” “Gone with the Wind,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”), and Robert Donat, who played Mr. Chips, won the Academy Award that year, upsetting the fans of Clark Gable. Watching the film, though, you begin to understand why he won. He is a perfect softy. A bookish nerd who loves strongly, and cares about his kids over the course of a generation. If I found myself needing to re-translate Virgil, I’d want Mr. Chips at my side to aid me. Cura ut valeas.

 

4) Prof. John Keating

from “Dead Poets Society” (1989) 

And while we’re thinking about the stuffy world of boarding schools, let us contemplate someone who wants to breathe life into such a stuffy place. For many people under the age of 30, Peter Weir’s “Dead Poets Society” is almost a classroom standard. It inspired students without being insipid, and introduced a generation of young, crush-prone teenage girls to the large, dark eyes and perfectly coiffed hair of Robert Sean Leonard. It also proved to many people that the guy from “Mork and Mindy” actually had some acting chops (his work in “Good Morning, Vietnam” notwithstanding).

 

John Keating breezed into his classroom, currently full of dour, defeated and bored young men, and shouted enthusiastically at them. He told them to stand on their desks, to read unconventional poets like Walt Whitman, and, most importantly, to remember that they are young and full of life, and to carpe diem. It’s the job of schoolteachers to inspire their students, but it’s rare that someone will take such an active role in doing said thing.

 

Robin Williams is great in the role, and his teaching of poetry and, by extension, philosophy, seem to do more than give his students facts and figured to memorize. He actually manages to give them applicable life views that will serve to make them better people. And while he was eventually fired for being too radical, he had already left his mark in the classroom. Prof. Keating is one to remember.

 

3) Prof. Charles Xavier

from “ X-Men” (1963 – present) 

While I wish that we could see more of what Prof. Xavier actually taught, academically, at his School for Gifted Youngsters, it’s what he’s better known for that makes him so cool. You see, his school is, as anyone reading this site probably knows, is a front for a team of superheroic mutants, each with a specialized superpower, bent on fighting prejudice, and bringing justice to the world. His attitude was one of benevolence and support. He was, according to his creators, clearly inspired by the civil rights rhetoric of Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

What’s more, Prof. X is one of the world’s most powerful psychics (and there are a lot in this universe), effectively giving him the ability to change the minds of others for them, undermining their free will. That he never does so only proves how good-hearted and resolute he is. He is also given the change to butt-heads, ideologically, with a Malcolm X-type mutant, who would kill all humans, and leave nothing but superpowered mutants on the planet. This may seem all very involved, but it’s second nature to most comic book fans, and serves as a good lead into actual civil rights.

 

Plus, Prof. X runs a superhero school. How cool is that?

 

2) Dr. Henry Jones, Jr.

from “Raisers of the Lost Ark” (1981) 

He wears tweed jackets, and teaches the notoriously dull subject of archeology, and teaches at a buttoned-down university in the 1940s, but Dr. Jones has more cool in his fingernail than you do in two versions of you. While he manages to make dull archeological lectures fun, and he’s utterly dreamy (his female classmates do nothing but stare moonily at him), he’s more than juts a good teacher. You see, he knows a lot about archeology because he’s done the actual field work, digging up old artifacts, studying ancient religions, and occasionally beating up platoons of Nazis with his bare fists.

 

Yes, Henry “Indiana” Jones (Harrison Ford) is the teacher who moonlights as a globe-trekking adventurer. When he’s not in class talking about the Cross of Coronado, he’s actually out on the high seas, beating up thugs, actually trying to retrieve it. When he’s not talking about the neolithic era, he’s going to ancient tombs and carefully retrieving ancient artifacts. And when he’s not presenting a general air of intellectual strength, he’s showing off his physical strength by pounding on Nazis, whipping thuggee, and dodging the very wrath of God.

 

“Raiders of the Lost Ark” is one of my favorite movies to this day, and Indiana Jones is one of the best adventurers the screen has ever seen. He is a down-to-Earth professor who has almost passed into the realm of myth. What a cool guy.

 

1) Lillian Mueller and Janet Jones

from Van Halen’s “Hot For Teacher” music video (1984) 

Everyone remembers that one teacher or professor that they had an enormous burning crush on. We all remember the subtle rivalries we had with classmates to gain the most amount of attention from said teacher. We all remember their pretty face, warm demeanor, and their uncanny ability to turn the most dowdy of outfits into sex-soaked robes of pure erotic energy. These hot teachers got us enthused about going to school, if not necessarily interested in paying direct attention to the subject at hand.

 

The Platonic ideal of all hot teachers came to an entire generation of young boys in Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher” music video. The song was already plenty suggestive with lyrics like “Give me something to write on,” which, even in 1984, sounded like some sort of penis allusion to me, but the music video upped the ante, giving us one of the hottest teachers ever seen. When she comes strolling into the classroom, she’s already played by Playboy model Milliam Mueller. Her short short and button-up shirt carefully orchstrated to drive the kids wild. But during the course of the video, he whips off her outfit to reveal a bikini underneath! Now played by Janet Jones, notorious for marrying hockey superstar Wayne Gretzky, she proceeded to titillate the young boys in the classroom, mostly played by Van Halen band members, and, disturbingly, child versions of themselves as well.

 

There’s something disgustingly and deliciously trashy about the music video today, but seeing it as a young boy in 1984, before you had any sort of regular access to pornography, it was one of the most important films you could have seen. For a brief period, we were all hot for teacher.

 

Honorable Mentions: 

Otis Drexell from “Drexell’s Class”

 

Rupert Giles from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (technically a librarian)

 

Angie Dickenson’s character from “Pretty Maids All in a Row”

 

Bobbi Harlow from “Bloom County”

 

Prof. Ned Brainard from “The Absent-Minded Professor”

 

Jimmy Stewart’s character from “Rope”

 

Dave Foley as the sidekick teacher in “Sky High”

 

The faculty at Acme Looniversity in “Tiny Toon Adventures”

 

 

Witney Seibold is an AA holder, onetime theater major, onetime film major, living in Los Angeles with his wife, his books, his videos and his collection of lectures on CD. He writes film articles on the days when he’s not feeling lazy, and maintains his own ‘blog, Three Cheers for Darkened Years! where he has posted over 800 articles to date. He is also half of the voice of The B-Movies Podcast, which he co-hosts on CRAVE Online with William Bibbiani.

Happy Memorial Day! This is the time of year when we commemorate those who have perished in military service by taking a day off, eating hot dogs that have been cooked outdoors, drinking lukewarm punch, and watching cars drive around in a circle really quickly (the Indianapolis 500 has been an establishment since 1911). It may have its origins in somber mourning, but generations regard the holiday as the joyous start of Summer Vacation. We may be paying homage to the soldiers of yore, but kids love the holiday as a much-needed day off.

 

To keep things more military-minded, and to recall the military theme of the holiday we’ll be celebrating over the weekend, I have, in honor of the real soldiers fighting abroad, and the fake ones storming the alien motherships in our imaginations, compiled the following list of ten fictional military forces from movies, TV, and other pop culture locales. Some of these groups are bloodthirsty warmongers, who savagely murder people (or creatures) by the busload. Some or benevolent organizations bent on wrecking peace and order throughout the galaxy. Some are secretive elite forces, clandestinely fighting the super-powered terrorists that would do in the world. Whatever their character, though, each of these military forces is notable for their gumption and their vim.

 

There then, are the top-ten:

 

10) The Robotech Defense Force

from “Robotech” (1985) and its spinoffs

The continuity of “Robotech” is a vast and impenetrable one, covering several timelines and continuities that only the most hardcore of fans can follow. The original idea behind “Robotech” is, however, pretty damn cool. Here is what I could discern from some cursory internet research:

 

In 1999, right when Earth was on the brink of a worldwide nuclear war, an alien spacecraft crash landed on Macross Island. The crash made everyone nervous, and the world militaries joined together to fight a potential alien invasion. The aliens, called Zentraedi, are 50-foot tall giants, and are sensitive about where their ships land, so they did indeed send an invading force after their crashed ship in order to destroy it, and humanity be damned. Luckily humanity had the wherewithal to form the Robotech Defense Force, an army of soldiers with gigantic 50-foot-tall robots suits. They could fly through space and shoot missiles with the best pf them.

 

Please don’t leave comments explaining how much I left out of the Robotech mythos; I know there’s a lot. Do note, however, the interest we sci-fi geeks have in gigantic robot suits. “Robotech” wasn’t the only Japanese cartoon show to feature such a conceit (“Voltron,” and “Tranzor Z” spring to mind as well), and it wasn’t long before Americans started making their own giant robot armies as well. “Robot Jox” is well-beloved may many an interior 15-year-old, and thanks to James Cameron, we have several silly robot suits. As in…

 

9) The United States Colonial Marines

from “Aliens” (1986)

James Cameron, as you may or may not know, once worked as a professional trucker before he became a filmmaker. And while these days he may be better-known for action-packed, touchy-feely SFX romances, he was once bent on making a definitive film about the hard-drinking, hard-fighting, larger-than-life world of truckers. He came closest in his 1986 actioner “Aliens,” which pitted a group of tough-as-nails marines against a swarm of hard-to-kill killer creatures. The film is exciting and well-paced, despite the weird fight scene at the end where the alien mother fights Sigourney Weaver in a robot suit.

 

The military in this film are dispatch to a distant planet where they know killer aliens are lurking. They are a cocky lot, and proclaim they will have no trouble killing the monsters. They are dudded up with superguns, and the best possible military training. They joke and eat gruel, and reminisce about wars in the past. They are, essentially, warm-hearted space-truckers who can kill with efficiency. Bill Paxton plays the whiner, Michael Biehn plays their fearless leader, and, most notably, Jeanette Goldstein, in her butch hairdo, ripped biceps and tight tank-top, played the grunting badass.

 

Cameron has also been fond of strong women, and Jeanette Goldstein, as pvt. Vasquez, is one of the strongest. She seems tough and capable, and able to make her own decisions. Something tells me that Cameron wanted to get her on screen more, but had to stick with Ellen Ripley, who, herself, was transformed into kind of a badass in this film.

 

8) The First Battalion Transvestite Brigade, airborne wing

from “Eddie Izzard: Dress to Kill” (1998)

 

 First, watch this video, starting at the 3:38 mark:

 

And, yes, he’s right! What would be more surprising than an brigade of transvestite soldiers, parachuting into dangerous areas with fantastic makeup!? If the army employed more of these oddball tactics, perhaps wars would be over more quickly.

 

7) The USNC Army

from “Halo” (2001)

The United Nations Space Command has created a badass army of cyber-warriors. Think The Borg, but fast-moving, articulate, and with guns. The USNC needed these warriors to fight off a group of space aliens called The Covenant, who would stop humanity from using their planet to colonize. The USNC, even at the outset of the first “Halo” game, have been fighting for decades already, and have suffered crippling losses. “Halo,” it seems, is a sci-fi war game that tries to accurately replicate a true-to-life military quagmire.

 

The soldiers in “Halo” are, at first appearance, little more than the masked wonks you usually see being blown away by the hundreds in sci-fi movies. “Halo” attempts to add some tragedy to the proceedings, though, as it seems that the game cannot be ultimately “won.” You may beat the game and complete all the levels, but the story surrounding the game implies that your gameplay actions have no baring on the outcome on the war. No more heroes anymore.

 

I have not played the “Halo” games, but I have tried on a Master Chief helmet (complete with night-vision goggles), and just wearing it made me feel kind of badass. I also like that the game’s makers didn’t merely make their faceless soldiers into bland, indestructible monsters, trying to give them humanity by making them doomed.

 

6) The KISS Army

founded 1975

I wanna rock ‘n’ roll all night. And party every day. We are the worshipers of the Starchild, The Demon, Space Ace, and Catman. We have leather-studded talismans that give us our powers. We can destroy phantoms, and stomp in your face with our gigantic boots. We are dressed to kill. We are the Destroyers. We are creatures of the night. Members of the psycho circus. We will band together and shoot you down with our love guns.

 

Few bands are flashier than KISS, and few bands are less pretentious. In ostentatious makeup and outfits, KISS would charge out on stage with no agenda other than singing about how much they liked booze, pussy and parties. There is an innocent directness in the plainly demonic trappings of KISS. They are trying to shock your parents. And, thanks to order forms printed in their 1976 album “ Destroyer,” you could be part of their army, hellbent on taking over the world with the power of rock. The KISS army is the best army in the world, because you get to be in it.

 

Over the years, the KISS army has only grown, claiming even (if you can believe it) ex-secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. You keep on shouting. You! Keep on shouting! I can’t hear you!

 

5) S.H.I.E.L.D.

From various Marvel comics, beginning in 1965

The character of Nick Fury was originally a grizzled, hard-chewing solider who fought on the front-lines of various commonplace wars. It wasn’t until he joined the mascent government organization S.H.I.E.L.D. that he really began to come into his own as a super-smart superspy who would fight aliens and supervillains from his flying headquarters. S.H.I.E.L.D. (Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-Enforcement Division) are more than a shadowy cabal of superspies like MI-6. They are a legitimate military force trained in secret tactics, and the mechanics of supervillainy.

 

S.H.I.E.L.D. (also Strategic Hazard Intervention Espionage Logistic Directorate), despite is cool-ass superhero superspy army setup, is more than just means for mayhem, though. They are an open acknowledgment from its creators that superheroes need their own policing system. They need something to organize them and keep tabs on their actions. If you have dozens of costumed vigilantes running amok, why not band them together under the aegis of a secret government institution? In a way S.H.I.E.L.D. is more powerful than any superhero in that they have the means and the bureaucracy to keep them all in check.

 

Nick Fury has appeared across several comics, a TV movie, has has cameos in several recent superhero feature films, and is slated to be a lead character in several others. S.H.I.E.L.D. has invaded the mass consciousness for the time being.

 

4) The Mobile Infantry

from Starship Troopers (1959)

The Klendathu are attacking Earth! Those horrible space bugs are godless horrors from beyond the stars!It’s your only recourse to help fight back. If you are an able-bodied young person, between the ages of 17-20, you can enlist! You can fight! You can help save your planet from the enemy! We’ll keep fighting! We’ll win!

 

Robert A. Heinlein’s 1959 novel, and Paul Verhoeven’s much-debated 1997 feature film based on it, are masterful in the way they use a sci-fi army of eager-to-kill-and-equally-eager-to-die young people to mirror the kill-’em-all propaganda that surrounds war, and the need for military action. Heinlein has said that his novel reflects his pro-military beliefs he harbored at the time; he supported a strong American nuclear program. Verhoeven took the book one step further, and turned the war experience into a cleverly satiric action film which turned the human race into a group of twentysomething Nazi-like murderers of creepy alien creatures.

 

The Mobile Infantry is like a dream military for the hawk. All of its members wish for a better life, have hopes and dreams, and are willing to shoot thousands of rounds of ammo into the still-beating hearts of a ten-foot-tall insect in order to achieve them. They shout oo-rahs, and get matching tattoos. They are a co-ed outfit, and the women are just as tough as the men. And they’re all so damn good looking with their clear sin, straight teeth, impeccably coiffed hair, and their pseudo-fascist uniforms. We have seen the enemy. And he is us. And damn they’re awesome.

 

3) Starfleet

from “Star Trek” (1966) and its spinoffs.

This is the one military force on this list that is not devoted to defense, nor to conquering. Starfleet is a para-military organization set up in San Francisco, ordered by the United Federation of Planets to travel about the stars, making peace, studying spacial phenomenon, and learn important sociological lessons from newly-discovered intelligent life forms. There is a military system in place; they are constructed like naval ships, complete with ship captains, doctors, engineers, and other specialists, all of whom were trained trough Starfleet outfits. But these are not warships. These are ships for travel and exploration.

 

This is the kind of military I like. Sure, The Enterprise has shields and phasers and photon torpedoes, just in case they get in a scrape, but their primary function is to learn and explore. And they can’t operate a machine as vast and as complex as a starship without rigid military rules, ranks and specialists. But the strictness is to make sure you’re giving your A game, and not to kill others. Violence is always a last resort. Unless you’re Captain Kirk, then you can get into the occasional fistfight.

 

It’s rare that we get to see the inner workings of a military organization with the detail we saw on the various “Star Trek” programs. The makers of the shows were very good at making it look like The Enterprises were operational machines, and that the power hierarchy was rigidly established.

 

2) The Empire

from “Star Wars” (1980)

And while you never had any sort of idea as to how the power structure really works, or what The Empire was unmistakably the single mot threatening military force in the galaxy. They lived on board a gigantic, moon-sized weapon they called, not-so-subtly, The Death Star, having hushed conversations in darkened offices about how they planned on destroying entire planets, and taking down that pesky Underground.

 

While The Empire’s Storm Troopers have been called jokingly The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, their sheer numbers were such that they managed to take over the galaxy at some point, and a generation of men are in those shiny armored uniforms. Some have been tried to fly TIE Fighters and take down enemy ships. By sheer dint of will, and a vast, vast arsenal to back them up, The Empire has managed to keep the entire galaxy in its iron grip.

 

What’s more, on of The Empire chief enforcers is am evil masked psychic monk with a light sword who can strangle you from across the room, and often does. He can fly a TIE fighter like everyone else, and is driven by what he calls The Dark Side. He is essentially a Nazi SS commander who is quick to fight hand-to-hand, has psychic powers, can fly a jet, and is fueled, rather literally, by hate. If you don’t fear The Empire, you are a fool.

 

1) G.I. Joe

from “G.I. Joe” (toy ,1964. TV show, 1985)

“G.I. Joe” has become so ubiquitous, it could be argued that the popular perception of the military (at least until the 1990s) is more about these toys and cartoons than it is about actual soldiers. In the 1960s, the “G.I. Joe” action figures were sold to little boys as idealized versions of military fighting men. They were not bloodthirsty characters, but clean-cut, hardworking enlisted men with short haircuts and kung-fu grip. The Joes were not merely fighting in whatever war the U.S. was embroiled in at the time, but were an elite squad assembled to fight a secret terrorist organization called The Cobra Command, who had complex schemes for quick world dominance.

 

This conflict was made more detailed in the 1985 cartoon series that, let’s face it, we all watched. It was a blind, cheery endorsement of the military, filtered through the little-boy, rose-colored prism of robot tanks, laser guns, and space vehicles. And while the actual military mechanics of “G.I. Joe” were pointedly obfuscated, and the conflicts were grossly oversimplified toy commercials, a generation of little boys first learned about war and military conquest from “G.I. Joe.” They are a presence in our minds, and a part of our subconscious. These Joes are the military.

 

In recent years, “G.I. Joe” has been slipping deeper and deeper into fantasy territory, and its relation to the real-life conflicts in the world is becoming increasingly distant. This is all fine. As cartoons (and cartoon-like feature films) go, the little boys only want to see lasers and ‘splosions and characters with clearly-designed outward traits that they can easily understand. “G.I. Joe” is still doing its part to fulfill our war fantasies.

 

 

Witney Seibold is a dove living in Los Angeles with his wife, his books, his videos, and his unpopular opinions. He once had a clearly-outlined plans to flee to Canada in case the U.S. ever instated a draft. He writes film reviews from time to time, which can be accessed at his ‘blog Three Cheers for Darkened Years! He is also the co-host, with William Bibbiani, of The B-Movies Podcast at CRAVE Online, which runs weekly, and you would do well to subscribe to. 

 

“Name the remake of the groundbreaking horror classic in which the killer –”

“Halloween, uh, Texas Chainsaw, Dawn of the Dead, The Hills Have Eyes, Amityville Horror, Last House on the Left, Friday the 13th , A Nightmare On Elm Street, My Bloody Valentine, When A Stranger Calls, Prom Night, Black Christmas, House of Wax, The Fog, Piranha. It’s one of those, right? Right?”

-dialogue from “Scream 4”

 

Sadly, I cannot verify this statistic, but the sad state of Hollywood’s major releases has me in a position where I cannot safely argue against it. Evidently, over 95% of all major feature films released by major Hollywood studios are sequels, remakes, or “reboots.” They’re either based on an older screenplay, a book, or some kind of existing property. Video games, comic books, Italian comic books, Japanese cartoon shows, theme park rides, old TV shows that have already been made into movies, even toys… everything is up for grabs these days. And while Hollywood has always, since time immemorial, kowtowed shamelessly to the quick buck and the easily-recognizable, sleazy adaptation, people my age can only see this belligerently constant double-dipping into the shallow well of creativity as a problem. Where, we impotently ask ourselves, are the original screenplays in Hollywood? Are we eventually going to start seeing an era where the same 15 ‘80s cult films are constantly re-imagined?

We like to blame Hollywood itself for this dearth of creativity, and imagine some abstract studio execs, probably white fat guys with hairpieces, blithely ignorant of film history, and insanely fearful of anything with the smallest whiff of risk. We, equally, like to blame ignorant, pock-marked, violence-obsessed, porn-addicted, booze-stealing, asshole American teenagers, who will blindly shell out their hard-earned drug money to see any old piece of recent CGI-bogged crap vaguely promising ‘splosions and monsters, without and regard to its quality or originality. And while there are indeed film-ignorant studio execs in the world, who don’t know their classics, and who will never take risks, and while there are indeed equally film-ignorant teenagers in the world who only seem to dimly perceive that cinemas provide shallow images of unconnected mayhem, I think the true problem lies with you and I. The problem, I declare, is us.

I have many friends who are reasonably intelligent, and who have good taste in movies, who still express vague enthusiasm about certain remakes, sequels, and terrible-looking Hollywood blockbusters. Too many people I know have declared that they’re already on board for the third live-action “Transformers” film, even though it is rather widely held that “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is one of the most nonsensical and perhaps whorish Hollywood blockbusters of recent years, and that Michael Bay is one of the world’s most prominent hacks. And while I like to think I myself am getting more selective about which films I actively choose to see, I am most certainly not exempt from paying my money to see some large-budget, high-profile sequel or remake out of mere curiosity.

I declare the following: Mere curiosity is not reason enough to see a film. I would like to think that, as a film critic, I have some sort of influence on what films my readers choose to see, and my write-ups can accurately guide people into intelligent conversations about certain feature films, but I understand that most people are going to see what they’re going to see regardless. Nothing I can say or write, for instance, will keep people away from “The Dark Knight Rises.” I fully expect the film to be as thoughtful, gorgeous and exciting as Christopher Nolan’s previous “Batman” films, but if I were to discover the film is bad, my thoughtfully-written-yet-negative review would likely go unheeded by the scads of enthused “Batman” fans the world over. I may even be lambasted by outraged true-believers for being a naysayer.

 

 

My point being that we’ll always be drawn to big films, whether they be good, or dreck.

But all that’s as may be. The reason I write this article is a (perhaps futile) quest to change the way Hollywood makes movies. I want to, as is my wont, offer some positive reinforcement, rather than just doing a usual bit of internet ranting. I, along with many, am very tired of retreads, remakes, reboots, re-imagnings, sequels upon sequels upon sequels. It feels like tasteful movies for grownups are so few and far-between sometimes. There is, however, a very simple solution. We can change Hollywood in a very active fashion, and I would like to propose that everyone in the country take up this practice: theater-hopping.

I don’t mean paying for one movie in a multiplex, and seeing three or four. That’s quotidian, milquetoast adolescent thievery. I mean the uncomplicated practice of buying a ticket for one movie at a multiplex, and going to see another. It’s really that simple. If some hard-working first-time filmmaker has made a heartfelt and stirring drama, and you love it, and you feel it needs more support, buy a ticket for it. You can, of course, tell friends to see it, or, if you’re like me, publish reviews about it, imploring the public at large to get behind it, but you’re also capable of putting as much of your own money as possible toward the cause.

That way, your small, loved, unadvertised drama can be fully supported. The fact remains that you vote with your dollars. Your money shows the higher-ups in the industry what you’re willing to see more of. Hollywood is a low-risk industry. They will not often spring something hugely new on the public, and tend to make films similar to previous successes (when they’re not outright remaking them). Give to the scrappy and amazing film.

This also means that, since you’re no longer paying for them, you can intentionally neglect the blockbuster piece of crap you don’t think will be any good, but are too curious to resist. You have the power to withhold dollars from Michael Bay. This is an amazing power. You can dictate his success. If you’re seeing his films, but not paying for them, his films will go away. If you are paying for the neglected indie classics, more of those will be made.

I understand this is a small anarchy, but, I have to admit, I love a little bit of anarchy here and there, and this is using your anarchy for a powerful aesthetic cause. Think of the clout we have as tastemakers! We are the people big studios are trying to reach. We have the money and the free publicity they seek. We need to be aware of this. We need to take active control of this power. We can demand what we want, send a message, tell the people in charge that we will not see your remakes. And all through the simple, time-worn practice of theater-hopping.

I understand that theater-hopping is not practical in all instances. One-screen theaters are out, and two-screen theaters are probably too well-guarded. This will only work in a many-screen theater that is playing both a large piece of dreck that you’re interested in, and a small, scrappy low-budget film that you feel deserves support.

Here’s a few practical tips on how to theater-hop:

1. Know what theaters your two movies are playing in. If you know where you’re going, and move with confidence, the theater staff will not bother you. If you’re asked if you’re lost, don’t show your ticket stub to the staff. Just ask for your chosen film by title.

    

2. Make sure the multiplex has more than one floor. You can usually move pretty freely about most large theaters using their elevator. The ticket-taker often resides on the other side of it, and you can ride up and down without being bothered.

    

3. Go during the week, and not the weekend. Go during the daytime if you can. Theater attendance is lowest on Tuesdays (as I know from many years’ experience working in movie theaters). It’ll be easier to move about a theater unnoticed if the dayshift is on staff. They’re less vigilant. It’s also less likely that you’ll be sitting in an assigned seat if the theater is largely empty, and it’s the kind of theater to assign seats.

    

4. Bring your own 3-D glasses. If the blockbuster you’re interested in is in 3-D, and you’re paying for a traditional film, you’ll need ‘em. They’re easy to procure, and you won’t have to pay the extras fee if you’re theater-hopping. Plus it’ll save you the extra fee. Contact me if you want some tips on how to turn your 3-D glasses into 2-D glasses. I’ve done it. It works.

   

    

5. Exit out the back of the theater. In the off chance that a theater employee is savvy to what you’re doing, it’s easy to flee out the back exits, and out into the sunlight without being pursued.

    

6. If you get busted, play dumb. It’s entirely likely this won’t work, but it’s worth a shot. Don’t ever act indignant; that’s the best way to get barred from the theater entirely.

    

7. Don’t be a jerk, and stay for several films. I have to admit that I’m guilty of doing this, but it’s no longer something I practice, nor do I encourage it. That’s pushing things into a dickhead territory, and giving short shrift to the theaters. I’m not encouraging occasional petty theft. I’m encouraging a bold dismantling of Hollywood expectations.

 

I hope this article offers some empowering advice. We have the subtle and playfully immature power to sabotage the Hollywood system. Let’s get to using it. Go out. Do it. Leave comments on what films you saw, and leave notes on how to navigate through theaters undetected. We will reshape the taste of the nation. It’s in our grasp.

 

Witney Seibold is a writer living in Los Angeles living with his wife and his unpopular opinions. He curates an unpopular ‘blog, Three Cheers for Darkened Years! where he has published over 800 articles and film reviews. He is also the co-host of The B-Movies Podcast on CRAVE Online with William Bibbiani. He wants it known that this article is completely in earnest.

 

I recall a time when rock snobs and record nerds operated in the upper echelons of geek culture. Before the explosion of the internet in the mid 1990s, and people started freely downloading all the rare and previously-hard-to-find singles, the only way to get information about obscure bands and off-the-wall records was from some snotty-yet-ultra-cool asshole down at your local record store. Occasionally, you might stumble across some fanzine at your favorite comic book shop, or find one while rifling through your big sister’s discarded magazine collection in search of sexy back issues of “Vogue,” but for the most part, acquiring information about weird bands and strange new music was an elite process.

 

While I appreciate that most everyone has instant access to some of the best music in the world these days you can, from where you are sitting, download Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue,” and listen to it right now, all while looking up its Wikipedia entry and learning all about the mad genius behind it there is something to be said for the thrill of the hunt; downloading rare music brings no thrill, while discovering a Holy Grail in a dollar bin can make your week.

 

Music has, however, in recent years, been kind of shunted off to the side in favor of other realms of geek culture. Most everyone knows comic book lore these days, and video games have been around long enough that adults are playing them, and the internet has made us savvy to every intricate step in the filmmaking process, turning us all into critics (and be sure to check out my own ‘blog, Three Cheers for Darkened Years!). But the old-fashioned rock critic is a shriveling breed. Radio stations rarely play new music, and bands are selling fewer and fewer records. It was only a recent innovation to start counting downloads.

 

In the spirit of that snotty rock critic you remember from the record store of old, I have decided to compile a list of 20 records that geeks would love. It’s likely you already own many of these records. It’s likelier still that you have records that are way cooler than the ones I’m going to list here. If you’ve never heard of the record, consider this list a laundry list of recommendations for great music to be appreciated by the snotty geek.  N.B.

Keep in mind that most people’s music experiences are unique, and this list will surely not cover every last corner of geek music (I know little of math rock, my electronica experience is very limited, and I’m not going to get started on wizard rock). These are just 20 important records in no particular order.

 

 

 

 

Flood (1990)

 

by: They Might Be Giants

John Flansburgh and John Linnell, who took their name from an obscure George C. Scott movie, are often at the forefront of the genre known as geek rock. Their bouncy, playful rhythms and their truly strange choices of subject matter make for wonderfully light and enjoyable and peculiar songs about palindromes, statues, famous Belgian painters, and fingertips. Their seminal 1990 record Flood (their fourth studio album) is one of their most popular, including such hits as “Birdhouse in Your Soul,””Twisting,” “Someone Keeps Moving My Chair,” “Particle Man,” and their famed cover of “Istanbul (Not Constantinople).”

 

Indeed “Flood” is so good that it is the namesake of what I call The Flood Syndrome; that is it’s such an amazing record that you find yourself mildly disappointed by the band’s other output, however brilliant it may be. They Might Be Giants are still making record and touring today, and their newest, “Join Us!” is due out later this year. Their infamous Dial-a-Song service, established in 1989, is still up and running. Call (718) 387-6962, and, if you can get through, you’ll hear a song by them for free over the phone.

 

 

The Dr. Demento 20

th 

Anniversary Collection (1991)

 

by: various artists

If it were not for Dr. Demento (nee Barret Hansen), a generation would not know that comedy belonged in music. Broadcasting from KMET in Pasadena, CA, Dr. Demento, a rock critic and aficionado of obscure jazz, carved out a niche for himself playing old comedy records and stand-up routines when his peers were all rocking out to The Grateful Dead. He was one of the first to play Frank Zappa, Spike Jones, and Allen Sherman. He also had an open-mailbox policy, and often received records from ambitious teenage comedy nerds from all over the world. Most famously, he discovered “Weird Al” Yankovic, and “Weird Al’s” track “Another One Rides the Bus” was recorded live in Dr. Demento’s studio.

 

I recall many a halcyon Sunday night listening to Dr. Demento as I drifted off to bed. It was the perfect cap to a hectic weekend.

 

While Dr. Demento has curated many, many records and collections in his day (most of them for the stalwart Rhino Records), the definitive collection to own is probably his 20^th anniversary collection that was released in 1991. It contains a lot of famous novelty hits like “Fish Heads” by Barnes and Barnes, “Dead Puppies” by Ogden Edsl, “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah” by Allen Sherman, “The Monster Mash” by Bobby “Boris” Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers, “Star Trekkin’” by The Firm, and “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha Haa!” by Napoleon XIV. Each one of the tracks on this collection in an invaluable classic.

 

 

Space is the Place (1972)

 

by: Sun Ra and his Intergalactic Solar Arkestra

Sun Ra (nee Herman “Sonny” Blount) started making jazz records as early as 1954. He was insanely prolific, having released over 200 records (most on his own label) all throughout his music career. It was hard to choose one of his catalog to recommend, so I’m sticking with the one I’m the most familiar with. In 1972, Sun Ra made a feature film about himself and his band, and he released a soundtrack record to go along with it. Both are entitled “Space is the Place.”

 

Sun Ra. How do I describe him? Kook saint? The Salvador Dalí of the jazz world? A saturnine spiritual musical lunatic? A legitimate alien visitor? Often seen dressed in huge, flashy pharaoh outfits, including ornate headdresses, or chainmail skullcaps, Sun Ra would, with this Arkestra, compose and perform 13-minute free-form jazz odysseys, ranting about cosmic waves, spacial forms, and his alien origins. He would use computers and Moog synths long before they were in vogue, and made electro-jazz soundscapes that alienate the casual listener, and bend the ear of people searching (in vain) for a hummable melody. One could accuse Sun Ra of being an acid head hippie, but his outfit was a strict drug-free zone. This guy meant every word.

 

His music was virtuosic and weird, and is just the thing to groove to on a hot Saturday afternoon in Summer when you need your brain to be exploded out the top of your head and transported to a distant Saturn moon to live amongst the half-alien offspring of Nikola Tesla.

 

 

Freedom of Choice (1980)

 

by: Devo

No geek’s music collection is complete without at least one record by Devo, the famed outer-world outfit from Akron, OH. Devo, led by Mark Mothersbaugh, is often listed as an adjunct of the punk and post-punk movements, as their lyrics often espoused a powerful anti-establishment message, observing that human society has reached a point of definite devolution. Their sound, however, is anything but punk rock, featuring an electro-infused repetitive bop, and goofy vocals. Their live act included weird costumes, masks, and the famous power domes. There was even Mothersbaugh’s creepy alter-ego Booji Boy, which was just Mark in a mask, singing in a falsetto.

 

While Devo’s entire early output is invaluable, the one record that may considered the crux of their sound and their philosophy is their 1980 record 擢reedom of Choice,their third studio album. It contains hits like “Whip It,” “Girl U Want,” and the title track. Freedom of choice is what you got. Freedom from choice is what you want.

 

Devo is still making records to this day, having released “Something for Everybody” in 2010. The entire record is nothing but peppy earworms and goofy ballads.

 

 

The Transformed Man (1968)

 

By: William Shatner

O Shatner! My Shatner! I groove the songs you sing.

And every geek must fight to find this ancient album thing.

With covers of old Beatles tunes, while speaking all the lyrics,

And wacky drugged-out poetry, a dirge and panegyrics,

But sing, sing, sing!

O the ranting, pseudo-comedy

Where in the bins, my Shatner lies,

Fallen oddball oddity.

 

Apologies to Walt Whitman, there.

 

Yes, as we all know, the erstwhile Canadian actor, and cult star of “Star Trek,” recorded his infamous album “The Transformed Man” back in the late ’60s, and it has been something of an oddity ever since. Shatner famously did not really sing, but ranted, beat poetry style, the lyrics to some famous pop hits of the day. His cover of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is something to be remembered, and listening to the entire album in one sitting can transport you into a weird netherworld of ’60s pop culture where spaced-out druggie spirituality actually overlapped with mainstream music.

 

If you haven’t seen the video of Shatner singing “Rocket Man” at an awards show, then you must.

 

 

Dawn Metropolis (2009)

 

by: Anamanaguchi

In this age of video game ubiquity, there is no shortage of bands who have devoted themselves to playing hard rock versions of video game music (I’m fond of Minibosses, and The Retro Remix Revue), and, in the case of Anamanaguchi, a techno group from New York, remixing pop tunes out of 8- and 16-bit speakers to make new original music. They are a powerpop band with punkish undertones, all making music with video game sound effects.

 

This, however, is no cutesy homage, or nostalgia orgy. These are serious musicians who are cleverly repurposing the explodey soundtrack of many of our childhoods, and seamlessly integrating it into the ‘blogosphere generation’s quick-download idiom. From what I understand, they put on one heck of a live show, and, while currently best-known for writing the music to the “Scott Pilgrim” video game (and a few bits of music for the “Scott Pilgrim” feature film), they are poised to become a legitimate cult phenomenon. Video game players,. Geeks, and fans of hard-edged techno-thrills take note. Anamanaguchi are worth seeking out.

 

 

Other Worlds, Other Sounds (1958)

 

by: Juan García Esquivel

In the late ’50s and early ’60s, Esquivel was probably categorized as mere jazz, but today has been called the technical master of experimental lounge music. Using a wide array of instruments such as xylophones, slide guitars and bongo drums, the tortoise-shell-glasses-wearing Mexican hipster expounded on the loungey trends of the day, making them into perky, languid and science-fiction-y mood piece perfect for swaying arhythmically to. The dreaminess, though, was tempered by a legitimate 1950s corniness that is gleeful to the nostalgia buff. His “Mucha Muchacha” contains a Herb Alpert brass portion, and a lame mid-song narration by two white people explaining what the title means. It’s awesome.

 

What’s more, Esquivel was one of the pioneers of stereo sound, learning to mix his music for the recently-discovered two-speaker system. If you can find early vinyl of his stuff, buy it immediately. If not, most of his hits have been re-released on CD, most notably on a best-of record called 鉄pace Age Bachelor Pad Music,and his wondrous, wondrous hit record “Other Worlds, Other Sounds” from 1958. Esquivel, daddy-o, was a square candy that looked round.

 

 

The Blue Album (1994)

 

by: Weezer

For a long time I suspected Weezer was only included on lists of geek rockers because a few members of the band wore glasses. Then I managed to hear their music, and while it wasn’t technically very complicated (they had the simplistic punk-rock chord progressions down, and little else), it still struck me in a weird way. Weezer sang about Buddy Holly and unraveling sweaters in a playful, childish poetry fashion that belied their geek sincerity. They have a self-effacing, underdog geek appeal that has gone missing in recent years. Luckily, Weezer is still making records.

 

Their 1994 untitled debut album, often called The Blue Album, has the two songs listed above, as well as hits like “Say it Ain’t So,” and “My Name is Jonas.” It was one of those rare albums, though, that’s actually solid all the way through, and warrants several listens. And for those who think Weezer is little more than a whiny, geeky college rock group, I encourage you to watch some of their music videos. In one, thanks to special effects, they play a song for the cast of “Happy Days.” In another, they jam with The Muppets. A new one employs dozens of YouTube stars. They are clever riffers on popular culture, and savvy musicians who know their place in the world.

 

 

Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Pirates of Penzance”

 

the D’Oyly-Carte production

While most geeks are known for miring themselves in comic books, technology, science fiction, and video games, it must be acknowledged that there are red-headed step-children even in the geek world. There are ultra-nerdy intellectual geeks in the world who can actually build circuit boards, have mastered chess, and sing in the college’s a capella choir. These are people who can give you a beat-down in Tolkien trivia, and can whoop you real good in a D&D LARP, and have, perhaps, a small collection of showtunes and classical records back in their dorm room. This entry is for them.

 

Grand opera and playful operettas are not usually listed as primary interests on video game message boards and the like, but they do fill an important showtunes niche in the collection of wussy theater geeks, and shy intellectual types. And what better place to go, than the ultra-witty, mannered, and jumpy-enjoyable world of William Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan for such things? Gilbert and Sullivan’s playful Carroll-esque rhymes and catchy, hummable tunes are ready-made for the classical music phobic, and play right into the ears of the music lover. The lyrics are fun to memorize, and the tunes are fun to learn to play on the piano.

 

“The Pirates of Penzance” also features, well, pirates, as well as a fun adventure story. A true geek can recite the lyrics to the Modern Major-General song impeccably. If you’re afraid to actually dole out cash for an old classical piece, merely rent the 1983 film version of the musical with Kevin Kline and Linda Ronstadt and Angela Lansbury. Come over the the dark side.

 

 

The Orange Box soundtrack (2007)

 

by: Jonathan Coulton, et al

When the video game company Valve released “The Orange Box” in 2007, it was intended to be a stop-gap between two other games in a popular running franchise. It included three games: “Half-Life 2,” “Fortress 2,” and a quickly thrown-off mini-game called “Portal.” Strangely, it was the third of these to take off in popularity, to the point where the wold-over is littered with squealing “Portal” fans who claim it to be the best game ever made. I haven’t played it, but it sounds to be old-fashioned video game mechanics at their best (pass through cleverly placed doorways to escape a trap) and doesn’t bother to bog itself down in exposition or cut-in mini-movies.

 

The soundtrack to this unexpectedly popular Orange Box was an amazing hit, mostly for the single “Still Alive” written by geek master Jonathan Coulton (who had previously written tender folk ballads with sci-fi lyrics, like “Code Monkey” and “Skullcrusher Mountain.” “Still Alive” was sung by a computer in the context of the game, praising your triumphs, but still being kind of passive-aggressive about how many people it had killed. It was a clever song that turned usual video game conventions on their ear.

 

The box also contains other music and songs from video games, which is usually amazing to listen to, especially out of context.

 

 

Dare to be Stupid (1985)

 

by: “Weird Al” Yankovic

I have to admit, I am a nut for “Weird Al” Yankovic. “Dare to Be Stupid” was the first record I ever got for myself, and I’ve been hooked ever since. Even at age 32, I find myself wiggling in anticipation for his next record (“Alpocolypse” is due out in June), and I still love his sound. No proper geek is without at least one “Weird Al” record in their collection and, for the poor souls who haven’t managed to accumulate one or two in their lives, I humbly suggest they start with his 1985 album “Dare to Be Stupid.”

 

Most little boys my age know the title track from “Dare to Be Stupid” as it was played on the soundtrack to “Transformers: The Movie,” right at the scene where Eric Idle showed up. But more than that, the song is a rambunctious and fun pastiche to Devo, while matching their wit and weirdness tenfold. Indeed, it was “Weird Al’s” loving tribute to Devo that can act as a gateway into their music. It makes me wish Al would do a straightforward cover of a Devo song someday.

 

“Dare to Be Stupid” includes the classic parodies “Like a Surgeon,” the strange “I want a New Duck,” and the ever-famous “Yoda,” spoofing The Kink’s transgendered odyssey “Lola.” Every “Star Wars” nerd knows “Yoda.” More notably, though, this record has some of Al’s best original work, like his torch song “One More Minute,” and his playful ragtime hit “This is the Life,” which was used in TV broadcasts of the cult comedy “Johnny Dangerously.” This is also the only Al album to feature a cover song. The song? The “George of the Jungle”” theme song.

 

“Weird Al” Yankovic is comedy music at its finest. Not content to merely do cutesy, obvious jokes, Al is a virtuoso, a passionate lover of music, a playful critic of popular culture, and important pop culture footnote in and of himself.

 

 

The Mollusk (1997)

 

by: Ween

Lazy, questionably talented guitar riffs, squeaky sped-up or languorous slowed-down vocals, and subject matter that would make your grandmother tear her face off, Ween’s music is certainly not for everybody. But for the bong aficionados, and lazy-eyed seekers of the bottom of the musical fish tank, Ween may be made to order. With albums like “The Pod,” “God Ween Satan,” and “Chocolate and Cheese,” Ween have left their mark as experimental rockers who are either playing an elaborate prank on their listeners, or who are, more likely, spaced-out wonks with an unlikely record deal, and a passion to make the jumbled puzzles in their mind into comedy records from Mars.

 

Their 1997 album “The Mollusk” is probably one of their more accessible records, as it has some actual hummable melodies and a baffling nautical throughline that’s fun to follow. Their song “Ocean Man” was featured in the “SpongeBob SquarePants Movie,” and their chipper song “Waving My Dick in the Wind” is exactly about said activity. They’re like a somnambulist version of Frank Zappa. Your brother’s favorite record, as you click it back and forth quickly between 33 and 45 rpm. If you can groove to “The Mollusk,” move to one of the records listed above. Then get into some of their more modern stuff. Then you’ll be lost forever.

 

 

Meet the Residents (1974)

 

by: The Residents

And speaking of bands that aren’t for everyone…

Not content to live about the fringe, The Residents have purposely remained anonymous throughout their multi-decade career, often wearing scary eyeball-head masks, and other face-obscuring costumes. It’s unclear as to how many people are in the band at any given moment, and if there have been any personnel changes, they haven’t been advertised. They have over 150 records to date, some of which are proper studio albums, most of which are independently-released performance art pieces that may not exist. The residents are taking concepts of fame and deliberately eschewing them. Even if they played no music at all, they would be fascinating artists.

 

They play music that can only be described as “experimental.” Perhaps “noise rock.” Some of what they play could be categorized as pop music, although the bulk of what they do are abstract soundscapes, and quiet atonal parodies of popular musical forms. They’re so oblique and maddening, they’re almost outside the world of music altogether. They’re like the Crispin Glover of rock ‘n’ roll.

 

Their first studio album is as good a place to start as any. It’s an ostensible spoof of “Meet the Beatles” (they credit themselves as John Crawfish, George Crawfish, Paul McCrawfish, and Ringo Starfish), but sounds nothing like The Beatles in their music or content. You want some ultra-weird outsider jams? Reside.

 

 

The Big Problem ≠ The Solution. The Solution = Let it Be (1989)

 

by: Crispin Hellion Glover

Crispin Glover is like the Crispin Glover of Crispin Glover.

 

For those of you who only know Glover as an actor, you’re missing out on the true depths of his insanity. He is not merely a quirky and outspoken weirdo on the screen, but a seriously dark artist who recuts books into swirling, rotting phantasmagoria of off-putting blackened joys, makes edgy dark films, and, as of 1989, put out a record of bizarre rap, clunky, whiny folk, and alien readings of his book Oak Mot, accompanied by creepy, faraway jazz.

 

The record was produced by Barnes and Barnes, and features a solo by “Weird Al” Yankovic, but it is not, by any means, a comedy record. Crispin Glover’s music vacillates all over the map, at times being pointedly annoying, and at others disturbingly horrific. His rap jam, “Auto-Manipulator,” all about masturbation, is badly done and forcedly jejune. Really? “Clowny Clown Clown?” His cover of “The Man on the Flying Trapeze” is something to lace your circus nightmares, and his cover of “These Boots Are Made for Walking,” where he shrieks and weeps his way through it, is a subtle piece of brilliance.

 

It’s unclear as to whether or not Glover was playing a prank or being entirely earnest. Either way, it’s fun to hack/slash your way through a weirdo record like this.

 

 

An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer (1959)

 

by: Tom Lehrer

Tom Lehrer is a satirist who got his start in musical theater. In the late ’50s and early ’60s, he recorded several albums’ worth of wry, dry and witty records, often performed live in front of an audience, singing about poisoning pigeons, wicked Boy Scouts, and the old dope peddler. His clear-as-a-bell piano playing, and pointedly clever rhymes made him come across less as a pop star, and more like a playful professor. Which indeed he is; to this day, he occasionally teaches math at UC Santa Cruz.

 

Tom Lehrer’s mastery of disparate musical forms is astonishing, given that his first interest has always been mathematics. He can move from marches to lullabies to calypso tunes without blinking. His music also has a wonderfully intellectual and nerdy edge that pushes him from a crass master of mockery into a legitimate genius. Just listen to him singing the names of the chemical elements to the Modern Major General song. Or trying to come up with a chipper title tune to “Oedipus Rex.” And then thrill to the edgy beating described in “The Masochism Tango.”

 

Lehrer made three records, and quietly retired, having claimed the muse had left him. Luckily, we have dozens of his songs left to entertain us.

 

 

Whatever and Ever, Amen (1997)

 

by: Ben Folds Five

I’m rockin’ the suburbs. No one encapsulates college rock more than Ben Folds. His playfully immature complaints, hummable riffs, and pseudo-soulful piano ballads play right into the intellect-starved and newly growing college-aged mind. To this day, he is blasted across college campuses, and his concerts are attended almost entirely by the 18-24 demo. I know. I went to one recently, and felt decidedly old. And if my words aren’t enough of an indicator, get this: Ben Folds is the subject of more college a cappella arrangements than any other pop artist.

 

He’s like a joyous, youth-friendly version of Billy Joel. A calm, less flashy comedy version of Elton John. His 1997 record “Whatever and Ever, Amen” came out right when I was in the midst of the college experience, so its sound hit me right in the nostalgia. Oddly, though, I think it’ll do the same for you. Ben Folds has reached a weird singularity of universality. He is now and he is then and he is eternal.

 

 

Exotica (1957)

 

by: Martin Denny

Like Esquivel, Martin Denny was a pioneer of a kind of jazz we now call “lounge.” Quiet, calming, like a slow-motion explosion inside your martini, Martin Denny created mood pieces that invoked faraway beaches, deep jungles, and steamy, open-air sex parlors that never existed. He would quietly tinker away on his keyboard while slide guitars, upright basses and weird percussion instruments accompanied him. He was also notorious for putting exotic bird noises in the backgrounds of many of his recordings, making for interruptions of the best kind. If the Enchanted Tiki Room was for grownups, it would play Martin Denny music.

 

In the mid ’50s, the erstwhile composer and pianist took up gigs playing in Hawai’i, and when the island became a state in 1959, and America became obsessed with a new kind of Tiki culture, Martin Denny was there to fill the musical niche. He did not merely replay traditional Hawai’ian hymns, but riffed on the form, mixing what he had learned with the jazz trends of the day. Martin Denny was one smooth motherfucker. If you want to calm a party down, get people restful and cuddly, you play Martin Denny.

 

 

UFO Romantics (2002)

 

by: Guitar Wolf

I have to admit, I know little of the world of J-Pop, andwhen compiling a list of music for the geek crowd, J-Pop needs to be mentioned. Rather than trudge through the volumes and volumes of squeaky, hyperactive electronic little-girl bubblegum that infects the genre, I turn instead to the curious Japanese blend of American noise punk/garage music put out by the ice-cool stage act Guitar Wolf.

 

Their sound is largely indistinguishable from any number of middling J-Pop grunge acts (I’m actually more fond of Fifi and the Mach 3), but where Guitar Wolf exceeds is in their stage personae. They wear leather jackets, and affect an air of ultra-cool disconnection. The band members have wolf names: Guitar Wolf, Bass Wolf, Drums Wolf. They call themselves the Worlds Greatest Jet rock ‘n’ Roll Band. Jet rock ‘n’ roll is the unique genre in which they played.

 

Most amusing of all is the film they made, “Wild Zero” (2000) in which they play their on stage personae as dangerous silent drifters who accidentally wander into a zombie apocalypse. Yes, they dispatch zombies with their swinging guitars, and with the power of their rock.

 

 

Absolutely Free (1967)

 

by: Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention

 

Frank Zappa is a hard one. He’s a playful anti-hippie-type who often goes on tirades against the facets of society that bother him (which was largely everything) giving him an obnoxious air of smugness that’s hard to get around. Through it all he was funny, but his glib directness puts off a lot of people (including record producers), forcing him to work with his equally whacked out band and no one else. What’s more, Zappa was interested in forming all new sounds, full of sloppy background noise, weird echo, and capturing the true chaos of creation. What’s more still, he was interested in opera, and would pepper his albums with long, long, long atonal musical experiments; he once tried to write a piece of classical music using a thirteen-note scale.

 

So yes, Zappa is hard to get into. But he has made some wonderfully funny and wry spoofs in his day, and some of his records, while sloppy and weird, are still reasonably accessible. For the neophyte looking to get into Zappa, or for the fan of oddball music, I recommend his second studio record “Absolutely Free.” He sings of Suzy Creamcheese (his nickname for bland, middle-American teenage girls), vegetables, and spoofs conformity with his ballad “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It.” He was like a musical Abbie Hoffman. A mad, drunken revolutionary without the booze. He’s a peek into the small counter-culture right underneath the psychedelics of the 1960s. Not everyone likes him, but most, I think, should be familiar with him.

 

 

The Velvet Touch of Los Straightjackets (1999)

 

by: Los Straightjackets

Rockabilly impresarios from Nashville, TN, Los Straightjackets are an instrumental rock band whose love for ’50s punk and hard surf has fueled a decades-long career. Their sound reminds me of greasy diners, late nights in fast cars, and the milkshake you threw at that one asshole waiter. But, y’know, all in a fun way. They play traditional rockabilly tunes, compose their own new material, and, then, just to keep you on your toes, will throw in an unexpected cover, as in their “Velvet Touch” record, where they cover “My Heart Will Go On,” the love ballad from “Titanic.”

 

One of my favorite covers of theirs is the theme song to “The Munsters,” which employs their awesome playing, off-kilter sense of humor, and pop culture awareness. Sadly that track is only available on a Rob Zombie compilation.

 

The best part of all, though, are their on-stage antics, as they are never seen without their smart suits and famous luchador masks. A group of wry, awesome rockabilly luchadors? Sign me up.

 

 

 

 

Witney Seibold is a movie nerd living in Los Angeles with his loving wife, who actually knows a lot more about music than he does. He maintains a film review ‘blog called Three Cheers for Darkened Years! where he has posted over 800 articles to date, most of them film reviews. He is also the wussier half of The B-Movies Podcast at Crave online, which he co-hosts with William Bibbiani.

Dan Rush’s “Everything Must Go” is based on a short story by Raymond Carver, who previously had his work adapted by Robert Altman in the epic suburban drama “Short Cuts.” Carver’s stories all seem to be infused with a certain flavor of amoral suburban angst, that is somewhere between the saturated melodrama of Douglas Sirk and the gin-soaked poetic delirium of Charles Bukowski. I have read little of his work, I must confess, so I can’t say for sure how close Rush’s film is to its source material. I can say, though, that his film, while dealing with a depressed alcoholic who is trying to rid his life of all its weighty possessions, is not as dark or as hard-edged as it could have been.

Perhaps it was the casting of comedian Will Ferrell in the leads role. Ferrell is known for his self-unaware hysterics, and ego-tastic blowhards, only occasionally venturing into quiet, soulful shlubs and awkward salarymen (as in 2006’s “Stranger than Fiction”). He is genial and affable and unthreatening. This means that his character in “Everything Must Go,” a put-upon alcoholic salesman, is instantly kind of likeable, but doesn’t possess the necessary weight to bring the enterprise to its potential tragic impact. Ferrell has the pathos down, but none of the tragedy. He has the self-pity, but none of the raw villainy required to bring this film any real oomph. As it stands, “Everything Must Go” is quietly affecting, and gently tragic, but not Earth-moving. You can kind of tell that this is the director’s first feature.

 

 

Ferrell plays Nick Halsey, a legitimately out-of-control alcoholic who has been coasting at his salesman job for years. At the beginning of the film, he is fired for his more-than-occasional drunkenness, and offered little more than an imitation Swiss Army knife as a consolation. Arriving home, he finds that his wife has changed the locks, left town, and strewn his every belonging out of the front yard. His bank account has been frozen, his telephone is out of service, and his car is repossessed. Drunk, destitute, and without even the most basic faculties, he actively decides to stay in limbo, essentially living on his front lawn, spending what little money he has left on Pabst Blue Ribbon.

He develops some weird regards for the people in his neighborhood, who can see him organizing his stuff during the day, and sleeping in his La-Z-boy chair at night. There is the old friend (Stephen Root) who seems to be having some sort of loving and deviant sex with a younger woman. There is the pretty, pregnant Samantha (Rebecca Hall) who doesn’t seem to grasp just how destitute Nick is. And there’s the professional regard he develops with a neighborhood boy Kenny (Christopher Jordan Wallace), who eventually is hired by Nick to convert his shattered pile of a previous life into the yard sale to end all yard sales.

While Nick is suffering and drunk, and his police detective friend/AA sponsor (Michael Peña) is hastily insisting that he get his shambled life back together, “Everything Must Go” is surprisingly gentle to his haggard protagonist. When he pathetically seeks out an old high school chum (Laura Dern) to sort of self-indulgently while away in some misplaced nostalgia, he is allowed to have his moment. The scenes with Dern are healing and nice. As he sells off his belongings, weans himself off of beer, and shares the profits with Kenny and a close regard for Samantha, Nick races toward a healing oblivion.

The actual oblivion is, perhaps, more romantic than it should have been, and Nick’s deliberate erasure of himself from the Grid could have felt more cathartic, but “Everything Must Go” is such an earnest effort that it’s hard not to get hooked for long passages. I left a trifle unsatisfied, but I did get the feeling that Ferrell, just like Nick, will eventually become the serious, pure worker that he so desperately wants to be.

I once wrote a brief article on how massive cult science fiction films like “Star Wars” seem to fulfill a religious need in the hearts of sci-fi fans, and how the release of “Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace” represented a crisis of faith for true believers. It was a short article that read more like the short thesis of a longer essay than an actual complete thought, but I still think there’s something to it. Why else, then, would there have been such an outpouring of vitriol from “Star Wars” fans the world over? Why did the phrase “George Lucas raped my childhood!” enter common parlance? George Lucas owns the rights to his “Star Wars” movies, and may do what he wants with them, but, perhaps, the people who live for the movies – the ones who make fan films, who re-enact the film on YouTube, who re-edit the new “Star Wars” films to their liking, who obsessively collect toys, who have made “Star Wars” into a lifestyle – are the ones who truly “own” “Star Wars.” 

Alexandre O. Philippe‘s new documentary “The People vs. George Lucas” is an exhaustive and holistic documentary that should rest near the hearts of all obsessive “Star Wars” fans, as it brings every last issue to light, and interviews scads of nerds, comedians, authors (among then Neil Gaiman), and pop culture experts on the matter (among them, Geekscape’s Jonathan London, a man I occasionally write for), coming to various conclusions, and exactingly examining each pop culture faith crisis that “Star Wars” has presented since 1997, the year the Special Editions were released in theaters.

 

Why, for instance, did Lucas decide to erase all the hard-wrought practical effects from his 1977 only to replace them with slicker – and perhaps blander – digital effects? Why did he add all the extra visuals? Why does he keep on denying fans access to the original versions on home video? Why has he gone out of his way to suppress the awful “Star Wars Holiday Special?” And what role does Jar-Jar Binks play in all this? Surely Lucas, who hasn’t made many films in his career, has the right to re-tinker his films, but does he have the right to re-write cinema history in such a blatant fashion?

 

“The People vs. George Lucas” jumps, two feet first, into the maddening ambivalence that surrounds the much maligned George Lucas. Generations of film audiences have sainted him for making “Star Wars,” grew up with the toys, and were welcomed into a marketing glut that the world had never yet seen. Then, once Lucas had become a billionaire, and decided to repackage his films, the fans felt betrayed. Then, when Lucas decided to make a few more “Star Wars” films 22 years after the fact, they were welcomed by fans and critics with horror and disgust. For a generation of near-religious fanatics, this is more than a bad sci-fi film to be dismissed. This is reversing dogmatic decree. Angry fans weigh in, ranting about how they’ve been led on. Other critics do point out how no one forced those kids to buy the “Star Wars” toys. There were even a few words on the curious phenomenon of “Star Wars” fans who have to prove their fandom by exclaiming how much they hate “Star Wars.” Like hipster atheists, with no religious agenda other than an open bone to pick with their previous church, these fans are still mired in “Star Wars” lore, and live to hate it. Maybe they can stray to the dark side, and try out some re-runs of “Star Trek.” Bwa ha ha.

 I was surprised, even, to see the suggestion that the new, hated “Star Wars” films are actually having the same effect on children today as the old films had on their parents. Some fans even suggested, wistfully, that perhaps its time to let “Star Wars” go. The most melancholy pieces come from, of all people, Francis Ford Coppola, who remembered George Lucas the maverick filmmaker, who had to work and struggle to get “Star Wars” made, and laments that the overwhelming success of his film, and his sudden wealth only ruined him as an artist, stagnating his career. Coppola and the fans seem to agree: Lucas simply became too large for his own good. 

This pop culture struggle has been at the center of the Geek lifestyle since 1977, when geekery really exploded in earnest. A generation (and perhaps a cultural tolerance for arrested adolescence) has now grown up, unshaken, in the cult of “Star Wars,” and they have to star acknowledging, as they age, and as the franchise becomes increasingly moribund, that it may be a thing of the past. In a way, “The People vs. George Lucas” with its open embracing of geek ambivalence toward their geek heroes, may serve as a distant death knell for the geek lifestyle. If we’re growing up, and our old objects of affection are tarnished, are we going to stick around?

Since extensive footage of the “Star Wars” movies was not available, Philippe did the next best thing, and peppered his film with the hundred upon hundreds of fan-made “Star Wars” films in the world. There is, the film points out, something unique about “Star Wars” fans, and their need to re-create the movie in their own idiom. It makes for a saturation of the eyeballs that can be a little overwhelming for the non-”Star Wars” fan, but creates a refreshing and lively variety of visuals. Here’s something curious: for all the rage Lucas has incurred from his own fans, he encourages fan film and re-edits through his own website. This is sporting of him.

 

The finest review I have seen of this phenomenon was made by Harry S. Plinkett (a.k.a. Mike Stoklasa) of Red Letter Media, who made hysterical and insightful feature-length video reviews of each of the “Star Wars” prequels. If you feel lost on the issue, or don’t know the details, watch these reviews, and you’ll be right on track. For those who do not celebrate the geek lifestyle, or find the entire worship of “star Wars” to be childish, you may want to see the film anyway; it will give you a keen idea on how popular culture seems to move in the information age.

 

In keeping with my recent article on the most disgusting movies ever made, I wanted to continue on the theme of movies (and, in this case, one video game and one play) that still have the ability to weird out even the most stalwart and gore-desensitized soul. Talking to friends, I have learned that while barfing and oozing and bleeding are par for the course scenes of self-mutilation are always sure-fire ways to get the teeth chattering. A man can hack the limb off of a zombie with a pane of glass, and people yawn, but if the same man slices his own hand with the same pane of glass, people tend to avert their eyes. 

 

There’s something about scenes of self-slaughter that are decidedly more visceral than other scenes of violence. Not many of us can relate to the experience of pulling a trigger, and killing a bad guy. But we can all imagine, all too vividly, just what it might feel like to have to pull out a fingernail.

 

So steel yourself, as I’m going to go into some pretty dark territory, as I recount the ten greatest self-mutilation scenes in popular culture. Some will make you wince visibly. Others may make you exclaim. All of which will have a huge impact.

 

10) Mark “Chopper” Read severs his own ear

in “Chopper” (2000)

Eric Bana had not yet become a recognizable movie star in America in 2000, but he was already a darling of the Aussie circuit (and of some of the better-versed American indie aficionados) thanks to his raw and rambunctiously violent performance in “Chopper,” the true story of Australian supercriminal Mark Read. Read was one of those celebrity criminals, as well-known for his outsize personality and outspoken media appearances as he was for his litany of crimes.

 

In one scene, Read had to prove that, by staying in prison, he was in mortal danger. His mind jumped to the logical, if not completely icky, conclusion that if he were horribly mutilated in some way, he would show how much danger he is in. Of course, his own decision to simply and easily slice off an ear only threw a light, ironically, onto how mad he was, and how much danger he was in from himself.

 

This is an excellent crime flick, worth seeking out, if only for Bana’s stellar and near-unrecognizable performance. That one ear-slicing scene, well…

 

9) Nina pulls on a hangnail

in “Black Swan” (2010)

“Black Swan” has, perhaps, more trauma to the fingers than any other film. It may feature a scene of a woman stabbing herself in the face, but it’s the fingertips we remember. Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman, in her Oscar-winning role) already has a problem with scratching herself, and her overbearing mother (Barbara Hershey) insists on trimming her fingernails to the very quick, sometime resulting in bleeding and bandages. We’ve all accidentally cut or fingernails too closely at one time or another, so we know the sharp pain it can bring.

 

But in a scene that is perhaps hallucination brought on by the dark, sticky inner caves of madness, we see Nina, away from her mother, retiring to a bathroom to escape the party she has been attending. She looks at her sore, reddened fingertips, and begins to pick at them. She sees a hangnail, and pulls at it. And, in what is probably the most painful scene in a movie full of painful scenes, she yanks so hard, she essentially shucks the skin off of the entire length of her finger.

 

We cut back and see that it did not really happen, but everyone in the audience groaned a little at that scene. That’s a pain we can, perhaps, all to easily visualize.

 

8) Peter Winter yanks off a fingernail

in “Clean, Shaven” (1993)

Peter Winter (Peter Greene) is on a potentially futile quest to regain custody of his daughter from the Foster family that has been looking after her. Peter is a legitimate schizophrenic, whose world is full of strange hallucinations, paranoia and unseen violence. He sleeps in his darkened car, and breaks mirrors. In terms of psychological accuracy, Lodge Kerrigan’s 1993 film is first rate. In terms of its disturbing portrayal of a man crumbling beneath his own mind, it’s harrowing and gut-wrenching.

 

The one scene most everyone remembers, though, is an unexpected scene in which Peter cleans his fingernails with a knife an then, perhaps as a trifle, perhaps to fulfill some paranoid fantasy, he stabs the knife into his fingertip, digs under his nail, and wrenches it up from his hand. There is no screaming, and there is no blood, but the audience will still shift very, very uncomfortably in their seats.

 

It turns out, of course, that the fingernail removal was only a hallucination, but its impact will never be forgotten, and the sickness and madness conveyed in the scene will leave you marked. I implore the strong to seek out “Clean, Shaven.”

 

7) Aron Ralston frees himself

in “127 Hours” (2010)

Aron Ralston (James Franco) is a free-wheeling outdoorsy type who loves to trek through deserts on his bike, climb rocks, and take to the natural world all by his lonesome. He is a bit reckless, and perhaps a bit too solitary, but he is energized all the time, and loves his life. His need for solitude let to an unfortunate accident where he found himself at the bottom of a canyon, his arm pinned between a fallen boulder and the cliff face. You wanted solitude? You got it.

 

What he does to free himself is well-known by now, and comedians have been referring to Danny Boyle’s terse film as “I Cut My Arm Off!” But what “127 Hours” truly does, aside from giving us a taut drama and endlessly creative storytelling conceits, is a tactile experience of sawing an arm off. We don’t necessarily see the blood, but when Aron begins chipping away at his forelock, using nothing but a dull Leatherman’s tool and gumption, we can almost see ourselves doing it.

 

When he hit’s his nerve, we hear a noise. It’s a shrill, grating electric buzzing sound, like a game of Operation crying out in torturous horror. If pain could make a noise, I’m pretty sure that’s what it would sound like.

 

6) Ethan cuts off his own finger

in “Heavy Rain”

The story of “Heavy Rain” is so involved and complicated, that there are entire websites devoted to it. The makers of the game intended the game to be many, many hours long, so the gameplay is stretched over scene after scene of plot twists and strange pseudo-supernatural noir conceits that would leave even fans of Tolkein a little baffled.

 

At one point, though, near the end of the game, a cackling serial killer forces the character you control, a fellow named Ethan, who is looking for his missing son, to slice off a finger. The usual idea of hitting buttons and causing mayhem is turned on ear as the target becomes a human hand, and you get to see the slicing all close-up and in explicit detail. More than playfully and suicidally throwing yourself into a bottomless pit, as just about every frustrated game player has done at some point, “Heavy Rain” seems to be dragging the player way too close to the action than is ordinarily comfortable. Video game mayhem has, for a brief moment, something wrenching and visceral about it.

 

I don’t put too much stock in the stories of the games I play, but I don’t think I could remain uninvolved in a scene where I had to do harm to a real-looking human hand.

 

5) Titus Adronicus cuts off his own hand

in “Titus Andronicus” (c. 1590)

Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus” was one of his early plays, and is considered to be one of the more obscure plays by today’s standards. In its time, though, the play was actually Shakespeare’s biggest hit as it was, by today’s parlance, a proper slasher, and a crowd-pleasing pot-boiler, full of sex and violence and revenge. That it resembled a lot of the other ultra-violent revenge plays of the time (“The Jew of Malta” and “The Revenger’s Tragedy” are spiritual cousins) probably helped. The play is essentially a shopping list of horrible things that characters do to one another. There is murder, orchestrated rape, the severing of a tongue, and a notorious finale involving cannibalism.

 

In the middle of the play, the wicked Moor, Aaron has convinced Titus, a shamed general, that he can free his wrongly accused sons from prison if he severs his own hand. Titus, driven slightly mad by the rape of his daughter and some other horrible crap that happened to him (all at the hands of the wicked queen Tamora), decides rather quickly to free his hand from his body, and chops it off right on stage.

 

Violence on stage is always more shocking than violence in movies, but imagine standing there amongst the Groundlings, back in the 1590s, watching actors strut and fret about the Globe stage, talking about chopping and bleeding. It would be thrilling and gut-wrenching all at once. And then, if simulated well enough, you’d see your title character cut off a limb, and bleed real blood onstage (and they would have used real blood). Holy dang, how horrible.

 

4) Esther locks herself in her hotel room

in “In My Skin” (2002)

Marina de Van’s body examination of addictive behavior is one of the best horror films of the last decade, as it’s one of the hardest to watch, and one of the most viscerally icky. De Van plays the lead role of Esther, a woman who is successful at work, but doesn’t seem to socialize that well. At a party, she wanders into the darkened back yard where she trips and cuts her leg. Rather than let the cut heal, she find herself sneaking off into back corridors to cut it open, and keep the wound bleeding. She seems objectively fascinated with the machinations of her own body.

 

 She does not behave like a typical depressed cutter, though. She behaves like an addict. And her addiction is slicing her own skin. As the film’s finale, Esther rents a hotel room with nothing more than a short skirt and a long knife. The ensuing orgy of self-violence is bad enough, but it’s made all the more harrowing by the character’s unknowable drives, leading her to do these horrible things to herself. 

 

 “In My Skin” is not just an icky reactionary polemic, inviting the audience to gross out over gross images. This is a Buñuel-like examination of the stranger corners of the human mind. 

 

3) Max lets the numbers out

in “π” (1997)

I could have included more films by Darren Aronofsky, but I think I have him covered, what with this one and “Black Swan.” Aronofsky’s films all seem to be about the parallels between inner and outer decay. As desperation and madness increase, so do the bodily horrors, and we have a series of films about athletes and drug addicts and obsessives, all becomes lost in their own personal vortexes and addiction, and losing their bodies as a part of it.

 

His first feature film, the indie darling “π,” is about an obsessive, reclusive mathematician named Max (Sean Gullette), who has become coldly attached to the idea that numbers can be used everywhere, and that patterns exist everywhere in nature. No mere numerologist, Max has complicated formulae that seem to be getting closer and closer to something big. As he gets closer, though, the decay begins to set in. Ants invade his apartment. Mysterious figures begins tracking him down on the street, ans, most notably, a weird lump appears on the side of his head.

 

By the film’s end, Max has begun to see what his madness is, and how close he is to finding a Unified Field Theorem that is, very literally, destroying his brain. Thanks to a fit of horror and a cordless drill, though, Max lets the numbers out. It’s a moment of mad cathartic violence not seen since the early days of Cronenberg.

 

2) Lajoska makes a monument of himself

In “Taxidermia” (2006)

György Pálfi’s recent horror film is very obscure, and could have easily been included on my list of The Most Disgusting Movies Ever Made. If you’re into bodily horror, I don’t think they get more visceral than this one. It follows three generations of men, and their various bodily drives that enhance them, and then ultimately destroy them. Big, greasy, fleshy closeups to genitals, stomachs, and quivering organs are the word of the day here.

 

The scene in question involves the third and final generation, represented by Lajoka Balatony (Marc Bischoff), who has taken to looking after his horrid 800-pound father (Trócsányi Gergõ) in the basement of his taxidermy shop. His father used to be a competitive eater, and now eats food by the kilogram. Lajoska, by contrast, is thin and sickly, and resents his father’s large, bilious body. I don’t want to say what happens between these two, but it leads to the following climax in an explosive fashion.

 

Lajoska, you see, has become horrified with his body, and becomes madly fond of his art of taxidermy. The climax involves a large, complex machine, full of tubes and blades, which allows Lajoska to stay alive while she slowly removes each one of his organs and stuffs his own body. The scene takes a logn time, and features closeups of the human body you never thought you’d ever see in a movie. In terms of self-mutilation, bodily horror, and human appetites, “Taxidermia” is operatic.

 

1) All seven “Saw” movies.

(2004-2010)

I prefer my horror movies to remain somewhere in the psychological, bothering to examine real human fears, and allowing us to exorcize our demons by facing them within the safety of a theater. There has to be something said, though, the the successful stripe of popularly-known “torture porn” movies that came out over the last decade. Throwing all semblance of psychology to the wind, the torture movies went straight for the gut, creating a series of ugly movies of people being cut up and discarded in orgies of blood and nihilism.

 

Whether you love them or hate them, the “Saw” movies are the visceral and gory frat parties that live at the forefront of this movement. And while they are often cited as having little character, and no real fear, they did do something notable, and that was to take the doer of violence away from the victim, and force the victim to do violence unto themselves. This made for some weird (and increasingly protracted) moral games, and increasingly violent (and creative) ways of hurting yourself. The series was more than people hacking off limbs. Soon they had to dig keys out of still-warm eye sockets, and weigh body parts on scales.

 

In terms of drama, there is plenty to criticize. In terms of raw, horrific reactions, and sense-heavy, gut-wrenching, creative self-mutilation, the “Saw” series is, at the very least, a notable footnote in the evolution of the horror film.

 

Witney Seibold is a comepletely in-tact human being living in Los Angeles. When he is not writing dark articles about people hurting themselves, he is writing peaceful and insightful movie reviews over on his ‘blog, Three Cheers for Darkened Years! where he has published over 800 articles to date. He also is the co-host of The B-Movies Podcast over at Crave Online with William Bibbiani.

 

 

            I was astonished at how well Hans Schott-Schöbinger’s 1969 pseudo-erotic potboiler “The Sins of Madame Bovary” mirrored Gustave Flaubert’s 1856 masterpiece. The stories are startlingly identical, and, while details have been changed (most notably, the lack of a suicide at the end) there is a heavy fog of despair over both. And while fealty to the source material is often praised by audiences, especially when it is fealty to a piece of literature so well known as Madame Bovary, I have to admit, I was a little disappointed with this film adaptation. It is, after all, about as lurid, melodramatic, well-shot, and well-acted as any cheapie Italian Euro-schlock eroto-thriller it purports to be; I would have expected (and appreciated) a good deal more misplaced and inappropriate sex scenes featuring Edwige Fenech’s ample, gravity-defying breasts.

 

 

            You see, there is a long tradition in softcore smut of hiding your smutty intentions my masking them (usually just barely) below the surface of famed literature. Going back as far as 1967, there have been film versions of The Marquis de Sade’s Justine. There are at least four film versions of Pauline Réage’s The Story of O. There have been countless film versions of the 1959 smut novel Emmanuelle, and don’t get me started on Lady Chatterly. And while some of these adaptations are earnest attempts to tell grown-up stories of adult sexuality, the vast bulk of them are flimsy excuses to hang prurient, bare-faced sex on a façade of class.

 

 

            With a lurid title like “The Sins of Madame Bovary,” I immediately assumed (as would anyone) that this film (new on video from One 7 Media) would fall into the smuttier category. And, as the chintzy photography, flimsy outfits, bad dialogue and bad acting immediately attested, I was prepared for something that would gleefully violate the memory of Gustave Flaubert, and dive straight for the bodice-ripping pleasure the raincoat brigade so eagerly seeks. But, I am disappointed to report, it’s actually trying to tell a legitimate story, and the film’s first bare breasts don’t appear until 25 minutes in. And even then, they are in a non-sexual context; Emma Bovary (Fenech) is merely changing out of her nighty. It’s not until about an hour of the film’s 90 minutes has elapsed before there is even a sex scene, but it’s a scene of Fenech doing the mildly nasty with an actor named Franco Ressel, who looks like a wiry, demonic redhead version of Burt Lancaster. In terms of raw eroticism, it’s like watching your ugly uncle getting it on.

 

 

            From then on, the film is good about keeping Fenech dressed in as little as possible. She traipses about her mansion, dressed in translucent frocks, sure to keep her boobs illuminated. She flirts with her various lovers, and whips off her clothes at a moment’s notice. For a short while, “The Sins of Madame Bovary” lives up to its trashy promises.

 

            But the rest of the film was strangely and unsatisfyingly faithful to the book. Emma Bovary is already living with her milquetoast husband Charles (Gerhard Riedmann) at the film’s outset, and she’s already feeling the pang of her dull married life. Her dissatisfaction is only inflamed by her romance novels, and lack of real-life experience (she was educated in a convent). In the book, we really feel Emma’s suffocating boredom paired with her tragic naïveté. In this film, she comes across as a whiny brat, and her husband, previously so clueless, is actually kind of a decent and soft-spoken fellow; he’s just, it seems, lousy in bed. She meets Adolphe (Ressel) at a ball, and they have a promising flirtation. Many weeks of teasing and prodding result in a desperate, clumsy sex scene in a barn, while a tempest rages outside. Ordinarily, this stretching out of the first sex scene would give the filmmaker’s an excuse to ratchet up the sexual tension, but there’s nothing to really impy that there’s anything tense between these two. The only thing sexual about any of these scenes is how overwhelmingly sexy Edwige Fenech is.  

 

 

 

            Edwige Fenech got her career started in the late 1960s with a series of softcore Italian smut flicks with odd titles like “Strip Nude for your Killer” and “Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key.” She looked like a more alluring version of the zaftig goddesses of Fellini’s imagination. Her face was girlish and her figure was copious. Her breasts seem to operate by their own laws of physics. Her presence in an Italian softcore film would assure funding. She is, in certain circles, a legitimate screamqueen, and siren of the sex film biz. She is still working to this day in films like “Hostel: Part II.” She is also an actress of limited range, more notable for her energy and her gameness than her subtlety. This is not necessarily a bad thing; Tura Satana herself was, after all, a pretty lame actress.

 

            The film then grinds quickly past Emma Bovary’s second lover Léon (Gianni Dei, who, thanks to a glitch in the DVD’s subtitle track, was always called “L©√on”), and the dissatisfaction she feels in sleeping with him. There’s also a subplot involving the reptilian machinations of the practically invertebrate Rudolph (Peter Carsten), a manipulative moneylender who attempts to blackmail Emma into bed.

 

            The film ends with thoughts of suicide, but does not actually depict Emma’s suicide, leaving off yet another opportunity to blow the film over the top.

 

            Is it weird that I was upset over its stringent literary fidelity? Am I sounding too pervy when I ask for more sex out of something so reportedly trashy? I don’t think so. I think, in this case, the film demanded it, and failed to deliver. If you’re interested in literary smut, there are much better places to start, and if you want to see Fenech disrobe, there are better ways to do it.

What with “Thor” being released this weekend, I have been pondering reading some of the ancient Norse sagas. I have yet to hunker down to  Njal’s Saga, and I feel it is an oversight in my self-imposed education. In terms of my ancient adventure epics, I’ll have to stick with Sir Gawain, King Arthur, Genji, Beowulf and Gilgamesh for the time being. By the way, if you haven’t read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, there’s a dandy translation from the Old English by none other than J.R.R. Tolkein. It’s a really grand story, featuring decapitations, and magic.

 

“Thor” has also had me pondering about some of the better Ancient Mayhem films I’ve seen. There is a long proud tradition in filmmaking, stretching back to the silent days, with Biblical epics like “Ben Hur,” exploring the wonders, the melodrama, and the bloody mayhem of ancient times. And, as we get to look at history through our skewed, rose-colored nostalgia goggles, we can feel free to pepper our ancient stories with handfuls of badass warriors who may or may not have actually existed, and cheer them on with ceaseless glee. Thanks to comics, movies, and TV, our ancient heroes are palpable for wide modern audiences.

 

In that spirit, here is a list of ten god-like warriors of the ancient world, as filtered through our modern-day popular culture outlets.

 

10) Musashi Miyamoto

Hiroshi Inagaki’s feudal-set Samurai trilogy (1954-1956) tells the (allegedly) true story of a lost teenage orphan, determined to fight in the war, running away from his orphanage, being rejected, had having to fight his way back home through dangerous territory. He is whipped and beaten and even captured and tied up, suspended from a tree, during his adventures, but manages to escape every time, merrily working his way across the countryside, beating off entire armies with nothing but a stick; he didn’t even have a proper sword. Eventually he learns humility and swordsman skills, and becomes a proper samurai, channeling his wild energy into a calm, determined resolve.

 

In “Musashi Miyamoto” especially (which is my favorite of the series), our hero (originally called Takezo) is depicted as a wild, hard-swinging badass who can take down armies with nothing more than screaming and what amounts to a baseball bat. And, since Toshiro Mifune (a much finer and subtler actor than he typically gets credit for) is playing him, through his performance, we’re treated to a good strong taste of his fiery madness. Here is a man you don’t want to get in the way of, but will eventually want as your tutor. If you like Samurai films, and you’ve already seen 鉄even Samuraiin film class, here’s a good place to catch up.

 

9) Leonidas

Ripped like a pro wrestler, and about as articulate, Leonidas, as depicted in Zack Snyder’s bafflingly successful film “300,” is a fist-pumping lager lout with a beard and an allergy to shirts. If you want historical accuracy, and a gentle, classicist approach, go far elsewhere; Snyder’s film seems to pride itself on action tropes far above any sort of grand poetry or even regular human sanity. The Battle of Thermopylae (about 430 BC), a famous tale of how 300 Spartan warriors managed to briefly hold off the thousands of invading Persians, is transformed into an ultra-violent, CGI-laden action thriller for the under-14 set, all based on a famous comic book by nerd luminary Frank Miller.

 

But if its a badass you want, Leonidas is about as badass as they come. His chest could crush a truck, and his chewy overacting by Gerard Butler is as gorgeously hammy as they come. He charges into battle in a loincloth and a helmet and a reckless, psychopathic sense of invincibility, eager to tear Persians apart with his bare hands. He may be foolish and kind of a lunkhead, and he may inhabit a dumb kinda movie, but dang if that’s not cool.

 

8) Yor, The Hunter from the Future

Yor gets in on a technicality, as, strictly speaking, he was not an ancient warrior, but a warrior of the distant future. But, seeing as he was living in a Stone-Age-like village, wearing loincloths and using only the most rudimentary tools, I think he counts. Consider this: Yor was technically a caveman, equipped with nothing more than the most primitive intelligence, and yet he managed to fight dinosaurs, battle ape-men, infiltrate a spaceship, face off against alien overlords, and explode the alien whatchamacallit. I think that earns him plenty of Brownie points.

 

“Yor, The Hunter from the Future” came out in 1983, long after the ’60s Italian renaissance of sword-and-sandal films, but it sets a wondrous precedent of cheesy-bad-wonderful Dark-Ages-Mixed-With-Sci-Fi genre mix-ups that marked the entire decade. Yor himself is a towheaded, ripped, bad-acting badass who served as the clarion call for a generation. Was his influence positive? You try explaining to the average Gen-Xer that it wasn’t.

 

7) Captain Caveman

He is a little man, about 4’3”, covered in fur, wielding a club, facing off against criminals. Oh yes, and he can pull random objects out of his copious body hair. Oh yes, and he wears a cape and can fly. Oh yes, and he has a cadre of hot teenage beauties to assist him. He speaks in broken English, and always has a deliriously happy smile affixed to his face. He is more than just a caveman displaced in time. He is more than a superhero. He is more than a pimp. He is living the dream.

 

Captain Caveman is a superhero our of the Hanna Barbera stable whose show, “Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels” (1977) only lasted for about three years, but managed to leave an impression on every kid who managed to see him in action. Ask any kid my age, and they’ll be ready to scream the good Captain’s name in a gloriously rallying battle cry. Hanna Barbera was know in the 1970s as a giant of television, who produced almost nothing but hugely obnoxious characters. Captain Caveman stands heads and shoulder-less shoulders above the rest.

 

6) Turok

Turok began his life as a 15^th century Native American, lost in a Lost Valley somewhere in North America. He and his sidekick, Andar, would fight the dinosaurs who lived in the valley (!), constantly searching for their way home. In its original comic book run, Turok would eventually find his way out of the valley, only to run into the first Spaniards to arrive on the continent. We all know how things worked out from there… “Turok: Son of Stone” was a standout in a long comic book tradition of mythic westerns and bold Indians.

 

Most kids our age, however, know Turk from a reboot orchestrated by Valiant comics in the mid 1990s. In this new iteration, Turok was more than a resolute noble savage, but a legitimate, hard-nosed badass whose dinosaur foes were equipped with cranial machines that made them super intelligent. Turok also had an arch-nemesis now named Mothergod, who was a wicked space alien of some kind. There was also some talk of multi-dimensional rifts and the like. The premise may have been dumb, but the new Turok took off, spawning RPGs, video games, and several new comic book titles. If a strong Indian is what you’re looking for, Turok is not your father’s Tonto.

 

5) Spartacus

In Stanley Kubrick’s infamous 1960 feature film, Spartacus (Kirk Douglas) was a well-coiffed and steely-eyed oppressed slave whose life led him into the arms of an opportunistic gladiators’ school, run by the mincing and frightening Crassus (Laurence Olivier). Spartacus was a good enough gladiator that he was able to survive, and even catch the eye of the bitter slave woman Varinia (Jean Simmons). But, as is well known, Spartacus eventually broke free of his shackles and escaped, along with his fellow gladiators. Not content to stop there, he swept across Rome, gathering ex-slaves and sympathizers to the slave cause, freeing all the slaves in Rome. He was eventually captured and crucified, but not before becoming a legend. I defy anyone to watch the famous “I’m Spartacus!” scene and not tear up a little bit.

 

Spartacus (c. 109 – 71 BC) is, however, such an alluring histoical character that he has been recently revived again in a cable TV series called “Spartacus: Blood and Sand” (later, “Spartacus: Gods of the Arena”). In an attempt to perhaps imitate “300,” the new Spartacus is a shouting, ripped hard-fighting badass, who glorious in showers of blood, and raunchy sex with lithe, partially-dressed Roman beauties. One version is stately and classical, the other is sensual and tough. Both versions reflect a warrior for the ages.

 

4) He-Man

He-Man has a dubious origin. Evidently, Mattel Toys had numerous dolls left over from a largely failed toy tie-in with “Conan the Barbarian.” They had the swords and a mold for a muscular torso just laying around their warehouses. Someone had the brilliant idea of re-purposing the toys as a new character, and thusly He-Man was born. Shortly thereafter, thanks to president Reagan’s lift of the ban on advertising toward children, Mattel launched “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe,” a cartoon show to tie in with their hastily constructed toys.

 

This advertising gimmick worked better than they could have hoped, as even now, decades after the fact, kids remember the toys, and fondly recall the clunky and weird TV show intended only to sell them.

 

He-Man is kind of a bland hero. He lives in a kingdom called Eternia, sometime in the dark ages. By day he is the prince of Eternia, a mild-mannered hunk named Adam. When he hold his magic sword aloft and speaks the magic words, he is transformed into a superpowered Dark Ages hero, who rushes to save his friends from the evil sorcerer Skeletor. This is a weird version of the Dark Ages, though, as they have the requisite beasts and magic, but also robots and tanks and the like. “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe” essentially catered to every little boy fantasy at once, making for a surreal mixture of disparate genre elements. Thanks to this placating, every little boy loved it, and every grown little boy remembers it.

 

3) Hercules

But only when he’s played by Steve Reeves.

 

Steve Reeves was a hunky bodybuilder from Montana who moved to Hollywood in the late 1940s to pursue an acting career. His beginnings were decidedly inauspicious, having landed forgettable bit roles in big Hollywood movies, and a forgettable leading role in the Ed Wood movie “Jail Bait.” In 1958, however, Reeves landed the role of a lifetime in an Italian film called “Le Fatiche di Ercole,” better known in the United States as just “Hercules.” A legend was born.

 

Reeves is not a very good actor, mind you; few models and bodybuilders are. But Reeves was possessed of an infectious good nature that colored everything he did. He smiled a lot. He seemed to be enjoying himself. And when he thrust out his toned and bronzed pectoral muscles toward the camera, laughing and flexing, you could tell he was proud of his body. Heck, if I had a physique like that, I’d likely flaunt it as well. Reeves was like a working man’s version of Errol Flynn. A burlier, lunkheaded version of Douglas Fairbanks. A bad movie hero for the ages. He was a queer icon, a hero, and the star of some of the goofiest sword and sandal films ever made. You can find “Hercules” and its sequel, “Hercules Unchained,” on “Mystery Science Theater 3000.”

 

2) Asterix

this is real French history: In about AD 50, when the Roman Empire ruled most of Europe, a single village in northern France (once called Gaul), held out against the Roman invaders. It was the only area in all of Europe that was never officially conquered by Caesar. It was never discovered why this particular village was able to hold out, but local legend sprang up that they were demigods with super-strength. In the late 1950, comic book writer René Goscinney, and his talented artist friend Albert Uderzo teamed up to create Asterix the Gaul, the hero of this legendary village.

 

Asterix was a stalwart and good-hearted little man whose lived to serve his village, and to engage in merry pranks with his fat friend Obelix. He loved a good punch-up, took great pleasure in pummeling Romans, and frequently dined on delicious wild boar who lived in the area. He got super-strength from a magic potion brewed by his local druid Getafix. He was often enlisted by his chief Vitalstatistix (or Majestix depending on your translation) to leave his village, and he would go on adventures that took him to far-flung places like Belgium, Corsica, Goth, Spain, and, most famously, Egypt.

 

Asterix comics have been released ever since 1959, and were continued by Albert Uderzo when Goscinny died in 1977. They have been translated into almost every language, and , in terms of pure sales, are one of the most successful publications in the history of comics. They aren’t as popular in America as they ought to be, but I encourage you to find a few and read them. They are marked by witty word play, wonderful art, clever stories, and a surprising amount of historical accuracy about the Roman world. Just be sure to find the British translations. The American ones aren’t very good.

 

1) Conan the Barbarian

And no one can think of ancient warriors without thinking of Conan the Barbarian. While he started his life in a series of pulp novels back in 1932, and a series of Marvel comics in the early 1970s, Conan is best known to us from John Milius’ 1982 feature film starring Austrain uber-hunk Arnold Schwarzenegger. The film was not only bracing visceral, and pleasingly violent, but was rocked by some creepy magical characters and special effects that burned themselves deep into the brains of a generation. It also cemented the reputation of Schwarzenegger, making his the unlikely go-to action hero for over a decade.

 

There is something stoic and implacable about Conan. He is a hard-working warrior, yes, and an ignorant denizen of the Dark Ages, but there is something steely and heroic in his resolve. Something pragmatic, long before there was such thing as Pragmatism. He was able to attract a series of merry men who would gladly charge with him into danger. He was not necessarily noble, but he was a badass we loved, and kind of a funny guy. By the time “Conan the Destroyer” came out in 1984, the magic became over-the-top and kind of ridiculous, and even more fun than before.

 

There was a third Conan film written, but it fell apart in the Hollywood machine. It was evnetually made into a film called “Kull the Conqueror” starring TV superstar Kevin Sorbo. And, thanks to the recent trend of unfortunate remakes, there is another “Conan the Barbarian” due out later this year. It will star a bodybuilder named Jason Momoa, and it will be presented in 3-D. I guess we shall see if Conan’s bloody legacy as the best ancient badass of all time will live up to his reputation.

 

Honorable Mention: Dar

The main publisher of Geekscape, Mr. Jonathan London, threatened he would not publish this article unless I made mention of Marc Singer’s indelible performance as Dar, in Don Coscarelli’s cable TV staple “The Beastmaster.” Dar can far-see, and put his mind into the bodies of animals. He once traveled through the portal of time. He wears a loincloth. I have nothing else to say about “The Beastmaster.”

 

 

Witney Seibold is a writer living in Los Angeles. He rides his bike a lot, and eats too many Cheez-Its. When he’s not writing weekly lists for Geekscape, he is maintaining his own ‘blog Three Cheers for Darkened Years! and sharing his unsolicited opinions with the world. He is also the fortunate co-host of The B-Movies Podcast over at Crave Online, which he shares with the show’s host William Bibbiani. His opinions are probably a little bit more valid than yours.

Thor resembles Superman in many ways, in that he seems to be a superpowered space alien, perhaps from another dimension entirely, living on Earth, trying to adjust to human society. The New Mexico of Thor’s experiences, though, is a lot more utilitarian than the Norman Rockwell experience of Smallville, KS; he is not living the American experience, necessarily, but he does know to sneak into secret government bases to steal stuff and beat up masked guys in black outfits. Thor also has a few ambassadors to Earth, in the form of young women who look like they’re still in college, but somehow have years of extensive and specialist research under their belts. They’re researching spacial phenomenon, but it’s never quite explained what they’re looking for or why.

Kenneth Branagh‘s “Thor” is poised as a summer blockbuster, giving star treatment to one of the lesser heroes in the Marvel canon. Thor is the Norse God of Thunder, but in this universe, he is merely a space alien from a dimension called Asgard, who was once mistaken for the Norse God of Thunder. You would think with the presence of multi-dimensional space aliens with god-like powers, the constant use of a noisy teleporting machine, and rule by a purportedly classical monarchy, that “Thor” would be especially suited to Branagh’s usual sense of over-the-top Shakespearean bombast, lending a shining classical weight to the proceedings. “Thor” feels more like a typical superhero flick (as the genre is so common these days), complete with noisy CGI battles and fake-looking backgrounds clearly shot on small sets coated with blue screens.

I have to admit, I was fully prepared to laugh at “Thor.” Its mixture of magical god-like being on one side of the universe, mixing with hi-tech sci-fi CIA spooks on the other immediately brought to mind the notorious genre jumbles of 1980s fantasy films like “Krull,” “Yor, The Hunter from The Future,” and “Masters of the Universe.” Branagh, however, perhaps humbled by his command of such a large budget, flattens out his film to a level of mild interest and adequate excitement. What could have been a glorious exercise in the verse-laden old-timey opulence of an old world godhead, becomes a thriller on par with some of the second-tier superhero movies of recent years. Not as good as “Spider-Man 2,” better than “The Incredible Hulk,” bigger production design than “Iron Man 2,” about as good as “Daredevil.” To translate for those who don’t religiously follow superhero movies: It’s a perfectly entertaining movie. 

Thor (Aussie superhunk Chris Hemsworth) lives in Asgard, an Oz-looking collection of sweeping CGI landscapes. Asgard is ruled by the infinitely wise Odin (Anthony Hopkins), and his queen Frigga (Rene Russo), who are Thor’s parents. Asgard itself is made up of large royal chambers and a few secret back corridors. Across town, across the Rainbow Bridge, is a large teleporting machine that allows Asgardians to travel freely between dimensions. The machine is guarded by Heimdall (Idris Elba), a stoic security man of the gods. We don’t get any real peeks as to what life is like for the average citizen of Asgard, nor do we spend any time with any characters other than our main three or four. Thor has a brother named Loki (a rather good Tom Hiddleston, a little known British TV actor, catching his big break), who is pleased not to be next in line for the throne. Anyone who knows the comics, or old Norwegian lore, knows that Loki will eventually become a scheming bad guy, even though he’s kind of a milquetoast wimp at the outset.

Thor, in order to impress his father, and to cement his upcoming coronation as the next king of Asgard, gathers together his band of merry men (Ray Stevenson, Tadanobu Asano, Josh Dallas, and the supernaturally attractive Jaimie Alexander), and invades the dimension of The Frost Giants, an old-time enemy of the Asgardians. The Frost Giants are twelve-foot tall, blue-skinned ghouls who live in a wasted tundra, and have powers like Mr. Freeze in the Batman comics. When Odin learns of Thor’s covert invasion, he strips Thor of his superpowers and his trademark hammer, and sends him to Earth to learn humility.

Thor lands in front of Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), and her research team (Stellan Skarsgård, the only Scandinavian actor in the film, and Kat Dennings), a trio of scientists who are researching something or other, but are resolute in their studies. Natalie Portman can be grand, given the right role; I was fond of her wispy skittishness in “Black Swan,” but when asked to behave like a grown scientist, she comes across as a teenage hobbyist. I would have loved to have seen someone older in the role. Thor is taken under their wing, and they teach one another about each other’s respective home planets. In the one scene where Thor reveals that he is from outer space, Jane takes it entirely in stride, and ends up having a warm, non-sexual sleepover with Thor on the roof of her lab. When Thor appears later in his god-like cape, wielding his mighty hammer, she growls at him like a horny adolescent. Perhaps her girlishness is appropriate after all.

There are some other plot twists back on Asgard, as Odin falls ill, and Loki takes over the throne, all as part of a jealous conspiracy with the Frost Giants. The constant switching back-and-forth between the dusty location shoots in New Mexico, and the constructed plastic, CGI-designed world of Asgard is less jarring that you’d think. Branagh, thanks to his deftness as a director, and to his use of Patrick Doyle‘s wonderfully theatrical score, keeps the disparate worlds mercifully close. He also keeps his film’s pace light and brisk, speeding through great swaths of information with a light hand that will keep the comic book fans involved. I was a little frustrated by how quickly a lot of information was glossed over, and how little time was taken for slow, personal moments (what is life like in Asgard, f’rinstance?), but I suspect that my concerns will be swallowed by the mainstream comic book lovers that are the film’s intended core audience. 

“Thor” is also intended as another building block in the upcoming superhero orgy that is 2012′s “The Avengers,” arranged to be directed by cult TV director Joss Whedon. Fans of the genre will note the presence of Clark Greggas the CIA spook, as he has already appeared in “Iron Man,” and “Iron Man 2.” Some will also wonder why the fantastic Jeremy Renner has a cameo as an army stooge, until one realizes that he is merely being set up for other feature films. “Thor” does give into its brief moments of fanboy placating, but can mercifully stand on its own as an entertaining fantasy film with some exciting fights, fun characters, and impressive special effects.

There was a time – sometime in the mid 1990s, before the superhero boom – that Hollywood wanted to make a “Fantastic Four” movie. It was going to be directed by Chris Columbus, and Gabriel Byrne was in rumored to play Reed Richards. Gwyneth Paltrow was rumored to play Sue Storm. It was going to have a budget even bigger than that of “Titanic.” Including origin story, it would have also been about a well-established Fantastic Four taking on terrorists. The computer effects would have been unprecedented. The film was never made. It never got much further than the “rumor” phase.

 

Going back to the very beginning of film, the industry is rife with elaborate tales of dream projects and ambitious auteurs being stymied by budgets, the available technology, changing trends, or just pure bad luck. Sure, geeks love to gather and buzz about rumored film projects, often in a desperate attempt to nose out our peers in being the first to have the inside information, but more often talked about are the projects of ambitious, established filmmakers whose promised projects actually entered the planning phase, and then, for one reason or another, fell apart. “So close,” we cineastes quietly and lamentably cluck to ourselves, “so very close.”

 

Here then is a list of ten great unrealized projects, all from great (or at least established) filmmakers, that actually managed to stick their toes into reality before evaporating into the ether. Here they are in no particular order.

 

“Starfleet Academy”

When J.J. Abrams announced his “Star Trek” reboot in 2008, it caused a bit of controversy amongst fans; I, being a dyed-in-the-wool Trekkie (I even refuse to use the term “Trekker”), was especially skeptical. This, I felt, however cool-looking and fast-paced and exciting, couldn’t possibly feel like proper “Star Trek.” It couldn’t be infused with that intellectual thrill or that sense of wonder that marked the best of the franchise’s various TV series. And while I liked the film fine as an exciting sci-fi action film, I was still a detractor when it came to the film’s purity.

 

But I was not the only naysayer about the 2009 “Star Trek” film. One of the series’ long-time producers, Harve Bennett, who produced films II through V, actually came forward at this time, announcing how close he had once come to his dream “Trek” project, to be made after the upsetting reviews and low earnings of “Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.” Bennett’s “Star Trek VI” was, it turns out, remarkably similar to the film that Abrams ended up making; it was to be set in the early days of Kirk and Spock, and was to take place at Starfleet Academy when the two characters first met and became friends. The film, though, rather than being about alternate timelines, action, and genocide, was to be largely about racism and academic struggles. It was, essentially, going to be a low-key college student film, right down to the ivy-covered walls of an ancient-looking Starfleet Academy.

 

Low-key and intellectual is how I’ve always liked my “Star Trek,” so I think this would have been a great addition to the canon. Sadly, the studios weren’t quite ready to turn their backs on the original actors, and there were already talks about a “Star Trek: The Next Generation” feature film, so Bennett’s “Starfleet Academy” became another story. Oh well. I still have my old TV show videos to roll around in.

 

“At the Mountains of Madness”

The the possible exceptions of John Carpenter’s “In the Mouth of Madness” and Stuart Gordon’s “Re-Animator” (and quite possibly the underrated 1991 TV movie “Cast a Deadly Spell”), there have been few good film adaptations of the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, that reclusive, sickly, racist, atheist wonk quietly writing hugely terrifying horror masterpieces from his attic in Rhode Island. Every geek knows his name, he is often compared to Poe in terms of his strength of prose and ability to unsettle, and his stories have produced an entire fringe industry of card games, spinoff tales, and bad movies.

 

Another sainted geek icon, Guillermo Del Toro, has no end of genre projects that he wants to work on, but one of his more notable ambitions was to make a feature film based on Lovecraft’s novel At the Mountains of Madness. It was to have an appropriately huge budget, and had even attracted the attention of Tom Cruise (to act) and James Cameron (to produce). One would think with geek media being so much in the center these days that someone like Del Toro adapting a property like Lovecraft would be a no-brainer.

 

Sadly, Del Toro is also notorious for being something of a geeky ranter, making him come across as unfocused and immature and over-enthusiastic. His budget was evidently way too high (it would have to have been in the hundreds of millions), and, despite the Hollywood heft of Cruise and Cameron, the film was scrapped almost immediately. I’m not sure if Del Toro would have had the somber restraint of most of Lovecraft’s works, but… dang wouldn’t you like to see what he would offer? I sure would.

 

“Ronnie Rocket”

Kind of a superhero film, kind of an absurd mystery of the strange forces of existence, “Ronnie Rocket,” about a three-foot-tall man with bright red hair, was slated to be David Lynch’s first studio film after the quiet midnight success of “Eraserhead.” David Lynch never really fought for this film (he’s not a fighter in the conventional sense), but he did loudly announce his intentions to make it. He would never openly discuss the details of the script (he never does), but he assured us that it was going to be bigger and creepier and more impressive than “Eraserhead.”

 

I’m already on board.

 

Some peers of mine were able to peek at the script to “Ronnie Rocket,” and it contained surreal scenes of men being cut open, their organs replaced with electronic devices, and strange whirring machines emerging from their bodies (which all sounds less like Lynch, and more like “Tetsuo: The Iron Man” to me). I can’t attest to the “meaning” of it (and neither, probably, could Lynch), but giving Lynch carte blanche to make the project of his choice, at that point in his career, would have been even more epically nightmarish than even films like “Lost Highway” and “Inland Empire.” Picture “Eraserhead” with a big budget.

 

Unfortunately, the script was, natch, too strange for most studio heads, and Lynch put himself out as a director-for-hire. This was no bad thing, as his next film was the excellent “The Elephant Man.”

 

“Superman Lives”

Everyone has heard of this one, and everyone seems to have heard a different story. Here’s what I have been able to compile as absolutely true: After the failure of “Superman IV: The Quest for Peace,” the studio decided to give Superman a rest for a while. Soon, however, scripts for a new “Superman” feature film, proposing a new actor and a new storyline, began to circulate the system, and rumors began to fly. Despite it all, “Superman” would not stay down, and talked of “Superman Lives” began to pepper the late 1990s. Eventually, the director behind the ultra-successful “Batman,” Tim Burton, was assigned to the project, and Nicolas Cage was signed on as Kal-El, the last son of Krypton.

 

Nicolas Cage? Indeed. The notoriously edgy actor, with the sad soulful eyes, and bugnuts crazy performing style was going to wear the outfit. The only reason I can figure as to why “Superman Lives” was not eventually made is the machination of one (unnamed) producer, who kept making stranger and stranger requests of the projects’ first celebrity screenwriter Kevin Smith (who talks extensively about this subject on one of this many lecture videos). Evidently, this producer wanted Superman to lose his costume and his superpowers at the film’s outset. He also wanted Superman to have a funny gay sidekick. He also wanted Superman to fight a giant spider (!).

 

All the hemming and hawing led to a great fizzle-out, and many comic book nerds breathed a sigh of relief. It wouldn’t be until 2006 that another “Superman” feature film would be made. Make your own judgments about Bryan Singer’s film here. _______________________________.

 

“Napoleon” and “The Aryan Papers”

He is often cited as one of the greatest film directors the medium has ever seen. Most young men become familiar with Stanley Kubrick when they are teenagers, and fall in love with his extremely mannered and deeply affected genre fare like “A Clockwork Orange” and “Dr. Strangelove.” Later in life, they discover “Eyes Wide Shut,” “Full Metal Jacket” and “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Each one of his films is a masterpiece, and each shot was so carefully planned and shot and re-shot, ad infinitum, that his style could never be replicated. Kubrick was a master of craft, and slowly and carefully obsessed over each one of his projects.

 

Reportedly, Kubrick once had a filing cabinet full of index cards. Each card detailed a single day in the life of Napoleon. Kubrick sent people all over Europe, toting samples of the dirt from the field of Waterloo, looking for suitable places to film. A script was written. Jack Nicholson was tapped to play the maligned historical general. For years, Kubrick did his reading and his research. Every details was meticulously planned. Yes, Kubrick was obsessed with Napoleon, and his Napoleon feature film was the single most ambitious project he ever attached himself to.

 

Of course it was rejected for budgetary reasons, and Kubrick channeled his historical epic energies in “Barry Lyndon.” An excellent film to be sure, but compared to what it could have been, it almost seems paltry.

 

Also worth a mention is Kubrick’s plan to make a definitive WWII drama called “The Aryan Papers.” This was less well-researched, and less time was spent on it, but it was still marked by Kubrick’s calculated and obsessive qualities. A cast was assembled, and a script was written. Kubrick, however, continued to work slowly in an industry that thrives on brevity, and eventually the attached stars drifted away, and other filmmakers began cranking out their own WWII dramas, most notably, Stephen Spielberg with “Schindler’s List.”

 

Kubrick dropped “The Aryan Papers,” and turned his energies to his quiet urban epic about adult sex-negativity, and a sci-fi film about intelligent robots.

 

“Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian”

Yes, a script was actually written for this. Tim Burton had achieved a great success with “Batman,” and all of Hollywood started asking for his next projects. Burton, while being an idiosyncratic auteur, is notoriously not much of a go-getter; he has said in interviews that he’ll film whatever he’s assigned to, and rarely approaches studios with his own ideas (“Edward Scissorhands” and “The Nightmare Before Christmas” being notable exceptions). So when it was announced that “Beetlejuice” was to have a sequel, Burton said lackadaisically that he was on board.

 

The script featured the Deetz’s, the family from “Beetlejuice” moving to a small Hawaiian island, and Beetlejuice following, linking up with some ancient Tiki gods along the way. Hm. This sounds like a horrible idea to me, but, if looked at through my filter of what I remember of films from 1990ish, it could have been a gloriously oddball affair along the lines of, say, “Ruben and Ed.” Luckily Burton dropped out, choosing instead to make “Batman Returns.”

 

You resourceful internet pirates can probably find copies of the script for “Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian” somewhere online. Look it up. Read it. Then swede it in your garage and put it on YouTube. You’ll be a sensation.

 

“The Man Who Killed Don Quixote”

This may be too hasty to mention, as Terry Gilliam is reportedly trying to finish it, but, as was detailed in a very good 2002 documentary film called “Lost in La Mancha,” his take on the Quixote story was one of his most troubled productions in a long history of troubled productions. Every single one of Gilliam’s films (with the possible exception of his toxic “Tideland”) has run into some sort of trouble, and has threatened to shut down. Only one actually did, though. “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” was to feature Johnny Depp as a time-traveling Sancho Panza, and Bernard Chaumeil as Quixote, and the production’s fantasy sequences were to be marked by Gilliam’s usual chaotic fantasy weirdness.

 

Bad weather, ill health, and the usual studio reluctance brought the entire film to a halt, and it fell apart entirely. His “Brazil” was recut several times. “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” had a script mix-up. The star of his “Dr. Parnassus” died during production. After a while, you begin to wonder if Gilliam has been cursed.

 

It’s also curious the history Don Quixote has. Orson Welles also notoriously tried to make a film version that was endlessly stymied, despite the director’s best efforts. You would think that a famed comic novel about a goofy knight having fantastical adventures and making an ass of himself would translate to film just fine, and that an American production could be made. The country has yet to see a great Quixote film.

 

The best film version I’ve seen is, curiously enough, a 1957 version from the Soviet Union, which is well-acted, looks fantastic, and is accurate to the original novel. There are some bootleg VHS copies in the better video stores. If you are in a position to look for it, seek it out.

 

“The Crow 2037: A New World of Gods and Monsters”

Yes, there is another film based on Alex Proyas’ 1994 film “The Crow” currently in the works, and there have been several straight-to-video sequels along the way. The story, about various men who are killed, and then resurrected by a magical crow to exact revenge, is so versatile that endless films could be made. Indeed, one of the men originally attached to write the third “Crow” feature film (after the failure of “The Crow: City of Angels,” was none other than heavy metal frontman Rob Zombie, before he was known as a filmmaker.

 

Zombie’s idea was pretty solid: The hero in question was killed and resurrected when he was but a young boy, and doesn’t remember what happened. He grows into adulthood, still in the dark, and curious about his weird seeming immortality. It’s not until he accidentally meets his killer in a bar that the memories come flooding back. He then goes on his wild quest for revenge, but also has to question why revenge may be necessary, given that he’s lived a long life to date.

 

My guess it that Zombie wrote a treatment, and the executives rejected his dour and gruesome ideas; having seen “House of 1000 Corpses,” I can see what an early script of his might have looked like. My guess is it would have been low-budget, psychedelic, brutally violent, and utterly horrifying. But, y’know, in a good way.

 

“Hamlet”

Set in modern time, and with modern dress, this version of “Hamlet,” planned to be released before Olivier’s famous 1948 version, was one of Alfred Hitchcock’s dream projects. Pairing Hitchcock with Hamlet seems like a match made in heaven to me. Who better to tackle the hotbox psychological insecurities of a well-dressed royal figure than the master of suspense himself? Hamlet would have been energetic and dashing and constantly sweating under his own indecision. That he was slated to have been played by Cary Grant only makes the image all the more striking.

 

I can’t find anywhere if Hitchcock intended to use Shakespeare’s language, or if he intended to use modern language, but either way, it could have matched Kurosawa’ “The Bad Sleep Well” or Branagh’s uncut version of “Hamlet” in terms of cinematic adaptations of the celebrated play.

 

Hitchcock was attached to many films in his day, and directed quite a few. Here’s one that would have been amazing to see realized.

 

“Dune”

Frank Herbert’s famed sci-fi novel Dune has been compared to Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings in terms of its scope, and its holistic creation of an entire insular language. It may be hard to believe in this post Peter-Jackson-era, but there was a time when Dune was far more beloved and slavered over than the famed fantasy novels. A “Dune” feature film had to be made. It had to. And, like most enormous projects, finding a director was a dodgy proposition.

 

One of the first directors attached to make “Dune,” back in the mid 1970s, was none other than famed cult icon Alejandro Jodorowsky, the man behind “El Topo,” the first legitimate midnight movie, and “The Holy Mountain,” one of my favorites. Jodorowsky’s vision of “Dune” was probably one of the most ambitious sci-fi projects in the medium’s history. Forget “Avatar.” “Dune” would have been epic. For one, he wanted the film to be about three hours long, which was unheard of for a sci-fi film. He wanted a legitimate 900-pound actor (whom he knew personally) to play Baron Harkkonen. He tapped a then-obscure Dutch surrealist named H.R. Giger to design the film. He hired a comic book artist named Moebius (Jean Giraud) to draw the storyboards, and come up with some new ways to film fast-moving space ships. He made some deals with Pink Floyd to write a triple album of rock ballads. He even managed to sign Salvador Dalí to play the president of the universe. There was reportedly a conflict over the president’s toilet/throne.

 

This is all true.

 

Of course, everyone and their mother began to balk at the budget of such a huge, huge project, and it eventually collapsed under its own weight. Giger drawings ended up being used for “Alien,” and he entered the pop consciousness. A lot of the storyboards of the space ships ended up being used on another ambitious sci-fi film at the time called “Star Wars.”

 

This is one I wish I could have seen.

 

 

Witney Seibold is a film critic living in Los Angeles with his wonderful wife, and his festering stagnant pool of unpopular opinions. In addition to his work for Geekscape, he maintains a ‘blog, which has nearly 800 articles at this point, called Three Cheers for Darkened Years! He is also the co-host (with one William Bibbiani) of The B-Movies Podcast over at Crave Online, where he discusses film news and gives reviews on a weekly basis.

We’ve seen it all, haven’t we? We’ve seen heads exploding. We’ve seen intestines get ripped out of people’s bodies, and used as garrote wire. We’ve seen people get their bottom jaws pulled forcibly from their faces. We’ve seen people get stabbed to death, shot, drowned, strangled, savagely beaten, tortured, skinned, immolated and crucified. And, being the horror movie junkies that we are, have eaten up every second of it. It’s amazing the level of violence and gore that the average gorehound can tolerate. There’s a reason Fangoria magazine has lasted as long as it has. Our lust for red Karo syrup spilling out of rubber corpses cannot be sated.

 

However, this is not an article about gore. Finding the world’s goriest movies in a no-brainer (start with “Dead Alive” and work your way down), and is the frequent subject of horror movie fans’ conversations. What is far more interesting to me are the movies that still, perhaps decades after their making, have the power to make even the most desensitized teenager squirm in their chair. There are teenagers who can stomach the most horrifying amount of violence imaginable, and actually applaud the use of torture and rape in movies, but still may not be able to make it through certain films, as they are just too disgusting.

 

This is an article devoted to the most disgusting and disturbing movies ever made. Only one of them is disgusting strictly because of its gore level. The rest… well, lets dive into the fountain of unknown stagnant fluids.

 

10) “The Fly II” (1988)

Dir. Chris Walas

Let’s start off a little bit easy. David Cronenberg’s 1986 remake of “The Fly” was one of the most visceral horror movies ever made. It was so focused on it’s lumpen, malodorous mutation of its protagonist into a giant insect, that critics began seeing its body horror as a metaphor for venereal disease. The film’s finale, in which Jeff Goldblum sheds his scabby hide to reveal a slick-with-grime, twitching monster underneath is still capable of providing fuel for your nightmares.

 

The film was a huge hit, so a sequel was put into the works. The director, Chris Walas, was a creature creator on the first film (as well as some other wonderful monster flicks from the 1980s like “Gremlins,” “Enemy Mine,” and “House II”), so we were promised, at the very least, some really nice monster design. The story followed the son of Seth Brundle, and the fly-like symptoms he displays. Daphne Zuniga played the love interest. The director could have given us a pat retelling of the first “Fly,” but what Walas gave us was a gooey, icky pile of fly spore that can turn just about anyone’s stomach.

 

The film contains: A woman giving birth to a mutated exoskeleton. A human baby being fished out of a mass of quivering pus. Eric Stoltz (the titular fly man) encasing himself in a sticky cocoon of filth. A man having his face melted off by acidic fly vomit (it doesn’t kill him). Another man being decapitated by a passing elevator. A man being forcibly mutated into a stump of human flesh.

 

9) “Body Melt” (1993)

Dir. Philip Brophy

A pure exploitation movie if ever there was one, Philip Brophy’s “Body Melt,” a latter-day entry in the powerful cycle of Aussie exploitation movies, has so little story, and so many gooey gore effects, it plays more like an SFX demo reel than an actual feature film. The film follows a detective as he investigates some mysterious deaths in a small Australian hicks ville. People seem to be mysteriously turning into puddles of goop. It turns out that a local military outfit is testing a new chemical weapon. Is there any tension here? Will they be stopped? Nope. We have a setup and a melting body. Repeat ad nausea um.

 

There is also a really, really wiggy subplot about a trio of horny twenty-somethings on a sex vacation in the deep outback. They find a family of dangerous rednecks who like to eat the adrenal glands directly out of freshly killed kangaroos to get high. The daughter looks like a big fleshy mongol, complete with low-brown facial makeup effect, and one of the horny boys has sex with her anyway. Watching the two of them get it on will make your gorge rise.

 

The film contains: Numerous people melting into colorful pools of chunky glop. An expanding and exploding stomach. An expanding and exploding tongue. And expanding and exploding penis (I kid you not). The aforementioned kangaroo brain-eating. Creepy mongol sex. Incest. The occasional murder.

 

8) “Meet the Feebles” (1989)

Dir. Peter Jackson

To most movie buffs and hardcore geeks, Peter Jackson is merely the director behind a series of films based on a popular line of fantasy novels. Before he became something of a geek saint, hooked on CGI and so-called “epic storytelling,” Jackson was dear to my own heart as the director of a series of extreme, and extremely funny, gore films. The man was once at the forefront of the gore cults, thanks to his involvement in 1992’s “Dead Alive,” (a.k.a. “Braindead”) perhaps still the goriest film ever made. He also started his career with a gross and enthused alien invasion film called “Bad Taste.” If you don’t know these films, you should do yourself a favor and seek them out. They will serve as important blocks in your gore education.

 

In 1989, though, Jackson had his most bizarre idea to date: He wanted to make a sick, seamy spoof of “The Muppet Show,” revealing all of the horrible dramas, sexual dalliances, drug addictions, crime dealings, and secret porn production that went on backstage. The result is hilarious… and really, really gross. Our hero is peerless and pure, but the Feebles Variety Hour is steeped in corrupted and petty souls who will kill, commit rape, and spread venereal diseases with impunity. In the right frame of mind, this film can be sublime. In most states of mind, it will be gleefully repellent.

 

The film contains: A frog shooting heroin, a stabbing, a fly eating fecal matter, tribbles peeing on an elephant and then getting crushed to death by a rolling barrel, a walrus fucking a cat, a rabbit vomiting on stage, a talking fish being eaten alive and then being regurgitated, a pervy aardvark sniffing panties, an illicit porn shoot, horrible scabs from a sexual disease, and a song about sodomy. There is more.

 

7) “Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist” (1997)

Dir. Kirby Dick

Bob Flanagan was a performance artist living with cystic fibrosis. His lungs were constantly full of fluid, and for the final few years of his life he was constantly on oxygen. Rather than allow his illness to keep him infirm, he channeled his pain into his sexual interests, and became a legitimate sub to his loving wife’s extreme dom. They played some pretty weird sex games, all of which added to their loving and caring relationship, and served to extend Flanagan’s life. Kirby Dick, the documentarian who has never shied away from extreme subject matter, turns his unflinching lens on Flanagan, detailing his every game, performance, and sexual proclivity.

 

This mean, of course, that we are treated to some pretty wiggy visuals along the way. Flanagan did not merely like to be spanked (although that was certainly part of it), but took his masochism to some amazing heights. He would hang weights from his genitals. He would be cut and scarred. He would shove unthinkable things up various orifices. I could go into more detail, but I’m not sure how explicit you want me to be. The film is fascinating, but it take a strong constitution.

 

The film contains: Flanagan being spanked. His genitals being cut with a scalpel. A pool ball being inserted into his anus. Heavy weights dangling from his scrotum. Him hanging upside-down and being whipped. His real blood. An unflinching closeup of him nailing his penis to a board. All of which are done for real.

 

6) “Nekromantik 2” (1991)

Dir. Jörg Buttgereit

Jörg Buttgereit is one of those filmmakers, like Nick Zedd, whose name is only known in the outside circles. He has made 17 films in his career, but is best known for a small cycle of films (including “Nekromantik” and “Corpse Fucking Art”) all about the romantic glories of necrophilia. The “Nekromantik” movies are not necessarily explicit in their level of gore – they were made on a really low budget, and are clearly using only whatever homemade effects they had at hand – but they are so frank in their close-up depiction of sticky, rotting, stagnant corpse love, that they transcend and become truly gut-wrenching.

 

“Nekromatik 2” follows the adventures of the dead corpse who used to be the hero from the first “Nekromantik,” as he is exhumed, in pieces, already black and squishy, and repeatedly raped by our new necrophiliac, Monika. There’s a whole weird plot about how she is trying to hide her necrophiliac tendencies from her new boyfriend, while she sneaks around getting off with the dead behind his back. This is a really, really icky film. There are tender and adult ways to depict necrophilia; just watch the 1996 film “Kissed” sometime. “Nekromantik” is clearly made by a crazed fetishist.

 

The film contains: Icky blackened corpses, sticky blackened corpses, On-screen masturbation, blood, guts, dismemberment, and a general unsavory tone.

 

5) “Tetsuo: The Iron Man” (1989)

Dir. Shinya Tsukamoto

I’ve tried to steer a little wide of certain Japanese feature films, as there are – as I’m sure the readers of Geekscape know – entire piles of hentai with tentacles raping schoolgirls. I declare any of those film exempt as they, I assume, count more as fetish pornography than they do merely sick movies. There is one wonderful cult film from the late 1980s, though, that I must discuss. Shinya Tsukamoto’s experimental film “Tetsuo: The Iron Man.” “Tetsuo” follows an unnamed salaryman (Tamarowo Taguchi) who is living in quiet awkwardness with his girlfriend. He has violent hallucinations/fantasies/attacks, where he is chased by clanky machine women in the subway, and raped by the vacuum-tube-like penis of a devil woman. It’s unclear as to why, but he himself soon begins to sprout machinery from his body.

 

The mutation scenes are a little unsettling, made outright terrifying by the shiny black-and-white photography, and frantic use of stop-motion animation. Pretty soon our hero has become an entire living pile of mechanical junk, and is being pursued by an equally mutated rival (Tsukamoto) in some obviously symbolic battles. By the end, they merge into a giant mechanical penis. More than a mere whacked-out Japanese curiosity, “Tetsuo: The Iron Man” is one for the ages. There are also two sequels.

 

The film contains: Bloody mutations. Machine rape. Quivering flesh. A guy slitting open his leg, and shoving a mechanical pipe inside. Maggots eating the wound. A penis turning into a drill. Weird animations. Guys spitting up big piles of pus.

 

4) Street Trash (1987)

Dir. J. Michael Muro

I once wrote an article on the worst films I had seen, and I listed “Street Trash” on it. It’s a horrible and horrifying movie. Like “Body Melt,” it’s little more than a series of largely unconnected gore effects, feeding into no particular story. It, however, has the added bonus of taking place in a the filthy, unsavory, and pointedly disgusting world of amoral, alcoholic, homeless criminals. The film purports to be a serious expose of the life of homeless people (I think), but is nothing more than people doing horrible things to one another, and then drinking a secret stash of booze that causes their bodies to melt.

 

That’s pretty much the only narrative through-line in the film: the case of poisoned booze. It is found behind the wall of a local liquor store, and is promptly stolen. Whenever some homeless wino drinks it, they melt. The melting effects are really impressive, if not gut-wrenching horrible to look at. Everything in between is sickening and dirty, and feels like a less savory version of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” It left me feeling sad and alone and covered with a thin patina of human filth. The oddest thing about the film: its director, J. Michael Muro, is actually a successful cinematographer and cameraman in Hollywood, having filmed such blockbusters as “Crash” (2005), “Titanic,” “L.A. Confidential,” and the “X-Men” films. I guess, while walking his steadicam around famous actors, working with high-profile directors, he was harboring secret fantasies of watching them turn into blubbering pools of jelly.

 

The film contains: Numerous people melting for several minutes at a time. A guy melting down a toilet. A guy’s feet falling off. A man getting his penis severed, and being tossed around like a football. A woman being accidentally smothered by a fat guy. Her corpse being raped in a landfill.

 

3) Pink Flamingos (1972)

Dir. John Waters

On film posters and trailers, the MPAA likes to list, briefly, why they gave certain films certain ratings. This film is rated “R,” for strong sexuality and language throughout. John Waters’ seminal classic “Pink Flamingos,” has one of my favorite of those descriptions: “Rated ‘NC-17,’ for a wide range of perversions in explicit detail.” And indeed, Waters delivers on every one of those perversions. The story is well-known: Babs Johnson (Divine) has been declared the Filthiest Person Alive. This is a title she is proud of. She maintains it by keeping her horrible mother (the incomparable Edith Massey) in a crib, giving rape victims to her pervy son, whom she occasionally fellates, and stealing meat by hiding it between her legs. Her rivals are the Marbles (David Lochary and Mink Stole) who kidnap and impregnate young women (using their gay butler), and then sell the infants to lesbian couples to fund their elementary school heroin dealing outfit.

 

You may have heard how films like “A Clockwork Orange” or “Midnight Cowboy” were rated “X” upon their initial release, and then learn that they aren’t so violent or sexy by today’s standards. The astonishing thing about “Pink Flamingos” is that, nearly 40 years after the fact, it’s still disgusting. It still has the power to outrage and nauseate. I don’t want to say that the film has no other merits, though. John Waters put a definite sense of humor, and a definite queery-cum-trashy aesthetic to his film that makes it strangely watchable. I still like “Female Trouble” much better, but “Pink Flamingos” is a classic.

 

The film contains: A big fat transvestite. Poo in a box. A chicken being crushed to death on screen, between the bodies of a rapist and his victim. Edith Massey in her underpants ranting about eggs. Divine fellating her “son” on camera. Divine licking an apartment. Raping. Vomiting. Flashing. A transsexual flashing. A singing asshole. Dismemberment. Murder. Weird, weird dialogue. And the infamous finale of actual onscreen coprophagy. Look it up.

 

2) “Cannibal Holocaust” (1980)

Dir. Ruggero Deodato

This film, like a few of the films listed above, was taken to court. People believed, you see, that the deaths on camera were real, and that it was, just as the advertising claimed, a legitimate snuff film. The filmmakers had to call the actors (Robert Kerman, Francesca Ciardi, et al) into court to prove to a jury that they were alive and well, and just actors in a well-staged, pseudo-snuff film. That the film didn’t actually kill people seems to be its only defensible detail. The rest of the film is so bloody, so gritty and realistic, and contains so much real-life violence, that it turns from a horror film into the ultimate experience in grueling horror (apologies to “Evil Dead” fans).

 

The story follows a documentary film crew as they venture into the wilds of Brazil, seeking to document some lost civilizations. The crew declare on camera that they are benevolent anthropologists, but reveal in side footage that they are hoping to make a shock “mondo” film, and perhaps kill some of the natives while they’re at it. When they find the natives, they are brutally slaughtered on camera, and eaten. A second team of filmmakers goes looking for them. They too are slaughtered. Its documentary style makes “Cannibal Holocaust” feel a bit too realistic at times, and horribly staged at others, lending it a definite snuff film vibe. It has no precedent. It’s a violent violent film, filled with gore effects that you feel are real. When they kill animals on screen, it is for real.

 

The film contains: Cannibalism. Torture. Rape. A guy being eaten in front of his peers. White men teasing and killing natives. Buckets and buckets of blood. Piles and piles of entrails. Entrails spilling out of a person. A turtle being killed and ripped apart on camera. A monkey being decapitated on camera. More gore than you’ll like.

 

1) “Salò, or: The 120 Days of Sodom”

Dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini

Based on a story by The Marquis de Sade, Pasolini’s “Salò” is notable less for its sick content (which is plenty sick) and more for its high quality, and professional tone. Sure, it features hot young teenagers being forced to perform all manner of horrid sexual perversions, but you do get the sense that Pasolini had something very profound on his mind. That it was well-paced, well-acted, and well-shot only adds to how disturbing it is. This is not some weirdo in a basement, masturbating to his private torture fantasies. This is a meticulously crafted, bared-faced look in to the heart of human evil. Some might call it a great film. It was release don home video by the Criterion Collection. It’s probably, to this day, one of the most extreme and sickest movies I have seen.

 

The story is about a corrupt group of Italian higher-ups – a teacher, a politician, a priest – who have kidnapped a group of teenage boys and girls at the end of WWII. Their parents are all dead, and no one is looking for them. There is no hope. There is no rescue. They must perform increasingly horrible demands or face execution, or worse, continued torture. The images of the film are bad enough – boys and girls are raped and degraded, their resolve is eaten away, they are forced to eat shit and bathe in it – but, worse, the kids are gradually worn down by the adults until they have no personality, hope or resolve, and begin to accept their fate. Even when they’re being tortured and killed. “I’d kill you now,” one of the men says to his beloved charge at one point, “but I would only be able to experience that ecstasy once.”

 

Pasolini is a great filmmaker, and he is wildly hated in certain circles, and not only for this film. He was an open atheist in a Catholic nation (although he had his religious moments; he made “The Gospel According to St. Matthew,” perhaps the best Christ movie ever made), and an open homosexual in front of the people whom that would piss off the most. With “Salò,” though, he may have gone too far. Pasolini was murdered in the street shortly after the premiere of his film, supposedly run down by one of the actors from the film, who ran over him with his own car. Whether a martyr to great art, or a sick pervert, Pasolini’s film is one to seek out. It is indelible.

 

The film contains: Whippings, strippings, crying children, emotional torture, physical torture, blood, more coprophagy, more berating, more rape, more blood, a general feeling of nihilism.

 

 

Witney Seibold is a film critic living in Los Angeles with his wife. He watches a lot of movies, not all of them sick and disturbing. He maintains his own ‘blog, “Three Cheers for Darkened Years,” which has compiled nearly 800 of his articles to date, including all the lists he’s compiled for Geekscape. He is also the quiet co-host of The B-Moves Podcast over at Crave Online with William Bibbiani. He likes to think he knows what he’s talking about.

Of course I was apprehensive. I’m often wary of sequels, especially sequels to movies I love, fraudulently made a decade after the fact. Wes Craven‘s “Scream,” especially, made in 1996, was such a loud voice in the horror genre, and codified the use of irony and self-awareness in popular culture; it was about teenagers who recognized that they were inside a horror movie-like situation. How could another “Scream” film be made in 2011, and still be significant or relevant in any way? After all, since the playful self-awareness of “Scream,” horror has seen several trends rise and fall. We’re in the midst of an unfortunate remake renaissance. Torture porn has come and, one can hope, gone. J-horror was the word of the day for a while. The horror film landscape has changed since 1996, and we now have a generation of half-interested internet junkies who are more interested in disconnected brutal violence than they are in cutesy slashers like “Scream.”

Thankfully, Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson have made probably the smartest return to the material they could have with “Scream 4,” an R-rated film that, while perhaps not as scary as it could have been, and perhaps having flaws in its basic whodunnit structure, managed to be smart about how self-reference has reached critical mass, and what young horror fans (both in the movie and in the audience) expect the characters to do. It’s really very good. The previous “Scream” films were savvy about pointing out what the basic rules for horror films and sequels were. In this film, the general consensus seems to be that there are no rules. And that everything must be captured online to be considered “real.”

 

The film’s opening is a doozy, using Dave Eggers-like tactics about referring to one’s being self-referential, and then commenting on the fact that one is referring to being self-referential. The irony, “Scream 4” seems to be saying, is nearly impenetrable these days. Williamson and Craven were wise about what they had made in 1996 and where it all stands today. Now everything must be commented on immediately. I mean heck, I write online movie reviews, and at this very moment, I’m feeling a little self-conscious about it. And you, in turn, are reading this review. We’re in this cycle together.

Our old surviving cast is still around: Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell, looking fantastic) is a wounded survivor who has written a book about women surviving trauma (which seems to be a theme throughout most of Craven’s films). Deputy Dewey Riley (David Arquette) is still a kind of bumbling dork, but is now the town’s sheriff. He also still married to Gayle Weathers (Courtney Cox), who has retired from journalism, but still aches to write. As to not become too involved in the cycle of rehashing old plot details (especially some of the bizarro twists in “Scream 3”), we also have a new young cast to introduce, if only to provide a body count for the inevitable kills. There’s Sidney’s bland cousin Jill (Emma Roberts), who resembles Sidney in many ways. There’s Jill’s best friend Kirby (a very good Hayden Panettiere), her hot friend Olivia (Marielle Jaffe), a pair of AV nerds (Rory Culkin and Erik Knudsen) who stand in for the film-savvy Randy from the first two “Scream” films, and there’s Jill’s ex-boyfriend Trevor (Nico Tortorella), who is set up as a suspect, meaning he clearly cannot ultimately be the killer.

There are also some small notable roles from Marley Shelton, Mary McDonnell and Alison Brie.

Yes, killings begin, a decade to the day after the last killings. It’s to “Scream 4’s” detriment that there is not a long list of potential suspects this time around; the killer’s identity is a mystery, but we never get the feeling that any of the characters were walking around amongst could be the killer. However, Craven proves that he’s such a strong director (and not just a horror director), that we do get a good sense of the universe that these characters inhabit. It’s not quite so good as “Scream” in this respect, but the effect is still there.

In this universe, the original “Scream” was adapted into a series of films-with-the-film called “Stab.” The “Stab” franchise is now on part 7, and the local kids all love the films. The content of the “Stab” movies are now under intense scrutiny by the characters, and the killer, knowing how s/he will be seen, is careful to model the killings on the films, and also film them for instant broadcast on the internet. This is not as trite as is sounds.

I can’t describe too much else without giving away vital plot details, or revealing who the killer might be, suffice to say the film’s finale does a good job of laying on it’s comment, while keeping the film thrilling. Whether or not you guessed who the killer was is beyond the point. The point is why the killer is doing what they are doing. The killer’s motivations are in-keeping with the spirit of the modern internet-generation’s idiom.

But I don’t want this film to sound like it’s merely a hipster exercise in ouroboros analytics. It’s also a pretty solid film. It may not be as scary as “Scream,” and it may not be as richly character driven as the best of the genre, but it’s one of the more intelligent horror films I’ve seen in a long while, and, coming from the “Scream” franchise, that’s only appropriate.

I was recently chatting with fellow Geekscapist William Bibbiani, and he had a wonderful idea…

No doubt, horror fans remember the 2005-2007 Showtime series of TV specials called “Masters of Horror.” It was a high-concept horror series compiled by TV director Mick Garris, and the angle was that every episode would be directed by a different film director, well-known for their horror films. The idea was that the makers could direct whatever content they wanted, provided they did it within 60 minutes, and under a certain budget. He compiled high-end, well-known genre directors like John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper, Dario Argento, Joe Dante, John Landis, and Stuart Gordon, but also landed a few talented directors whose “mastery” or horror is perhaps of dubious pedigree, i.e. Lucky McKee, James McNaughton, and Japan’s whacked-out master Takashi Miike. On paper, this is an excellent idea, and some of the short films produced for this series were indeed very good. I’ve cited “Sick Girl” and “Cigarette Burns” in previous articles.

The second season proved to be more logistically difficult, and the film produced, while still coming from some notable directors, were not lauded by much of anyone. There were plans afoot, from what I understand, to make a “Masters of Science Fiction,” which was kind of a non-starter, and a “Masters of Italian Horror” is still in the works.

And while I love to see masterful directors pour themselves into material they might be passionate about (or, at the very least, working again), I’m far more interested in the mindful workings of… let’s call them Outsider Auteurs. The filmmakers who are less known for their solid genre cred, and more for their oddball passions. By way of illustrating, imagine what, say Edward D. Wood, Jr. would make, had he the freedom to produce whatever content he wanted. And also had access to a budget only typically available to high-end directors. One can only imagine the epic weirdness he would have made. What if John Rad had lived, and had somehow secured millions to make his dream project? Would it have been as magical as “Dangerous Men?” Even more magical? To me, peering into the mind of a passionate outside is going to prove more fascinating than the workaday exploits of a bored professional.

In that spirit, I would like to pitch the following TV series to Showtime: “Masters of Schlock.” We compile a list of recent outsider auteurs, noted for some great bad movies, and give them the same content freedom afforded to the Masters of Horror. If they can make a 60-minute film, under the budget and relatively on time, then it goes on the air, uncut and untouched. This could be possibly the most interesting TV series ever produced.

Having trouble thinking of some directors for this project? Might I suggest the following?

Uwe Boll

The master behind some horrible videogame-to-film adaptations, well-known for his mastery with low budgets, German director Uwe Boll (rhymes with “provable”) has earned rancor from geeks the world over for his string of horrible movies. He has also baffled the world by managing to secure some hugely talented actors to star in such films as “BloodRayne,” “Alone in the Dark,” and “In the Name of the King.” He has also made some strangely energetic comedies like “Blubberella” and “Postal,” which play like Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker films on a mixture of rum and crystal meth.

Boll has been very vocal about his films, and very publicly defensive of them. He feels he is making great entertainments, and has even claimed that his films are far better than any of the usual Hollywood schlock (which is a claim, I think, that can actually be debated). He offered to fight any of his critics in a boxing ring. It’s rare that you see such passion from a director, talent or no.

Uwe Boll would be the perfect mastermind/producer of this project. He could contribute an episode, and then secure budgets for his fellow auteurs. He would shout and badger and publicize like no one’s business. He would make the entire series into an open criticism of the Hollywood system. He would come to alienate a lot of the other directors. Boll is just the maniac e need to kick off this series.

Claudio Fragasso

Claudio Fragasso has directed 23 feature films and TV specials in his career, but he is known in the U.S. for his opus about vegetarian goblins, “Troll 2.” “Troll 2” (no relation to 1986’s “Troll”), is probably well-known to most cult film aficionados, and was outlined in a documentary film called “Best Worst Movie,” directed by “Troll 2’s” child star. Fragasso is interviewed in the documentary, and he is ambivalent; he is clearly a little annoyed by the smart-alecky Americans who seem to be openly mocking his film, but at the same time is grateful for the exposure he’s getting. Fragasso, it becomes clear, was no mere director-for-hire, and was actually making a project he was passionate about. He proceeds to badmouth the actors for not understanding his vision.

I have seen “Troll 2” several times, and I can attest for its strangeness. Vision or no, the film has an unfathomable sense of humor, and logical leaps that make the head spin (grandpa came back from the afterlife! With a grenade!). Fragasso also had a sideways approach to English, giving the ESL dialogue a Bela Lugosi-like bent. And through it all, he insisted that this was how people actually talked.

Bring this man back to America, please. Give him a budget. Give him carte blanche on content. He can make a serious teen drama, or another cheap monster film. Whatever he makes, I want to see it. And I want to see the interview with him afterwords.

Brian Trenchard-Smith

It may be a little unfair to include Brian Trenchard-Smith on this list, as his is a legitimately talented director, and one responsible for an enormous American influx of Aussie exploitation movies, but I feel the man needs as much exposure as he can get. What’s more, he has just as much passion for genre material as anyone, having made over 50 films in his career, and responsible for some films that you know you’ve seen: “Leprechaun 3,” “Leprechaun 4: In Space,” “Dead-End Drive-In,” “BMX Bandits,” “Stunt Rock,” “Night of the Demons 2,” and the unforgettable “Turkey Shoot,” a.k.a. “Escape 2000.” If you don'[t know who this man is, I implore that you learn.

There was a recent documentary film called “Not Quite Hollywood,” which traced the rise of Australian exploitation movies in the 1970s. At the time, censorship codes were lifted, and filmmakers took to their newfound freedom with aplomb, featuring a whole slew of car chase movies, kung-fu films, sex films, and horror/gore unseen in the country’s history. At the forefront of this movement was Brian Trenchard-Smith, gleefully blowing up cars and setting stuntmen on fire.

Let’s see what Trenchard-Smith can do when he’s in the spotlight, shall we? Surely he’d be blowing shit up with more enthusiasm than any director working. Remember, an exploding car is only exciting because you know that the filmmakers had to blow up a real car somewhere. CGI can go sit in a corner. Trenchard-Smith would give the explosion its due.

Jeff Leroy

With the dull thudding impact of CGI on the world of genre film, and major studios lazily pumping out B-films as if they’re A-films, it’s comforting to hear that people like Jeff Leroy are hard at work in their garages. In 2010, Jeff Leroy made a sci-fi action epic called “Rat Scratch Fever,” and managed to land it in a few theaters around Los Angeles. This was a low-budget film to be sure, but this was no talky, conceptual sci-fi film like 2004’s “Primer.” No, this was an energetic, effects-laden monster flick with guns, killer rats, and toppling cities.

The trailer for the film makes it look like a joke at first, but a few moments scrutiny proves that a man was making an earnest sci-fi epic with what little money and resources he has. The result looks amazing, and is possessed of that old-fashioned B-movies passion that seems to have moved underground these days. “Rat Scratch Fever” is about giant rats from out space who invade Earth. Guns and explosions ensue. ‘Nuff said. Imagine if Sam Raimi had grown up in the post-CGI era, and was a little more unhinged.

Now let’s give that guy some money. The untold energy will be staggering.

Damon Packard

Those of us living in L.A. have probably heard the name of Damon Packard. A few years back, he entered the consciousness of the area’s film buffs by self-distributing a homemade DVD of his feature film “Reflections of Evil.” He would press hundreds of copies, and drive around town, leaving small stacks in newspapaer racks and in the hipper video and movie outlets. There was a perios when you couldn’t go anywhere in Hollywood without running into “Reflections of Evil.” I was one of the brave souls who actually watched the film, and it featured Packard himself, playing a homeless man, ranting, vomiting, and committing acts of violence on the streets of Hollywood. It’s a pretty gross film.

He followed up “Reflections of Evil” with a gonzo sci-fi collage called “SpaceDisco One: The Movie,” which he filmed in parks, without permits, and on the Universal CityWalk. I even wrote a review of it at one point. Packard actually contacted me, and announced that the budget for the film was only about $50, and that he was working hard to keep the spirit of independent film alive. And indeed he is. So few filmmakers these days are the pick-up-a-camera-and-go type.

Packard is supposedly living in poverty in a trailer outside of L.A. And though his films may not have any budget, he has still managed to carve out a niche for himself amongst the locals, and is still pouring passion into his projects, however odd they may be. I say we find Packard, give him a camera, give him a budget bigger than any he’s ever had, and let him go nuts. The result would be amazing.

Mark Region

One of the biggest online sensations of 2009 was the trailer for Mark Region’s “After Last Season,” a clunky “thriller” about psychic powers, an unseen serial killer (I think), and sets notably made of cardboard. I’ve seen the film, and I’ve read interviews with the director, and I’m still unsure as to whether or not he was a madman making an earnest film, or if he was a super-arch comedian making a some sort of protracted Andy Kaufmanesque satire. Either way, “After Last Season” looks like the kind of film that could never be made, with its lazy dialogue, bizarro geography, lugubrious pacing, and late-’80s era CGI.

If you haven’t seen the trailer, I encourage you to seek it out. Like all of the directors on this list, though, I want to state that Region is not a figure to be mocked. Region, along with all the others on this list, are to be praised for their gumption, their tenacity, and their willingness to share their vision. I can’t attest for the success of each of their projects, but what sets them all apart from the average director is their clear passion for the material they’re presenting.

Region is clearly passionate, and while “After Last Season” reportedly cost $5 million (!), I’d love to see what he could do with a more modest budget.

Babar Ahmed

In 2009, I got in a car, and drove out to West Covina to see a film that was only released in two theaters nationwide. That a film like “Royal Kill” could have made it to theaters at all is something of a miracle. The film is… it’s… it’s certainly hard to describe. It features Eric Roberts as a put-upon dad, trying to protect an innocent girl (Lalaine) from a wicked assassin (Gail Kim). In turn, the wicked assassin is being hunted down by a handsome counter-assassin (Alexander Wraith). Pat Morita shows up in a few scenes, even though he had died four years earlier. It’s clear that the filmmakers only had a few minutes of Pat Morita on film, so they looped his footage and dialogue backwards, claiming he was speaking in a secret assassin’s language.

“Royal Kill” is kind of special to me. It’s a badass film that’s clearly trying to touch on all the typical action tropes, but falls into a somnambulist state somewhere along the way, turning into a dream,-like experience. That I was one of maybe 10 people who saw it in theaters makes me feel special.

The film’s director, Babar Ahmed is yet another hardworking outsider who is pouring his heart into these cheapie action flicks. Who knows what’s really on his mind, and who knows what he intended with his strangely nihilistic film. All I know is I’d like to see more from him, especially when unencumbered.

James Nguyen

I have to be honest; I haven’t seen 2008’s “Birdemic: Shock and Terror,” but I have heard the stories. An ostensible cross between “An Inconvenient Truth,” and “The Birds,” made on a budget of about $100, “Birdemic” is James Nguyen’s earnest parable about pollution gone mad, and the angry birds that wreak revenge on the unwitting human populace. Cheaply made, badly acted, and oddly plotted, “Birdemic” seems like it can only be the result of a passionate mind.

Nguyen, however, unlike his outsider peers, is not out to make an exciting thriller, but clearly has an agenda on hid mind with “Birdemic,” and it’s upcoming sequel “Birdemic II: The Resurrection 3D.” He is an environmentalist who wants to defend the planet, and has made what he feels to be stirring propaganda.

I fear that with his 3D sequel that Nguyen is beginning to believe his own joke. This is a pity. Rather than continuing to be earnest and passionate, he has decided to side with the hipsters, and give them something silly. Call this the Wiseau Syndrome. It bothers me that he seems to have changed his intentions as time has passed. We need to get this guy back on his own side quick before he sells out.

Which is, I understand, an odd thing to say about the director “Birdemic.”

Stewart Raffill

Another film I drove to another county to see was 2010’s “Standing Ovation,” a small, colorful, plucky tweener musical from Stewart Raffill. I have written my review of this film, as has Geekscape’s own William Bibbiani. This is a film that has managed to win over hundreds of young men with its oddness, and has made small circles on the midnight movie circuit. I won’t spend a lot of time describing it here, but I will ask that you read the reviews and seek out some information on it. It’ll be worth it.

The film’s director, Stewart Raffill, is actually a hardworking and prolific director who has made 23 features in his career including “The Philadelphia Experiment,” “Mac and Me,” and “The Ice Pirates.” While it may be easy to dismiss him as a commercial hack, I can say from experience that Raffill is a practical man who applies himself professionally to whatever he tries. “Standing Ovation” is probably his purest vision, having grown the film organically from the personalities of the South Jersey kids he interviewed. He is like a steely father figure who will nurture whatever project he sets his mind to. This is not something that can be said of most mainstream directors.

What does this man dream of making? What would he do with his free shot? Don’t you want to see?

Tommy Wiseau

We’ve all seen “The Room,” right?

Tommy Wisau is a curious man, shrouded in mystery. His Los Angeles cult film, “The Room” opened in several theaters throughout town about 8 years ago, and he managed to four-wall theaters for years, hyping his film as a deep look into the minds of humanity. It was a clunky infidelity “thriller” about a betrayed man, and the shallow wife who mocked him. Wiseau himself starred in it. His barbarian tresses, lazy eye, and indecipherable accent gave the film a surreal edge.

But then hipsters, who could no longer avoid the ubiquitous advertising, started seeing midnight shows at The Sunset in Hollywood. It quickly became an ironic classic, attracting both the curious and the douchey would-be cultists. Wiseau, sensing his new audience, changed gears, implying that it was meant to be a comedy all this time, and gleefully appeared at midnight shows to soak up the glory. He has since become something of a household name, appearing at film festivals and events, and even the San Deigo Comic Con. I have a picture with him.

I sense, though, that at one point, Wiseau was trying to do… well something… with “The Room.” I can’t really be sure what it is; the film is lame and tepid and obvious. But there was some sort of passion there at some point. Wiseau has become such a cult icon at this point it would be foolish to exclude him from a special project like “Master of Schlock.” If you gave him freedom to make whatever he wanted, perhaps he would come out of his ironic shell, and make something even more spectacular than “The Room.” Perhaps he would also reveal where he came from, and where he got his money. Perhaps he’ll introduce us to the Chechnyan rebels he’s bankrolling.

Just save his film for last. I have a feeling he’d have trouble completing on time.

Again, I want to state that these are people selected for their passion. These are men who are auteurs. People who believe in what they do, and who infect sensitive audiences with their passion. Mock their films if you must, but have respect for the men. They made movies they believe in. That’s much more than can be said for most working filmmakers.

Witney Seibold spends most of his days in Los Angeles, watching cheesy films, and writing about them. He love donuts, waffles, cartoons, and dark existential dramas. In addition to his writing for Geekscape, he also maintains a ‘blog, Three Cheers for Darkened Years!, which compiles his works from the past eight or nine years. He also is the co-host of The B-Movies Podcast for Crave Online, where he discusses the films of the day with William Bibbiani.

Recently on Geekscape, the site’s founder, Mr. Jonathan London, posted an article defending Zack Snyder’s recent film “Sucker Punch.” He was particularly disgusted with the reaction the film elicited from a certain crowd of young geeks, who declared “Sucker Punch” to be one of the worst films ever made. He accused audiences and professional critics of lambasting a film that hardly deserved it.

 

I’m not here to defend “Sucker Punch,” or to attack it again; I have written my review and said my piece. I still feel the film is overdesigned, strangely plotted, and smears cursory proto-feminist messages over an obvious undercurrent of adolescent oversexualization. And while I think Mr. London is a little too passionate in his defense of the film (his essay is a wrathful litany against the wolfpack), I do feel that he has made an important point. I recently sent him the following message, which was my way of agreeing:

 

Re: Your “Sucker Punch” article. As so-called “geek” content has proliferated, and once-fringe genre entertainment becomes increasingly exploited by the mainstream, the meaning of “geek” has become increasingly hazy. The new generation of “geeks,” I feel, more than our own generation, has become less about joining an outside group, and… more about feeding into the main hive mind. Hence, when something geeky comes along, and it’s not quite up to snuff, the Wolfpack Mentality begins, and the teens (and less-than-professional critics) tear it to shreds.

The geeks have become the bullies.

Mr. London’s ultimate point is that we, the geeks, have inherited the Earth, and we’re not treating it very well. Let me give you a bit of cultural context: I recall a time (and you can accuse me of falling for nostalgia if you must) when geeks were still outsiders. We did not have any “cool” cache like we do today, and were not able to dictate the content of Hollywood F/X extravaganzas with our hard-earned dollars. Geeks stayed off to the side, playing Dungeons & Dragons, reading “X-Men” comics, and hoping that someday, mainstream Hollywood would answer our prayers (or badgering letters) and produce a feature film that not only featured our favorite superheroes, but would be stringently faithful to the source material. We still loved our movies and we still had our genre films, but we had to physically gather to share our passion. We had to scrounge fanzines and make grand treks to conventions to see our heroes.

 

A decade has passed, and the geeks have gotten their way. The most recent evidence being the national release of “Sucker Punch,” which features 100% bonafide geek imagery from ages past. It featured steampunk zombie warriors, young women in sexy fetishwear, holding swords and killing giant samurai robots. It had a train to Saturn, androids and dragons. These images, once relegated to outsider circles and the imaginations of love-starved, needy 1980s geek teens are now being produced, en masse, by the Hollywood machine. And geeks are rejecting them. In the last decade or so, geeks have somehow mutated from socially awkward badgering nerds, content to live on the fringes and compete in pseudo-friendly trivia-offs, into a more aggressive breed of hive mind assholes. The kids are not interested in discovering something new. However obscure your love is, there’s a website devoted to it, and anyone can pretend to be an expert. Or perhaps it’s been Hollywood’s increased co-opting of once-fringe exploitation material. Or perhaps there’s just been a simple social shift. Either way, geeks no longer have the relief that comes with a new genre film. They have an all-or-nothing bully attitude. They begin picking on filmmakers like Zack Snyder, or M. Night Shyamalan for not living up to their exacting standards. The spirit has changed from an attitude of solidarity (occasionally marked by awkward geek aggression) into one of accusatory and dismissive rudeness. As Mr. London pointed out, there is no serious critique from young geek, nor feelings of gratitude. There’s just a horrid and extremely reactionary rancor that boils down all geek media to either “epic” or “fail.”

 

Geeks should indeed be more forgiving.

 

But it’s a double-edged sword.

 

There are other filmmakers, I feel, who have been unduly praised for providing certain content, and not for, necessarily, making great films. Filmmakers like Guillermo Del Toro, Edgar Wright, and even Peter Jackson are copiously lionized throughout the geek community, not just for making a series of stylish genre films, but for, themselves, being wiggling, ranting fanboys. They were clearly, we saw, one of us at one point. They made it to the top (Why the aforementioned filmmakers have achieved such a status, and Zack Snyder has not is a matter of taste, I suppose).

 

Edgar Wright’s films are rambunctious and over-energetic and a bit messy. Doubly so for Del Toro (although his “Pan’s Labyrinth” came close to greatness). Peter Jackson used to make geek films (“Dead Alive” “Bad Taste”), and, strangely, abandoned his usual tropes to make an over-long and stringently detailed and perfectly boring 12-hour film based on The Lord of the Rings, one of the single most lauded geek films of recent memory. These people provide comic book imagery and fantastical ideas, and are made canon giants because of it. The response is never measured or critically even. It’s, again, a result of the all-or-nothing attitude of young geeks.

 

(N.B. I don’t want to sound like I preferred geek culture before it “sold out,” and that it was better when it was on the fringe, but… well, there was more purity of vision when it was on the edge; any culture, according to most studies – be it subculture, popular culture or ancient culture – loses its strength and clarity as its members increase. Geeks are now professional filmmakers, they control what they want. And we’re using that power to make live-action Transformers films that we never asked for. The geek audience may hate these films, but, as Mr. London pointed out, it’s exactly what they’ve asked for. It’s their own fault.)

 

Rather than sitting and accusing you young geeks of ruining geekdom, and pointing out (however rightly) that you too often give in to hive-like wolfpack mentality, I would like to offer the following list of rules to shape you. To help you grow into better geeks. To turn you from ranting and vitriolic bullies into smarter, more dynamic and more appreciative critics of geek content. I, essentially, want to make you the best geeks you can be.

 

1): Go back in the closet. Geeks have gained control of the popular media for the time being, and we need to realize that it cannot last. The superhero trend will end, comic books will wane in popularity, and the world will alter itself in ways we cannot predict. If you tie your cart to what’s popular, you are doomed to crash into the ravine of waning popular opinion. Your job is to love something because you love it, and damn however embarrassing it is. You can express yourself online, and rant to your friends, but you shouldn’t insist on your way of looking at things; Your identity is, more than ever, defined by what you love. Make sure you really love it, and can continue to love it, however your peers feel about it. I’m convinced a lot of geek lore will soon vanish, and we’ll have to go back in the closet anyway. When this happens, you’ll be ready.

 

2): Be driven by your passions. What you love should be dictated by the powers within you, not by what you read online. You may have heard that “Sucker Punch” was rotten, and that all your friends hated it, and that all the online critics (professional and otherwise) have been lambasting it, but it’s not your job to agree with all that. It’s your job to see a film you want to see, and judge it by your own sense of taste. Your taste will grow and evolve as time passes (as it must), and you cannot allow yourself to accept or reject a film based on the hive mind. Live by your passions. It’s what geekery is all about.

 

3): Do not judge harshly. If a film or a game or a comic is bad, say so, and say why. If it is good, say so and say why. If you find yourself inflating (or deflating) your opinion of something to placate an audience of peers, you have become a sour critic and a bad geek. You must be 100% honest at all times. You’ll find that defending a lambasted film, or lionizing a popularly bad one can be liberating. It can sharpen you, because you have your honest opinion to back it up.

 

4): Be humble. It’s been said that geeks control the world. There is a feature film based on “The Avengers” in the works, which is connected to a series of other superhero films. In less than a decade, we’ve had two Hulk mythologies and two Spider-Man mythologies. This is all because geeks have demanded it, and we’ve proven, through our dollars, that we’re willing to see this stuff. This does afford us some sense of entitlement to be sure. Don’t fall for it. Ask politely. Enjoy what we’re given. To repeat rule three, don’t judge harshly. This is a culture where you will get what you ask for. Or maybe not. The point is to approach things with humility. If you don‘t get what you want, write the screenplay. Shop it around. Talk about it. But don’t ever make direct demands. It makes you sound like a douche.

 

5): Save your enthusiasm. This rule may be difficult for most dyed-in-the-wool geeks, but I assure you the best way to be a better-rounded geek (other than eating nothing but Hot Pockets and Energy Drinks) is to reject the advertising machine. If you hear that there’s a new “Batman” film in the works, you may be enthused, you may be excited, but you should not become a frothy, anticipatory weirdo over it. Even if it’s something you’ve been waiting years for, your best approach is one of measured, cautious optimism. If you allow your enthusiasm to take over, then what you look forward to can only disappoint you. Or become great before you’ve even seen it. Wait until the film/game/comic is released. Then suss it over in your mind. Then get excited. You will find that your appreciation is actually deeper.

 

6): Realize that films will not define your game/comic/book. Many geeks who are into video games or comics or geek lit feel that a feature film adaptation from a major Hollywood studio will somehow legitimize the object of their affection. If Hollywood makes a film of, say, “Half Life,” then it means it has reached the big time, right? Well, not necessarily. It may color the way mainstream moviegoing audiences feel about the game, but, surely it will not change the game. I declare the following: You do not need a feature film to legitimize the thing you love. If you love the X-Men, continue to love the X-Men. A feature film will not change that. If you love a game, continue to love the game. Don’t demand a film adaptation, or adopt an attitude that a film will change and grow what you love. See rule #2: Follow your passions. Don’t let a filmmaker lead you.

 

7): Realize that film adaptations are to be judged on their own merits. This is going to be a toughie for anyone who has ever written a review, and I may get flack for it, but I feel it’s an important thing to remember, and an aspect of popular criticism that is often forgotten, and is the source of a lot of geek rage. If you see a film adaptation of your favorite comic book, hate the film if it is made badly, and not if it deviates from the source. “Wolverine” wasn’t bad because they “changed Deadpool.” Say it was bad because it wasn’t serious enough, or it didn’t treat the character with humanity. “Resident Evil 4” wasn’t bad because the characters were different than in the game; it’s bad because it’s a really boneheaded film. If you’re a casual observer, it’s fine to bring preconceptions into the theater with you, but try to let the film tell you what it has to say, rather than merely expecting what you’ve already heard. If you write about films in any capacity, you have to be especially objective.

 

8): You don’t have to see everything. I know the instinct one has as a teenager/twentysomething to absorb every last film. As a teen, I myself went through a long, long phase of seeing films merely because I could, and not because I necessarily wanted to. I felt like I was building a repertoire in my head; a personal encyclopedia. Everyone should go through this phase, perhaps, just so they know how to watch movies properly. But it’s equally healthy to not go see movies. If you hear that the latest geek blockbuster is bad, and your friends are kinda mixed, and you feel like you should see it, even though you’re not sure if you want to… don’t go. You vote with your dollars and your free press. If you don’t see it, you are making a declarative statement. If you love the comic so much that a film would be heresy, don’t see it. It’s o.k. to stay at home and read. If you’re unsure as to what films to see, you can trust the words of friends, or of critics you respect. I hear there are some critics around here you might want to take a look at…

9): Never start a sentence with “I don’t BELIEVE you haven’t seen…” i.e. Stay away from shame tactics. Great films are great, and they’ll always be there for us to consume in our own time. Don’t ever make someone feel bad or guilty that they haven’t seen a perceived classic. Sure, that 14-year-old boy you met in line at Comic Con may think he knows horror movies, even though he hasn’t seen “Evil Dead 2,” “Nosferatu” or “The Exorcist,” and has announced that he’s not familiar with them. But it’s not your job to shame him. Shame tactics are a form of geek bullying. It’s your job to talk the films up to him. To find what he’s interested in, and give recommendations on that basis. To teach him, to offer “gateway” films. To see if you can get him interested in great works. Tempter your enthusiasm. Be humble. Never ever rely on shame.

 

10) Realize that you haven’t seen it all. This is actually a general life rule that can apply to all teenagers everywhere. You may have just broken through into the geek world, and are being introduced to Green Lantern mythology like the world has never seen, but know that, whatever plane you inhabit, there will be several around you, and many more above you. The geek world is a large and varied place, always there to offer new corners and pleasure to the young enthusiast. If you think that you’ve reached the pinnacle, you being assuming that you’re an expert, and you lose your humility. If you’ve seen “The Human Centipede,” you may begin to assume that you’ve seen the sickest, not realizing that there are people around you who popped their cherries with “Salò” or “Pink Flamingos.” Socrates once said that true wisom begins with the first realization that you don’t know everything. This is a good approach to your geek/film/comics/art education. Move through the varied pleasures. Know that there’s always going to be more.

 

Does all this sound condescending? Perhaps. I suppose it depends on your constitution. I only offer this advice on possible paths to clearing out the popular cynicism and bullying air that has infected a lot of young geeks and many teenagers who inhabit geek circles. Will this essay be Epic or Fail? Well, it’s advice. You make take it or ignore it accordingly.

 

After all, don’t we all want to be the best geeks we can be?

 

 

Witney Seibold is a film critic and luddite living in Los Angeles with his gorgeous wife and his collection of VHS tapes that he’s only now starting to upgrade. He maintains a ‘blog called Three Cheers for Darkened Years! where you can read all of his reviews, stretching back to his days at a local newspaper. He is also the co-host, with William Bibbiani, of The B-Movies Podcast over at Crave online. He is charming and clever and encourages you to read more

“Insidious” is half a very good movie, and half a really stupid one. I guess, then, that it averages out to “o.k.” in the broad scheme. Sadly, that’s all I can really say to recommend the film, as it’s largely a forgettable and not very notable haunted house picture from Leigh Whannel and James Wan, the creative team behind the “Saw” franchise, and “Dead Silence.” What they have made is a clear homage to their favorite ghost movie, Tobe Hooper‘s 1982 film “Poltergeist,” as it moves in a similar fashion to that film, and features a few nearly identical elements; There is an eccentric psychic woman, a missing child that must be retrieved from a ghost dimension, and a team of wise-cracking paranormal techies who aren’t nearly as amusing as the filmmakers seem to think they are. Sadly, the filmmakers become so preoccupied with their cliched, haunted house imagery (wispy, corner-of-the-eye image, creepy demon women, a playhouse Hell of demonic puppetry knickknacks), that it becomes heavily invested in their out-of-place, protracted-action climax, that “Insidious” falls apart.

 

The film’s setup scenes are actually doozies, and are genuinely spooky, lending for a strong sense of dread for a good 40 minutes. An average white family has moved into a new house in a posh area of the suburbs. Mom Renai (Rose Byrne), a one-time songwriter, is stressed beyond belief, and dad Josh (Patrick Wilson), seems to want to actively escape from any domestic activity, preferring to spend long days at his high school. How a high school teacher and a stalled songwriter can afford such a nice house is never explained. Maybe one of them is a trust fund baby. But never mind. The house is decidedly creepy. It has large hardwood floors, and a spare, half-decorated design. Doors creak a lot. It’s a credit to the film’s photographer that he was able to create a real space, and not just a cliched haunted house.

The usual odd things begin happening. Books are found on the floor. Furniture is found moved. Creepy, whispery voices are heard through the baby monitor. Then one of Renai and Josh’s two young sons accidentally bangs his head in the attic, and falls into a coma (!). From there, the weirdness only begins to ratchet up. Banging sounds emanate from the walls. Doors open and close right before them. Lights turn on and off. And, creepiest of all, figures and faces begin appearing in the darkness. Josh is staying late at work all the time, and we learn, logically, it’s because he’s just creeped out by the house. When Renai, stressed out over a comatose son, and nearly mad with fear, demands to move, it’s to Josh’s credit that they actually do.

 

Of course, in their newer, smaller house, found by Josh’s mom, played by Barbara Hershey, the haunting doesn’t seem to stop. Indeed, there a truly frightening scene in which Josh’s mom has a daylight demonic vision that really startled me. In fact, all of the scares up until this point were good ones. Sure, they were of the old guard jump-out-and-getcha type, but, I have to admit, most of them got me. I was on edge and delightfully scared for a long stretch.

 

Unfortunately, this is the point where the film starts to fall apart.  Eventually we have the psychic (Lin Shaye, who is actually pretty good) who goes on spirit quests, and we have the terrible and annoying ghost-busters (screenwriter Leigh Whannel and Aussie stuntman Angus Sampson), who banter about as well as two electrical appliances. The “quirky” scenes were annoying and insufferable.

I won’t tell you what the twist is, or what’s going on or why this family seems to be haunted, suffice to say that it involves astral projection, a ghost dimension, psychic handwriting, and a final desperate rescue. For a simple haunted house picture, this film sure does back-end the exposition. I’ve often been let down by haunted house movies, as they always feel the need to explain away the ghosts in some logical fashion. The explanation is never as exciting or as interesting as the mystery that precedes it. “Insidious” not only explains the reasons for the ghosts, but then goes on to add all kinds of weird back story that only serve to distract. And then, even more disappointing, they don’t give any explanation as to why the ghosts look the way they do, or why these particular ghosts are around.

 

Sorry to be so vague, but I really don’t want to ruin it. This film’s first half should be appreciated, I think, although I can’t earnestly declare “Insidious” to be a hugely quality movie. I guess as a midday spook fest in the Spring, it’ll do. Or if you’re scrounging your local video store, hoping for something to take up the darker hours of your slumber party, it might play. As a film, though, it’s kind of limp.

Roger Ebert once observed (in his review of “Punisher: War Zone,” I believe) that one could trust bad movies to look and sound bad. These days, you see, many bad movies have huge budgets and look fantastic and are often released by major studios. Even your run-of-the-mill straight-to-video cheapie is now made with slick digital cameras, making for (somewhat) professional-looking photography on all manner of corny gore-fests and cheap sexploitation thrillers. Films that here once reserved for seedy grindhouses, projected using shoddy machines, through scratched and milky film stock, and onto ripped screens, I an environment of drug-addled and slightly dangerous joyous abandon, is now available on the bottom shelves of your local Blockbuster Video, or is set right next to top-quality films on a randomly generated list of recommendations through an instant-view digital service, available for consumption in your home, where you can hide in the dark with your shame.

 

“Grim,” the latest film from the good folks at Troma, is a spiritual cousin to the cheap-ass grindhouse films of yore. It’s just as cheap, just as gory, just weird enough, and certainly bad enough to be set alongside any film played in a 1970s drive-in. The acting is clunky, the story is difficult to follow, the screenplay is oddly constructed, and it was clearly made by a passionate filmmaker. Adrian Santiago took up his camera, assembled a group of friends, collected a gang of dangerous-looking septuagenarian biker toughs, filled vat after vat of red Karo syrup, and headed out into the wilds of Texas to film a weird-ass, pseudo-post-apocalypse thriller. It feels very cheap (the camera, for instance, zooms in and out somewhat randomly, and the cameraman clearly let the camera slip out of his hands in a few scenes, invoking an early John Waters milieu), but it is all in a charming sort of way. Here is a film that was made in 2010, and looks like it was made in 2010, but feels like 1973 never ended.

The story follows the young Nicholas Grim who, at the film’s outset, watches his parents get murdered right in front of him. The murderers belong to something called the UAB, which we will later learn is a loosely-knit gang of biker thugs, hellbent on starting their own rural government in the backwoods of Texas. The UAB is led by the wicked Atticus Miller (Scott A. Mollette), who looks more than a little bit like Lemmy from Motörhead, and who gets to calmly and frequently exposit on the state of the world; evidently this is the future, and the economy has gotten so bad that these militia-like groups are everywhere in the world. We don’t see this, but it’s an ambitious conceit nonetheless. The young Nicholas is left alive (for some reason), and is found by a kindly farmer and his wife (Todd Farmer and Mary Winchester), who raise him into a peaceful agrarian loverboy (and played by Christopher Dimock, complete with floppy hairdo and soulful blue eyes).

Pretty soon, though, the UAB charges through and kills Nicholas’ new parents as well. He vows revenge, and starts tearing through UAB underlings ones at a time. There’s the hickish clean-up man who looks like a young James Hetfield (Everitt King) whose fingernails Nicholas pulls off. There’s the goofy, sword-toting womanizer Romeo (Niko Red Star) who seems to own some sort of ultimate fighting club. Eventually Nicholas has to team up with a freed sex slave Celina (Brandi Price) and her Sandinista brother Destino (Jason Ramirez) to take down the UAB compound. The finale is predictably bloody. Indeed, when anyone gets shot in this film, a Monty-Python-like spray of bright red fluid geysers from their bodies, dousing everyone in the vicinity. I admire that commitment to gore.

The fall of the true exploitation movie has been blamed on several things: Proper grindhouse theaters have closed, drive-in theaters have contracted in popularity (although there are still many in operation), mainstream Hollywood has adopted the violent genre material once felt verboten, and the internet has brought sexual material to the overpacked eyeballs of scores of teenagers. It’s heartening to know, then, that there are people like Adrian Santiago out there, and that Troma is still thriving, still plugging away, providing the cheap-ass thrills to people who may not know any better, and others who can take a charmed thrill in seeing an earnest effort.

 

In a weird way, I am recommending “Grim,” despite it’s terrible acting, weird dialogue, and horrid cinematography. It seems to be the grandchild of a long-retired showman, trying to carry on his grandfather’s show biz legacy, despite dwindling audiences and a clear shift in paradigm.

I have a phobia of bugs. I can’t look at cockroaches without squirming. When I see those little shiny-backed creatures scuttling haphazardly across the sidewalk in the middle of the night, going to whatever place cockroaches need to be in such a hurry, I will warily wait for them to finish their idle nighttime journey before I continue on my way. I can handle small black ants and ladybugs. Anything larger than my thumbnail will be fled from. Grasshoppers have featured in several of my most vivid nightmares, and I’m afraid of gardening ever since I came across an awaiting subterranean potato bug in my youth.

 

But, here’s an odd thing: If a gigantic insect appears in a movie, I squeal in delight. I can’t bring myself to step on a one-inch lock beetle, but when a 30-foot beetle steps on a car, I cheer. I think if an insect is blown into the size of a legitimate movie monster, I can somehow commute my fears; it’s easier to deal with a monster than it is a phobia.

 

To the giddy fear of the b-movie fanatic, and to the unmitigated glee to the would-be entomologist who actually had bug-making kits as children, I offer the following list of creepy bugs, insects, beetles and crawly critters to come out of movies and TV.

 

10) The singing cockroaches

from “Joe’s Apartment” (1996)

“Joe’s Apartment” began its life as a short film, shown on late-night MTV in between the videos, back when MTV was good and relevant. The short was about a twentysomething man, Joe, whose hot date is interrupted by the thousands of singing, talking cockroaches who live in his tiny New York apartment. The short was such a hit that MTV, when they first began to branch into feature films, extended it to feature length, cast Jerry O’Connell, and added entire a cappella musical numbers sung by an entire choir of roaches.

 

I don’t like to think of this too often, but if I were to imagine New York cockroaches developing their own social structure, I imagine it would be kind of like in “Joe’s Apartment.” There are thousands of you, and life is cheap, so you learn to work together, to wisecrack, and develop a kind of group mentality and playful narcissism to survive. That this group mentality was envisioned by a cappella music is kind of brilliant.

 

The roaches, while all disgusting little buggers, actually have a sense of humor, and eventually begin to help Joe in his endeavors (with mixed results), leading him to bigger and better things. And they’re always ready with a song. Part immature joke and part New Yorker’s fantasy, “Joe’s Apartment” is a weirdly enjoyable oddity.

 

9) The Evil Queen Pulsating Bloated Festering

Sweaty Pus-Filled Malformed Slug-for-a-Butt

from: “Earthworm Jim” (1995-1996)

“Earthworm Jim,” based on the video game, was one of my favorite cartoons as a teenager. I appreciated its absurdist slant on superhero tropes, and it’s surreal bouts of bizarro humor. It followed the adventures of an intelligent earthworm who had been mentally enhanced by a super suit. Jim was a blowhard, thought like a child, and ranted like a teen. He was fond of mayhem. That he was played by Dan Castellanetta was a boon. His sidekick was a cute li’l puppy named Peter who became a giant violent creature when he got hurt.

 

And, to match the hero’s weird-ass origins, he was frequently placed opposite a rogues gallery of equally bizarre villains, including a man with a monkey for a head (name: Prof. Money-for-a-Head), a superintelligent goldfish (who was always in his goldfish bowl), and his arch-nemesis, The Evil Queen Pulsating Bloated Festering Sweaty Pus-Filled Malformed Slug-for-a-Butt. The Queen was a giant beetle grub of some kind, who would lurge and ooze disgustingly across her horrible ship, scheming to steal Jim’s super suit. She was supposed to be dark and evil, but came across as cluelessly over-the-top, like a bad stage mom.

 

The Evil Queen (often referred to as simple “Queen something…something…For-a-Butt”) was played on the show by SCTV veteran Andrea Martin, lending to the role a kind of manic energy. As far as big bloated pus-filled sacs of living ick go, the Queen is one for the books.

 

8) The Applegates

from “Meet the Applegates” (1990)

On the surface, the Applegate family is a typically boring, white suburban family. Dad Richard (Ed Begley, Jr.) is a businessman. Mom Jane (Stockard Channing) is a well-coiffed housewife. Kids Johnny and Sally (Bobby Jacoby and Cami Cooper) are your average teens with average teen interests. What their neighbors don’t know is that the Applegates are actually a species of shape-shifting giant mantises, sent into the human world to learn their secrets and eventually kill them all.

 

The joke of the film is that the bug monsters, while disguised as humans, eventually begin to give into human vices. Dad begins having an affair with a human woman. Jr. begins taking copious amounts of drugs. None of them can seem to refrain from occasionally encasing human beings in sticky, sickly cocoons. In a strangely tragic twist, sis is even raped at one point. Is the film funny? Not exactly. In fact, as the film progresses, it becomes increasingly disgusting, as more bugs show up, and more bugs get messily squashed; there’s more bug goo in this film than any I’ve seen. And I’ve seen Cronenberg’s “The Fly.”

 

As far as memorable movie bugs go, though, I think the Applegates rate highly. Big scary creatures with weird, wicked motives, a horrible taste for garbage, and all-too human weaknesses leading top acts of gooey, gooey violence? Yeah, those are bugs to remember.

 

7) Mosquitor

from the “Masters of the Universe” toy line (1987)

Mosquitor was a badass. It was a half man, half mosquito that could suck the energy and the blood from his enemies. Of all the toys released by Mattel’s Master of the Universe line, Mosquitor is the most sought-after, as it was one of the last ones made, and, hence, one of the rarest. The doll has a button on its back whicj, when pushed, would cause bloody to flow down the insignia on Mosquitor’s chest. It had a big creepy mosquito head. I think I had one. But, like many of my childhood toys, it went missing. Or perhaps it was sold off at a garage sale, along with my Castle Greyskull and my Omega Supreme.

 

I talk to kids my age, and they all seem to remember Mosquitor. This is particularly strange, as the bug man never appeared on any of the “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe” cartoon shows. This is a curious phenomenon for a show whose sole function was to sell toys. I guess the toy was good looking enough that little boys remember it to this day.

 

Look around on eBay, and you’ll find a Mosquitor. It will be going for about $30 (US). If it’s in the package, you could be shelling out up to $300. For an obscure doll at the end of a toyline’s run, Mosquitor has stood out in the back corners of a generation’s imagination. He’s earned a spot on this list for sure.

 

6) The typewriter-faced bug

from “Naked Lunch” (1991)

William Burrough’s Naked Lunch is one of the strangest works of literature from a school of writing already marked by it’s inaccessibility and strangeness. The eldest of the famous Beat authors, Burroughs infamously holed himself up in a hotel room for several days, shot up a near-lethal dose of heroin, and typed incessantly, throwing pages over his head as he completed them. When Kerouac and Ginsburg found him, near death, days later, they compiled the pages as best they could, and published them as Naked Lunch. The book is a phantasmagoic odyssey into the fevered brain of an alien being, involving copious amount of kinky bisexual sex, giant intelligent bug-birds called Mugwumps, and a strange, undefined conspiracy pertaining to an other-realm called Interzone.

 

And then, in 1991, David Cronenberg thought to film this book. The result deviates from the source material a lot, but it just as, well bugnuts crazy as the original. It’s based partly on the book, but also borrows events from Burrough’s own life. Peter Weller plays Bill Lee, a stone-faced exterminator, who has taken to injecting the power used to kill bugs. When he accidentally kills his wife in a hazy game of William Tell (based on fact), Lee finds himself taking advice from a huge talking insect with a typewriter for a face. The bug is also hooked on the bug powder, and encourages Lee to have gay sex.

 

I’m afraid of bugs as is. When it is given the surreal typewriter face, and tries to slime its way into my pants, I’m going to be especially terrified. Thank you William Burroughs, and thank you David Cronenberg. You’ve made me eternally weirded out.

 

5) Mick

from “Sick Girl” (2006)

Part horror film, part mind-control drama, part queer romance parable, Lucky McKee’s “Sick Girl” is one worth seeking out. It was released as part of the “Master of Horror” series in 2006, and is one of the better films from that series. I’m not sure if Lucky McKee (who, at that point had only directed the excellent “May”) could be considered a “master” of horror the same way, say George A. Romero or Dario Argento could be, but his film is still worth a look for it’s buggy nuttiness and weird slimy horror.

 

Angela Bettis plays Ida, a mousy entomologist who scares off all potential girlfriends with her passion for insects; she keeps them around the house. Creepiest of all is an unidentified species of giant bug she received recently in the mail from an anonymous source. She names this bug Mick, and dotes on it endlessly. Mick, however, is an intelligent little creature, and sneaks out of its cage at night to plug some kind of proboscis into Ida’s ear. Weird.

 

Ida is also obsessed with the waifish gal who is frequently seen in her lobby, filling her sketchbook with pixies and butterflies. This gal is Misty, and is played by Erin Brown, a.k.a. softcore starlet Misty Mundae. They are both awkward people, and actually have a kind of sweet romance. It’s not long before Misty is living with Ida, and Mick is planting his proboscis in her ear as well. I don’t want to reveal the ending of all this, but there are some terrifying mutations along the way. That Mick is one smooth operator, and can do things to you you can’t imagine. Plus, he’s really awful looking. Eesh.

 

4) The Brain Bug

from “Starship Troopers” (1997)

Paul Verhoeven’s over-the-top sci-fi flick is a clunky and hugely entertaining film that tells the tale of our continued struggle with giant intelligent insects from space. When it’s not being violent, or subtly glorifying fascism and fetishizing the military, it’s being weirdly campy and soapy. The human characters are all unreasonably good looking (Casper Van Dien, in the lead role, looks like an archetypal Aryan youth), and they’re all appropriately shallow. The film is noisy and dumb and a bloody good time.

 

The evil insects in the film, a species called The Klendathu, has been pooping meteors at Earth for years (I’m not making that up), and it’s up to the humans to invade their home planet and kill them all. The bugs are equipped with razor-like pincers, and many a head will be severed before this war is over. I wonder if drill instructors call their charges “maggot” in a war against insects. But I digress.

 

The Klendathu don’t display any sort of organized civilization, but we take for granted that they are indeed intelligent. We are told that the bugs are given orders by something called The Brain Bug, which is a psychic, 40-foot-long maggot living in a cave. The Brain Bug is a big squirming pustule with several eyes and a large, oozing vaginal mouth. It’s pretty gross-looking. One of the most sublimely ridiculous moments in the film come when, near the end, the human soldiers have captured the Brain Bug, and led it out into the sunlight under a net. Neil Patrick Harris, a psychic by trade, puts it’s hand on the Brain Bug and furrows his brow. He looks up with no small mount of gravitas on his face. “It’s scared,” he utters.

 

That’s why we go to the movies.

 

3) Them

from “Them!” (1954)

There is a small-kidney shaped neighborhood near Long Beach, just along the cast of the L.A. River, called Frogtown. Frogtown is where the Three Stooges grew up. It’s a quiet little property. It’s one biggest claim to fame, though, is it was where the 1954 classic “Them!” was shot. “Them!” was one of the first in a long series of American kaiju films; that is, a series of giant creatures, mutated by radiation, wreaking havoc on small American towns. Tarantulas, Deadly Mantises and grasshoppers all had their moment in the sun. The single definitive film in the series, though was “Them!”

 

Often showed on network TV on lazy weekday evenings, “Them!” was about kindly policeman played by James Whitmore and an ambitious scientist played by Edmund Gwenn (Santa from “Miracle on 34^th Street”) who discovers that nuclear tests in New Mexico have been mutating the ant population. James Arness is in the film as well. The story is as predictable as you please, as military actions become increasingly desperate, and the numbers of the creatures continues to grow.

 

Like I said, regular-sized bugs frighten me, but very, very large ones make me wiggle with glee. I saw “Them!” on TV when I was a boy, and it lit up my fantasies like never before. This is the beginning of the giant bug genre, and all films with a giant bug in them owes an enormous debt to “Them!” the special effects are marvelously cheesy, and the action is pleasantly sloppy. This is a B-movie classic for the ages, and the ants are enjoyable to watch.

 

2) The Fly

from “The Fly” (1958)

Kurt Neuman’s 1958 classic is known for containing one of the most iconic bugs in cinema history. If you haven’t seen the film, you’re no doubt familiar with the slow pan from a park bench over to a spider web where we hear a horrible tiny voice shouting, almost inaudibly “Help me!” Watch the film if you haven’t. That moment is not just a cutesy horror film password. It’s actually a kind of gut-wrenching moment of dread. I had heard the line quoted hundreds of times, but when I finally sat to watch “The Fly,” I was a little scared.

 

“The Fly” gives us two monsters for our money. Al Hedison plays a mad scientist who has invented a pair of pods that can teleport matter instantly between them. He is so eager to try out his machine on a living being that he tries it out himself. In the teleporter with him, though, is a simple household fly. The teleporter, confused about teleporting two living beings, actidentally jumbles them together, and Dr. Delambre emerges with the head and right arm of a fly. The makeup to make the fly monster is so convincing that you may find yourself a little shocked when he first shows up. Meanwhile, the fly body with the head of a man, confused and dazed, finds itself caught in a spider’s web.

 

I can imagine the dream-like passage of intelligence out of a human brain. The slow deterioration of consciousness that both beings must feel. “The Fly” is looked on as a campy movie of an era long past (Vincet Price’s presence in the film only compounds that), when it should be considered alongside other classic monster films. The Fly is a scary and tragic and original beast.

 

1) Mothra

from “Mothra” (1961)

Mothra is 80 meters long. She weighs 25,000 tons. She can breathe fire as a moth, and wrap other monsters in string as a larva. Mothra is the biggest, meanest, toughest insect in all moviedom. She can wreck Japanese cities with the best of them, and has given Godzilla a run for his money on several occasions. Mothra, like many of the kaiju monsters, has had shifting allegiances over the years, sometimes being a horror to be destroyed, sometimes being a benevolent protector against other monsters.

 

While Godzilla is clearly the reigning king of the monsters, I’d say that Mothra is a worthy queen. Godzilla may have a reputation as a misunderstood beast, he still looks like a horrible destructive creature. Mothra, with her placid face and need to reproduce, strikes me as being more animal. More driven by her instincts, and unconcerned with man. In a way, this makes her more sympathetic. She doesn’t want to bother anyone. She just wants to go about her business, hatching giant moth spawn, and shooting rays at large buildings.

 

O.k. Maybe Mothra is also a badass who likes destruction as much as the next Ghidorah. As far as killer giant bugs go, Mothra can take them all. As far as movie bug monsters go, Mothra is probably the best. Mothra has been in 10 films from 1961 to 2004. Long may she reign.

 

 

Witney Seibold is a bug-phobic living in his bug-free apartment in Los Angeles with his lovely wife. He likes donuts, old books, and record shopping. When he’s not writing weird-ass articles for Geekscape, he maintains a ‘blog of movie reviews at Three Cheers for Darkened Years! He is also the co-host of The B-Movies Podcast out of Crave Online, which can be downloaded on iTunes. If you like this article, seek him out. You’ll find he’s rather gregarious.