Adam Baran

Starring Grace Jones!!! When will this get a US release????

I may be biased, or mentally challenged, depending on your point of view, and I may also be calling this a bit early, but I’m going to say that the Best Movie of 2008 is, and will be named later in the year, Rambo. FUCKING RAMBO!!!! He kills EVERYONE ON EARTH!!! He decapitates them with his home made machete, he shoots them with his super powered arrows, he guns them down with his mega-machine gun. Stallone is a genius and turns this flick into the equivalent of a really hardcore 70’s grindhouse roughie with way better special FX. Tarantino must be jealous! There’s even a moment at the end that recalls the final showdown in Kill Bill.

I know the reviews say this film is violent, but I just want to say it is not just violent, it is unbelievably jaw-droppingly violent, hence the grindhouse comparison. A whole village is massacred in the most unspeakable ways - children are stabbed and tossed in the paths of flamethrowers. Stallone rips through a bad guy’s carotid artery with his bare fucking hands. And don’t get me started on the scene where he sets of a mothertrucking H-BOMB!!! Who knew? I knew! I knew it all the time that it would be so good! I can’t get it out of my head way more than There Will Be Blood!

The plot is basic Rambo - Rambo’s asked to - oh wait - WHO CARES ABOUT THE PLOT! Rambo has to save a girl - cut to hundreds of nameless Burmese (yeah the country is never referred to by it’s proper name Myanmar) baddies getting the Rambo treatment. The dialogue is sparse, the cursory set-up scenes will often be reduced to their bare fucking minimum.

Girl: I don’t know what to say

Rambo: Then don’t say anything. Go Home. Just go home.

Stallone knows there doesn’t need to be any fat in this script. It’s a perfect piece of art. Stallone is a man’s man with so many veins in his bulging arms and thighs that at times he resembles one of those trees that throws apples at Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. Seriously, I mean I don’t even think he was this bulked up for Rocky Balboa, a movie which was so perfect I didn’t know for sure if he could top it. I cried at two movies in 2006 - Shortbus and Rocky Balboa, no joke. Everyone who goofed on Stallone for reviving these franchises has to be eating major shit right now. These movies are vital, necessary, old-school kick-ass MOVIES with a capital MOVIES.

I did have to give pause at one thing in this masterpiece - the fact that as usual, the major number one bad guy is shown or alluded to, having sex with a guy. Another gay-as-villain cliche? I thought about it for a while, whether I could get over that obviously not so good decision on the part of Sly and the other screenwriter, but I decided that A. If I could come to the thinking during Elephant that Van Sant’s decision to make the two Columbine killers have sex was an unfortunate experiment that proves the one flaw in an otherwise perfect movie, that I could do it with Rambo, a movie that aims itself at audiences with far lower sophistication levels. Excusable? No not really, though it’s plausible that the villain would just HAPPEN to be gay. And B. You can’t have exploitation throughout a movie and then get upset when the group you’re in gets exploited - meaning - I gleefully watched a movie where hundreds of Asian extras are portrayed as super-bad-guys of the lowest common denominator and I let it go and just accept that you gotta have some ethnic group be the bad guy - and if I accept that then I can’t really get upset when they throw gays in the mix somehow. It’s like watching South Park or Family Guy and thinking everything is funny except when they make fun of gays. And C. The cliche of the bad guy being gay just goes with everything else that’s cliche in the movie, and all those cliches and old-school action tropes make it thusly more amazing. Yeah yeah I know there’s a bit of cognitive dissonance going on, and I’m open to being called on it. But if all these roided-out fratboy types can get into Rambo, why can’t the hipster fags too?

At the end of the screening, as the credits rolled, over a single image. Someone made a move that managed to describe the entire message of the movie in two seconds. First he put his hand over the light where the projector was - making a peace symbol with his fingers. Then he switched it quickly, turning it into the middle-finger gesture. Everyone cheered and the 30 or so frat guys in my audience stood up for a standing ovation. Beat that, any other movie in 2008.

Hey, as Rambo says “Live for Nothing. Die for Something.”

I love this song, but that is some MESSY shit right there. I like how her dancing almost goes into a mime-in-a-box routine. And I particularly like her Amy Madigan meets the son in Down and Out in Beverly Hills at the end look.

Check out Terry’s Musical Life for a bit more about this messy Italo Disco group, and to download songs.

Cause I had posted this a long time ago and then it was removed - Here’s Liza Minnelli doing an outstanding rendition of Donna Summer’s Bad Girls during the Goldie and Liza TV Variety Special (more clips from that soon). Look for Halton Muse and co-star of Andy Warhol’s Heat the Divine Pat Ast on backup, along with dull-as-dirt America’s Next Top Model Judge Twiggy as a fellow ho. And sorry honey, the camera doesn’t love you Miss Twiggy!! It only sees LIZA!!

After I got finished watching Frightmare this weekend, I was quick to pop in Death Bed: The Bed That Eats, an exploitation independent (as Stephen Thrower calls them in Nightmare USA) from 1977 that was never released officially until a DVD release in 2003. In the meantime, it was bootlegged and pirated and released in the public domain in Europe and Asia, developing a cult fan base among vidiots and cult-horror film junkies. I’m a little late to the Death Bed cult, as the kids at Kim’s have been telling me about it for years, but after watching it I’m fully on the “this movie is genius and a real work of trash-art” tip.

Here’s the Opening:

It’s the most ludicrous premise on Earth, a possessed bed, a demon’s blood seeping into the bed, making it a hungry monster - though it’s sort of no more absurd than some of the cheesy monster movies that came out of the 50’s and 60’s with tiny animals growing to monster size after coming in contact with radioactive materials. The funny thing is the conceit of the movie is that people have to lie down on the bed, which immediately sucks them in, using a sort of piss-colored acid to rot away their skin, while the spirit of a consumptive Aubrey Beardsley-esque artist imprisoned behind a painting on the wall watches and acts as the omniscient narrator, observing, and ultimately helping to vanquish the cursed bed. The film could be described as sort of a schlocky Ed Wood affair meets Jean Rollin-esque Euro Horror meets hauntingly weird surrealistic nightmare. There’s completely hilarious sequences like the bed develops an indigestion from eating too many people, and in the next sequence we see it eating a bottle of Pepto Bismol. But as Stephen Thrower points out: “Death Bed can be silly alright, but it’s humor is all over the scale, from slapstick to irony: even on first viewing it’s not something you simply laugh at.”

Unless of course, you’re Patton Oswalt, who hilariously skewers the entire production, in a completely admirable way on his album “Werewolves and Lollipops.” You can tell he really likes it, even though he puts up a good front. Enjoy.

I’m sure his hilarious bit drove many of his fans to check out Death Bed: The Bed that Eats, and that’s just fine by me. The film is truly something special, an inspired piece of insanity from the pit of the 70’s bargain basement horror bin.

Okay, that’s enough about that. Time to call it a night. I’ll just lie down here on my bed, and AAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!! FUCCCKKKKK!!!!

Ugh, I’m trying to find a gym to work off all the fat you accumulate when you are unemployed for 6 months and you have lots of free time so you get really into food like, for instance, you wake up and have either a blueberry muffin for breakfast or some sugar cookies later, and then they open the best restaurant ever Shopsins near you and you can’t help but going every day and having a big chicken sandwich with a side of stuffing. And then for dinner you just get lazy and decide well, okay I’m going to have Thai food again tonight, same as always and your paunch grows and grows.

Despite the fact that somehow my metabolism works to keep my weight at 170, and that everyone tells me I am thin, I see the flab and it’s my mission to get rid of it pronto. But gyms are expensive and all I want is a place with a treadmill and a bike cause I just want to do aerobic workouts for about six months, as per my Dr’s orders, but I don’t want to pay $450 bucks for that! By the way, someone pointed out to me a month ago something that I never realized about Strangers with Candy, which is that the Doctor that Jerri Blank would go to see was named Dr. Zorders…Get it? That show is the comedic gift that keeps on giving.

In other news, for my birthday on MARCH 20th would someone please get me a copy of Kitten Natividad’s amazing (so I’ve heard) workout video “Eroticise” where she and her melon-breasted Russ Meyer recruited friends do a workout/striptease routine that ends with a completely naked workout session. If anyone sees one online that’s not a fortune, just like the gym, please let me know. I’ve seen bootlegs for around thirty which seems steep, and Eddie Brandt’s doesn’t even have it, though apparently Miss Natividad, whose bust suffered after a bout with cancer and a mastectomy, is a customer there.

Speaking of boobs, I was listening to T. Rex today and as much as I loved them, the lyrics to Raw Ramp are pretty cringeworthy:

“Woman I love your chests, ooh, Baby I’m crazy bout your breasts.”

That’s all for now. Ramble over and out.