Adam Baran

Here’s some clips from Philip Michael Thomas’ angel dust freakout extravaganza Death Drug…soon to be screening at the soon to be world famous Price Chompers Bushwick Discount Uniplex Pavilion…I’m not going to really explain these clips - they’re pretty obvious..so don’t get worked up.

Crack is wack, but Price Chomping is the wave of the future!

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 just watched this little rare horror flick, well-detailed in my new favorite book ever Nightmare USA by Stephen Thrower. These crazy film students kidnap their idol, recently deceased Christopher Lee-esque horror star Conrad Ragzoff. His wife contacts him during a seance and orders him to kill his kidnappers, though he’d already killed several people while he was alive, so he probably didn’t need too much motivation. First half is really good, budget and pacing and some believability issues make the second half kind of boring. Some fun kills, a floating coffin and some cool spontaneous combustion. Not really worth the energy of finding it but it’s Netflixable if you so desire. Was released on DVD as “Frightmare” by Troma, and the disc is awful, with some of the worst sound recording I’ve ever heard on any DVD release.

Synapse DVD seems to have it’s eyes on the prize right now. First they release the restored Snake Woman’s Curse and Horrors of Malformed Men, which I reviewed a few days ago (Click Here). Now they’ve put out one of the most hysterically cheesy horror movies I’ve ever seen, the heavy-metal horror shocker Black Roses.

The trailer above is basically all the highlights of the movie in 5 minutes, but it’s really worth seeing in its entirety. It’s about a heavy metal band who for some untold reason decides to kick off their world tour in the sleepy town of Mill Basin, which fortunately for them is rife with teen angst. What the teens don’t know is that the heavy metal band - which is sort of supposed to be like Ozzy but looks more like Twisted Sister or Quiet Riot, only gayer, are demons from hell trying to possess the minds and souls of their fans. A local teacher who prefers to teach about the transcendentalists (snooze!) becomes concerned when his kids start acting like angry zombies and parents start turning up dead by the tour-busloads. Yoinks!

There’s tons of gratuitous body double nudity. In one sequence - the sequence in the trailer where the girl kills her stepdad - right before that there’s a scene where the body double of that girl stands in front of the mirror rubbing her boobs for 10 minutes! It’s great! Plus, all the monsters in the movie are superb 80’s Stan Winston clones, and the final demon that Damian turns into looks more like something from an old fifties creature feature than something that’s supposed to scare us. Synapse also included the hilariously bad audition tapes of all the actors who tried out for the part of Damian, the lead singer of Black Roses. It’s a lineup of some of the most cheesy 80’s hair metal losers ever captured on video.

There’s also an appearance by Vincent “Big Pussy” Pastore, from The Sopranos, as an Italian father who doesn’t like his son’s musical tastes, and ends up getting sucked into a sub-woofer by a demonic spider monster that for some reason, he can’t fight off, even though it’s really small. He delivers a classic movie line when speaking to his son. “Only two kinds of people wear earrings: pirates, and faggots. And I don’t see any ship in our driveway.” This is primo stuff here people! You still have time to Netflix it or pick it up at your local video emporium before All Hallow’s Eve, so get on it!

One of my favorite Halloween movies to watch is the 1981 horror spoof Student Bodies, which was a flop on it’s initial release, and has become a sort of cult movie. It’s filled with corny (and I mean corny) gags, but a lot of those corny gags are pretty funny. It takes place at a local high school - a killer who comes to be known as “the Breather” stalks a high school girl and her friends and kills them when he finds them having sex. It’s filled with spoofs of all the big slasher movies, Halloween, Friday the 13th, Psycho and many more. Surprisingly, the thing it spoofs the most - or rather, it’s biggest reference point is Dario Argento’s classic giallo film The Bird With The Crystal Plumage - which also has a “breather” calling up his victims and whispering hateful things to them. But when the breather calls in Student Bodies, something very different happens. Sort of NSFW. This is so stupid but it cracks me up!

Another super stupid one, but I love how the cast really plays it sorta straight. “Did you hang up?” “No, I just said ‘Click’.”

In the next sequence, we get to hear what’s really going on in all those serial killer’s minds as they spy on young teen girls in the lockeroom. “Belly Button!”

Seriously, how can you not find that funny enough to want to watch? It’s awesome! And so much better than that dumb Scary Movie! It’s great!! Honest!!

We now pause for station identification:

If you grew up in the tri-state area (for those on the West Coast, that means New York-New Jerz-and Connecticut) like I did, you may remember the original Channel 11 - WPIX, before it became the WB and now the CW or whatever it is. Channel 11 used to run tons of movies, usually in the evenings you could probably catch Pretty Woman or Goonies or E.T. or something of that nature, and then the 10 o’clock news and then at 11:ooPM it was like Cheers heaven. Blech!

The best thing that I remember Channel 11 did was during October, it would rename itself “Shocktober,” and it would air horror movies all month, all the time - well, not actually all the time, but like, at night, and on the weekends round the clock. Now in my memory it was just October, but in the preview below they seem to indicate that it was also during September and November too. This would jibe with the sheer number of horror movies I remember them showing. They would have all the Nightmare On Elm Streets one week, then the next would be Friday the 13th, then Halloween 1-5, Child’s Play, Creepshow 1 and 2, Night of the Creeps, Poltergeists 1-3, Critters 1-3, Tales of the Darkside the movie (which scared the shit out of me during the Gargoyle sequence), Cat’s Eye (which I was also vaguely creeped out by), Psycho 2, 3, and 4: The New Beginning, and probably tons of 80’s horror movies that I can’t even remember.

I just loved this stuff when I was about 11, 12, and 13. I had just started reading Stephen King novels, and I had plowed through the popular teen-lit horror books by people like R.L. Stine, who wrote the Fear Street series, which basically ripped off every famous horror movie ever, and Christopher Pike, whose novels usually featured some sex along with the blood and guts and vampires. There’s something just incredibly comforting about being able to watch these old promos on YouTube. WPIX was pretty loyal to their audience, and the horror craze was as huge then as it is now. They had a popular horror movie program - Chiller Theatre in the 70’s, check out this creepy intro that used to frighten kids more than the movies they showed!

I really miss this stuff, and the channels that used to get that when October rolls around, we wanna watch scary stuff, and not Fast and the Furious Part 7. So in October, I’m gonna devote this blog to all things scary and scary movies. Be forewarned! I’m also thinking of a way to put on a party where I can show all the crazy weird horror movies I’ve been collecting - many of which I picked up on my trip to LA.

Bonus Clip: Check out this promo for an episode of the Tales from the Darkside show. Renee Taylor plays a nagging Jewish mother with a voodoo charm! I’m calling Eddie Brandt’s tomorrow to see if they got this on tape. I just gotta see this.

Now go to sleep, before you all turn into a piece of date bread.