1982's "The Snowman" is a Cosmic Horror Christmas Kino!

If your parents weren't disgusting crackheads, you will have grown up watching short animation kino The Snowman at Christmas time. No doubt your young heart will have thrilled to the innocent joy of creation, the bravura flight around the world, and the whimsical dance sequence.

But it will also have been cruelly punctured by the ending, which I will spoil for the crack babies (the snowman melts), because it's far too late for them now. I'm here to rectify that, by revealing that the snowman is a servant of the dark Elder God Cthulhu, who even now slumbers at his cyclopean house in sunken Rl'yeh.

The first sign something is amiss is when the snowman turns his head as the young boy observes him through the glass of his front door, in what horror film viewers will recognise as classic horror film grammar. Compare the moment in Scream (1996) where Drew Barrymore sees Ghostface from behind through the window and he turns around to face her. Something-seeing-you-from-behind-glass is horror grammar, and the animators know it, as they are professionals. This is why only patricians can appreciate art.

This happens at the witching hour, by the way.

The snowman then proceeds to gain the boy's trust so he can take him as a sacrifice to his dark master. The second clue to his true nature is that the cat shits its pants when it sees him. As we know from Stoker's Dracula and others, animals can sense the presence of the uncanny. In fact all the animals in the picture run away from the snowman or behave wildly in confusion, except for the owl, and the owls are not what they seem.

One day I shall write at length on the connections between the Lovecraftian and Lynchian branches of cosmic horror.

The snowman then takes the boy flying around the world, and we get the only lyrics in the whole picture (silent cinema, as you will know, is preferable wherever possible). These include the following:

Suddenly swooping low on an ocean deep

Rousing up a mighty monster from its sleep

That sounds like Cthulhu to me. The kino shows a whale, and the plebeian will interpret that as the "monster" of the lyrics, but it's evident to me that true kinographers know to suggest the presence of the true horror through environmental signifiers. Consider Spielberg's use of the water ripples to suggest the T-rex in Jurassic Park; Park is a very good film, but it would be kino had he never shown the dinosaur at all.

In other words, the presence of the whale indicates the forces arising far beneath the surface: it is driving even massive creatures to the surface in flight.

Absolutely eldritch.

Given just one more day, when the stars were right, the snowman would have sacrificed the boy to bring about Cthulhu's rise. The day is still coming when he will rise up from the sea. His vast wings will black out the stars, and all the Earth will tremble in horror and terror as he walks upon the land!

Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nfah Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!

Star War The Third Gathers: Backstroke of the West!

As you know, Star Wars Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is out now. I have seen the webm of Darth Vader killing people with his laser sword, and it is much as you'd imagine.

Since any Star Wars post-Jedi fellates prostate, I suggest you watch, instead, the massively improved Episode Three dub, Backstroke of the West.

I know this has been around literally forever, but I never bothered to see it until recently. It makes that /tv/ prequels-as-kino meme real.

In which I reveal the dankest of my OC

This is the OC that won the election.

Mad Max Ripoffs: Doomsday

2008's Doomsday is technically a ripoff of Escape from New York, 28 Days Later, Aliens, and, I guess, King Arthur as well, but I'm counting it as a Mad Max ripoff because all the most interesting stuff is in that style.

Doomsday is set in the future in which England has followed Trump's lead and built a wall to keep Scotland contained (ostensibly this is due to a virus but I think we all know it's to keep the bagpipes out). Unfortunately this does little to make England great again, because it's being run by an incompetent PM who's little more but a puppet for the main villain. And therein lies the twist: this movie isn't post-apocalyptic, only Scotland is.

And who's gonna pay for the wall? Scotland!

This sounds like a great comedy premise, and if the movie was as balls-out silly and retarded as that premise would imply, it might have been the greatest of all the ripoff movies. Sadly, it strikes out in two directions at once, trying to be lolrandumb 80s redditry and grimdark Alien Cubed Sci Fi at the same time. Like a Tarantino movie, these two completely contradictory tones are never reconciled, and so the movie doesn't really work.

This is a pity, because Doomsday is pretty much exactly the kind of movie I'd be making if I had the budget to work with. Since I don't, I'm doing this instead. But Doomsday has a special little place in my black, desiccated heart despite its shortcomings.

Aye aye, cap'n.

Our heroine is Kate Beckinsale from Underworld, but with one eye missing (because she's Snake Plissken geddit XDXDXD). She's tasked with going into Scotland to try to find a cure for the disease that's popped up south of the wall. She gets a team who are the marines from Aliens, most of whom get offed in short order.

Kate is then captured by our Mad Max-ian cannibals, who want her to lead them back I guess blah blah whatever. There's too much plot in this movie. More importantly, they have a sweet party where men in kilts dance to the can can and this chick, Viper, sets some dude on fire.

tfw no post-apocalyptic qt to set me on fire :(((

This is the best part of the movie, because it is hilarious, which is what the rest of the picture should have been. Unfortunately Viper gets bumped off too early in the proceedings and Kate and her buddies go to chill with Malcolm MacDowell in a castle (really).

After the awkward detour into the Middle Ages, we finally get a car chase, which is pretty good but rips off too many beats from The Road Warrior. Ripping off the aesthetic is cool, but ripping off the beats is kind of lame. The vehicles are good though.

 

One of these things is not like the other things.

How to make Doomsday a 10/10 movie

Although Doomsday kind of sucks, it is very close to being my ideal for a movie. I believe with these simple changes it would be 10/10 kino:

• Cut out all the boring government intrigue stuff. Nobody cares.
• Cut out the whole King Arthur sequence and replace it with more car chases.
• Give Kate a personality.
• Don't kill off Viper like five minutes after she first appears. Have her survive into the final chase.
• Have her ride into battle on her cookmobile:

Instant kino.

If you followed these simple steps, this would be the best ripoff movie ever made. I should totally be a script doctor.

Post-apocalypse checklist:

MOHAWKS: several. Sol has one.

SHOULDER PADS: the goodies have them as part of their body armour and some of the baddies too.

CUSTOM CARS: several, pictured.

MUTANTS: none, but the disease kind of makes it up.

GOGGLES: a couple on odd baddies.

TOTAL: 5/5 - what Scotland looks like now.

I Just Wanna Be Your Disco Bitch (Love Theme from Pat Bastard and the Spurious 5)

For those times when all you want is to be someone's disco bitch. Enjoy:

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The Thing in the Fridge is now a video.

FILLER!

Original here.

The yeti crab looks made up, but isn't.

Look at this yeti crab with its great big long monkey arms. It looks like a video game boss, not a real thing.

However, the yeti crab is real, and that is great. Sadly you can't have one as a pet, because they live around volcanic fissures in the ocean.

It is my dream to some day live among the yeti crabs.

Bring back megafauna.

The titanoboa was a 40-foot-long snake. The longest snake recorded in modern times was 25 feet. I bet the 40-foot snake could eat the 25-foot snake for breakfast.

100% accurate size chart

You'd never go swimming in those times, because there were megalodons everywhere. If you think sharks today are scary, you're a pussy. Megalodons were so big they could eat a helicopter. If we had megalodons today we'd have invented planes much earlier, because no one would be stupid enough to take a boat out on the sea. You'd get eaten and killed by the megalodon.

Even if you stayed on land, you'd probably get knocked the fuck out by one of those giant dragonflies or something. If you were really slow, megatherium the giant ground sloth might eat you, although I think it ate tree branches or something but whatever, I bet it would totally kill and eat you.

Nowadays everything's too small, because there's not enough oxygen in the air and the temperature is way too damn low. As a long person, I want to rectify that.

I propose we free up some oxygen by planting more rainforests. To do this, we can clear a couple of cities. No one would miss Warrington, or Milton Keynes. I say bulldoze the lot and pop some rainforests in the ground there.

Then we could pollute more to make global warming happen. This would bring back the conditions for enormous animals. YES/NO?

Doctor Bastard: now a major You Tube creepypasta reading with a cast of thousands

Doctor Bastard is now available to make house calls in video format.

The original pasta can be found here on this very blogge.

Bastard Role Models: Inky the Octopus

I hope and trust you've all caught up with the most important story of recent times. No, not Lying Ted Cruz stealing Colorado from The Once And Future Don; I'm talking about Inky the Octopus and his daring escape from captivity to rejoin the ocean.

Inky's in your cereal.

Inky is a better role model than 99% of people. More impressively, he's a better role model than 99% of fictional characters. Take the movie Finding Nemo, for example. Nemo, like Inky, gets caught and put in captivity. But Nemo needs his father and mentally special sidekick Dory to come get him.

Not Inky.

Inky's escape makes The Great Escape and Shaw Shank Redemption look like child's play. Moreover, they make whatever you're doing with your life look like Seed of Chucky. Could you squeeze your whole body through a 6-inch pipe? You can't even keep up going to the gym, you fat fuck.

Inky f'taghn!

Nightcrawler is a great movie.

If you haven't watched Nightcrawler, but have watched anything else from the last several years, you should be banned from cinemas because you have shit taste. Nightcrawler is a great movie about how utterly morally bankrupt the media is. It stars Jake Gyllenhaaal as creepy fuck Lou, a petty thief whose skill set translates perfectly to the job of filming crime scenes and related human misery for profit. His character is like the Gawker of movie characters, except much more likeable and less evil.

Lou takes inspiration from online business courses and enlists Rick, a halfwit who needs the money, to help him navigate around LA looking for scenes of violence and destruction. As the film rolls on, he pushes the limits further and further by moving around bits of stuff, including bodies, to get better footage, and ultimately semi-staging the news so he can record it. As someone that's done TV shit, I know people like that are out there. Given how brazenly "journalists" sneer at the very concept of ethics, it's not even surprising that people like this prosper in this industry.

Since everyone in the media is a lying, evil, amoral, deceitful scumbag, you would think the character would not be very likeable, and apparently this was true for many people when the movie came out. A lot of people's reactions to this film were basically "it's bad because he is a bad man", by which rationale Citizen Kane, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, A Clockwork Orange, and basically everything worth watching sucks. I can't relate to those people, and I suspect they're not really human.

Anyway, Jake Gyllenhaaaaaaaaaaaaal and Rene Russo are both really good in it and you should see it if you like movies with dysfunctional protagonists like Taxi Driver, King of Comedy, Super, and Paul Blart Mall Cop.

Happy April Fool's Day!

April Fool's Day is an ancient tradition in which people fuck with one another in the most mean-spirited ways possible. It is like every other day, except that when you get found out, you can plaster on a shit-eating grin and say "Aaapril Foool's!" and everyone will laugh despite the blood and tears.

You might think that April Fool's Day would be right up my alley, as I am a thoroughly despicable person. That's not a very nice thing to think though. It's judgemental, and that makes you as bad as me, if not worse. Probably worse, actually, because you're a good person. You should know better.

Everyone with horrible friends will of course be on the lookout for the pranksters and vagabonds among their ranks, and some friends employ a strategy of mutually assured destruction to ensure that any pranking going on will be met with excessive retaliation and the probable dissolution of the, in any case, inexplicable friendship.

This provides a good opportunity for you to exploit as a third party. Say you have a friend who has a friend you hate. You can frame the hated party for a prank on your good buddy, causing them to go to war and end their friendship. Be creative.

Another thing you can do is not prank people all April Fool's Day for years, making you look like a saint, and then offload with great brutality one year when nobody expects it. Note, however, that this will result in a loss of trust, so only do it when you've grown bored of your current circle of friends.

I was going to review the great slasher movie April Fool's Day (not the remake, of course), but I didn't because I was busy. Slaughter High is also set on April Fool's Day and invokes the Britbong tradition by which it runs out at midday. Remember this if you are ever in Bongesia, because if someone pranks you after midday the joke is on them, even though the tar and feathers may be on you.

What ever happened to hitchhikers?

It seems like a lot of people hitchhiked in old movies and in the 1950s and 60s. Why did this lost enterprise so suddenly vanish from the world? Was it because all hitchhikers are either murderers or are murdered? If you ever heard a story about a hitchhiker they always end up dead or murder someone else. What if a murdering hitchhiker hitched a ride with a hitchhiker murderer? Who would strike first? I don't know. Everyone from old times had a hitchhiking story, especially hippy girls. How fucking dangerous can everything be if pot smoking young girls in ankle skirts got into strangers' cars on a regular basis? I say you're all too goddamn scared of nothing. I'm going to hitchhike all the way home in place of a commute and save a fortune. I miss the days of Kerouac and Charles Manson. I can guarantee that I could dance on hot coals juggling knives and be fine, I don't think anything is going to happen. I remain unconvinced that death is anything that ever really happens. I know because I had a little rabbit when I was eleven and it's been at the same farm for eighteen years now. They don't allow visitors. I don't think that's fair. I say the lack of death in our lives is getting ridiculous, have you seen how many people are around? It's ludicrous and frankly, I don't wanna see any more of you assholes, cause it's getting ridiculous. I'm so busy I could sleep until a million. I'm high energy but mentally retarded. My doctor says I've got terminal ass burgers. I'm allowed to say it cause it's what's wrong with me and if you say it you're a racist. I think I've understood this. Post a comment if I'm wrong, I dare you. I wish I could hitchhike out of this life, but it could be a lot worse honestly I'm not complaining. Has anyone seen my daughter I don't remember where I put her.

Doctor Bastard

The first weeks of your therapy went better than expected. You would easily recommend this guy to anybody, unfortunate name withstanding. No one ever seemed to get inside your head so quickly, or with such polite detachment. Deft with words, like a surgeon with his hands. The things he could elicit from you practically without any effort, it was almost disconcerting even as it reassured you. In the first hour you cried. The next time you went back the weight was lifted, and you felt you could get down to some real talking. By the third session that ticking clock went by unheard, and you were surprised, even a little sad, to come to the end of your immersion in that little room.

At some stage you began to really think of him as a surgeon, so clinical and so precise with where he took you, doing light exploratory work on your half-open mind with God knows how many other cases to juggle. You know how they say those experts make it look easy?

And then there's the funny smell coming from his desk some days, and those surgical gloves in the bin over in the corner. At first you thought maybe a surgeon used the room sometimes for whatever reason, but given your read on the guy, maybe your first instincts were right.

You asked him about it once, trying to keep it casual. He said he practises surgery every once in a red moon. Dropped the old joke about leaving his watch in a patient, maybe to play it off. But he didn't really laugh about it like it was a joke - more like when you're remembering a story from your college days or some shit. It's a cautionary tale against the pace of modern life I guess. The guy doesn't know something's wrong until he finally sits down in the quiet of his own home, and he hears it deep inside himself.

Tick, tick, tick, tick...

You can picture this guy walking around like the fucking crocodile from Peter Pan. Whoever heard of a surgeon practising therapy in his spare time? Or the other way round?

People talk about a sixth sense. Everything appears to be well, but there's a voice in the back of your head insisting it's wrong. It's paranoia, and it doesn't want you to get better. You've got to keep telling yourself that. Voices in your head and talking to yourself too now. Wasn't this supposed to be going in the opposite direction? This is the best progress you've made in years and you're starting to feel like he's not a real doctor.

And you can tell the anxiety's kicking in again, cause there's that clock on the wall creeping into your consciousness, driving you crazy. It was all going so well, like you were scaling the heights, and then you backslid halfway down the fucking mountain again. You don't need this shit in your head, and now you're thinking that your therapist is leaving shit inside his patients for real. Well why couldn't it be possible? He's doing open surgery on your deepest trauma centres every week, right there under the lights. Who knows what could've slipped in?

Tick, tick, tick, tick...

One day you'll find yourself heading to the twins' room with a kitchen knife in your hand. You'll do a double take, and stare at it in horror. You don't remember anything for the last couple minutes. You're a parent now. You can't be blacking out and listening to commands left rattling inside your head. You start to hope your dreams were dreams. You had to physically stop yourself there. You don't know what the fuck is up.

So you call in to the hospital and they talk to you like you're some fucking kid asking to see Hugh Jass. You're getting madder and panicking now. You swear to them you're not fucking around. You drive for miles on nothing but muscle memory from the times you used to drive there every week, you're fucking shaking so much.

You practically march up to the reception desk. She's looking over those glasses at you like it's the reason she bought them. But her attitude changes when she learns what you're there for. Her face turns grey, and she mutters something about checking with her boss. Then in the quickest time you've ever waited in a place like this, she's back with an administrator saying you'd better leave. Since February they've been getting these calls in from people asking for a Doctor Bastard. No such person works there. There's no one named Bastard in any hospital in the county. It's starting to scare them.

Everything you've read for months there's something in the margins, links or targeted ads, like creatures milling at the limits of your vision, all about surgical malpractice. Lawyers. Tales. Stories about people with live animals and infant forelimbs sewn up inside them. Somebody was admitted down in Kettering. They found a baby's arm was pressing on his lungs. Another lady had a mother rat inside of her deliver a litter. She came in shitting blood from what they'd gnawed out from inside of her.

Tick, tick, tick, tick...

Every night you sleep later and later. Every corner of your room there's someone's shadow. In your dreams a man in a white coat stands there, in your kitchen, in your home, watching you, smiling. You don't want to sleep. You won't go to the twins's room. You hear them crying in the night and pull your knees up like you don't trust your feet not to go. Everything's plastic in your kitchen now. You eat with sporks and shit. Takeout every night you can get it, and he's still at that conference in Chicago, totally unaware. You want to turn yourself in, have someone open you up, take off the top of that head. Maybe you'll do it yourself. You don't know what the fuck you'll find in there. Maybe no one should be exposed to it. Doctor Bastard? Was he a symptom of this madness? Or did something ancient as fuck find a new way to fuck with the sad world? There's a wailing from the room you never step foot in, down that corridor you walked every day before you ever thought to open up your mind.

Blunt Force Troma: Tromeo and Juliet!!!

"Well we found a peanut all right...a peanut of death!"

- Cop

It's Valentine's Day, and how better to celebrate than with the most romantic movie of all time: Tromeo and Juliet? 

The movie opens with the indelible cinematic image of a dead squirrel hanging from a noose, and features the late, great Lemmy from Motörhead as the narrator, so if you're looking for something to get your partner in the mood for love, you know you've come to the right place.

Tromeo and Juliet concerns two families at war with each other, from forth the fatal loins of which the title characters come. They communicate their feud by means of animal carcasses, but soon escalate to dismemberment and death. For example, this guy gets his fingers cut off.

Then he has his head trapped in a car window and driven into a fire hydrant, whereupon he tries to scoop his fallen brains back into his skull.

But that's not even close to the best part. That honour must go to the context-and-fat-free dream sequence in which Juliet's pregnant stomach is unzipped to reveal a mound of popcorn and a couple of rats. Why? I don't know, and nor does anybody else! Just let it happen to you.

We wouldn't want to scar your mind of course. Note that her nightshirt thing randomly disappears and reappears throughout this sequence, even though you couldn't possibly make that mistake. Based Troma, we salute you.

Despite the similar title, this isn't just a straight remake of the 1597 Shakespeare movie. The ending reveals a left-field twist that changes everything, which I'm surprised William Shakespeare didn't think of himself. Needless to say, this is a cinematic landmark everyone should see before they die (or during). Look out for the great Tiffany Shepis in her first role as "Peter" (top pic). If you watch this movie you will have a fine Valentine's Day (guarantee void outside of Tromaville).