Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Chandu the Magician!

♪It's the
Eye of the tiger
It's the
Thrill of the fight

The worst thing to happen to movie discussion was when fedora neckbeards started calling clichés "tropes", built a website about it that turned into a 2009-era Epic Cringe Compilation, then became he/hims and kept calling clichés "tropes", only with their made-up stories being about owning chuds in line for Starbucks instead of slaying forty bullies with their trusty blades.

This was every millennial who now calls you an incel.

The reason this is gay is because it has resulted in all movie writing trying to comment on "tropes" instead of telling a story anyone might want to watch. A perfectly good movie can be and has been made using nothing but clichés strung together, all the more impressively because it pre-dates many of them even being clichés. Based on some Shadowesque radio play long forgotten, 1931's Chandu had a becaped hero raiding tombs and rescuing princesses from black-clad villains who captured scientists to build death rays long before the first Superman comic dropped, and longer before Lucas and Spielberg ripped off the formula and killed cinéma with their merchandising-friendly pulp pastiches.

No smartphones, no bathetic quips, just an evil megalomaniac and his flunkies living in the moment.

Frank Chandler (Edmund Lowe) heroically culturally appropriates the mystic arts of Indian yogis to battle Roxor (Béla Lugosi, fresh off his star-making turn in Dracula). Lugosi was always disappointed at his frequent typecasting but it was his own fault for being far too entertaining as a villain. Roxor has so much infectious enthusiasm for mayhem you soon find yourself half-rooting for him. When his death ray is complete, he spends several minutes of screentime gleefully imagining what cities he's going to blow up with it, having made no plan whatsoever beyond actually having it.

"No! No, you can't bury him alive!"
"Why not?"
- actual dialogue

The camera effects and miniature work are impressive for the early 1930s, when the death of the silents largely resulted in static, verbose productions. Cameras dive and circle like seabirds all over the place. Chandu conjures a mini-me to keep tabs on the inebriated comic relief sidekick, which has no plot relevance but they could do the effect, and to 99% of viewers it still might as well have been magic.

"I can do that with a green bedsheet in my basement!" - 50,000 guys who never will.

Chandu received a serialised sequel in which, strangely enough, Lugosi played the title role. It's fun, as those old serials were, but this one has everything you need. It can play back-to-back with the 90s Shadow and Phantom, John Carter and the Brendan Fraser Mummy flicks and not feel out of place. Reject TVTropes; retvrn to cliché.

Thank God It's Friday The 13th: Friday the 13th!!!

Note: I hadn't realised I wrote this ten million years ago when I was covering the Friday the 13th series but never published it, so here it is:

Everybody loves Jason, but before Jason was even in junior league hockey, someone else was killing camp counsellors at Crystal Lake. Who could it be??? Well you probably already know, but in case you don't, this article contains spoilers.

Glass shattering titles, fades to white and cutaways of clouds crossing the moon were all cool little motifs that tied the series together before they just forgot to do those.

Friday the 13th concerns Steve Christie's ill-fated attempt to revive the summer camp that was shut down in the 1950s after a boy named Jason drowned and two camp counsellors were subsequently murdered. Everyone in town is shit-scared of the place, calling it Camp Blood, possibly because the greatest character ever, Crazy Ralph, spends all his time cycling around drunk off his face telling everyone they're doomed if they set foot in the camp grounds.

IDK if he was even in the script, or just wandered onto the set while cameras were rolling.

Most of the movie is taken up with the camp counsellors killing time until the kids show up (presumably they never do, given the state of everyone at the end of the movie, although I like to think one family set off from across the country and arrived before they ever got the message). The counsellors are blissfully unaware of anything going on, but everyone else in Crystal Lake is on edge. A motorcycle cop stops by the camp and goes on a left-field rant about pot and people going crazy at the full moon. I love this character.

The Village People were never the same after the great schism of June 13th.

Friday the 13th is in a tradition of stories taking place over a day (minus the pre-titles sequence, which takes place in 1957) that includes Slacker, The Breakfast Club, Halloween, Prom Night, and Waiting for Godot. It's a slice of life punctuated with murder. The camp counsellors go swimming, whack a snake, play strip Monopoly (a poor choice since, as we all know, Monopoly never ends), and talk about disturbing dreams.

On one level, dropping her off by the cemetery is just film-school foreshadowing, but on the other hand shooting this flick in a town called Hope makes it a cemetery for hope, which is much darker.

Who is the killer? Is it Steve Christie? Crazy Ralph? The motorcycle cop? No, it's someone we've never met before! If this is a deliberate subversion of murder mystery conventions, it's kind of brilliant. Of course the killer is Mrs Voorhees, Jason's mother, who is typical of concerned parents everywhere in that she's perfectly willing to go to ridiculous extremes to prevent another death, like killing multiple people. Yes, she says she couldn't let them open the camp again after what happened to Jason, so she kills everyone instead.

The movie, uh, cleverly misleads you by casting a blatant man as her double in all the pre-reveal scenes.

Mrs Voorhees is a great killer and it's sad that she's so overshadowed by her son. She may have a shaky grasp of her own motive, but she's a good shot with a bow and arrows and she has the patience to wait under a bed while Kevin Bacon gets lucky before killing him. She also seems to be able to pass for normal or indeed forget about her spree killing ways in between camp openings, because she's known to Mr Christie, and has managed not to kill him until Friday the 13th rolls around. This is why I want to see a prequel series set in Crystal Lake featuring Mrs Voorhees, Mr Christie, Crazy Ralph, the trucker who says "Camp Crystal Lake is jinxed" and others living in the town. It would be like Twin Peaks.

>falling by julee cruise starts playing

RANKED: The Greatest Sideshow Stars of All Time!!!

Before grid girls and booth babes, prissy karens put another based and storied profession out of work: that of the noble sideshow performer. "But Pat", you sob, shaking with limp-wristed rage, "sideshows were heckin exploitative! For shame! This time you've really gone too heckin far!" Not so, fucko! Sideshows gave people with physical oddities scope to earn a living in a time when other avenues were often closed to them. Some became quite well-to-do and were beloved by fans and the entertainment community of the day. Many were dismayed at the end of their livelihood being foisted upon them by the pompous edicts of progressivism. Here at Pat Bastard and the Spurious Five Dot Blogspot Dot Com we stan our physically unusual kings and queens and revile the slime who shut their stardom down.

Listicle theme: Sideshow - Alice Cooper

Martin Laurello

"Some days I don't know whether I'm coming or going" - Martin Laurello (probably)

Known as the human owl, Laurello had the incredible ability to reenact that scene from The Exorcist, which had to have been the best party trick ever, except it hadn't been released yet. He could twist his spine around so that his head faced backwards, in which condition he apparently was unable to breathe, but, like the biggest Chad ever to walk the earth, he kept doing it anyway. Not content to be a one-trick pony, Laurello also learned ventriloquism and trained dogs to perform. It has been dubiously alleged that he was a big NSDAP fan but, if true, that's even more titanium-ballsed.

Prince Randian

"Some days, I don't know whether I'm sitting or standing" - Prince Randian (definitely)

I think it's fair that when you've got no limbs, you are entitled to declare yourself prince. The royal in question had a signature trick of lighting a cigarette using only his mouth, but, frankly, it's more impressive that he could move at all, using a sort of caterpillar-like motion to work his way across the ground. Less often remarked upon is that Prince Randian kind of looked like Uncle Phil from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

Myrtle Corbin

>she's got legs by zz top starts playing

Myrtle Corbin was a dipygus, meaning she had two pelvises and thus four legs. She forewent the obvious career as half a chorus line to make bank on the sideshow circuit. If Myrtle were alive today she would launch so much DevianTART fetishfaggotry you'd never go a day without seeing "dipygus" trending somewhere on the internet. This would, however, be a 5000% improvement over the shit tier fetishes prevailing IRL, plus "dipygus" is fun to say.

Frank Lentini

You will have heard of unborn children who absorb their twins in the womb. One man didn't quite finish the job.

That man's name? You guessed it: Frank Lentini.

Though the leftovers of his partially-absorbed twin left him with one leg short of Myrtle Corbin's total, Lentini did have an extra toe on one foot, an extra foot on one knee, and two working sets of genitals. Since Corbin also had two working pussies, it is theoretically possible they could have double-teamed each other, producing some type of spider-person offspring in each of Corbin's wombs. What might have been, the world will never know, as both married people of more regular phenotypes and had healthy kids of their own.

Schlitzie

You wouldn't get it...

The most famous face of the sideshow of all, the microcephalic known as Schlitzie the Pinhead remains a misunderstood figure. He was male, but was presented as a female character in part for a pragmatic reason: as he was incontinent, wearing a dress allowed easier access for his nurse to clean him up. Although his speech (of which you can hear a sample in the movie Freaks) was unintelligible to most, Schlitzie was keenly aware of what other people said about him, and enjoyed trolling those who were insensitive fucks about his condition. Schlitzie spent some unhappy years as a ward of the state before he was recognised and given a new home by Bill Unks, a sword-swallower from the good old days, who would later take him to the park where the former superstar was able to enjoy drawing a crowd and entertaining them as he loved best. One of Schlitzie was worth more than every unctuous douchebag who chants "let your freak flag fly" at Globohomo Pride events then in the same breath snerks at you to "have a normal one" combined.

Honourable mention pending further investigation: Zip

Dubious mention must be made of Zip, another so-called pinhead whose inclusion in the canon of greats is called into question because it is widely believed that he wasn't microcephalic at all, and just kind of looked a bit like it.

The mystery endures.

It's fabled that his last words to his sister on his deathbed were something like "we sure fooled 'em for a long time, didn't we?". In 2024, this prompts the question: was Zip guilty of pinheadface?

But those are just a few of the great names that graced the world of the sideshow. Post ur favourites in the comments. Don't forget to like and subscribe to Anal Cunt - Topic on YouTube.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Late Autumn!

The auteur theory, popularised by French New Wave critics-turned-makers-of-the-sort-of-films-a-critic-would-make, has been a disaster for the cinéma, not because their faves like Hitchcock and Ray weren't authors of a sort, but because after it became universal doctrine among the sort of person who makes video essays (bald), every hack filmmaker started self-consciously repeating motifs and turning his flicks into his own niche jerkoff material.

But long before the New Wave bores ruined everything, one filmmaker devised an authorial stamp so unique, and made such good use of it, that despite being acknowledged as the GOAT, he's almost never been ripped off. Video-essay Norwoods gush over such played-out hyperkinetic gimmicks as "the oner", but Yasujirō Ozu defied the crass culture of acceleration by increasingly eliminating camera movements from his ouevre as it matured from the silent era to the 60s, favouring tasteful minimalistic composition and a defiantly languid pace for his long succession of domestic dramas.

Strap the fuck in for some static noodle eating action like you've never seen.

"Boring!" you cry, throwing your rattle on the floor, kicking your stubby feet in your pram. Yeah, I thought so too, but Ozu is the rare filmmaker you grow into and not out of. His subject matter is the stuff of everyday life: generational friction, matchmaking, misunderstanding, loss, acceptance, shooting the shit about your college-age crushes, the fate of the old when left behind. His lengthy career captured changes in a society enamoured of tradition and the new in equal and irreconcilable measure. An Ozu film examines and observes, comments sparely and with room for ambiguity, and looks for the good in its conflicted characters. If you watch several back-to-back, you'll find they blur together in the memory, all variations on a theme, like eddies in a river always flowing down toward the sea.

Idea for a YouTube video: every Ozukino but it's just the establishing shots.

Late Autumn is my favourite one in part because it plays as a tribute to Ozu's frequent star and waifu, Setsuko Hara, once the young protagonist chafing against her elders' wishes, now the serene mother of another iteration of the same. Will she remarry? Will her daughter still find time to visit her when she moves out with her new man? You wouldn't care, you couldn't be compelled to care, but Ozu and his cast beguile you to care, because their neatly composed world is worth preserving. Many of his characters are Buddhist, many of the conflicts in his films about forgoing attachments and the transience of things: change is sad, but inevitable. But on the flipside, he very gently pushes back on that philosophy with the subtly radical rejoinder: it's inevitable, but sad.

Setsuko Hara > Mona Lisa

There is no order in which to watch the Ozu titles Late Autumn, Late Spring, etc.; it's just a naming convention he liked. None of his films are direct sequels to one another, but recurrences with difference, like the seasons themselves. Reject Hollywood; watch Ozu.