Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Cat People!

Believe it or not, movies were once made by people who could read.

If there's one thing on which I can't agree with Ezra Pound, it's in his negative review of Cat People. Famous for popularising jumpscares (which was rightly seen as artful at the time), this 40s RKO gem should be famouser all round. Simone Simon (which is French for Simon Simo) stars as Irena Dubrovna, a Slavic art ho qt3.14 who spends her time sketching panthers at the local zoo. Some Fucking Guy plays Oliver, who strikes up a romance with her in scenes that, much like Hitchcock's The Birds, threaten a feature-length romantic comedy before the horror creeps in to spare us that fate.

The panther, in the background, turns and moves with her as she exits the frame, as though it were her shadow. Happy accident or kinographic genius? No, I couldn't be bothered to find out either.

The idyllic romance is dogged (or should that be catted AMIRITE LOL) by ominous omens, but the pair persist unto the point of matrimony, only to find Irena rendered frigid by her paralysing fear that she will turn into a panther herself due to legends from her Serbian heritage. To be fair, it beats "I have a headache". But Irena wants to smash, so she pursues the cureall prescribed by modernity and twitter thots: therapy.

Wahmen will literally go to be hypnotised by a witch doctor who believes you want to fuck your parents before they'll try calming the fuck down.

When that inevitably solves nothing and makes things worse (hint: if they fixed the problem you wouldn't have to keep going), Irena's mood turns possessive and paranoid, and she ambiguously stalks Oliver's maybe-too-close coworker, Alice (Jane Randolph). As a panther? Only vague shadows hint. Monster movies often struggle to equivocate between plodding literalism and ham-fisted symbolism. By keeping you guessing to the end, Cat People doesn't just maintain a sense of mystery but in so doing keeps either unsatisfactory extreme at bay. Irena's pop-psychologised neurosis is a modern monster, her apparent animistic alter ego an ancient one. By casting a question mark over the symbolic clues, the nature of the horror remains in a quantum state between the two. You know, like Schrödinger's etc. etc.

A high-backed chair positioned just behind her head gives the appearance of cat-like ears...

Here she hides in the foliage like a jungle cat...

Cat People was redundantly remade in the 80s and couldn't be revisited today because of furfags.

You said it Johnny.

Fortunately the original is much less dated than most old school horror fare and can be viewed without condescension. Watch Cat People this Halloween.

Christian blôgg approved.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Event Horizon!

You remember that, right?

I recall being baffled at the late Roger Ebert's dismissive review of this cult classic in which he bemoaned its mining of the unknown in the form of the final frontier as expressing an unwarranted fear of science and discovery. You could make the same critique of Frankenstein or Jurassic Park, but Ebert didn't, which suggests to me his real beef with the movie was that it unnerved him, which apparently it did for quite a number of contemporary viewers (Ebert was always like this, was a good writer but a terrible critic, and was skewered like the fat pig he was by Vincent Gallo, who memorably said he had the "physique of a slave trader". Don't feel bad for the porcine columnist; he was a piece of shit who doxed the lead actress from Friday the 13th to his sycophantic dogs because he didn't like the movie. Rot in hell, piggy).

Roger Ebert learning why we don't do that, forever (colourised).

Anyway, I bring this up because I always just found this flick cool and not particularly disturbing, but you may react differently. The good ship Event Horizon (1997) disappeared some years ago and has now reappeared minus the crew. Lovecraftesquely disturbed scientist Dr Weir (Sam Neil) is despatched with a crew of military toughs to investigate what happened, only to find himself aboard a haunted house in space.

Neil personally requested his arm patch display the aboriginal grievance politics flag in place of the Union Jack. Naturally, the symbolism of a meddling libcuck being the one to unleash horrors beyond his comprehension flew way over his head.

Naturally, everyone starts to go craaazy out in space, reminding many reviewers of The Shining but, given the timing, reminding me more of Sphere, which came out the following year and was basically this movie underwater. Sphere is worth a spin, but never picked up the cult following that this one did, perhaps because the Event Horizon itself boasts the coolest set design in movies. Everything in it is so Gothicmaxxed that redditors to this day insist it's in the boopin snootin Warhammer 40k uuuniveeerse, but you can hardly blame a production for seizing on an aesthetic that has never once gone out of style.

"Do you think we have enough spikes and crosses?"
"No"
- set designer Joseph Bennett to director Paul W.S. Anderson (or vice versa)

From the casting of porn stars and amputees for the blood orgy scene to the reams of bonus gore footage found decaying in a Romanian salt mine, everything about this production has been recited more times online than a videogame creepypasta. When was the last time anyone talked about astroturfed hipster horror like The Babadook? Anyone you know ever say "dude, bro, you've got to see it for that scene, bruh"? For a critically derided flop, Event Horizon proved to be the little kino that could.

How'd they get this footage from my crawlspace, is what I want to know.

Greatest Album of All Time of the Week: DaDa!

The album cover being a modified detail from Dalí's Slave Market with Disappearing Bust of Voltaire is a return tribute to Dalí, who was a major Coop fan and declared his act "musical surrealism". Dalí made a First Cylindric Chromo-Hologram Portrait of Alice Cooper's Brain, the story of which is the best thing you'll read all year.

Everyone knows Alice Cooper for his pioneering theatrical stage show and his slew of classic anthems from "Eighteen" to "Elected" to "Poison", but the thing that really stabs you in the neck as you delve into the Cooper catalogue is how eclectic it all is, like a Ween album strung out over half a dozen decades. The first two albums are as uncommercial as it gets, weird psychedelia with odd melodic gems jutting out randomly like teeth out of a Briton's gums. Then there's the era of unimpeachable classics from Love it to Death through Billion Dollar Babies or even Welcome to my Nightmare (depending on how charitably you view Muscle of Love), but even this hit-making hard rock era has its oddities like the dark jazzy atmospherics of "Blue Turk" or the James-Bond-meets-King-Crimson pastiche of "Halo of Flies". Then you've got disco parodies and showtunes on Goes to Hell, sci-fi new wave on Flush the Fashion, hair metal, industrial and more. For every wild left-turn that crashes in flames, there's one that pays off in spades, but by far the oddest and greatest Alice album is one he doesn't even remember writing or recording at all. Just as Bowie's cocaine album (Station to Station) was his best and bleakest, so too was the Coop's. Now I'm not saying you should dabble in white powder for the sake of a tune. I mean, fuck it, Minor Threat coined straight edge and their Complete Discography is one of the few punk discs that holds up after half a spin. But just as LSD seems to inevitably lead to inane surrealism and heroin to insomniac self-pity, cocaine seems to have a distinctly dark and empty energy you wouldn't guess from something that has adults bouncing off the walls like kids on Halloween candy.

Not that DaDa doesn't have laughs - "I Love America" is almost tryhard in its comic aspirations, though redeemed by the fact Cooper actually meant it - but there's a sort of desperation in the laughter, like a guy trying to distract himself from gnawing despair with a good time. The synthy opener is weirdly beautiful and almost goth, but Cooper sounds like a for-real mental patient on it, far from the theatrical madness of "The Ballad of Dwight Frye". "Enough's Enough" sounds like it was inspired by Midnight Cowboy, a tale of an abusive monster of a father taunting his boy now that his dear old mother is no longer there to protect him, set to a dissonently bouncy bit of new wave that reflects the awful glee in the bad dad's jibes. "Former Lee Warmer" is a tale of a mute, mentally retarded brother kept locked up in a family home that makes those Phantom of the Opera organ tones you'd hear in haunted house parodies actually creepy again. "No Man's Land" is actually hilarious but the casual mention of "my other personalities" brings chills back to a superficially comic scenario. "Scarlet and Sheba" is like some kind of twisted BDSM tango that evokes a dungeon with the scent of candles heavy in the air. "Fresh Blood" takes a startling detour into funk and seems to describe the unhappy lot of a Renfield stewarding a vampire from kill to kill amid the festivity of an uncaring city. "Pass the Gun Around" is a raw sketch of the end of the road against the grandest, most ostentatious arrangements on the album, with a Dick Wagner solo that sounds like David Gilmour having the worst nightmare of his life. Maybe Alice just doesn't want to remember.

Jimbo: The Thinking Barbarian - 20. One Way Ticket to Midnight (Part 4)!

Previously...

Theme: Battle Cry - Messiah Prophet

To be concluded...

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.