Pat Bastard and the Spurious 5
Now Gods, stand up for bastards.
Tuesday, 12 November 2024
RANKED: The Top 10 Animals!!!
Monday, 4 November 2024
Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Forbidden Planet!
The Supermanesque title font is an odd fit for the psych-horrorkino that's about to come. |
By far the greatest science fiction movie ever made, Forbidden Planet is pointless to discuss without spoilers, so before we get into it, I'll simply note that you can blame it for the uniformed pontificating of Star Trek and the invincible robot shenanigans of Terminator and Chopping Mall.
At this stage, crewmembers were not yet marked for death by shirt colour. |
Robby was so popular he had an otherwise unrelated spinoff movie, The Invisible Boy. |
But on the spoiler front, Planet cuts much deeper than you might infer from its frivolous legacy. Ostensibly an extremely loose reworking of Shakespeare's The Tempest, Planet abstracts from the personal to depict an archetypal tragedy at the level of an entire civilisation. Leslie Nielsen's spaceship crew touch down on the Forbidden Planet (1956) to investigate the strange case of Dr Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), survivor of the lost ship Bellerophon who has since made a home there with his daughter Altaira (Anne Francis).
I want to live in Casa Morbius and freak out my guests with my reinforced bunker shutters. |
Morbius has been studying the fate of the planet's former inhabitants, the ancient race of ayylmaos known as the Krell, whose sudden disappearance left intact a raft of kino sets augmented by audacious matte paintings whose monumental scale feels realer and vaster than whatever nonsense slopscapes CGI has wrought.
The emptiness left by the absence of the Krell themselves is palpable and haunting. |
Of course, if you've seen the film you know the secret: the Krell had managed to repress their most primal unconscious drives until their technology hit a point of singularity at which they were unwittingly released and wiped everything out in a single Event Horizon style blood orgy of annihilation. The Jungian resonance of the monster from within is subtly foreshadowed (lol) throughout the picture.
The bright red, curved claw of the id monster looks a lot like the comet logo on the crewmen's hats, which are of course positioned right over the brain. JuSt A cOiNcIdEnCe though! |
OK, the position of the claw cast probably wasn't intended as a phallic symbol, but when your material is the unconscious mind, associations kind of form themselves, don't they? |
tHe EfFeCtS aRe DaTed! Yeah but imagine this fucking thing coming at you halfway into a night shift. |
Tuesday, 29 October 2024
Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Night of the Demons!
Not at all to be confused with last week's classy classic, this Night of the Demons is the 2009 remake of the 80s also-ran best known for popularising goth girls to the horny mind, and is the trashy peak of trashcore. Why the remake? Because the original was also trashy, but this one dials it up to 11, with more gratuitous carnage, sluttier scream queens with ludicrous silicone cans, and a soundtrack of the kind of metal you imagine methheads bang to in tin sheds. The original might have been edgy and hedonistic in its day, but with this one you can taste the spilled beer and feel the sticky floors beneath your feet. If your cinematographic palette pales at Friday the 13th levels of sleaze and gore, feel free to stick to the Universal classic monsters, but if just once a year, as the Christian lore of Halloween entails, you feel the need to let the forces of chaos and debauchery have their day, cry havoc and let spin this brain cell obliterator of a flick.
Come on guys, it'll be fun. |
This Night concerns a Halloween party gone ever-so-predictably bad, set in an impressively ominous New Orleans mansion where the silent-movie-pastiche opening sequence informs us demons were once summoned and contained, waiting to rise anew and ruin everyone's festivities.
IDK what "Southern Gothic" is but I think it's this. |
Our hapless protagonists are an A-Z of B-C-list scream royalty. Angela, back from the original, is played by Shannon Elizabeth, who was in the unpronounceable remake of Th13rteen Ghosts. Bobbi Sue Luther starred in Laid to Rest, which is only slightly more than you or I have ever done. Monica Keena has the unique distinction of surviving both Jason and Freddy. And Diora Baird was in the prequel to the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (but also South of Heaven, which, if you take anything from this bløg, watch).
May all our T&A queens have that one actually good movie in their filmographies. |
In the highest traditions of Plato and Aristotle, our heroines debate the merits of slutty vs scary costumes, mostly settling on the time-honoured cat-ears-and-cleavage formula, to disgusted looks of the I-can't-buh-lieve-she's-wearing-the-same-outfuht? genre.
Sadly this scene does not end with them ripping each other's clothes off and some guy in a Bob Hope costume saying to camera "now that's what I call a catfight". |
The bartender's Manson costume is a neat detail. |
Homosexuals will never understand the profound straightness of hot girls kissing. |
A decade and a half of studios trying to force iconic girlboss characters obliterated by a single still of Monica Keena on an average day. |
Tuesday, 22 October 2024
Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Night of the Demon!
♪I am a man who walks alone And when I'm walking a dark road At night or strolling through the park When the light begins to change I sometimes feel a little strange A little anxious when it's dark... |
All hero protagonists are chudjak-coded (no-fun stick-up-the-ass types) and all villains are soyjak-coded (overly theatrical balding beardos). Joseph Campbell talks about this (probably, idk). |
In this scene, the movie subtly foreshadows impending doom by having the woman drive. |
Monday, 14 October 2024
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 blĂ´gg approved. |
Tuesday, 8 October 2024
Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Event Horizon!
You remember that, right? |
"Do you think we have enough spikes and crosses?" "No" - set designer Joseph Bennett to director Paul W.S. Anderson (or vice versa) |
How'd they get this footage from my crawlspace, is what I want to know. |