RANKED: The Top Ten Women!

Theme: I Respect Your Feelings as a Woman and a Friend - Anal Cunt

As you know, this March marks Women's History Month, and we at Pat Bastard and the Spurious 5 Dot Blogspot Dot Com intend to honour this prestigious month by ranking the women who have shaped our lives and brightened up our world. You may not like our ranking, but we don't like you.

Diora Baird

Freckles bros, your patience has paid off.

South of Heaven star Diora Baird may have been famous for her chest, but let's not sleep on her ridiculously kino hips and face. In the Berenstein timeline in which Hollywood was wiped out by a natural disaster and taken over by me and my goblins in the 90s, she would have reigned as queen of the silver screen throughout the 2000s. In a way, though, her legend is more potent for the fact that, like a latterday Barbara Crampton, she remains a secret to be found in such B horror fare as Night of the Demons and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake prequel.

Anita Ekberg

No wonder Sweden's furniture is so popular.

Like Baird, Anita Ekberg would have been Earth's biggest star had she lived under my dictatorship, but kinosseurs have little to complain about, what with her livening up La Dolce Vita and dancing hypnotically in GOAT noir Screaming Mimi. Although styled by publicists as Paramount's answer to Marilyn Monroe, Ekberg was much better because Monroe was a cartoon character, a camp and derisive pastiche of the hetero ideal, while Ekberg was the real thing. Mass media hacks only revealed their classless seething in dubbing her "Iceberg" for her completely warranted dearth of patience with their bullshit.

Stacy Keibler

As prophecied by ZZ Top.

INSPIRING: WCW and WWE star Keibler proved you can rock A-cups and still be a 10. All you need to compensate is an impossibly perfect visage and 41½" legs. INSPIRINGER: thanks to her, straight men watched wrestling for the first time in droves. Is there any barrier she couldn't break?

Linda Darnell

You must be this perfect to be known professionally as The Perfect Face.

Sabotage a safe-horny "classic beauties" list by posting monochrome 10 Linda Darnell, whose largely forgotten oeuvre nonetheless includes odd gems like Hangover Square and Blackbeard the Pirate. Literally and accurately called The Perfect Face, I'm surprised the Hayes code allowed Darnell to be shown from the neck up. Check out the Hills Have Eyes rejects at your local bus exchange and tell me with a straight face that we're all one species.

Aishwarya Rai

Finally, a 10 who doesn't have to say "my eyes are up here".

One hundred billion Indians were guaranteed to produce at least one instance of genetic perfection. Rai's credits include Dhoom 2 and The Last Legion, but who are you kidding? You'd watch her watch paint dry. Plus, getting to feature a woman whose hottest feature actually are her eyes classes this article up by ~500%.

Kelly Brook

Kelly Brook looked like this:

Thank you, Kelly. Very cool!

Elena Satine

Pictured with suspicious beverage.

Doomed forever to be known as Pissfu for the scene in Twin Peaks The Return in which she listens sexily to Dougie draining the lizard (????), Elena Satine deserves immortalisation of a more auspicious and dignified kind: on my bl■g about Mad Max ripoffs and sea slugs.

Jennifer Connelly

Our Jen models her very least bedroom eyes.

Dark City may have been her most cerebral and stylish kino and The Hot Spot the pinnacle of top shelf sleaze, but it was in Career Opportunities that she redefined the possibilities of that most tastefully erotic female garment, the white tank top.

Claudia Cardinale

If you draw a woman this shape, at least 200 people will tell you it's unrealistic and impossible.

From The Leopard to The Pink Panther, Cardinale made two films named for big cats. Federico Fellini cast her as herself as his perfect dream waifu in 8½, placing her on the same tier as Anita Ekberg. Nordic? Med? Why can't we all just get along?

Tia Carrere

Filipina/Chinese/Spanish, born in Hawaii, as if that gives you anything to work with.

Best known for her role in Wayne's World, Carrere also starred in Relic Hunter, which was a show about her chest. Carrere singlehandedly started the yellow fever epidemic that killed every single male who came of age in the 90s, making her the Typhoid Mary of her day.

Did I miss any good women??? Post ur favourites in the comments!!!

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Nightmare Returns!

Theme: Second Coming - Alice Cooper

Note: I know this is a Halloween post, but I ran out of buffer articles to post bc lazy, but in any case it's been a whole winter since Halloween, and we deserve another.

You may be /fa/, but are you /fa/ enough to rock this bright red codpiece? I didn't think so.

Can a concert film be greatest movie of all time of the week? Why not, if it's Alice Cooper's 1987 comeback showcase The Nightmare Returns? For, from the psychedelic 60s inception of the OG band to the present, perennial Pat Bastard and the Spurious 5 favourite Cooper has injected off-kilter narrative and imagery into the rock show format, transforming it into a visual spectacle with a classically theatrical throughline, from scene-setting start through rising action to knuckle-biting eucatastrophe to ecstatic catharsis. Groucho hailed it as the last stand of vaudeville, while the Dalí praised it as musical surrealism. Personally, I've been to see the great man twice, back when he was a mere boy of sixty-something, and can report that he still stage-mogged bands a fraction of his vintage.

Unlike Sir Mixalot, Alice actually has an anaconda to back up his boasts*.

Yet the narrative behind the scenes lends even more satisfaction to this triumphant moment: Coop himself describes how the old Alice of the OG band days and the classic Welcome to my Nightmare was society's whipping boy, cringing, stumbling about the stage, as pitiful as he was dastardly. Like so many rock stars, Cooper felt the pull of addiction and collapsed personally even as his career lurched erratically from one creative peak to another. From the Inside turned personal misfortune into top tier songcraft, with each tale inspired by fellow inmates in the nuthouse where he spent his first rehab, but it was cocaine masterpiece DaDa where the master hit rock bottom personally even while the unchained forces of his shadow wrought his finest art.

This is exactly how I look when dreaming up my firest b╙og posts.

But then something happened to shock everyone anew: Coop ditched the coke and booze, retvrned to Christ and stormed back into the public's nightmares as he took his rightful place at the head of a brand new wave of rockers who had cut their teeth on his material, pacing and leading like the genre godfather he was. And he was no longer the whipping boy: this Cooper owned the stage. No longer was it his nightmare; this time he was yours.

The pro wrestling energy in this entrance is off the scale.

Alright, the actual Constrictor album this tour promoted kind of sucked, minus the GOATed opener and closer ("Teenage Frankenstein" and Jason Lives theme "He's Back (The Man Behind the Mask)" respectively), but this hardly matters because only two of the blah tracks are in this show, while all the justifiably overplayed hits you know from radio benefit measurelessly from the added muscle of the metal treatment ("Go to Hell" sounds like it was written with just this overhaul in mind). Speaking of muscle, the more elaborate axework on display comes courtesy of Kane Roberts, who played up to the Rambo image his physique implied, making this even more of an 80s time capsule experience. He even has a machine gun guitar that shoots flames:

Sorry Marty, this is what peak cinéma actually looks like.

The rampage continues in crowd-pleasing style, with Alice duelling this dominatrix who shows up on stage, as dominatrices are wont to do:

Thot patrolled. I repeat: the thot has been patrolled.

The Coop then aims his righteous malice at a cameraman who's been foreshadowed getting too close in a couple of shots, laying the groundwork for his well-deserved demise:

Vlad III poses with Ottoman invader (1462, colourised).

But all good things must come to an end, and so our hero sadly finds himself restrained in hospital, where he laments his lonely life in classic "The Ballad of Dwight Frye". Of course, no hospital can keep /ourpsycho/ down for long:

REKT.

Further shenanigans include a bit of practical magic, in which the Coop constructs a monstrous automaton...

And "Sick Things", in which Coop is adored by these dudes that kind of look like the Toxic Avenger:

I love how he poses like a rapper with his bitches and/or hoes, except they're drooling mutants. Don't worry; I feel the same way about you guys.

Finally, it looks like he must pay for all his crimes. But even a murderer is entitled to his last words, in this case tender fan favourite "I Love the Dead":

"Before I go, I just want to say one thing: I love fucking corpses. Thanks!" - A. Cooper.

Even in death the spirit that inspired every subsequent shock band from the Sex Pistols to Mötley Crüe shows its defiance of society in general. As the executioner steals a triumphant kiss from the Coop's severed head...

Oh, like you've never had a faceful of fluids before.

But then, as though the clouds suddenly part, the spiral into madness and horror gives way to the jubilant strains of "School's Out", which I'm fairly sure even yak herders in the ruralest hamlets of Nepal have heard, and what's better still, after the journey you've been on, it hits like you're hearing it for the first time.

Now that's entertainment.

It's masterful sequencing of a sort the OG band used to good effect on Love it to Death, with the bleak "Dwight Frye" giving way to the reassuringly Zen "Sun Arise". You could also liken it to the end of Fantasia, when the first rays of light put paid to all the devil's bullshit. Generations of imitators have come and gone and tried to top the spectacle with more lavish productions, ostentatious pyrotechnics or tryhard shock antics, but that showman's grasp of narrative and the immortal songs have yet to be surpassed.

*Yeah, I know it's a boa constrictor. Everyone's a herpetologist.

Greatest Album of All Time of the Week: Philosophy of the World!

Lady, I think the pertinent question is what is Foot Foot?

Austin Wiggin may be the Tommy Wiseau of music: an eccentric visionary whose obsessed dream shaped an oft-lampooned yet widely beloved project with all the authentic quirkiness lo-fi hipsters strain with zero self-awareness to attain. The legend goes that Wiggin forged his family of four daughters (Dorothy, Betty, Helen and Rachel) into an inept, amateurish, but extremely compelling and charming band, whose elliptical compositions defied all known music theory but work as unintended comedy and warm the listener's heart with their earnest, innocent and searching Philosophy of the World (1969).

Because we live in an age when authenticity is largely suppressed by the cringe-compilation panopticon effect of knowing everything you do is scrutinised by millions of strangers with untreated personality pathologies, and today the Wiggins would be cruelly derided as lolcows, 21st Century NPCs have devised countless alternative explanations for the Shaggs phenomenon: is the record an intentional joke? Was Austin an evil paytriarchy against whose overbearing designs the daughters subtly rebelled by playing poorly on purpose? Are the sweet sentiments of "Who Are Parents" and "We Have A Saviour" really le ironic social satire? All these fevered inkblot readings can be dismissed with a curt "go back to reddit", because even if there were any truth to them, you'd still be a boring douche for reducing the actual record to such trite crap, like the sort of autofellatio maestro who wants you to know that ackshually Holden Caulfield is Just a Whiny Privileged Kid or that you're Not Supposed to Root for the Joker.

But even to acknowledge the revisionism is to grant it more consideration than it merits: the original liner notes are clear: "Their music is different, it is theirs alone. They believe in it, live it [...] perhaps only the Shaggs do what others would like to do, and that is perform only what they believe in, what they feel, not what others think the Shaggs should feel". As music, it's unorthodox, but I'm still jamming it in my head rn (right now). As philosophy, it reaffirms Confucian notions of filial piety, faith in Jesus Christ, and a cheerful fatalism about human nature: "You can never please/Anybo-ody/In this world". That's actually much deeper than anything evil slime like Lennon or Cobain ever wrote. On the first listen you might have a condescending laugh that mellows to affection. Subsequently, though, you're going to find that there's a lot of wisdom and real humour in these songs. The strange whimsicality of "My Pal Foot Foot" and twist ending of "My Companion" are perennially fresh and beguiling. Pretty soon you'll find you're laughing with them.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Dracula Untold!

Theme: Béla Lugosi's Dead - Bauhaus

Spoilers ho:

1979's Vlad Țepeș was as exciting a work of entertainment as it was a thoughtful and compelling historical drama, making 2014's accessible capeshit spin on the material just a little bit redundant, but if Hollywood revisionists are going to ruin every female villain with a le sympathetic origin story (Wicked, Maleficent, fucking Cruella, of all things), then it's only fair the lads get to reclaim pop culture's preeminent prince of darkness, setting the record straight on everyone's favourite vampire and neatly bridging the historical and fictional Draculas (Draculae?). Also, it's kind of a remake of the start of Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, focusing in on the 15th Century setting and skipping over the events of the 1890s novel, which thereby neatly lets that be its own thing.

Least cinématic Tuesday of Vlad's life.

Voiceover narration gives a brief summary of Vlad's past in the Ottoman janissary corps and his return to the throne of Wallachia, except they call it Transylvania, which is a different part of Romania, but, hey, if you court the capeshitter audience you have to take great pains not to confuse them. Things are going well for Vlad (Luke Evans) and his wife (Sarah Gadon) for about two minutes before the Ottomans are back demanding moar boys to be child soldiers (and rape slaves, but they left that part out). Vlad fights back to protect his kid, but knows he'll need more power to repel the giant pedo empire at his door, so makes a Faustian pact with Charles Dance's elder vampire, who grants him super strength and the ability to transform into a flock(?) of bats.

Apparently acceptable collective nouns for groups of bats include "colony", "swarm" (boring) and "cauldron" (much more patrician).

The twist is that he can return to human if he makes it three days without drinking blood, so it's not like a dumb deal-with-the-devil because he can have his cake and eat it too, providing there's no tragic plot contrivance where he has to drink the blood and become Dracula Untold (2014) forever. Even when he does, he willingly kys's himself, except a second tragic plot contrivance brings him back, but you can't fault his intentions the whole time, making him by far the easiest Faustian sucker (lol) to root for in the movies. If you walk yourself back through the plot beats point by point, he made all the choices that seemed to make the most sense at the time, and that's all I ask.

True to life, /ourboi/ did NOTHING wrong.

Yeah, yeah, I know, this is otherwise a dumb flick packed with dumb vampire movie clichés, like death by silver (literally everyone forgets that's werewolfs) and the hilarious, risible death by sunlight which makes being a vampire an extended game of the-floor-is-lava:

"Whoah! Almost fucking died again, ahaha, whoops!" - a very terrifying creature of the night.

But no matter! It wins points for set and costume design, for its correct portrayal of Mehmet as an evil shithead, and for fighting revisionist fire with fire. The action may be of the CG-heavy capeshittoid variety, but it's still kind of fun, and the sequel-hook nonsense easily dismissed. No one anywhere on Earth remembers this, but in the 2010s someone at Universal Studios was obsessed with trying to jam the square peg of the Classic Monsters into the round asshole of the loathsome Cinematic Uuuuniveeerse trend popularised by Marvel.

Did someone say uuuuuuniveeeeeerse? I'm gonna...I'm gonna consoooooooooom!!!

The idea was that Dracula Untold, the Tom Cruise Mummy and (I think?) the someone or other Wolfman would form the basis of a heckin universerino in which monsters would do boopin snootin Marvel Team Ups, so presumably the Charles Dance character was meant to be one of the "villains" they would face. Naturally the Dark Uuuniveeerse (yes, that is what they called it) never happened, so we'll never see the showdown between Drac and Dance. I know you're devastated to learn that, but let's just assume /ourlad/ wins quickly and goes on to retake Constantinople, in a sequel worthy of the great man.