Cool Thing: Tsaatan Reindeer Riders!

Theme: Run Run Rudolph - Chuck Berry

POV: you just said hApPy HoLiDaYs in a Merry Christmas neighbourhood.

The Tsaatan are a nomadic Tuvan people found in best country, Mongolia. While most people ride horses or the bus, the Tsaatan ride reindeers, which is more cool. So central are their lil Christmassy bros to their lifestyle that Tsaatan means "the people with reindeer", and they move their ortzes (tents) around the oft-frozen taiga with their herds, milking them, trading their antlers (doan't worry; they grow back), and sometimes ritually merking one to drink its blood to give them warrior strength, which seems somewhat pointless because there are only 200 of them in the entire world, they live in the harshest wilderness imaginable, and absolutely noone cares to trek out there in -40ºC temperatures to pick a fight with them, unless perhaps cable hasbara tells boomers they're building a reindeer-powered nuke.

The Tsaatan speak Dukhan and practice an ancient shamanic religion requiring them to pick a sacred reindeer from among the herd whose antlers are never amputated. To ensure this reindeer brings good fortune, they place a bowl of milk on its back and walk it around an ortz three times. If the bowl falls off to land facing upright toward the sky, it's an auspicious choice of reindeer. If this just keeps never happening, IDK what they do; you don't have a lot of options in this tough environment, and milk doesn't grow on trees. Incidentally, milk is extremely important throughout Mongolia, with airag, the fermented milk of mares, being the country's signature beverage. All Mongolians are lactose intolerant, but they just drink it constantly anyway, because they're also Chads. Don't let your whiny kid tell you xir lactose intolerance means xe can't possibly deign to stomach a normal diet; if it's good enough for men of the Altan Urag, it's good enough for xim.

In summary: the Tsaatan are cool, Mongolia is cool, I'm a Mongolboo, there hasn't been a good movie released this decade, listen to Hanggai and the Hu, practice khoomei and sygyt, and I'll see you next time with another Cool Thing or B-movie writeup or something; IDK.

RANKED: the Best and Worst of Christmas Music!

H8ing Christmas is reddit, yet most Christmas music is annoying. How to navigate this elaborate minefield? Why, by means of every cowardly bastard's first and last refuge: radical centrism. Here are the five best and five worst Christmas songs.

The Good

1. Jesus Christ - Big Star

Coping neckbeards have occasionally tried to spin this banger from the devastating Third/Sister Lovers album as ironic. Wrong! Chilton's songwriting exposed every nerve and when he was being sarcastic, as on "Thank You Friends", you'd have to be as autismal as me to miss it. "Jesus Christ" is the crowning jewel in any patrician's seasonal playlist.

2. We Three Kings - Rob Halford

Sure, metal covers are a played-out novelty staple but that doesn't change the fact that making something metal generally improves it, and lyrics of such crushing heft as "King forever/Ceasing never/Over us all to reign" merit every bit of bombast the format imbues. Better yet, there's zero irony in Halford's treatment. Constantly misunderstood by idiots, the name Judas Priest was always intended to convey the duality in the human soul between evil and good, and Halford, who lived this internal war harder than many, ultimately roots for the Priest.

3. No Man's Land - Alice Cooper

Featured on the master's greatest album, DaDa, "No Man's Land" tells a tale of a mall Santa who ditches his duties to go bang some thot he just met, meaning the movie Bad Santa is just a ripoff of this unknown classic from the 80s. The already-ambiguous context of the album gives it a more troubling undertone too, but on a playlist this will go over everyone's heads, enabling them to discover it for themselves when they spin the album, making it the gift that keeps on giving.

4. One More Sleep - Leona Lewis

Basic thots cover your ears: "One More Sleep" is the pop R&B banger "All I Want for Christmas is You" wishes it could be, and finally makes good use of those chiming bell sounds that festoon any number of weaker seasonal arrangements.

5. Als I Lay on Yoolis Night - Martin Best Ensemble

This 14th Century traditional song reaches back into our deep and overly neglected well of heritage to fill you with the calm that is the counterpoint to Halford's majestic bombast and Cooper's sinister mischief.

The Bad

1. Feed the World - Live Aid

Dear boomoids: the reason there was a horrific famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s is because a communist psychopath named Mengistu Haile Mariam murdered the last emperor, seized power and implemented the same collectivisation of agriculture policies that killed millions in the USSR and tens of millions in China, not because "nothing ever grows" in "Africa". Sure, as continents go, Africa is by far the biggest net importer of food from outside of itself, but it didn't have to be that way. There was a perfectly good country called Rhodesia that was known as the breadbasket of Africa until yet another communist faction took it over, ethnically cleansed the white farmers who made it work, and caused another famine that killed a million people. Rather than realise that being an evil libtard is the common denominator in everything that goes wrong ever, evil libtards instead wrote this song pestering everyone to "feed the world", causing an immense, unstoppable explosion of a dependent population, creating a genuinely apocalyptic ticking time bomb, making this by far the worst and most destructive song in history.

2. Happy Xmas (War is Over) - John Lennon and the Yoko Ono Band

So dreary and boring that for years I heard its refrain as "without any cheer" instead of "fear", and it still seemed to make some kind of sense. War will be over when Lennon-worshippers stop listening to neocon slop about how Hitl0r was uniquely evil in all of history and, simultaneously, everyone from Poutine to Hummus is Hitl0r.

3. I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day - ???

FACT CHECK: the snowman doesn't bring the snow. The snow comes first, then kids make the snowman out of it. Way to screw the kids out of their well-earned credit, someone I can't be bothered to Bing Search.

4. Last Christmas I Gave You My Heart - Wham!

BARF.

5. We All Want Some Figgy Pudding - traditional

"And we won't go until we get some/We won't go until we get some/We won't go until we get some/So bring some out here". Scarcely has a song so begged for a steel-toe-capped boot to the taint.

Stay tuned for more phoned-in listicles!

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

Spoilers for Cat People entailed.

Last time we checked in with Oliver (S.F. Guy) and Alice (Jane Randolph), they were fighting for their lives against the ambiguous feline menace of Irena (Simone Simon). Years later they're married, confirming, somewhat hilariously, her worst fears. But has Irena returned as a spooky ghost to haunt their autistic daughter? Despite the title, this surprising sequel isn't so much a retread of the original's classic-horror atmospherics as a charming, redemptive coda with a wholesome festive vibe, its horror elements played even subtler and relegated to the merest frisson until they resurface in key scenes. Yes, Curse is the first and last horror sequel to shift gears into Christmaskino.

"Happy holidays" sayers on even more suicide watch than usual.

But as the movie opens, Oliver and Alice are troubled over their daughter Amy's (Ann Carter) apparent fantasy life. Amy daydreams, posts letters in a hollow tree, hangs out with a weird old lady and her live-in carer daughter, and, most disconcertingly of all, announces that she has a new friend, who turns out to be Irena. Is she an imaginary friend, a real benign spirit, or a vengeful ghost posing as Casper to lure Amy to her doom?

Sorry WitchTERF4968, under Project 2025 all women will be required to wear these fairytale gowns with the long drooping wizard sleeves. I don't make the rules!

Of course, to answer would be to spoil. Perhaps because it veered so far from the perfectly judged horror template of its rightly esteemed predecessor, Curse was a commercial flop and remains largely unknown. But if you've exhausted your oh-so-nontraditional Christmas movie fare with Die Hard and Batman Returns, and if you followed my orders and watched the original this Halloween, Curse might be the seasonal gem to see you through your Christmas evening. Either that or revisit The Mothman Prophecies. Maybe make it a double bill.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Mothman Prophecies!

Cryptid flicks might well be the most bargain-bin of all genres. Abominable was a neat riff on Hitchcock that memorably featured Tiffany Shepis being yanked spine first through a (rear) window, and Willow Creek was a top shelf Blair Witch Project ripoff that did little to disguise its plagiarism. But you've never heard of either, and it's way downhill from there on in, with one remarkably kino exception.

We're going uncharacteristically classy this Halloween.

What makes The Mothman Prophecies go so hard is the effortlessness with which it transcends its lowly underdog status as cryptidcore. If such cryptozoological heavyweights as the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot can barely scrape together more than one watchable title, who would have thought the fucking Mothman movie would be any good?

The schizo art coffee table book market remains sadly underserved.

Yet Prophecies is not content to meet us halfway with a blend of gory shlock and the odd good scene thrown in as a treat. From start to finish, it's a slickly shot and edited, oddly philosophical mood piece, taking the 1960s sightings of a winged, mysterious creature and the book from which it takes its title as a springboard to delve into realms of atmospheric kino more akin to David Lunch's oneiric ouevre than your average horror fare. Richard Gere stars as the everyman drawn into the rabbit-hole of Mothman lore by a fateful encounter that leaves him with questions and traumatic memories and troubled dreams. Laura Linney is the local cop who introduces him to the Mothman witnesses in the town of Point Pleasant, WV. In the movie's most audacious twist, the West Virginians themselves are not portrayed as the monsters.

Average West Virginian according to average Californian (Wrong Turn, 2003)

But I shall say no more about the plot because it's the atmosphere and visual style that retain their brooding impact. Questions linger. Closeups portend. Airborne cameras circle. Electric lights suggest.

A bird's eye view...or something else???

If you want a beer & popcorn flick for Halloween, you have a string of options, from the enjoyably retarded to the great. If you're alone and want to ponder the cosmological nature of the unknowable, watch The Mothman Prophecies.

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!

A Very Bastard Christmas

The strangest thing happened last night. I had just been fired from my job as desk clerk at Mr Potter's nuclear power plant for impersonating a clergyman, and was taking out my frustrations the usual way, by helping the blind beggars cross the road onto the middle of a roundabout, and leaving them.

Then for no reason at all, a bunch of youths started harassing me. They said "hey, that's not cool", and "don't do that", very aggressively, so I ran a safe distance and called the police. I explained what happened to a great big fat desk sergeant, who seemed to think I was joking. It's like there's no justice anywhere in the world. What if I had been violently beaten, or gored to death? It was pure typical victim blaming. Calling the police officer a fat fuck, I handed the phone back to the gentleman who'd kindly let me borrow it, and ran across the road, causing a cyclist to swerve and skid into a lamppost. This made me lel so much I started coughing, and coughed up blood all over the pavement.

I was looking for a doctor, but it was Christmas Eve and the lines were round the block. I decided if I was to get treatment, I would have to outdo some of these malingerers with their gaping neck wounds, so I hurried off to the theatre store to grab some fake blood, only to find that it had closed down and moved. Pouting in anger, I hurled a lady's small terrier at the deserted husk of a store, and spun on my heel, which caused me to slip and fall on the slick ground. Then the lady, totally unprovoked, started wailing on me with her umbrella like a dervish. I defended myself in the manner I've been taught by social media: by screaming and crying and playing the victim. A group of passing thugs heard my cries and hauled off the lady, who protested vehemently. In the confusion, I tied two of the thugs' shoelaces together and fled.

Bedraggled and potentially dying of consumption, I staggered onto the bridge, where I looked down at the icy river below. I contemplated ending it all by jumping, calculating that if I hit my head on a rock, I would probably only feel horrific agony for a few seconds, whereas if I missed I would likely die a slow death of pneumonia, unless I could remember to hold my head under the water long enough to drown, my lungs filling intolerably up with water. But no! That would be the coward's way out!!! So I had determined to live, when an angel appeared at my side. He said "no dude, you should totally jump. Heaven is totally unanimous on this".

Was he right? Should I have jumped? Fuck that, why am I asking you? The world needs me. I've seen the light! It's a Christmas miracle!! I'm going to live forever!!!!23$%*.