Greatest Album of All Time of the Week: Sorry!

Yeah, the first image that came up when I searched for this was a poster instead of the actual album cover, which has the driver running over a ball in the road. On the poster there is no ball, making a nonsense of the album title. Oh well.

Just as my favourite Pink Floyd album is Adam and Eve by Catherine Wheel, so too my favourite Smashing Pumpkins album is Sorry! by, uh, Catherine. No offence to Billy Corgan (who, despite what soybeards will tell you, was probably the 90s' least douchey rockstar), but Sorry! is more consistent than any given Pumpkins album and makes good on the haze-of-noise component of the sound to which the Pumpkins never quite committed to my liking. We can, however, credit the Pumpkins 100% for the template: "Saint" opens with a drum roll just like "Cherub Rock", while "2am" swipes the cinematic string section from "Spaceboy", and the signature squirrelly lead-work that set the Pumpkins leagues apart from the grunge pack can be found throughout (although, again, I prefer Catherine's guitar tone. Sorry!). Moreover, the blend of dazed boyhood whimsy and sneering aggression is no less authentic for being studiously cribbed from the more famous Illinoisans. It's just all so much more interesting than Burt Cobain's one-note whining, it makes you wish more people had ripped off Corgan over Cobain. Catherine is funnier too: the Bee Gees' "Every Christian Lion-Hearted Man Will Show You" is an inspired cover choice. And Catherine weren't afraid to colour outside of the lines either: "Flawless" anticipates Bri'ish shoegazers Slowdive's diversion into blissed-out country (as Mojave 3) by a cool year. Most importantly, their video for "Saint" was the most 90s video of all time.

Catherine released another album, 1996's Hot Saki and Bedtime Stories, which cut back on the noodling and leaned more into red-cup pop-punk house party vibes, but for my money was somewhat weaker overall. Still, Sorry! stands the test of time as one of the mid-90s' finest gems. Give it a spin, asshole!

RANKED: The Top 10 Animals!!!

"That's all very well, Pat", you muse, fresh off yet another binge of my superlative blôggue because it's the only thing worth reading on the internet, "but what exactly are the top ten animals? For I, a plebeian fuck, know only maybe dogs, cats, hamsters, birds - all of which I just call birds - and perhaps goldfish. Tell me more about the wonders of nature". OK.

Indian Giant Squirrel

I once travelled to the wilds of Maharashtra in search of this squirrel, which most of the twenty billion Indians don't seem to be aware exists. Well your humble blogguiste can confirm they're real, and they come in a wild variety of colours and patterns from reddish brown and white to full purple and orange. If I were Indian I would never shut the fuck up about these S-tier squirrels.

Binturong

The second greatest animal looks like a combination of so many other animals it might have been mashed together by an overly broad AI prompt. Often known as a bear-cat, to me it looks more like a raccoon-spidermonkey, complete with prehensile tail. Based on videos where they wrap themselves around people's shoulders, a binturong would be an excellent accessory for a pirate in some period adventurekino set in Indonesia, if anyone made good movies I want to see anymore.

Giant Oarfish

Every source you will find on the giant oarfish spins with a straight face that they may have "been mistaken for" or "inspired tales of" mythical sea serpents, instead of admitting that sea serpents are real and are simply a massive fish instead of a massive snake. Just look at this fucking thing.

Okapi

Once mistaken for a forest zebra due to its patterned hindquarters, the okapi is in fact a closer cousin of the giraffe. I'll take it over either, though, because it's great. The okapi has an extremely long prehensile tongue which it can wrap around a bunch of vegetation and rip it out for eating. If I had this, I would use it to steal ice cream cones from children, and then laugh in their stupid faces as they cried.

Resplendent Quetzal

The most /fa/ civilisation in history, the Aztecs, accessorised with the unparalelled plumage of this alien-looking bird, one of nature's most strikingly weird beauties, like Anya Tayylmao if she were of the avian persuasion.

Peacock Tarantula

Another kino animal almost unknown to its multitudinous countrymen, the peacock tarantula is endemic to a single forest in Andhra Pradesh. A bright blue spider is the most made-up-sounding thing you can imagine, but it's real. Even the most arachnophobic little baby bitch should celebrate this overlooked jewel in God's creation.

Yeti Crab

I gave my thoughts on the yeti crab one million years ago, and they have not changed. What an excellent animal.

Sun Bear

Like the okapi, the sun bear has an unusually long tongue, but unlike the okapi, it is a bear, and uses it to scoop out honey from beehives or some such nonsense. Sun bears may not be the biggest bear, but they're the coolest one. Perhaps had Timothy Treadwell been Sun Man instead of Grizzly Man, he wouldn't have had his face eaten as he screamed. Food for thought!

Superb Fruit Dove

As you can already tell by its name, the superb fruit dove is a cut above lesser fruit doves, with a bright pink patch on its head like "what are you going to do about it asshole?" - an attitude shared by all flight-proficient birds, but seldom with such self-justifying flair.

Rhinoceros Hornbill

All hornbills are cool but for my money, the rhinoceros one is the best. Named for the rhinoesque curvature of its casque, this bird is better than anything you've ever done or heard of in your pointless life. They can give off a majestic call with the amplificatory effect of the casque, and their eyes are colour-coded, with the males' being red and the females' white. I wish you'd go away.

But those are just my thoughts, what are yours? List your favourite animals in the comments and subscribe to EmptyHero on YouTube dot com.

Freddy Vs Jason!

If there was one good thing about 1992's Jason Goes To Hell (there was), it was the very final scene. After sitting out most of his own finale before being dragged under the ground by rock monsters, all that remains of Jason is his famous hockey mask, which is then grabbed and dragged down by Freddy's equally famous knived glove. More than a decade of blue balls later, Freddy Vs Jason finally dropped.

Colour coded for your convenience.

Freddy Vs Jason is the best Freddy Vs Jason movie anyone could reasonably have hoped for. If you doubt this, check out some of the absolutely awful script ideas that were floated in the development process, including Fred and Jay fighting as gladiators in Hell and looking for the Holy Grail (????). Every one of these scripts was basically Jason Goes To Hell Part 2: unnecessary convoluted plotting with a false sense of its own importance filled with hurr hurr humour and what the fucc moments that would have been a total disaster.

One of the least bad ideas had a young Freddy being one of the bullies who fucked with Jason at camp, just because that seems like something Freddy would do.

Instead we got exactly what we needed: an action movie with horror characteristics featuring pro wrestling style exaggerations of the classic characters beating the hell out of each other and slaughtering any 25-year-old teenager that got in their way.

Both their signature weapons are bumped up in size for the sake of spectacle.

The plot is simple: Freddy has been wiped from the collective memory of Springwood by its cops and doctors. If nobody knows about him, nobody's afraid of him, and without their fear powering him, he can't come back to fuck with them in their dreams. To reignite belief in him, he poses as Jason's mother and sends him on a mission to Springwood to drop some bodies. The plan works but Jason keeps killstealing like a neccbeard so Freddy hatches a new plan to get him asleep so he can take him out on his own terms. We understand that this is all just a setup for a big climactic fight scene, so this covers everything we need logistically to get there.

Jason gets a powerup numetal theme song at this point, just in case you didn't get that this is WWE.

Objections to this absolute masterpiece abound among the Reddit population: it breaks continuuuuity! It doesn't make sense in the uuuuuniverse! Such whining can be dismissed with extreme prejudice. There is no real internal logic in these movies and internal logic doesn't even make sense as a concept in the context of A Nightmare on Elm Street films because they are examples of surrealism. "But Jason wasn't afraid of water in the other films!" Yeah, but he also turned into a little boy in Jason Takes Manhattan and a possessing Mini Boglin in The Final Friday, and I don't hear you bringing that up. Maybe the fear existed at a deeper level of his unconscious mind waiting to be triggered, or some other gay psychobabble explanation, but it doesn't matter because the real purpose of that scene is to hammer home the fact that Jason is the babyface and Freddy is the heel. Only big-brained redditeurs don't seem to get this.

Something about this image is really unsettling and beautiful. I think it has something to do with the background receding into nothing.

With that said there are a few things you could reasonably nitpick about the film. Freddy dominates the fight a little too much while Jason has nearly all the kills, even toward the end. This could have been evened out a little. It would also have been nice to have a bit of a suspenseful stalking sequence once they get to Crystal Lake, as very little use is made of the woods and it would be fun to see the protagonists trying to escape not knowing where either of the killers was hiding.

More of this would have been nice.

But this isn't really a horror movie anyway, it's gory actionkino and it has a deliberate accelerating pace to keep up. The fight is varied and inventive and the buildup has momentum and never feels too much like filler. The characters are all pretty stock and given just enough definition that we remember them and kinda-sorta care but not really because we're really here for the main event, but the fluff adds context to it and is satisfying in itself. Some people (who don't bathe) insist they wanted the whole thing to be Jason and Freddy with no mortal characters at all, and I just don't know what to do with people like that.

"Ew, less of this" - someone

The idea of the town using drugs and censorship to keep the memory of Freddy under wraps, and their inevitable and disastrous failure, is fun and creative and not so pointed as to be didactic, and setpieces like Jason's cornfield massacre are gr8 too. The soundtrack, poised just between the ebb of numetal and the ascendancy of metalcore, is gr8 time capsule stuff, like an update of the Dokken and Alice Cooper songs that graced the 80s films. The celebrity casting of Kelly Rowland, slick production values and pop culture nods to shit like Scooby Doo and Jay and Silent Bob also ties in neatly and makes this sort of the last gasp of the late 90s/early 2000s slasher wave and, along with New Nightmare, kind of bookends that era nicely as well.

Now we just need Ghostface Vs Parka.

Thank God It's Friday The 13th: Jason X!!!

Jason X is the best early 2000s slasher movie in spehss you could ever hope for. Back when it came out that would have sounded like faint praise, but as we've previously discussed, the late 90s to the early 2000s were the last good era, and this flick is very, very early 2000s. So much so that I would almost say it's as quintessentially early 2000s as the old Friday the 13ths were quintessentially 80s. For the pop punk/postgrunge/numetal generation, this is nostalgiakino. Nothing ever looks as much like its era as its depictions of the future.

In 2055, the hospital patient's gown has been replaced by gloriously slutty chainmail for some reason.

The Final Girl this time out is a former Jason researcher who accidentally gets cryogenically frozen along with him in the near-future of 2001 (2010). Despite being revived four hundred years in the future, she proves to be much more capable than the people who have grown up on spaceships, and even seems to know the layout of their ship better than they do. This is typical of lazy Mary-Sue type writing, but maybe the point is more that people in the future are really stupid due to their overly convenient lifestyles. They reattach limbs and bring people back to life with nanobots so casually their survival instincts have dropped off to nothing. They're basically Elois from The Time Machine, and Jason is the based Morlock here to knock some sense into them, and by sense I mean a machete.

A condition in my will is to be stuffed in this position with my trusty blade.

Our based incel is thawed out and revived by the suspicion that two Eloi normalfags are having wanton secks somewhere on board, and throws a characteristically righteous murder spree in protest. He starts by whacking this galloping Stacy by freezing her head. Gamers: 1, thots: 0.

Serious question: is this the first time Jason's been to second base?

Jason then proceeds to hack his way through the rest of the crew who keep forgetting things like where there's a large unprotected glass screen he can easily break through, and to fill in this bluescreen:

Maybe it's just meant to be blue, considering they didn't correct for the light spill, but nothing except bluescreen is that shade of blue.

Eventually they fight back using such tricks as a modified fuccbot in a pleasingly The-Matrix-is-still-current-and-hip outfit, who blows off Jason's limbs and head, which seems to kill him pretty dead, although we're told the people of 2010 couldn't figure out a way to kill him and the firepower isn't noticeably more powerful than weapons we have today.

Psshhh...nothin personnel...Jason...

Nonetheless the crew, including Final Girl, seem satisfied she's put him down for good and get to Skyping with a possible rescue vessel leaving the ship to revive him as a cyborg for no fucking reason. Maybe the ship is run by a HAL type computer that's secretly Team Jason.

There's no way they didn't laugh out loud when he first tried this on.

The cyborg version, called, in the credits, "Uber Jason" (at the time this didn't make him sound like a taxi driver) is even more unstoppable than regular Jason, so to slow him down, Final Girl and the based autist who built the fuccbot waylay him into a holodeck in which he's confronted by some slutty campers, who he naturally kills.

Censored to avoid offence.

Eventually our hero is dishonourably tackled into Earth 2's atmosphere where he begins to burn up. Is this the final end of Jason? Well at least part of his mask makes it to the new Earth, where it falls, fittingly, in a lake. I leave it up to your imagination whether or not Jason survived and solo'd the entire new host planet of the normalfaggot locust, but I think we all know what we'd prefer. Jason X is dumb as shit, but in a fun way. Everything about it has that slick, cool blue-grey look everything had in the early 2000s and it's even directed like an episode of Star Trek, with that small-screen overreliance on closeups and sterile future, so it's like watching Jason whack Wil Wheaton and the chick who reads emotions for the benefit of the autistic audience.

The survivors: an autistic white man, a hot Asian woman and a sex robot, as God intended.

The only thing that sucks about this movie (in the bad way) is the quippy Marvel/Josh Whedon/Jar Jar Abrams tier dialogue, especially from the character Janessa. However, it wasn't as omnipresent back then and we're supposed to root for Jason against the crypto-redditeurs anyway, so I'll let it slide.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2!!!

There are two types of people in this world: those who think The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the late Tobe Hooper's greatest masterpiece, and those who have seen Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.

The Breakfast Club knockoff poster is a clue that this is going to be on another level.

Where 1 was frankly restrained for a movie called "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", 2 lives up to the derangement implied in such an ostentatious title, opening with a high speed car chase in the middle of which Leatherface slices up these two fratbois' car.

Everything better on a moving vehicle.

Hearing their death screams as the fratbois' final moments are recorded on her radio show, Final Girl Stretch (played by Caroline Williams and her legs) decides to team up with Lieutenant Lefty Enright, a based Texas lawman played by Dennis Hopper in the same year he won acclaim for his role in Blue Velvet. Together they will set a trap for the murderous family of cannibals.

Hopper has a rather condensed arc in which he learns the very important lesson that to defeat a chainsaw-wielding killer you must yourself learn the art of the chainsaw. To this end we get to witness him shopping for chainsaws, which he tries out in an excellent scene by going apeshit on a log.

You fuck that log up Denny.

The movie then bravely dispenses with the customary second act and launches straight into an extended climactic sequence that takes up like two thirds of the runtime. This dude who I think is named "Chop Top" but is referred to at one point as "Chrome Dome" due to the metal plate in his head, breaks into the radio station and chases Stretch around with the questionable assistance of Leatherface.

This scene kind of goes on too long but it has a nice uneasy mood about it so paradoxically it works.

Leatherface corners Stretch who basically offers to fuck him if he'll spare her life, which Leatherface (whose IQ, to be charitable, might be in the 60s) seems to weigh up for a while. This scene is an hysterically funny satire of the film criticism cliché that killers' weapons constitute a phallic substitute, with Stretch basically grinding her crotch on Leatherface's chainsaw. Had the scene gone on a little longer this might not have been a Texas Chainsaw sequel, but a Pumpkin one.

This is what film critics actually believe.

However Leatherface is then called away to the family residence and Stretch, whom he neglected to kill, follows him there, only to become trapped in the family's lair: an abandoned theme park, which is one of my favourite movie sets.

Thank you Tobe, very kino!

Stretch meets Leatherface again, who's kind enough to give her a skin mask of her own, fresh from her station assistant, which she doesn't seem to appreciate too much.

Bride of Leatherface

Naturally she winds up at the famous family dinner table and the old grampa gets wheeled out to try and crack her head, at which he fails consistently, giving Lieutenant Enright time to show up and engage Leatherface in a chainsaw duel.

This is a correct use of the medium.