Has this ever happened to you?

Where you're asleep, and you're dreaming about something funny, and you laugh yourself awake, and it's early morning so you've got a boner, and you're just lying there at 6 in the morning, cracking up with a hardon?

Is that normal?

Finally, I found my new home.

Yes.

Mad Max Ripoffs: Raiders of the Sun!!!

It is a consistent rule of post-apocalypse movies that whatever is in shortest supply is used most recklessly. Mad Max and The Road Warrior are all about the scarcity of gasoline, yet everyone spends all their time driving around and into one another. Raiders of the Sun continues in this tradition by having a shortage of gunpowder at the centre of its plot, yet everyone spends their time engaging in massive, unnecessary shootouts. There's no mention of a gasoline shortage, but we can assume there is one too, because in one scene a bunch of dudes dance around a family of dwarfs splashing tanks of it on them. This is the movie's chilling message: in a world without the internets, we would set fire to little people for our entertainment. The sequel will be about a dwarf shortage.

Even after the nuclear holocaust, dwarfs carry axes. That's racist.

The opening narration actually suggests the world was getting better, under the organisation of good guys "The Alpha League". Unfortunately they're now in a state of civil war against a rebel faction led by this guy:

"I do not want things to get better. I want to blow things up and be a bad guy :(" - actual dialogue.

You can tell he's the leader because he's the only one who put any effort into his outfit. In the post-apocalypse, it's clearly not tactical skill that grants leadership, but the size and extravagance of your shoulder pads. The only exception to this rule is the Lord Humungus, but that's because he was fucking huge.

In their quest to get more gunpowder to prevent the civil war from sort of awkwardly winding down, the main bad guy allies with another bad guy, whose name I also can't remember, who does nothing all day but half-assedly attempt to rape the women his minions bring him. He's the most laid-back rapist I've ever seen in a movie. When the Main Girl is brought before him she kicks him in the face and knocks out a tooth, and he just kind of chuckles and sends her away. He's like the rape equivalent of a Bond villain: in no hurry.

"Alas, poor molar. I knew it well" - not actual dialogue

The problem with this movie is that it's more like GI Joe than Mad Max. There are too many pitched battles and not enough chases. There is, however, a cool scene where Main Girl's husband joins Bond Rapist's gang to rescue her, and has to undergo an "initiation" that involves swinging from ropes in a duel to the death with another of Bond Rapist's henchmen. Now, I'm no mathematician, but it strikes me that if everyone who joins his gang has to kill one of his guys, his gang is never going to get any bigger. Fortunately, this is set after a nuclear war so no one questions stupid shit like that.

Post-apocalypse checklist:

MOHAWKS: none.

SHOULDER PADS: only the main bad guy has them, but they're very large.

CUSTOM CARS: the spiky one from Wheels of Fire makes another appearance and is knocked off the cliff in the same way, probably because they reused the footage, and the dwarf family drive some kind of station wagon type effort with a bunch of crap piled on.

MUTANTS: none.

GOGGLES: Main Bad Guy has some that he perches on his military-style hat.

TOTAL: 3/5 - naht very post-apocalyptic.

Album review: LIE: The Love And Terror Cult, by Charles Manson

Hey folks it's that time of year again!!! The time when I review an album of music for your listening pleasure. Today's album is a bit of a classic, yet sorely overlooked by the music press due to its singer/songwriter being involved in some interesting side projects. Charlie "Jesus Christ" Manson was a hippy who auditioned for the Monkees and squatted in one of the Beach Boys' houses, before breaking away from show biz to develop his own sound. I used to own his live album too, but I sold it because it sucked balls. It was recorded in a prison and the main instrument was the toilet flushing in the background. But LIE: The Love And Terror Cult, an album released to help fund his trial expenses, is his real artistic statement.

Sadly, Charlie's image was a little too unorthodox for the mainstream charts.

The album starts with "Look At Your Game Girl", which would letter be covered by the Guns and Roses. This sets the standard that will be maintained throughout the artist's oeuvre, in which the lyrics start off coherent and flatten out into a repetitive drawl like something a crazy wall-slapper would say over and over. He then lurches into "Ego", an uptempo meditation on Freudian theory with a nice string break for variety.

In fact there's quite an impressive variety of sounds on this album, though almost all anchored to this cool-ass chunky guitar sound. Charlie's vocals are similarly varied, as he tries on different personae on the various tracks. "Mechanical Man" he sings like a mechanical person of some sort, and relays the sad story of his pet monkey who died, although this may not be entirely autobiographical.

Charlie also lets the Family girls chime in on "I'll Never Say Never To Always", which sounds exactly like the kind of slightly-off nursery rhyme type melody they used to put in horror movies in the 70s, so maybe Charlie invented the trend.

The production is a little rough around the edges, but that's good because it allows Charlie to spread out his ideas, which often seem like sketches and half-finished musings, but are always tuneful and intriguing.

It's a shame Charlie didn't pursue his music more successfully, because you could slip some of this stuff into a playlist of late-60s standards like Buffalo Springfield and Jefferson Airplane and Crackerjack Fuckface* and you'd never know. In a parallel universe somewhere Charlie is remembered as a rock star like Jim Morrison, instead of a crazy-eyed cult leader who cut a guy's ear off and his hangers-on killed people.

9/10 very good album.

*This is not a real band.

Trolling at the Movies: Pumpkin!!!

Hello friends! You may not have heard of Pumpkin, because no one has. I've never met someone who's seen Pumpkin, and I think it's because everyone tried to bury it. The writer and director team have no more credits after it on IMDb, as if everyone in the industry made sure they never worked again. They tried to forget the movie ever happened, because it trolled them so hard.

The expression of a star beginning to doubt the movie is exactly what it seems.

Pumpkin stars Christina Ricci (Buffalo 66) as a popular blonde sorority sister who, in a twist of fate that would make Shakespeare hang up his tights, falls madly in love with a special kid. The movie asks, Rachel Dolezal-style, a question so absurd as to be unanswerable: can retards love?

Trick question: everyone loves Christina Ricci.

Make no mistake: there is no expectation of an answer behind this. Rather, it is a work of trolling that obliterates the line between the ridiculous and the sublime. If you can get behind a normal person having a relationship with a differently clever person, you're OK with exploitation of the oblivious, but if you can't, you're saying people of slowness don't deserve to find love with hot sorority girls. I'm sorry, that wasn't very PC; "systers of elevated temperature". For people who care deeply about how compassionate and socially aware they look, this is a tortuous dilemma.

Pumpkin is a sensitive young man.

So Christina Ricci has a lark playing the opposite of her character from the Addams Family movies. But her world is turned urpside durn when she's assigned a neuro-atypical citizen to tutor! What ever could ensue????????

Oh.

On finding that she only has eyes for Pumpkin, her erstwhile boyfriend has a tearful breakdown in his car, resulting in the greatest crash ever on film, in which his car bursts into a huge, comet-like tail of fire as soon as it falls off the edge of the cliff, and burns all the way down. It's like a cross between an episode of Invitation to Love and a Jim Steinman song.

As you can see, Pumpkin is great. But I don't think you can appreciate how great it is unless you watch it. I can't even tell if Christina Ricci is complicit in the trolling, or is being trolled, so finely balanced is her performance.

I think she gets it, but won't let on.

It's a shame this movie didn't become more well known, because I would have loved to see people debate these stupid issues like they were real issues, the way people do today. Pumpkin was so ahead of its time it's unreal. Like Rachel Dolezal over a decade later, it revealed that, far from the developmentally disabled, it's the self-important and self-serious that are the true retards.

I found a site that lets you map out the effects of a nuke.

Here you go: http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

It must be nice to have a bastard like me give you all the best links on the inter net.

How many people died in UR hometown??? Post your score in the comments!!!

Movie Independence Day Presents: ***!!South of Heaven!!***

South of Heaven is the best movie ever.

Make Your Own Monument Valley: $4.99 at Bastardmart.

Like Streets of Fire, South of Heaven smushes genres together to create something fresh and different. It’s a little bit like Tarantino (but better), the Coen Brothers, early Lynch (Eraserhead to Elephant Man), Raimi, Peckinpah, and Happy Tree Friends.

It's not a party until everybody dies.

There are two brothers who are meant to be collaborating on a novel, but one of them’s run off with a psycho, played by Shea Wigham in the best performance ever: “Mad Dog”. So the other brother gets visited by these two vaudeville goons who think he’s the other brother so they kick the shit out of him. This lady from a film noir keeps hanging around. Shit gets real. “Mad Dog” sings a Depeche Mode song. Then they all meet up in a little house and there’s a showdown, but not quite the one you might expect.

This is the expression of a serious individual.

Anyway, the plot isn't really that important. What’s important is the movie’s style: all the exteriors are like sets with backdrops, the characters are designed after Tex Avery cartoons, George “The Animal” Steel makes a cameo where he just sits there, and “Mad Dog” has a speech about a chicken which is better than everything. Most indie-type filmmakers try to hedge their bets by making their movies all ironical, so if they suck they can say they did it on purpose. South of Heaven is a little bit different than that: the content is funny, but the characters are serious, so you might find you actually give a shit about what happens to them. It’s a dark-comic tone of a different flavour than your typical dark-comedy.

The shirt that heralds the end times.

The other reason to see it is because the DVD by Synapse Pictures is really sweet. I don’t normally care that much about DVD packages, but this one is textbook so you should all buy it twice and give a copy to your grandma (if she likes really violent film noir cartoon westerns). It’s got three feature commentaries and three short films that are actually really long (but really inventive as well). The short films are definitely up themselves, but still really good anyway. I want to marry this DVD and have human-DVD-hybrid babies with it. I think they’d look like this guy:

Anyway, see South of Heaven.

Mad Max Ripoffs: Wheels of Fire!!!

Time for another Mad Max ripoff, my pretties. This one is fondly remembered by genre fans for the topless lady who becomes a living hood ornament for the bad guys. I can only dream of the day I'll be a big enough bastard to drive around with a topless woman strapped to the hood of my car, and frequently do. I'd give her some stock lines to learn so when we got stuck in traffic she could yell abuse at the other drivers based on their cars. I couldn't see anything, and would run over everyone all the time, but it would be worth it.

Villain solves this problem by standing, which must be fun over long distances. Image censored for boobs, as we wouldn't want to upset anybody.

To understand how she came to be strapped to the car, you'd have to go back to a different time. A time when her boyfriend is trying to win a car or something by fighting some weed. The weed subs in a big guy and the boyfriend starts getting his ass beat. Just when all seems lost, our indifference is blown by the arrival of Trace, Hood Ornament's brother and our nominal hero, who rescues boyfriend from a beatdown. They're then chased through the desert until they separate for no reason, and the bad guys capture our heroine.

I shall call the villain Standy, Who Stands On Cars.

In a bold artistic choice, she plays the whole kidnapping and sexual torture scenario with a sort of half-bored indignation, almost as if her trauma has induced a state of bad acting. We can forgive this though, as it's absolutely hilarious.

But do not be mildly perturbed, dear readers!!! For Trace slowly develops a plan to save her, or at least a general feeling that he might. But first, he picks up some other chick with a pet hawk, who falls into a cave and finds another teammate, who claims to be psychic because she can tell the cannibals who live there are planning to eat her. I think this girl is full of shit, because all her psychic insights suspiciously resemble the bleeding obvious.

She also claims to be able to translate this dwarf's thoughts into English, because in Wheels of Fire, dwarfs have their own language.

After a while, Trace, Hawky and Psychic run into a bunch of fucking hippies who are building a space rocket to get off post-apocalyptic Earth and start a new life. It would be awesome if the movie ended with their rocket climbing a few hundred feet and then collapsing, but it didn't happen. Trace, however, immediately forgets about looking for his sister and starts arguing about politics with some guy, and then with Hawky, whom he then sexes in public, then he leaves. I think Trace is autistic.

How many people were they planning to fit into that rocket? Fuck if Wheels of Fire knows!

I won't give away the ending, but it's not that the hippies go to space in their rocket ship. Wheels of Fire is somewhat of a classic, but suffers from the same problems that most of these ripoffs do: they have plenty of cars, explosions, sexy women and shoulder pads, but they're shot so indifferently you might as well be watching security footage. There's a small scene in this one where Trace sneaks up behind a rock before moving on, only it's filmed from in front of the rock, so what we're actually looking at is a rock covering most of the screen. They should have put the camera on the other side of the rock, with Trace. And that, my friends, is a free film school lesson for you.

Post-apocalypse checklist:

MOHAWKS: none.

SHOULDER PADS: a couple of bad guys have them, but nothing special.

CUSTOM CARS: there's a nice one with spikes, Trace has a flamethrower and grill attached to his, and naturally the bad guys accessorise theirs with Playboy Girl.

MUTANTS: underground cannibals that resemble the Morlocks from the 1960 version of The Time Machine, and presumably the psychic, unless she's just bullshitting.

GOGGLES: one of the bad guys and one of the hippies has them.

TOTAL: 4/5 - very post-apocalyptic.

"Humongous future in greeting cards" is the "I coulda been a contender" of St Elmo's Fire.

Remember St Elmo's Fire? The people in that movie thought the future was gonna be so great, because it was the 80s. Haha, fools.

The British rail network is a joke.

Video: a train recently leaking. Britain confirmed for third world country.

The rail network in Britbongistan is the oldest in the world and runs like it hasn't been updated since. Delays of anything from half an hour to several hours are considered normal, carriages are generally overcrowded, and there's always some old hag reading the Daily Mail. It's getting so bad that this generation of Britbongs don't even know simple rules of Bongish etiquette, like never sit next to or opposite someone. When I were a lad (I were never a lad), up to two thirds of a carriage's inhabitants would stand to avoid the terrible awkwardness of sitting next to someone. Diagonal was acceptable, but still frowned on, as it should be.

I was at a station recently where we weren't sure which of two late trains would arrive first, and on which platform. When we asked a worker which way we should gamble, she said "stay at the top of the stairs, and whichever one gets in first, run for it".

Do you remember when people in the 20th Century thought the 21st would be like the Jetsons? But instead, it was like the Flintstones.

I think we should add up all the times trains are delayed, and for every twenty-four hours of delay-time, we should keel-haul Richard Branson behind one of his shit-ass trains for ten minutes. I think this would see a dramatic improvement, but the government has yet to reply to my letters :(

12 rebel flags too hot for public viewing!!!

Mad Max Ripoffs: The New Barbarians!!!

Mad Max and The Road Warrior were among the most important movies of the late 70s and early 80s, a golden age in which the trashy and the classy briefly merged, resulting in a slew of genre pictures that were way better than ever before, like Halloween, the Star Wars trilogy, and The Shining. What was trashy? What was classy? People were literally confused. But never fear, anxious reader!!! For based Italy stepped in to restore genre movies to their wonderfully crappy B-roots with a bunch of post-apocalyptic ripoffs. Possibly the most infamous was...The New Barbarians!!!

"Books. That's what started the whole apocalypse!" - actual dialogue

You can tell a lot about a movie by its first image, and this one opens with a bunch of dead bodies in hazmat suits. The first one has boob domes; it has domes for boobs.

For the exhibitionist hazmat enthusiast.

So the plot involves the Templars, a group that drives around killing people to "purify" the earth, and their enemy, Scorpion, who spends his time driving around in circles and engaging in periodic shootouts with a small child who acts as his mechanic. The boy uses a catapult, Dennis the Menace-style, and Scorpion uses his handgun, which is very responsible. At first I assumed he didn't know it was a child who was attacking him, but the dialogue confirms they know each other and do this all the time, so I guess post-apocalyptic Italy just has less of a taboo about shooting at kids.

The Templars want to kill Scorpion, but they're not that fussed about it, as several scenes of conflict end with them pulling up next to each other, exchanging a few words, and then driving off like nothing happened.

"lol don't worry about this bad guy. We'll get him next week"

Along the way, Scorpion rescues a big-haired woman and is in turn rescued repeatedly (but very slowly) by a guy named Nadir, who dresses like a cross between a samurai and pimp, and is obsessed with being "the best", presumably to spite the parents who gave him a name that means "the worst".

The kid, the Templars and Nadir all know Scorpion, and it sort of seems like everyone just follows him around for want of anything better to do. No one really likes him, especially Nadir, who, on finding Scorpion being dragged behind a procession of Templars, very slowly shoots each one of them in turn, saving the one doing the dragging for last. Thanks, Nadir!

Nadir poses with Scorpion's car. Note the glowing green dome screaming "here I am" in a hostile wilderness.

There's also a completely inexplicable scene where the main Templar, Juan, apparently rapes Scorpion, except the way it's edited it kind of looks like he never removed his crotch piece, meaning he just awkwardly dry-humped Scorpion in front of all his minions.

You should definitely see The New Barbarians, because it's stupid and awesome. The movie also has a great moral that I can totally get behind:

"The more of a bastard you are, the surer you are to win" - the wisdom of a child

Post-apocalypse checklist:

MOHAWKS: one, purple.

SHOULDER PADS: all the Templars and Nadir have them.

CUSTOM CARS: Scorpion's has a detachable driver-side door, extendable drill, dome that lights up green at night, and rocket launcher in the boot. The Templars' have extendable whirring blades, drills and flamethrowers.

MUTANTS: some scavengers look like they might be.

GOGGLES: Big Hair has a fuckhueg red-tinted pair, for great justice.

TOTAL: 5/5 - totally post-apocalyptic.

Blunt Force Troma: Graduation Day!!!

Troma is great and slasher movies are great, so how great must a Troma slasher movie be? Well, the director's name is Herb Freed, perhaps in honour of 4/20. The killer stabs someone with a football-on-a-sword, for no fucking reason. And it features one of my favourite, and the stupidest, kills of all time.

Gaze into the armpit of terror.

So Graduation Day opens with a runner at a high school sporting event. She wins her race but keels over at the finish line. The film then cuts back and forth between her boyfriend cradling her dead body and the crowd watching about fifty billion times, perhaps because the editor had freed some herb that morning. We're then introduced to the runner's sister and Final Girl, who's returned home from the Navy just in time for Graduation Day, even though she doesn't go to school and her deceased sister presumably isn't graduating anymore.

The plot involves someone killing off members of the sports team, prefiguring all-time classic Night of the Dribbler, which is a real movie. Who is the killer? Could it be the coach who pushes his athletes to the limit? The principal who's boinking his secretary? Linnea Quigley? Yes, Linnea Quigley is in this movie, replacing some other actress who appears in early scenes they never bothered to reshoot. Or could it be...roller disco?

mfw no roller disco at my graduation: :{

Despite being a roller disco, this scene revolves around a band who wear fedoras and makeup and sing interminably about "The Gangster Rock". The whole scene seems like an attempt to one-up the flamboyant gayness of Prom Night, and it almost comes close.

The saddest thing about this movie is that the killer barely gets to do his own shtick at all before being discovered. He wears a fencing mask and carries a sword, but we only really see him once, carving up a couple of victims outside the roller disco. He hops out from some trees and does this hilarious little dance where he hops from one foot to the other before charging after his prospective mark. I think this guy and Prom Night guy should have a movie of their own, like Freddy Vs Jason.

come back I want to sword you

But the real high point of Graduation Day is a kill so dumb it makes sitting through all seven and a half minutes of "Gangster Rock" seem worth it. One of the last surviving members of the track team, seemingly oblivious to both the murders and the fact it's Graduation Day, goes out by himself to practise his pole vault. The pole hits the floor and we hear a scream, as it's revealed that he's pole vaulted onto a bed of spikes:

Right in the knee.

I love this kill so much I want it to be in every horror movie, even the classy ones like The Shining. How did the killer know this guy would be here on this of all days, and that no one else would be? Where did he get the spikes? Maybe he didn't know, and just put spikes everywhere he thought the team were likely to go: their lockers, the showers, even the track itself. What's even better about this scene is that it comes out of nowhere and is never remarked upon. Ah, Graduation Day killer, you were taken from us too soon.