Month: February 2019

New at 366Weird: Eating Raoul (1982)

At long last, I got the opportunity to vindicate this gonzo cannibal comedy for the brilliant social satire it was: Light-years ahead of its time. I offer Eating Raoul (1982) as a candidate for the Weird Movies’ List apocrypha.

Paul Bartel was writer, director, and co-lead, which makes this probably his magnum opus in his too-short career. But for what few opportunities he did find, Paul Bartel was a master of deadpan black comedy, albeit a little too reserved for the tastes of modern audiences.

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New at 123ish: If You Mourned NASA’a Opportunity Like A Lost Pet, This One’s For You

Why do humans anthropomorphize inanimate objects? Here we are on the brink of advances in AI, and we’re still failing the reverse Turing test with a simple shell script from the 1960s. Let’s explore the curious twists and turns of how humans relate to technology and get to know the Eliza effect. And maybe you won’t be impressed with Eliza, but you won’t be forgetting Laurie B. Andrews any time soon…

Related: My previous nattering on how much power AI is getting over us even now.

More stuff about robots and AI:

 

Two IMGUR Galleries Revisit Nightmares Of 20th-Century Kitsch

I don’t mean to gripe, but Millennials sure demand a lot of attention. There’s twenty stories about them per day; they’re killing this thing, they’re embracing that thing, they have it tough because this, they react because that.

Meanwhile, Generation X is over here passed over both ways. We got a couple minutes in the spotlight in the 1990s and that was the end of us. Which suits most of us, but when I keep hearing about how rotten the Millennials have it, that’s the part I get sick of hearing about. Money did not rain from the sky before Millennials were born. Somehow I jumped directly from the have-nots line to the “privileged elite” line while still being the same broke-ass slacker I was in 1990.

As an example of Generation X gripes we never got the chance to air, I present “Kitschy Nightmares From Satan’s Thrift Store” and “Vintage Magazine Ads,” both wry observations of pop culture in the mid-20th century. This, kids, is what your poor papa and mama had to live through. Which is why we’re so funny.

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New at 366Weird: LEMORA: A CHILD’S TALE OF THE SUPERNATURAL (1973)

I’m probably, what, one of the five or so bloggers to review this forgotten nightmare? Brace yourself for an edgy take on the vampire mythos with our review of Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural. Your skin crawling may not be entirely from the conventional scares.

This movie is a freak in so many other ways!

  • The only movie directed by Richard Blackburn
  • The only acting role for Lesley Taplin
  • Starring exploitation actress Cheryl Smith when she was of sub-legal age (and playing a 13-year-old).

Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith would go on to a famously seedy B-movie career including Caged Heat, The Swinging Cheerleaders, and Video Vixens!, but also cult movies like Phantom of the Paradise, The Incredible Melting Man, and Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid. Sadly, her star set too soon when she died from heroin complications.

I don’t write about vampires often, so here’s some other monsters I have written about…

 

New at 123ish.com: It’s Time To Embrace The Bio-Tech Age!

We live in a dark new age of science denial. From anti-vaxxers to anti-GMO to climate change denial, science is under attack on so many fronts at once that the prospect of progress seems doomed. And in the middle of all that, I’m demanding that we go full warp speed ahead on bio-technology.

Yes, we may have a bumpy path resolving some of the stickier ethical questions of genetic engineering and cloning, but it’s a journey well worth taking if it rewards us with cures for disease, better agriculture, and perhaps a cure for human rock-headedness. Dare to dream!

More of my pro-science advocacy:

 

Gimme Your Weird Love: Our 366Weird Picks For Valentine’s Flicks

Valentine’s Day just got very warped: Three of us weird cinephiles (your humble author included) pick our top five weird movies to celebrate Valentine’s Day. Is your vision of love bizarre and unconventional? Do you hope to win a mate over by your quirks alone? Is your idea of the perfect couple closer to The Addams Family than mainstream rom-coms?

Well you got 15 (don’t sweat the math, I checked) certified weirdest movies to choose from to mark this pesky wanna-be holiday. Giles even wrote a poem about it! What a hoot!

XOXOKQ : But bonus content has since been added:

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Geek Gifts Lists: Valentine’s Ideas

So it’s almost Valentine’s Day here, and you know we’re all about the geek love at Penguin Pete’s! I don’t usually do this kind of thing, but conveniently one of my gigs is at Krononaut, which curates lists of cool stuff we find on Amazon.

What’s the difference between that and the zillion other Amazon list blogs out there? Well, we make sure the product is in stock, has a price range in the median of ~$40 for a comfortable disposable income budget, and we organize things by theme. If you happened to be looking for a certain niche item, you can search Amazon and wade through pages of irrelevant results, or grab one of our lists and have a concise assortment between six and ten items long that’s targeted exactly at what you were shopping for. Sound nifty? You’ve no idea!

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Reasons Why I’m Not Popular On Social Media:

  1. I’m not suicidal. If I was, I wouldn’t be burdening millions of strangers with my tragic situation.

  2. I’m not bent, broken, destroyed, or despondent of all hope, and even if I was, the last thing I’d do is reach out to the Internet for support. I would go to the doctor.

  3. I never did heroin, so I have nothing to celebrate being two weeks clean and sober from. I would think I would get credit for never having done heroin in the first place, but apparently you’re only a good person if you did do heroin, then quit and brag about it.

  4. I get my pets the old-fashioned way from a local shelter, not rescuing a shivering abused stray from a dumpster and nursing it back from the brink of starvation. It’s my fault for not staking out dumpsters more.

  5. I’m not at all socially awkward. I’m perfectly comfortable making eye contact and small talk. I’ve even managed to stay married for a sustained length of time. Damn me for working to be such a well-adjusted person.

  6. I don’t have fourteen grandmothers who die every month so I can post memorials about them.

  7. I never had cancer, so I can’t kick its ass. I’m smoking as fast as I can over here, but no luck.

  8. I’m not blown away by nostalgia for something that just happened, nor do I consider myself in an exclusive club just for remembering something that a bunch of other people remember.

  9. I don’t know the names of any porn stars. This is because I’m simply not that impressed with porn to follow it that closely.

  10. I don’t get into petty fights with my work partners, rage-quit, then miraculously land a new job offer the next day with a prestigious company at twice my former pay.

  11. I don’t get disproportionately outraged over minor inconveniences. If it happens to me, I figure it’s probably happened to several other people who didn’t feel the need to make a big scene about it.

  12. I use proper spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Should I sue my school for making me unpopular?

  13. I don’t pimp my children in staged “pranks” which will traumatize them for life. I had kids because I wanted to raise human beings, not for access to slave labor to enhance my ego.

  14. Most things do not offend me. Even when they do, I get over it fast.

  15. If I see a celebrity, I leave them alone because I think that’s what they want. Consequently, I have no archive of selfies of me next to famous people with a strained smile trying to be polite.

  16. I don’t get outraged at people not being the fans of the same media franchises I’m a fan of.

  17. I’m not threatened by people from other demographics, so I don’t post anything bigoted about them to be validated by other people with the same bigotries.

  18. I do not have anybody bake me a cake themed after anything in pop culture. I don’t even like cake. If I’m hungry enough to get food, I’m too hungry to take its picture before I eat it.

  19. I don’t spontaneously repost, like, and share everyone who does any of the above.

  20. I don’t consider it worth the effort to lie about any of the above.

 

I’m just an old man who doesn’t get it, I guess.

 

New at 123ish: If Anybody Cared About Climate Change, We Could Have Solved It By Now

What do we do about climate change? Stop setting things on fire, duh! Start using alternative energy everywhere instead of fossil fuels. It’s not a “tomorrow” technology, as I point out, we’re had solar and wind power licked for years, even decades.

I’d just like to point out on my local Iowa scene: MidAmerican is at 50% renewable energy and is making plans to go 100%. They can’t do this without real estate to park the wind turbines, however, so please, folks, let’s be tolerant of a few wind turbines in the neighborhood if it means cheaper energy bills, less dependence on fossil fuels, and a happy, healthy planet? Small sacrifice, right? I’ve visited wind turbines, they’re not that bad to live near.

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New post up at 123ish: The Putin-Trump Madness Vortex!

I know the story has dominated the front page and top of the news hour for the past two years now, but I fear most of you out there just haven’t been impressed with what a huge global thing this Putin-Trump collusion thing is. Visit my recap of the most insane depths of the story by way of conspiracy theories rotating around Vladimir Trump, Donald Putin, or both. In my tribute to the late, great Robert Anton Wilson, I just dig up the rumors and mix them all up in a tasty crazy salad and serve them cold.

You think you’ve heard it all about this story, but did you hear about the time traveler theory? The killer mutant robot squid-octopus? The slave-children of Mars? I rounded up more crazy theories than a Russian hooker can pee on. If you’re scared from realizing you don’t know what’s truth and what’s fiction anymore – you’re not nearly scared enough!

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