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New at 366Weird: The Manitou!

Over at 366 Weird, my latest cinematic safari is a special treat: The Manitou (1978). A serious contender for the campiest Exorcist ripoff ever made, it’s a thrill ride of one “WTF?” moment piled onto another.

Whose idea was it to cast Tony Curtis in the lead? Who decided “native American medicine man” is a close-enough substitute for Catholic demons? Why did the 400-year-old medicine man pick this woman out of the blue to incubate his neck-rupturing reincarnation? Why did they go with a frozen hospital with meat-popsicle nurses frozen mid-wave? Why is this suddenly turning into 2001: A Space Odyssey? And why is it always black magic or white magic, doesn’t magic come in any other colors? We will never know, but even the late, great Roger Ebert had to warn people to set down their coffee before continuing the review.

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I Reviewed a Fistful of Giallos at 366Weird

OK, if two Giallo movies count as “a fistful,” that’s how many I covered at 366Weird lately and haven’t had the time to blog-blab about it yet. Forgive me if I burrow under the icebergs once in awhile, I am a busy penguin. That’s reviews of The Fifth Cord (1971) and All the Colors of the Dark (1972).

I loves me some Giallo, so much so that the editors at 366Weird pretty much leave everything in that genre up to me now. Even though I’ll be the first to admit that Giallo movies are often hokey, derivative, and usually out of their mind, I can’t get enough of the atmosphere, arty filming, and pulp fiction vibe from this charming little corner of cinema.

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A Magic: The Gathering shopper’s guide

Conventional wisdom among spike tournament players is that you NEVER, ever ever buy boxed MTG products or even booster packs. Yeah, but like all absolutes, isn’t that not always true? Here, I define some of the typical boxed products that at least come close to a decent value for the money, pointing out the “Best Magic! the Gathering Sealed Products.”

And I’m of course speaking as a collector and player myself. Strategic MTG investment has worked almost like a second career with me over the years. Keeping an eye out for good value purchases I can break up and sell for individual value helps me stay in the game, even on my pauper-level freelancer budget!

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New Review at 366Weird: Dark Star (1974)

After far, far too long a time, I finally popped the movie Dark Star (1974) off the reader-requested review queue at 366 Weird Movies. Not only is it a long-standing cult favorite for being the first theatrical release for both John Carpenter and Dan O’Bannon when they were still film students, it’s also a quirky and unique sci-fi comedy whose “hippies in space” motif is just enough to flirt with the list of weirdest movies of all time.

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IMGUR posts: 1980s Action Figures and Vintage Pulp Novel Cover Art

So you all might be noticing by now, I’ve been tinkering around with IMGUR a lot lately. I can’t help getting hold of a social media platform and eventually experimenting with it to see what kinds of nifty posts I can make in that medium. The IMGUR format is underappreciated; it’s more like a super-Tumblr since you can post any amount of text appended to images and chain images together into albums. Not bad for a site that originally started as a side-feature for Reddit.

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My IMGUR image essay on a peculiar sci-fi trope went viral

I couldn’t help but notice a trend as I explored the covers of pulp genre media. In sci-fi, horror, and speculative fiction in general, there’s one damsel-in-distress pose that’s almost guaranteed to show up. It’s rampant on comic books and pulp fiction novels, and shows up in TV and film spanning from the earliest decades to the most recent.

I’m talking, of course, about women in glass tubes. And once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere, until you have to wonder if there’s a global conspiracy to encase females in crystal cylinders. Many golden age sci-fi rags did it; some did it up to three times in their print run. Video media has done it from the original run of The Outer Limits to the film The Hunger Games. It was even performed as a science experiment at a world’s fair! Women in glass tubes, nicknamed “tube girls,” just fill the genre to the point where you never find the end of it.

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IMGUR dump: Vintage Science Fiction from the Golden Age

My latest IMGUR image essay is a tour of Golden Age Science and Speculative Fiction. It’s a nostalgic trip through sci fi as I discovered it growing up, from TV series to movies to magazines to the glory of paperback novel hounding at used bookstores. It was a damn fun post to throw together and I hope everyone has fun remembering the classics or discovering the forgotten gems from the sub-Atomic Age of Sci-Fi.

UPDATE – Related science fiction stuff:

 

New at 123ish: The day social media did something right for once

Look, down in the dump! It’s #trashtag, the social media challenge that made people realize they could use tag games for good! No longer do they have to choke down spoonfuls of cinnamon or run around blindfolded staggering into traffic. They can help clean up public places and score Internet up-arrows at the same time.

It’s small, but it’s progress. baby steps, baby steps.

Random links related to things I’ve said about social media before:

 

New At 366: Run Away To Frankenstein Island!

Cor blimey, it feels good to finally get Frankenstein Island off my to-review list! 366Weird indulged my Apocrypha recommendation, read this hysterical mess and marvel at the bad B-movie even MST3K never touched!

Oh, and if you tried to visit this site in the past ~48 hours and found it gronked, that’s because a hosted server update clobbered my custom .htaccess Apache voodoo, and I had to grovel to tech support to reset everything and then re-install new, improved voodoo. I can now commence transmitting my madness to the unsuspecting Interwebs.

But wait, there’s more! You’re here because you’re curious about legendary schlock-director Jerry Warren’s magnum opus, so here’s some bonus material outside the normal scope of a 366Weird write-up:

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New at 123ish.com: Is Disney A Monopoly, And Should We Be Worried?

Disney has recently raised some harrumphs in the geek community for becoming the owner of both Lucasfilm and Marvel properties. Is that enough to make Disney The Mouse That Roared? I discuss that question in the context of the big picture: In 2019, what media company isn’t a gigantic, world-crushing monopoly? As I demonstrate, hardly any.

As an addendum, literally the day after I posted this, rumor has it that Disney may shut down Marvel Comics right after acquiring it. If so, my prediction there:

“And here Disney just acquired two properties which – hold your fire, please – may prove to not be so valuable in a few years’ time.”

…proved more prophetic than I intended. Oops.

Other Disney-related things I’ve had to say over the years:

  • The Cult of Don Bluth – Former Disney animator, he struck out a career on his own and briefly beat the Mouse that Roared at his own game. Now fighting to get the classic arcade game Dragon’s Lair realized on screen.
  • Forgotten Gems Of Disney’s Dork Age – Disney put Generation X through hell in the 1970s, but these were its least stinky turkeys during that creative holocaust.
  • Best Disney Villain Figures – Paying tribute to the best of the baddest in Disney, with handsome collectible figurines.

Seriously, I don’t say much about Disney because it overall sucks.