Category: Media

News At 366 Weird Movies – I’m in a book!

A few of my reviews whirled by over at 366 Weird Movies while I was too busy with other things (week off for Father’s Day and all that). To catch up:

CAPSULE: AGAINST THE CLOCK (2019) – A messy mish-mosh of cyberpunk spy thriller themes, as half-baked as the sloppy CGI fractals and hyperactive jump cuts that frame this abortion of a film.

CAPSULE: KEOMA (1976) – Could have been a contender for the last great spaghetti western, but is ruined by the Soundtrack From Hell. Yes, you heard right, and you’ll wish you’d never heard. You’re asking of course, how bad can this possibly be? Here’s a sample. Now imagine that crotch-splitting abomination going on for the ENTIRE MOVIE. That’s right, it never shuts up, a continuous Greek chorus obliterating every serious moment for the 105 minute run-time.

CAPSULE: HARD TICKET TO HAWAII (1987) – A harmless descendant of Miami Vice, with lots of booby cheesecake and a loose story that has something impenetrable to do with a snake, a toilet, a blow-up doll, a skateboard, and a razor-edged Frisbee.

But let’s get to the important part

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Spookwire: The Eerie Mystery Of Phantom Social Workers

Hold onto your prayer beads, late-night browsers, because I’ve got a new gig that’s destined to scare the wits out of you! I’ll be blogging for Spookwire, a new site dedicated to the creepy, unexplained, and paranormal. From horror movies to conspiracy theories and every real-life intrigue in between, if it’s spooky, we do it!

So to one of our opening posts: The Eerie Mystery Of Phantom Social Workers. This has been a real-life event in the UK and US, and was related to a media circus on both sides of the pond. I touch on the US Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s, with the McMartin Preschool “trial,” and the gigantic Scotland Yard investigation over in the UK.

In brief, parents have reported home visits from people claiming to be social workers, who examine the home and threaten to take away the kids. But later calls to the government reveal no such persons worked there and no social welfare visits scheduled. So where do they come from, and what do they want? It’s a chilling question with some alarming theories to answer it.

 

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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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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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 366Weird: The Movie I Never Dared Pitch For The List!

After all these years as a staffie at 366WeirdMovies.com, the list is finally filled! And so it is now safe for me to utter The Movie Which I Dared Not Name – a film so bad, it drives celebrated Chicago film critics to fits of live televised rage.

I got to thinking about it via GoodBadFlicks – one of my favorite YouTube review channels – and their heartwarming defense of one of my favorite weird movies, Nothing But Trouble (1991). What the hell, why not embed that here:

Nothing But Trouble was my veto-proof nominee for the list of weirdest movies ever made, and I’ve caught a lot of flack for it, though everybody has to admit yes, it’s weird. My point (and it’s echoed repeatedly on the site) is that a movie doesn’t have to be good to be weird.