artm

Recently I’ve watched (not all films are horror, but i’ll list them anyway)

Army of Darkness (1992) (comedy / fantasy)

A sequel to Evil Dead 2, but only interesting if you’re a fan of Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbel, which luckily I am. This was a part of the rewatching the trilogy which I spread through 9 months.

Night of the Living Dead - 1990 (zombies)

Remake of Romero’s classic. Really enjoyed, the remake stays true to the mood of original while changing tiny bits in the plot here and there so you don’t get bored if you know the classical 1968 Night by heart. I really love the so un-holliwood-esque ambiguity of Ben’s character!

Dead Next Door (1988) (zombies)

No budget movie done right. Most actors play like shit, but who cares - they haven’t got payed! All money (which, I learned, came from Sam Raimi and specifically from Evil Dead 2) went into gore effects.

Day of the Dead (1985) (zombies)

Third part of Romero’s dead series, haven’t seen it for some time and loved it again.

Maniac (1934) (vintage / mad scientist)

Excellent bad movie, allegedly after Edgar Alan Poe’s story, allegedly one of the first gore exploitation movies. Superb dialogs (”I think we speak the same language. I am right?”/”I don’t get what you mean. Same language?”) , cat eating the living hart scene, squeezing the cat’s eye out scene, eating the squeezed out cat’s eye scene, title cards relating the symptoms of mental conditions etc. Next time I’m watching it drunk!

Rashomon (1950) (not horror)

Kurosawa’s breakthrough film, very nice fable.

El Laberinto del Fauno (2006) (not really horror)

I watched this one because Steve Eely mentioned it on Escape Pod and said his wife had to close her eyes at some scenes. That scared Miekje from watching it, but after I’ve seen it I think she would have liked it too. It’s a fantasy / reality mashup, like ‘’Narnia'’ or ‘’Harry Potter'’ but less corny, with a hint of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or something like that. It really could qualify as horror in the old times.

Faster pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) (not horror)

Great movie, evo sais it’s camp although the characters in there are anything but drag queens. Like usually not much to say about the great ones - I hate to spoil the fun for others.

Cannibal Holocaust (1980) (cannibals)

Although classified as exploitation movie, this one had a potential of being a good one if it weren’t for slaughtered animals. I really regreted watching it after I found out about that. To make sure you’re not interested: ‘’Bair Witch Project'’ is a better implementation of the same idea without animal torture.

Zombie Holocaust (1980) (zombies/cannibals)

One huge black plot hole so heavy that light cannot escape. It’s less coherent then ‘’Plan 9 From Outer Space'’, but slightly less pathetic (and I don’t mean it as a compliment). A must see for every C-movie buff. Either all “Italian” movies in the eighties had to start in New York and proceede in some remote location where “primitives” acted weird, or it’s a shameless and failing attempt to feed on success of the Cannibal Holocaust. So, to avoid watching the latter watch ‘’Zombie Holocaust'’ and ‘’Blair Witch Project'’ in one session, you’ll get the picture.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006) (hollywood slasher)

Nice prequel for the remake. Wow, that sounds cheesy! The movie isn’t though. Just another proof of superiority of the genre :-) The only thing I’m not so sure about is the whole rationalisation of the Hewitts: what the fuck? Am I supposed to understand them now? Feel sorry for poor inbreeds? Is it a psychological-fucking-thriller all of a sudden? Come on, it’s Tommy Leatherface, enigmatic chainsaw bearing psychopat, I don’t need no know why! And green war stories of Sherif Hoyt wannabe neither.

But at those sore moments I just read swedish subtitles and got the rational compensated to hell.

Za ginipiggu 2: Chiniku no hana (Guinea Pig 2: Flowers of Flesh and Blood) (1985) (minimalist experimental gore porn/japanese poetry)

Hehe, this was fun. I shouldn’t say that though, because the girl gets dismembered and she was somebody’s daughter and all. Sound effects are fantastic, gore fans tend to complain because they aren’t realistic, but well, I liked them anyway.

I wanted to know what the hell the guy was saying but could only find some sped up Spanish subtitles. Spanish haiku made it even funnier then it already is. The last scene made me thank entertainment industry for not having invented smell tv yet. May be they will never do because Japanese gore makers will do terrible things with it. Engineers would rather make more nukes then stunk chips.

Hostel (2005) (alleged torture porn)

This is often claimed to be an example of gorno / torture porn, but I don’t buy it - stupid build up takes 40 minutes. The final scene made me suspect Paxton will retur to the club as a customer one day. Some nice FX, and some terrible cut aways, as if director would scream “Cut!” to the torturer, but camera man would think it was to him. Homeless children murdering two oversized criminals was the saddest slapstick in years.

Psycho (1960) (psychiatric thriller)

This was the first time I couldn’t recall the slightest bit of the movie that I have seen before. I guess dementia took a hold of me, or may be it was my different personality that seen Psycho the last time.

The shower scene wasn’t that scary, but I somehow didn’t expect Arbogast to get killed as well (I had false memory of a scene with him further in the movie) and was shocked when he was. But it’s really not about scary scenes, but about scary Norman, and Perkins does a great job playing. Stuffed mother adds a hint of what’s coming in the dead department.

Apparently Norman is based on the same creep as Leatherface and the guy from ‘’Silence of the Lambs'’ (not Hannibal, but the other one).

Man with the screaming brain (2005) (low budget b-comedy)

This is a pseudo-80’s pseudo-horror comedy by Bruce Campbel, not really worth viewing. It took Bruce 20 years to make (so it is 80’s movie after all?) and it’s pretty lame. The plot is typical fopr early mad scientist horror flicks but trying too hard to not be able to be taken seriously. I guess it’s impossible to make a modern movie in this genre without tongue cutting all the way through the cheek.

Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed. Nobody can see what’s printed on the contract. It’s too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody’s eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract. Everybody dives in the trench and they struggle furiously to get to the other end. Two people arrive simultaneously and begin wrestling furiously, clawing each other and dunking each other under the shit. Eventually, one of them capitulates, and there’s only one contestant left. He reaches for the pen, but the Lackey says “Actually, I think you need a little more development. Swim again, please. Backstroke”. And he does of course.

Steve Albiny, “The problem with music”

Ah, that’s also how Idols (or American Idol, Pop Stars etc) work! Now each time I zap into one of those shows I’ll be sensing the stench. Hmm… Actually I always did.

Recently I’ve been listening to and downloading a lot of creative commons licensed music from jamendo. It’s a great service and they have a lot of strange music there which is just what I need. I star the albums I like, you can follow them with RSS aggregator (feed, or subscribe to it in your favorite aggregator).

A lot of music there is french and from the day one I was annoyed by accented characters in tags being fucked up. I blamed it on my player of choice but apparently it was jamendo’s encoder problem and they knew about it. Recoding solutuion was pretty simple, you’ll need pytagger library for python. But consider recoding copies of non-popular albums so you continue to seed the originals, at least until jamendo crew fixed the database.

I think both jamendo’s encoding software and current python’s unhealthy approach to unicode are to blame. And hopefully they’ll resolve the problem soon.