jetpack_monkey_ljarchive

It's been 25 years since Joel and the bots started riffing on KTMA in Minneapolis. After a year of that, they moved to cable and into our hearts.

My sense of humor is partially defined by the wacky hijinks of this show and I love it to pieces. Watch some tonight, won't you?

Have you? It's a great West Coast slash con full of friendly people talking fannish stuff. This year it's at the Four Points Sheraton LAX.

http://www.escapadecon.net

Here's my con report from last year.

I was interviewed to add a male fannish perspective to an LA Weekly article on slash fiction. I made it very clear to the interviewer that I would be upset if I was anything but a very small voice in the overall article, because the story of slash is not, by and large, a story about dudes. So to speak.

In any case, I was pleased that my part in the article was very small (although I'm a little annoyed that nearly half was taken up by me talking about the rough time I had at my first Escapade -- while true, I feel that my experience was probably an isolated one). However, a huge part of the article was taken up by male showrunners being kind of dickish. Which, you know, sky blue and grass green, news at 11.

Went to a lovely wedding in Georgia over the weekend, but that's another post.

Edited to correct "the first Escapade" to "my first Escapade" because I didn't know what slash fiction was when the first Escapade was happening.

The great Festivids redactening has begun!

I'm not actually sure I'll make a vid of the film I saw last night, but I want to leave my options open. Also, it makes writing this post super-easy.

This is just a quick post, because I don't have a lot to say about this one. It's the first of three feature spin-offs from HBO's Tales from the Crypt anthology series, followed quickly by Bordello of Blood and much less quickly by Ritual (which is also somewhat interesting in that it is a remake of I Walked with a Zombie, although I suspect with actual horror*).

Basically, this is a fun, dumb horror-action flick with some gross makeup effects and a delightful performance by Billy Zane as a demonic tempter trying to get his hands on a relic that will bring on the apocalypse. Most of the film is a mix of an amped-up Night of the Living Dead and an amped-down The Evil Dead with some crazy-ass comic-style visuals courtesy of director Ernest R. Dickerson (a fantastic director who mainly does television now). Also in the cast (and uniformly great) are William Sadler, Jada Pinkett Smith, Brenda Bakke, CCH Pounder, Gary Farmer, Thomas Haden Church, and B-movie stalwart Dick Miller.

* I Walked with a Zombie lacks an element necessary to a horror-film-as-horror-film in that, discounting xenophobia, there is at no point any real threat toward any of our protagonists. This isn't revealing the big twist. It's just not there. It's a bunch of people in a mess with some voodoo at the edges.

Once again, incredibly early, but I love Festivids and I get very excited.

Dear Festividder,

Here we are again. This is my third year in Festivids. This could be your first, your fourth, or somewhere in between. If it is your first time, I hope my requests do not terrify you in their verbosity. If you've been doing this for a while... I hope my requests do not terrify you in their verbosity. In any case, thank you for being awesome and adding to the Festivids experience!

Festivids is probably my favorite time of year, because vidders get to share the things they love with each other!

I hope that you have fun making whatever vid you make and that you love the end result. Festivids is about sharing love and squee and feelings and I will be happy with whatever you make for any of these seven fandoms, especially if you love them even one-tenth as much as I do.

Music-wise, I am easy-going. The right song is the right song for a vid. I do have a bulletproof musical kink for Celtic-infused folk and/or rock music, but in general, my tastes are cast far and wide -- rock, pop, folk, bluegrass, dance, alternative (whatever that means), singer-songwriter, rap, metal, emo, punk, New Wave, etc. I've found that genres I don't care for become amazing when they are the right choice for a vid, so there's nothing you should really avoid, as long as it's appropriate to whatever you're making.

The shortlist:
Almost Famous (2000) [safety]
The Body Snatcher (1945) [safety]
Gravity Falls (2012)
The Howling (1981) [safety]
Raumpatrouille / Space Patrol Orion (1966)
The Thin Man series
Vertigo (1958) [safety]

( Almost Famous (2000) )

( The Body Snatcher (1945) )

( Gravity Falls )

( The Howling (1981) )

( Raumpatrouille / Space Patrol Orion (1966) )

( The Thin Man series )

( Vertigo (1958) )

Thank you so much for taking part in this amazing time of year. I just know that you're going to come up with something great!

Hugs and squee,
Jetpack Monkey

Needed something more sedate after Ghostwatch, so I plugged in Michael Curtiz's The Walking Dead, which is about as horror-lite as you can get while still qualifying as a horror film. Boris Karloff plays an ex-con who is framed for the murder of a judge. He's executed just before the evidence that would have exonerated him comes to light. A kindly scientist resurrects him with New Science, but he comes back an amnesiac. However, he seems to recognize the people who framed him -- even the ones he never met before. One by one he confronts them and one by one they die.

Oddly enough for a horror film, his confronting them and their dying are not connected by murder. In each case, they suffer an accident brought on by a combination of tension and guilt. Karloff's character never kills anyone and there are suggestions throughout the film that he is acting as an agent of God.

It's a very strange little film, but recommended for a bravura Karloff performance and Curtiz's excellent direction.

I forgot to post yesterday and I, um, neglected to watch a horror film because Spartacus. Blame sweetestdrain . Anyway. Luckily for everyone, on Saturday I watched two horror films, so I can post about both now.

The Howling, watched via DVD.
I have a lot to say about this one, but I'm saving it up for my Dear Festividders letter. Man I love this movie, though. Good stuff.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, watched digitally.
An entirely appropriate film to watch after Night Vale Live. There's a lot of Twin Peaks in Night Vale, just amped to 900. Anyway. This is a weird capper on the series in that it's (mostly) a prequel. Most of the events in the film are familiar because Dale Cooper already found out about them in the course of his investigation in the series. However, that doesn't rob them of their nightmare quality as Laura Palmer's last days are laid out. It's a David Lynch movie, so there are moments of exquisite weirdness and overplayed mundanity in equal share. I love this movie even as it irritates the ever-loving s**t out of me.

A few of my next few entries may be brief as I may be watching some horror movies for secret Festivids purposes. Shhhh.  

Island of Lost Souls watched via Criterion Blu-ray

In 1956, Paramount Pictures sold the majority of its pre-1948 film library to MCA for quick cash. MCA later merged with Universal, leaving Paramount's early film catalog with that studio. This presented a problem in the question of releasing Paramount's early horror films on DVD, because Universal had its own horror brand that was strongly linked with films that were explicitly produced by that studio. Universal tended to release its horror films in sets or special editions centered around a particular monster. Paramount's horror films were few and tended not to fit in with Universal's marketing/groupings.

At least two of the films, 1932's Island of Lost Souls (adapted from H.G. Wells' "Island of Dr. Moreau") and 1944's The Uninvited (a haunted house tale starring Ray Milland), are bona fide masterpieces, but for a while it looked like they would never see a proper release beyond the existing VHS versions*. In the case of Island of Lost Souls, prospects were particularly bleak, as no original negatives survived -- only some prints that were in less-than-stellar condition.

Thank the cinema deities for Criterion Collection, which licensed both films from Universal for release on both DVD and Blu-ray. Island came out in 2011 and The Uninvited will come out later this month.

I watched this last night after not having seen it for decades and it really holds up. It came in right before enforcement of the Production Code started, so there's a lot of surprising elements, like a quick scene of mad scientist Dr. Moreau (an excellent Charles Laughton) performing surgery on one of his man-animal creations. The ending was just as brutal as I always remembered it being (while being mostly suggested after a tasteful pan away).

There are, unsurprisingly, some major problematic elements. The evolutionary scientist is an unscrupulous madman who casts himself as the god of his creations. There's also a lot of sexism and gender essentialism surrounding the two female characters. One of the underlying themes is "there are things man is not meant to know", but thankfully that's buried under "brutality begets brutality" and "maybe science works best with patience and possibly some control groups" (I may be bringing my own prejudices in here a bit on that last one).

In any case, it's a brilliant, brilliant film, featuring great performances from Laughton as well as Bela Lugosi in a small role as the furry, wide-eyed Sayer of Law. The screenplay is succinct and to the point, while still weaving in the themes I discussed earlier (and a few others). Director Erle C. Kenton works with cinematographer Karl Struss to create some visually dynamic sequences, including some unnerving uses of shadow.

Whatever Criterion did to restore the film works, because it's looking gorgeous. They also put together a rich package of extras. I only had the chance to sample two of them. One is a featurette where Devo's Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh discuss the influence that Island of Lost Souls had on the underlying philosophy of the band during its formation. The other is Devo's difficult-to-watch-but-impossible-not-to-watch 1976 short film In the Beginning Was the End: The Truth About De-Evolution, which features them performing Secret Agent Man and Jocko Homo.

I will post about Night Vale Live separately later on. Probably. I will say that Bobak Ferdowsi was there, sitting across the aisle from our group. That was frickin' awesome.

* Paramount had at least one other horror masterpiece from that era, 1931's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but that is owned by Warner Bros. for complicated reasons.

Watched through Netflix Instant.

Alas and alack, this is not related to the bats**t genius Japanese film Hausu. It is a head-scratcher, but for less awesome reasons.

The story is that a horror author (William Katt) moves back into his childhood home to work on his next book, a memoir of his time in Vietnam. This same house is where his aunt recently committed suicide and where, a few years back, his son went missing. The set-up is for a dark, moody haunted house film that uses the haunting to highlight the author's tragedy.

What happens instead is a series of wacky supernatural vignettes, several of which either seem to call back to The Evil Dead or predict Evil Dead II (released the following year). Interspersed throughout the film are a series of 'Nam flashbacks that only (barely) become relevant at the end of the movie.

There's a number of funny parts in the movie and some great uses of unexpected space (there's a bigger-on-the-inside moment that was very familiar to me as a Doctor Who fan). The mood whiplash, though, was a bit too much to take. I really wish the filmmakers had figured out what they were doing and where they were going with this.