CRIME DOES NOT PAY

KING KONG WEDDING CAKE

It's a King Kong Wedding Cake.

AN EASY ONE

I thought I would draw a picture of a clown only put a jumping spider face instead of the clown face.  So I did. And this is it.  The thing about jumping spiders is their big round eyes make them seem kind of sweet, except that there are too many of them.  No, s/he is not going to eat that bunny.  They are friends.

DRILL, BABY, DRILL

Eons ago, before the dawn of time, I drew a minicomic in which an oil rig drilled down and woke up a giant monster sleeping in the earth. A good idea if not super original.  I decided to draw a picture of that idea again, and a giant baby was the most horrible monster I could think of.  I also thought it would be funny if it was about to get poked in the butt.  So that is all there is to that idea.  Any sociopolitical or socioecological interepretations you would like to apply to this are what is in your head, not mine.

NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION

This year I resolve to try to do more things wrong.

(You ought to know by now to click on the image 

to view a larger size.)

JUST FOR FUN

Just for fun, here is the sketch I used for the drawing posted below.  I tried to do it directly in MyPaint but finally had to do this two inch high sketch and scan it to get it the way I wanted.

WISHING YOU A TIDY BOXING DAY

Please let me know which version you prefer, and why.

I HAVE A CHRISTMAS WISH TOO

Yesterday, having made an apple pie and working on my quilt, I listened to a motivational CD as I stitched, like any reasonable all-american housewife should on christmas eve.  Even if they are a mean old man like me.  One thing about quilting is that you think about other things as you do it, and the years drifted away as they seem to like to do in this joyous time of year.  I found myself recalling the days when I sat around the coffee table with my friend Torger, smoking pot, making art, and listening to the craziest records we could find at the Fort Collins Colorado Salvation Army store.  We often listened to preachin' records like Jimmy Swaggart or Jim Bakker, enjoying the music of their voices and the unintentional hilarity of their words, or motivational and success records with deep manly voices instilling us with the urge to at least wish we felt like achieving great things maybe someday.  One of the finest treasures we enjoyed was Earl Nightingale's phonograph recording of his essay "The Strangest Secret."  The best moment of the recording, and possibly the best moment of all the time we spent together, was when Mr. Nightingale said to us in his luscious announcer voice, "The SUCCESSFUL MAN, is the one who is DOING WHAT HE WANTS TO DO, BECAUSE HE WANTS TO DO IT."  We sat on the ratty carpet around a table full of art supplies, with a wall of art books on one side and a wall of science fiction magazines on the other side, high on dope, and looked at each other and said, well okay, we made it!  That is the day I truly gave up trying. Now I come to think of it I don't really have a Christmas wish after all.  It's a good story though.  Just remember to give up early enough in life that you can enjoy it.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Trillions of microscopic godzillas live unknown

in the dust beneath our feet.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS

MOVIES

 Since my primary source for illegally downloaded movies has gone freeleech (just look it up) for the holiday season I am jamming my folders with stuff I can't remember why I bookmarked months ago.  I was temporarily trying to uplift myself and watch a higher quality of film but that mostly just makes me want to plunge eyes-deep back into the crap that I find so soothing. First I have to make it through my backlog of  stuff I have had around for weeks, such as Polanski's Cul-de-Sac (1966) which I saw a few days ago and it is a very good movie of its type - a "one-set play" sort of thing where a bunch of people end up in the same place for one day and bring everything crashing down.  I guess I have seen about half of Polanski's works now and usually enjoy them - I thought Ghost Writer was great.  Yesterday I tried to watch The Adjustment Bureau for educational purposes but about halfway through I decided I didn't care if those two people defied the damn universe to be together because she was kind of a dick and he was kind of a pussy.  Then I tried to watch a Polish film, Angelus (2000) directed by Lech Majewski, which seemed to have potential with some offbeat mystical content in its depiction of an imaginary rosicrucian art cult among miners in communist Poland, but it is a bit abstract and broken into hundreds of brief vignettes and was not really compelling, story-wise.  Least unsatisfactory of the day and the one I made it all the way through was the stupidest and least coherent one, Gildersleeve's Ghost (1944).  I make a sort of a hobby out of seeing movies spun-off of radio shows and they are for the most part sub-par.  The Lum and Abner movies make it to just about par most of the time but I'll tell you the Fibber McGee and Molly movie Heavenly Days (also 1944) was just a big mess.  So is Gildersleeve's Ghost, but at least it was a palatable mess.  I have never cared much for the Great Gildersleeve radio program - I thought his 1950 program The Harold Peary Show much more entertaining.  Gildersleeve's Ghost begins with Peary in a double role as two of his ancestors who rise from the grave one stormy night, determined to help him win the election for police commissioner.  They do this by releasing the caged gorilla from the basement of the old dark house where a mad scientist is working on his invisibility experiments.  Then they vanish from the movie. Naturally everyone ends up in the old dark house on that stormy night, along with a gorilla suit in addition to the "actual" gorilla, a French Maid, an Invisible Woman, and a Negro Chauffeur.  How can you go wrong with those plot elements?  Also making an appearance is Jack Norton, drunk as usual.  It seems he appeared as a drunk more than 70 times.

COWBOY HANUKKAH

Wishin' you and your'n a wild and wooly Hanukkah!

The Quilt that Nearly Ended My Career

I figured the only way to get over my feelings of utter worthlessness was to do something difficult that I didn't really want to do.  So I got out this quilt.

I don't know how many quilts I have made.  Ten at least.  This is a pretty good example of them.  They are manly quilts, mostly solid colors with strong geometrical patterns, mostly salvaged from men's shirts and pants.  I enjoy the purely geometric design process and I like doing something this big, and something that will actually be useful, not just a picture you look at.  I sleep under one or two of my quilts every night.  This one, though, nearly did me in.  Sometimes I use store bought batting, a cottony layer to put between the top and bottom layers of fabric, and sometimes I just use an old blanket.  The blanket I tried to use for this one was way too thick and springy.  I should have stopped as soon as I thought there might be trouble, but I kept going in the belief that it would all even out and look okay in the end.  By the time I got it 90% done I realized I could either take it all apart or just throw it away.  So I took my seam ripper and cut all the stitches holding the layers together and threw away that stupid blanket.  The thought of going over both the top and bottom pieces of the quilt and picking out threads for hours took all the heart out of me.  I had another top finished and a package of batting, but I didn't feel like I could do anything with it so I packed all my quilting supplies away under the table in the corner of my studio and left them there.  I don't even know how many years ago that was.  I thought I would either quilt again someday or I wouldn't.  Looks like I am. I sat for about five hours picking threads out with tweezers.  Part of the time I listened to an L. Ron Hubbard audiobook my friend Jim gave me and it was even more atrocious than I expected.  Dreadful stuff.  This is a pretty good pattern.  The red sashing between the blocks is kind of a fuzzy flannel which contrasts nicely with the smooth cotton twill, and the back is wooly plaid with a constrasting orange stripe across one end.  I like the colors, and it should be a pretty good quilt when I get it done.

ART OF POETRY

Should a Painter take a Fancy to join a Horse's Neck to a human Head, and lay it over with Feathers of various Fowls, uniting together Limbs of every Animal, so as to make what resembles a comely Woman above, terminate vilely in a hideous Fish; could you, my Friends, forbear laughing, if admitted to see this motely Piece?  ... Painters and Poets, you'll say, have always had equal Liberty of attempting any bold Design - We know it, and this Privilege we ask and give in our Turn:  But not that Things incoherent be united, the Merciless associate with the Mild, Serpents be match'd with Doves, Lambs with Tygers. 

- Q. Horatius Flaccus c. 18BCE

WHEN MONKEYS PRAY

BLACK FRIDAY

Black Friday - an allegory

(click on image to see full-size)

CYBER MONDAY

National Eyelash Curler Day

Don't forget!

YAKETY SATAN

It just had to be done.

REMEMBER

HAPPY THANKSGIVING

Mermaid Mummy vs. Werewolf Frankenstein

HOW TO HANDLE YOUR SEX SCANDAL

I have been watching people handle sex scandals wrong for years. I have seen a few people handle them correctly, but those are the ones you don't remember because they blew over in about a week and were immediately forgotten.  I have never had a sex scandal (or a career) myself but somehow I know exactly what to do to avoid looking like an idiot and blowing your entire career, and I am putting this in writing now in the hope that some day someone will put it to good use.

Don't deny anything, and especially don't deny everything. Once you tell your story you have to stick with it and if you say you never did anything wrong in your entire life you are screwed. Wait until you know what they are saying before you shoot your mouth off.  Don't start confessing because you will come out with something nobody remembers except you. If you did it, admit it.  Show that you know now that it was the wrong thing to do, that you are sorry you did it and you won't do it again. Don't blame anyone or get angry. Don't address specifics because people love to list other folks' sins and they never forget them. Don't overdo it, and start crying and begging for forgiveness because desperate people are funny and pathetic. Admit that you are human and make mistakes but that you learn from your mistakes, that you were in circumstances that made you think that it was a good idea to do what you did but you know now that you were mistaken and if that situation ever recurs you will not do what you did. Then shut up about it forever. That is really all there is to it.

MOVIES

The Rift a.k.a. Endless Descent (1990) is a fairly entertaining submarine/cavemonster tale.  A submarine is sent to find out what happened to the previous submarine and they discover an underwater cave system with a secret DNA acceleration laboratory cranking out crazy cave monsters.  The submarine crew is a zany agglomeration of cliches - Tightass Commander who forces people to do things which will endanger everyone, because what he says goes; Disgraced Hero with something to prove; a Spaniard, a Frenchman and a German; Happy Swede and Angry Swede, a Woman and an Angry Woman (actually the other woman is also angry but she is only angry at Disgraced Hero), and a streetwise gentleman of African descent whose primary purpose is to occasionally remind everyone that they are all white, and he is black, and to exclaim "Sheeit!" and "Aw, May-un!" with monotonous regularity.  Look, here he is ogling the shapely posterior of Angry Woman:

Isn't he TOO outrageous?  Anyway, the monsters are pretty good, mostly because there are a bunch of different kinds that you only see enough of to be able to say what the hell was that, except for the crazy supermonster in the big cave that sends a giant tentacle mouth out to glom down on you while you stand there shooting at it.  Like any good submarine this one has a self destruct panel with a red LED countdown display but it only gives you two minutes to get into the escape pod which makes it really exciting since of course you have to stand there arguing for about a minute and a half. It mostly looks pretty cheap and it is mostly kind of stupid, the kind of stupid where someone says "Take this and don't lose it because if you do you will be trapped in the monster cave forever," and then they don't clip it to their belt or anything, they just carry it in their hand until they come to the first fuming crevasse and then guess what happens.  And yet it is really not too bad though I can't give it more than a 5/10.  It won't kill you to watch it.

On the other hand, Creature a.k.a Titan Find  (1985) is a shameless, no a shameful ripoff of both Alien and The Thing.  A bunch of people are stuck on a planet with a monster that not only has a drooly-toothed monster part it also has these blood slugs that take over your brain so your friends don't know you are also a monster.  Unless you inexplicably get all zombie looking and start going Graaar! The good thing is the blood slug makes Nude Scene Woman entirely disrobe for no discernable purpose, which is reason enough to root for the monster.  There is lots of '80s hair, over-illuminated plywood sets, and everyone basically seems like next week they will be doing a bit part on The Love Boat.  Except for Klaus Kinski in his "I won't say no to anything" period, the only interesting person in the movie. The print I have is about five minutes shorter than the standard runtime which explains why sometimes a monster scene would end with me not knowing what happened or people would go OH MY GOD and you would never see what was so awful.  They must have cut out some gnawing scenes or something.  You don't really see the monster suit well but that is a good thing because they must have said, "We need a suit just like the one in that Alien movie except our guy is five feet tall and weighs 180 pounds.  Make it so all he can do is shuffle slowly."  So shameful is the ripping-off of The Thing that when they are trying to figure out how to kill the monster suit one of them actually says, "I saw this movie once ... etc."  Shame on you, William Malone and Alan Reed.  Shame on you.  The scene where they finally blow up the monster suit, rather than being the best scene in the movie as it should be, was by far the stupidest and most embarrassing scene, and it has a bomb with a red LED countdown in it too.  For what it is worth the space ship model work, what you get of it, is not bad.  There is only one reason to see this movie, my reason, which is to see every science fiction movie ever made before I die.  I am getting to the dregs.  Deep, deep into the dregs.  Happy Halloween.

MOVIES

When I was looking for 1980s post-apocalyptic movies to watch I discovered there were a bunch of 1980s SF movies I hadn't seen.  I think I saw fewer movies in the 1980s because I didn't have a car and it wasn't as easy to go all the way across town to see something at a dollar movie, and impossible to go to any of the dozen drive-ins scattered around Denver at the time. I know that I saw fewer SF movies then because, although I always loved cheap Star Wars ripoffs, I disliked cheap Alien ripoffs because it's just a monster movie; whether it is supposed to be on another planet like in Galaxy of Terror  or on the bottom of the ocean like Leviathan  or Deepstar Six; it's just Ten Little Indians with tentacles and drooling fangs.

Moontrap (1989) is a pretty creative cheap independently produced SF movie in which it is discovered that there is a 14 thousand year old killer robot base on the moon.  They start out as buglike pods that open up and grab any scrap or machinery nearby and build themselves into big death ray killer robots.  They don't mind using organic components either, so they are kind of zombie killer robots.  The star of  it is Walter Koenig who had name recognition from having been in Star Trek on TV, but that didn't give him any real acting talent.  They show him thinking a lot.  The other big name is cult film star Bruce Campbell - cult film star means he was in a lot of movies but none of them very good ones.  They go to the14 thousand year old killer robot moon base and find a 14 thousand year old space babe in suspended animation, and the good part is she gets her shirt off at one point but not nearly enough time was spent on that.  I would have cut a few minutes of Koenig thinking and replaced it with shirtless space babe.  But that's just me. They did a pretty good job with sets, props, models and effects, especially with sets considering what is involved in a moonscape set, and the story is not just a string of cliches.   The least convincing effect in the whole movie was Koenig's hairpiece.  Hairpiece technology has advanced greatly in the intervening years. I learned one important fact - that a NASA moon lander, like all good movie spacecraft, contains a self-destruct panel with a beeping five minute red-LED countdown. Moontrap is not a total piece of crap and I will even give it a rating - 6/10

Unlike Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn (1983) which I remember making a conscious choice not to go see at the time and I am glad now I did that because I would have felt cheated even if I saw it as part of a double feature at a dollar movie.  It was directed by Charles Band, and I had ridden a bus half way across town to see a couple of his earlier movies, The End of the World and Laserblast and it looked like  Metalstorm was going to be even crappier.  I remember one guy shot me some pretty nasty looks for laughing so hard at Laserblast.  I remember also on the bus ride home I was sitting up at the front where the seats face the aisle and across from me was some kind of oddball with a bag of groceries who had a package of frozen fish sticks that he opened up and he'd stick his face down in it and take a big whiff of it, then grin around crazily at the other passengers, and repeat.  This drew chuckles from a few of the onlookers, but beside me was a sensitive young man who seemed to take their chuckles as a personal affront.  He glared angrily at the other passengers and took it upon himself to humanize the Fish Stick Whiffer by means of sympathetic communication.  He started asking the guy questions like, "Are you ANGRY?"  "Do you ever feel like you want to SCREAM?" Fish Stick Whiffer didn't seem to recognize that he was being spoken to and kept grinning away and enjoying the wonderful fish stick sensation.  Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn is an idiotic, incoherent half assed piece of crap. What is worse is that it was one of the few entries in the failed 3D craze of the day so it is full of shots of people needlessly pointing things right at the camera.  It was filmed almost entirely in an old sand quarry and at Vasquez Rocks, the default location for any cheap-ass cowboy movie which is all this is - a 1930s cheap ass cowboy movie and Road Warrior ripoff which should have been included in my post-apocalyptic series except for the sole fact that there is no introductory narrative telling how many years it has been since the fall of civilisation or the oil wars or the radiation wars or the cabbage patch kids wars or some other fake assed wars that made it possible to make such a stupid lousy movie.  The unshaven leather-clad loner is some kind of lawman looking for a bad hombre who is stirring up the natives who in this case are bald headed cyclops guys who have their right eye covered with wrinkly flesh.  There is a blonde girl in it who gets captured but she never gets her shirt off so what is the point.  There is lots of footage of driving around in the old sand pits, lots and lots of it, showing the crapped up dune buggies or the hero's goony cubemobile driving around, or thrilling point of view shots from the front bumper of driving between shrubs on an old sand quarry road, or of the driver jolting back and forth in a faked up cockpit.  Then there is lots of footage of people walking around in the old sand quarry, with something sending up a plume of smoke every twenty feet or so just so there is something happening on screen while they walk and walk and walk in the old sand pits. There is also a surprising amount of footage of the lawman just looking at something.  Like twenty seconds at a time of  a shot of his face, looking at something.  You can't even call it a reaction shot - he is just looking at something like the director said, "Okay now act like you are looking at it!  Perfect!  Cut!  It's a take!" When it comes to the big midnight showdown between the unshaven leatherclad lawman and the bad hombre with the huge black leather boobs on his costume, the lawman abruptly dashes over to a skycycle and suddenly it is a broad daylight skycycle chase with the bad guy Jared-Syn who always looks as stupid as his name, in a completely different costume and man are the blue-screen effects crappy.  I am going to ruin the entire movie for you right here and I don't care, but this shows just how incredibly lousy and stupid this movie is - not only is there nothing that could possibly be called a metalstorm in this movie, Jared-Syn is NEVER DESTROYED.  He GETS AWAY.  Total bullshit.  The only thing worth seeing in this entire half-assed piece of crappy bullshit garbage is this shot of the cubemobile jumping over a couple of dune buggies:

You have been warned.

MOVIES

 2019: After the Fall of New York (1983) was a fitting conclusion to my postapoc binge, as it stunk enough that it doesn't merit a full review.  A surly leatherclad loner is recruited to go into the ruins of  NYC and rescue the last fertile woman on Earth to take her away on a rocket ship to Alpha Centauri and humanity's New Start.  It is an Escape from New York ripoff and not a Road Warrior ripoff  so it only has a couple of cars, but I would hate for my handful of occasional readers to miss seeing these great things driving around in the same old quarry put to such good use in Warrior of the Lost World.  1983 was a good year for that quarry.

 

The only other notable features about the movie are a big model of NYC in ruins, which I always like to see, and the fact that about eight minutes of film time were shot in Monument Valley, meaning they actually flew the star and a crew over from Italy just for that.  Amazing.  Oh yeah, they also use some props and costumes from Starcrash, but that doesn't help much.

SUNDAY WEBCOMICS

One of the continuing matters of interest here at SUNDAY WEBCOMICS is the problem of creating an Online Webcomic while lacking the basic skills to do so, the ability to do any kind of artwork at all for example.  The creator of Artless Bart sidesteps that issue entirely, by simply posting storyboards with dialog and a description of what you would see if there was a picture there.

Returning to the pure SUNDAY WEBCOMICS art style, The Corpus Squid is pretty impressive.  Make that very impressive.  You should have heard the sound I made when I saw it.

Also pretty remarkable is the passive-agressive opening panel of Guards of Anarchy, and the way the pages become so gigantic as to be impossible to even see all of.

Because these are mostly pretty brief and I know you like to sit for hours trying to decipher inscrutable scribbly online webcomics here also is the most literally inscrutable Online Webcomic I have seen in some length of time, the brief and abortive Life in the Wild.

Go and do likewise.

MOVIES

I don't even know why I started this postapoc film festival but if I didn't still have another one slowly downloading, this one would bring it to an end.  Warrior of the Lost World (1983), Unlike BATTLETRUCK, is a cheap exploitation spectacle and nothing more.  According to IMDB the director was hired and brought to Italy where he was shown a poster and told to make a film to go with it.  The misspelled and mispunctuated opening narrative crawl (this is the first time I have ever seen misuse of the apostrophe in film credits) says it takes place "generations after the radioactive wars" in a "new age of tyranny."  Luckily there is an anonymous hero on a Supersonic Speedcycle (their term, not mine, but it is a good one) which is named Einstein because like the famous physicist it communicates by repeating brief, slightly sarcastic phrases three times in a grating squeak-doll voice, simultaneously flashing the same words on a little TV screen with a continuous star-zoom screen saver behind them.  This is the most irritating talking motorcycle ever created, and it gives the driver the opportunity to make weak sardonic retorts. The hero is recruited to rescue the female lead's professor father from the fascist overlord but while they rescue the professor the girl gets left behind so they have to rescue her too by gathering a ragtag group of rebels to overthrow the government.  If I were making a movie with Lost World in the title I would try to get some dinosaurs in there.  This movie has much in common with the previously reviewed Endgame, the hero being leatherclad, unshaven and pudgyfaced with no perceptible acting ability, the female lead being a non-actress of swarthy semi-asian extraction - in Endgame it was Laura Gemser of the Emmanuelle movies so at least she got her shirt off once but it was no big deal, and in this it's Persis Khambatta whose big talent was having a shaved head in a Star Trek movie.  Here she lacks even that.  The best thing the two have in common though is this helmet:

I couldn't get a good shot showing the spike on top but it is there.  Note that the W.O.T.L.W. photo is taken in the old quarry. They had a pretty good budget for cars and there are half a dozen of them, some goofy crapped up Volkswagens and a couple of these police cars with big spikes stuck on the front:

When they crash into something the spikes just fall off and scatter all over the road.  There are also a couple of big trucks, one of which gets exploded during the running gun battle down a tree-lined road, mysteriously transported in a flash to the old quarry to crash into an inexplicable pyramid of highly explosive oil drums.  The police cars suffer from a uniquely exploitation-cinematic technical flaw, in that when they start to go over a cliff, even a tiny bit, they explode right away in a huge ball of fire and plunge down into the old quarry in flaming fragments instead of waiting until they hit the bottom like other movie cars do.  In reality cars almost never explode which is why sometimes people just disappear and their car is found a couple of years later at the bottom of a ravine unexploded.  This movie also has a couple of helicopters but there isn't much you can do to crap up a helicopter, except paint it black like they did with everything else that moves.  They actually explode one of the helicopters, and the exploding helicopter is a classic mark of film quality but this one is done so abruptly and briefly it has little impact.  What does have a little impact though, and the high point in the movie for me, is when they encounter a BATTLETRUCK!

It's a costumed dump truck with a flamethrower, but they didn't have enough money to blow it up so it just grinds to a feeble halt, though it does run over that stupid motorcycle, to my extreme delight.  There are lots of good locations in this, the fascist government being ensconced in what looks like an unfinished resort hotel and their science center looks like a brewery.  The cast includes Fred Williamson who doesn't have much to do compared to his role in Warriors of the Wasteland, and Donald Pleasence as the Fascist Overlord, obviously the only actor in the entire production.  This is by far the stupidest entry into this brief festival and unless 2019: After the Fall of New York really pulls something great out of its leopard print helmet I will have to recommend this one as the postapoc film to see.

MOVIES

My post-apocalyptic binge continues with Warlords of the 21st Century, a.k.a. BATTLETRUCK (1982) which was made in New Zealand so it is scenic as hell and it is the story of BATTLETRUCK and its battle against the Renewable Energy Hippies and their champion, Methane Powered Motorcycle Man.  It is set "after the oil wars" when gasoline is nearly unobtainable so the thing to do is drive around in a gigantic armored truck looking for more fuel and enslaving people.  Here's how cool BATTLETRUCK is:

Note that it is being viewed through a Monocular Vision Enhancement Device which inexplicably always indicates N S E and W no matter which direction it is pointing. For technical purposes. Except for the purely irrational conceptual basis this is a creditable effort to create a believable post-industrial scenario, and not a cheap exploitation spectacle, which takes some of the fun out of it.  The geodesically domed hippie commune is convincingly created, like it burst full grown out of a 1968 issue of Mother Earth News or a Dealer McDope comic except unfortunately it  is winter so no naked hippie chicks.  Another strike against it.  Things really pep up though when the hippies pitch in and help their champion and his pal the bespectacled mechanogeek (people who owned television sets in the 1990s will recognize John Ratzenburger from that show about Cheers The Bar) to cobble together out of scrap metal a Super Deadly Machine Gun Volkswagen, seen here amid its Holocaust of Doom:

It's obvious that BATTLETRUCK must necessarily lose because it embodies the Old Paradigm, but at least it dies magnificently.  Even though there are only three vehicles, BATTLETRUCK, Battletruck Junior (for chasing things - it would have been cooler if Battletruck Junior had been carried inside BATTLETRUCK), and Machine Gun Volkswagen, there are also some entertaining Romanian style horse-drawn carriages, and the show opens with a two-horsepower VW Kombi pickup that is quite appealing.  Though this is not as stupid as most of the genre it has its moments, when stuff explodes and cars drive through things, and of course BATTLETRUCK's glorious demise.

MOVIES

Sometimes a guy just needs to see some Post-Road-Warrior crap. Good thing there are so many of them, because they were so easy to make.  You need some old cars with a bunch of funky crap tacked onto them, an abandoned industrial site, an old quarry, and for costumes some leftover Roman stuff mixed up with football shoulder, knee and elbow pads painted black.

 Wheels of Fire (1985) was created by Filipino genre hack Cirio Santiago.  It had a good enough budget to have some decent cars and a couple hundred uniformed extras in the big battle scene at the old gravel pit.  Some of it was filmed in an old fortress of some kind that still has big cannons in it.  It's a cowboy movie where there are these bandits and the good guy has to rescue his sister from them.  The good thing is that the sister is played by Lynda Wiesmeier whose big skill was having her big old tits out flopping around, and she spends most of her screen time doing just that, but unfortunately most of the time she is also tied up or getting slapped around or raped which I am not that big on.  I don't mind a little bondage but beating and raping is where I draw the line.  There is also another female car driver provided for romantic attachment but she only gets her shirt off for the brief love scene. You have to realize that it's the goofy cars and the boobs that make these stupid things watchable.There's lots of chasing around, and they actually crash the cars together real good and blow them up.  There are also some subterranean albino mutants thrown in, and some kind of incoherent aborigine dwarf and a telepathic girl who can communicate with him, and a rocket cult that is supposedly going to blast off into space in their stupid looking hand built rocket if the bandits don't come kill them all and blow it up first, which guess what - they do come kill them all and blow it up.  *Spoiler alert* Sorry.  Lots of bad guys get shot and so do some good guys and the lone stranger drives on. Here are a couple of the pretty decent looking cars driving around the old quarry with a topless babe strapped to the hood of one.  I just thought, "Man that would get really hot being strapped onto the hood half naked like that, not sexy hot but ouch hot."

This Trailer has everything in the entire movie that's worth seeing.

Endgame (1983) is by Italian genre hack Joe D'Amato, and in it the winner of the Running Man game gets recruited to take a telepathic kid across the mutant wasteland, so you get a Running Man ripoff for about half an hour and then the rest of it is Road Warrior with the requisite goofy cars driving around in the old quarry. [Hold on there!  The Running Man wasn't made until 1987!  So this is a Road Warrior style Tenth Victim ripoff, or somebody actually read Robert Sheckley!]  The in-jokey thing about this is that the Italian title was Endgame: Bronx lotto finale (Bronx final fight) which I assume is an attempt to latch onto the brand identification of another, marginally better Post-Road-Warrior movie, 1990: The Bronx Warriors (1982) which was actually filmed in the pre-apocalyptic Bronx.  Which is kind of interesting that you could do that, film a post-apocalyptic fantasy in the actual location because it is already so broke down and crummy it looks like an atom bomb went off there. This one though is in the future where normal people look like extras from a Flock of Seagulls video or rejects from Purple Rain, and tough guys paint stupid crap around their eyes to look cool.  The cars in this one are incredibly great and had me laughing louder than I have at anything in weeks.  Look at this idiotic thing:

That red dome on the hood is a flamethrower but I think you already guessed that.  There are only three funked up cars in this and they just stripped off most of the body, then tacked some wire mesh and pointy crap and a couple of oil drums on.  Since they didn't have a lot of cars, the wagon train runs into the Mutant Motocross Army, with about a hundred dirt bikes which the mutants customize by putting a ratty animal pelt on the gas tank and seat. The good thing is that even though the mutants only have two cars they put topless slave babes on them.  Nothing says future like topless chicks on a crapped up old junker driven by a fish man.  

They do blow up a couple of the cars but it is the kind of  blowing up where they just cut it together so it is supposed to look like they crashed but you can see the cars are just sitting there when they blow up.  Lots and lots of guys get shot off of motorcycles though so if you like seeing guys fall off motorcycles this is good for that. This movie also has the benefit of a Rhodes Synthesizer soundtrack, one guy at a keyboard going eedle deedle deedle deedle - oodle doodle doodle doodle for an hour and a half, which really adds a lot to a post-apocalyptic fantasy. Of the two I thought this was more hilarious, which is the major value of these.  I know you are wondering so I will tell you that of all the films of this genre which I have seen, and I have seen a lot, many of them when they came out in the theater, my favorite is Warriors of the Wasteland (1983) even though it doesn't have any women with their  shirts off, the cars have plastic domes and duct pipes stuck on them, and there are LOTS of them.  Plus the bad guys are extra ridiculous looking and there is a buttraping Knights Templar angle which you might think goes against what I said about rape and I guess it does.  Buttraping Post-Apocalyptic Knights Templar are, in my opinion, a socially redeeming plot element.

MOVIES

The Silk Express (1933) is as odd a jumble of plot devices as I have ever seen.  Youthful Neil Hamilton represents a textile mill owners' organization in the midst of a silk boom, compelled to import raw silk themselves to avoid exploitive pricing by unscrupulous speculators.  They have 72 hours to get the bales from Seattle to New York by train, and the speculators will do anything to stop the Silk Express.  There is a surprise discovery of Mongolian Silk Rust, and an imperilled archaeologist suffering from a rare Asian Sleeping Sickness which slowly deprives him of movement and senses and will kill him if he falls asleep, along for the ride to the only clinic in North America that can save him.  Naturally it turns into a Locked Room / Vanishing Weapon murder mystery on wheels.  Guy Kibbee shows up as a cantakerous lawman, along with Allan Jenkins in an uncharacteristic role as a scholarly hobo.  Not really thrilling, but odd.  6/10

Wives Under Suspicion (1938) stars Warren William, a fine figure of a man but no great shakes as an actor, in a somewhat unexpected psychodrama nicely directed by James Whale.  William puts a gloss of superficiality onto everything he does but this eventually becomes effective in spite of him.  The opening sequence is outstanding, and it is less formulaic than I expected but difficult to recommend.  It seems this is Whale's second treatment of this story, filmed in 1933 as The Kiss Before The Mirror.  5/10

I'm trying to find a Warren William film in which he does some real acting, and The Case of the Curious Bride (1935) presents him as Perry Mason, a wisecracking scoundrelly master-chef lawyer who has no qualms about concealing or manufacturing evidence, unnerving to anyone accustomed to Raymond Burr. Also startling is the fact that Mason's assistant Paul Drake is renamed Spudsy and played by Allan Jenkins in his conventional lowbrow mode.  It is only late in the movie that Spudsy is referred to as Drake, to my shock and dismay.  Claire Dodd doesn't have much to do as Della Street but answer the phone and look admiringly at Perry. Overall it is a fair murder mystery with lots of San Francisco locations.  Errol Flynn appears in a brief role that requires fighting but no speech. 5/10  I also saw William (and Flynn) recently in Don't Bet on Blondes (1935), an unremarkable Love Insurance farce.

Four's a Crowd (1938) is a frenetic screwball comedy starring Rosalind Russell and Errol Flynn, and it's a pretty good one if that is what you are looking for. 7/10

The Perfect Specimen (1937) pairs Flynn with Joan Blondell in a mild Rich Boy, Poor Girl comedy.  Joan is charming as always with soft shoulder-length hair and summery print dresses befitting her role as daughter of an eccentric professor, and she induces Flynn to break out of his golden cage and live it up.  Allan Jenkins helps out, and there is a lot of shouting "I would NEVER marry you!" before it is over. 6/10

I'm off in my own little world here.  I did see one recent movie, GANTZ - Perfect Answer (2011), the second of two movies based on the GANTZ manga.  It's all pretty ridiculous with lots of things blowing up and people brought back from the dead by a big black sphere to shoot aliens.  Wasn't as bad as Green Lantern.  Which was mostly pretty lame.  That's why I watch more movies from the 1930s.  At least you get Allan Jenkins, Guy Kibbee, Margaret Hamilton, et.al.even if the movie stinks.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

UPDATE!!! - The perpetrator of A Cannonade of Hogwash has generously advised me of its new location.  He continues to accumulate a body of work of a remarkable consistency and I don't feel that my original assessment, "I know this guy is trying to be 'ironic' but I don't think he's quite making it," quite does it justice.  I don't think I was really into full swing with this project at the time.

We start this week's bumper assortment of SUNDAY WEBCOMICS with Blunderclod! by Susan Marie, a superhero parody in which instead of being heroic and good at everything the hero is inept and clumsy.  Instead.  I have selected it primarily because it is an example of the old-timey "ball nose" style of amateur cartooning, which I haven't seen in years.  Nowadays budding cartoonists have so many sources from which to copy that they rarely opt for ball-nose, which to my mind lends an especially untainted quality to this strip.

Bearly There is a diverse collection of gag strips and the one to which I have linked is especially outstanding in its SUNDAY WEBCOMICSy qualities.  Who among us could have come up with this?  Only Rob.

And in conclusion, P.S. is two comic strips in one.  Except for the very last one which is the one I linked to, which strangely does not actually contain the "P.S." which is the conceptual basis of the comic, the idea of which seems to me to have a comic and then another comic as a Post Script, hence the title.  That makes it extra SUNDAY WEBCOMICSy, the final strip betraying its fundamental concept like that.

Whee.

MOVIES

Family Movie Night has not seen any huge successes of late, with all the selections being flawed to some strange degree, but a few have provided some satisfaction.


The Cobweb (1955) is an incoherent Mental Clinic soap opera in which the staff seem more neurotic and hysterical than the patients.  Richard Widmark, Charles Boyer and Gloria Grahame were miscast, and the best performance was Lillian Gish as a stiff and angry little administrator.  The script was a muddle and characters' motivations were not clearly defined.  I would not have sat through it on my own, but Donna found it more tolerable.  I would give it 4/10.

Tomorrow's Children (1934) is a roadshow exploitation/educational film on the topic of eugenics and compulsory sterilization.  Not by nature a very good movie, it still has some good entertainment value in characterization and story line, and it becomes a nailbiter before it is over.  Lanky redhead Sterling Holloway provides some peculiar comedy relief. 6/10


The Blonde Captive (1931) Is an anthropological exploitation film made and narrated by Lowell Thomas using footage from his expedition through the South Pacific and around the northern coast of Australia.  It is fascinating to see this footage of the indigenous Australians apparently untouched by technological societies.  The real anthropological interest here is more in the viewpoint of the filmmakers, as the ostensible purpose of the expedition is the search for evidence of the survival of traits of  Neanderthal Man in the modern age, and Neanderthal Man is rung in at every opportunity until they find a fat happy Australian who shows enough visual similarity to a sculpture in the museum that they can claim their thesis is proven.  This film was also a good opportunity for the average guy to see lots of women with no shirts on and call it education, and the narration's blatant racism and sexism were perfectly acceptable humor at the time.  6/10

Once a Sinner (1950) is a British melodramatic thriller centering on class conflict.  The plot element of marrying above/below one's station is more a 1930s thing in US films but it's still obviously an important issue in 1950 Britain.  Fairly entertaining and overall a pretty good movie, but not great.   6/10

MOVIES

The Phantom President (1932) In the first of his two sound picture appearances, George M. Cohan plays a dual role as a stuffed-shirt banker with presidential aspirations and the coincidentally identical stranger, a medicine show mountebank with the pep and personality needed to pull off a successful campaign.  Claudette Colbert is another of the dead stick banker's aspirations which is also taken over by his double - despite the obvious decades of age difference.  Jimmy Durante is the double's eccentric gibberish-spouting factotum and they perform a couple of  Rodgers and Hart numbers together with excellent chemistry.  There are few opportunities nowadays for us to ascertain what Cohan's appeal was, but his charisma and personality are obvious and his blackface performance lacks the smarmy emotionalism of Jolson's and doesn't even go into dialect.  There is some effective political satire here, showing that the only way to win the presidency is to put on an entertaining spectacle.  I was also impressed with the sophisticated direction and camerawork, with the double scenes handled very effectively.  It's all pretty weird, but entertaining, and Colbert is well-dressed in sleek satin with huge puffy feather collars or fur sleeves.  Worth seeing for historical value, 7/10

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

I have been getting comments from cartoonists whose work I featured in recent editions of SUNDAY WEBCOMIC.  Their confusion as to my intentions is understandable, as I am not always certain of them myself.  All I will say is that the purpose of SUNDAY WEBCOMIC is to present works which are uniquely creative in unexpected ways.  To the artists, I say - you are doing a webcomic and I am not, so that automatically puts you a cut above me.

There are a number of features I look for in a SUNDAY WEBCOMIC which can't be found in any other medium.  I love apology pages, where they write a long explanation for why there is no strip.  I love it when there is an explanation of the strip which takes longer to read than it does to read the actual comic.  When browsing webcomic lists I check out the ones that are discontinued or on hiatus because they often end with an apology, an explanation, or a promise that the strip positively will continue, that they will absolutely be back better than ever before you know it, and then I see it's dated May 2008.

The cartoonist who created Unlimited Evil integrated the abrupt end of the strip in a very pleasing way, and the artistic technique of the entire production is a great combination of scratchy original artwork and flashy digital processing that unites opposite ends of the quality scale.

The perpetrator of Childproof Epsilon also stays "in character" in the final strip, presenting it in exactly the same way as all the preceding work.  This strip is an exceptionally impressive solution to the problem of being unable to draw a comic strip, by having absolutely no artwork at all, ever.  I enjoy the tautological echo effect of having the same text repeated as a list under each strip, and the self-referential beginning strips which are about doing a comic with no artwork.  The only thing it doesn't do is come out and say it is an Online Webcomic in the title.

So there you have it.  Another one done.

MOVIES

I have been watching nothing but dispiriting crap for the past couple of weeks.  Sometimes intentionally, mostly by accident.  Sorry.

BLAME YOURSELF

-Herman Cain, multimillionaire, candidate for U.S. President

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

This week, SUNDAY WEBCOMIC proudly presents SUNDAY WEBCOMIC, an online webcomic about SUNDAY WEBCOMIC.  I even joined an online webcomic site so as to present it in its appropriate context with the appended apology and explanation requisite for such an endeavor.

Perhaps you, unaccustomed as you are to the total immersion experience of online webcomics necessary for me to bring you such quality selections each week, did not know that Stick Man is an actual genre of online webcomics.  An entire semi-ironic genre of comics consisting of crudely scribbled stick figures, more often than not making jokes appropriate to the college dormitory environment in which they are most frequently created.  Who would have thought of such a thing?  And yet, Sticktown seems to take it another unexpected step beyond mere irony to... something else.

Then, to show exactly what really makes my brain go DOING, please enjoy the noteworthy Old Hickory Blog, whatever it is.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

As I have pointed out in the past there are many solutions to the problem of wanting to do a webcomic while lacking the basic skills necessary to create comics.  The most elegant solution is to use only one picture, and only change the words.  That is what Zarj's Webcomics does.  Not only that, it tells you it is webcomics in the title, plus the extra added bonus of saying right in the banner across the top of the page that they are lame webcomics.  As everyone knows, saying a joke isn't funny makes it funny.

I often find comics which seem to have a lot of potential, but are in early stages of development with only a few strips to read.  Like Oldjokes and Caveman Rock Comic. I don't want to jinx them by bringing undue attention their way, but I hope they keep producing the same quality of work.

Just so you don't feel like I left you hanging with those, here is a classic example of SUNDAY WEBCOMIC inscrutability, Fun With Homeshopping.  Enjoy

On the Nature of Things

The Physical realm and the Spiritual realm are separate and distinct, though each affects the other.  The scholarship of the Physical realm is Science; its nature is Order and its laws are stable and consistent. The scholarship of the Spiritual realm is Mysticism; its nature is Chaos and its laws are dependent and mutable.  Where the two realms overlap is the realm of Charlatanry, where resemblances are reality and opinions are facts.  The scholarship of the Charlatanous realm is called Research; its nature is Contrivance and its laws are contradictory.  The aims of the Scientist and the Mystic are to discover, learn and share.  The aims of the Charlatan are to invent, prove and convince.  The Charlatan poses as Scientist or Mystic, whichever convenience requires, but is neither.  The Mystic who denies the reality of the Physical realm, and the Scientist who denies the reality of the Spiritual realm, are not Charlatans, but fools.

Movies

The Walls of Jericho (1948) Anne Baxter, Linda Darnell, Kirk Douglas and Cornel Wilde star in this melodrama of passion and politics in early 20th century small-town Kansas. It is pretty early in Douglas' career and he doesn't have much to do here but be led around by Darnell, his flashy scheming wife.  Wilde is inoffensive and it is not easy to see why he inspires such feelings among the ladies here but somebody had to do it.  The good thing about this is that three quarters of the way through, Baxter takes the movie and scampers off with it, and never gives it back.  Nothing in a movie makes my heart sink like the realization that it is turning into a prolonged trial scene, but Baxter really saved this one for me when a shocking turn of events makes her lead attorney and deliverer of the impassioned closing speech.  Unlike lesser stars she always looks great with her hair up and in restrained period costume, and she always did her best with what she was given, no matter what the role. One of my favorite scenes in cinema is her heartrendingly ironic closing speech in the wartime pro-soviet epic The North Star, a passionate evocation of a dream never to be fulfilled. Overall this is a darned good big budget costume melodrama and if that is what you are craving this really delivers, and I must say the costumes are great - some really swell dresses here, especially Darnell's elaborate display. Ann Dvorak plays a pivotal role as Wilde's bitter drunken wife, as does Barton MacLane as his usual surly menacing lout. I could have done with a few fewer renditions of Shine On Harvest Moon but I can't fault it on much else.  9/10

Anne Baxter - on her it looks good.

Movies

Naked Alibi (1954) is a weirdly unconvincing noir starring Sterling Hayden, Gloria Grahame and Gene Barry. Barry overacts horrifically as a volatile bakery owner, Hayden is the disgraced ex-police chief trying to prove Barry is a cop-killer, and Grahame is the woman in between.  Hayden and Grahame are good actors, and both kind of unusual looking, so they go together well, but this takes place in the world where there are towns called things like Border City, with streets that all curve so you can only see two blocks and not into the Medieval Paris or New York part of the backlot a few hundred yards away. The strange unbelievability of the production is distilled in Grahame's execution of the following peculiarly trashy dubbed musical number in an overlit soundstage Border City cantina with music but no band. Still there is something irresistibly seductive to me about her unusually tiny mouth - I find it hard to look at anything else when she is onscreen. 6/10 overall, but for weirdness it is more of an 8.

The Time of His Life (1955) Offbeat independent British comedy in which a snobbish matron must endure the reappearance of her convict father, whose only desire is to go back to jail where he belongs.  It relies mostly on prolonged slapstick and pratfalls for its "laughs" and could have been more amusing if it had simply gone with the appeal of the characters and circumstances. The only face I recognized was bespectacled Richard Wattis. Kind of a chore to sit through, but the organ and vibes soundtrack added a sort of Mr. Hulot emotional appeal and there is a song. 4/10

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

Way back in the middle of the 20th century was when I first learned to cherish the experience of the Sunday Comics.  Lying on the floor with a vast expanse of  colors and words spread before me I puzzled my way through such enigmas as Ferd'nand, The Little King and Henry.  I would come to the breakfast table with my elbows blackened by printer's ink and my brain dulled by the inexplicable antics of those strange silent characters.  I cannot come to your home and daub your elbows with grime once a week but I can do it to your brain.

What makes a really good choice for a SUNDAY WEBCOMIC for me is not just the quality of the work itself, but the quality of the apologies and explanations the artists attach to them.  The creator of this SUNDAY WEBCOMIC called Think About It keeps his explanations and apologies short, like what the comics theirselves are.

Another sterling quality that makes a great SUNDAY WEBCOMIC is choice of subject matter.  NaggyNerd seems to be entirely about video game characters.  I have heard of some of them, but I have never seen any of them being played and certainly have never played them myself, so it's kind of interesting to me to see.  I like to think of someone out there thinking this stuff is hilarious because they know what it is about.

As a special added bonus I am adding this special bonus in addition to the preceding two strips, specially, as a bonus.  Ferd'nand is still being created far off in lonely Denmark or somewhere and one may not only enjoy the comic itself, but the special added bonus of seeing people try to figure it out or explain it to each other, just like when I used to ask my Mom and she would as often as not be as puzzled as I was.

Go wash your elbows and come to the table.

I EXPRESS MY GRATITUDE

I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to all the folks out there who work so hard to make themselves look ridiculous in elaborate ways requiring continuous effort, expense, maintenance and pain. Sometimes I look in the mirror and think, "What a hideous old coot, getting more wretched and repulsive every day."  Then I remember all the people with their rainbow heads and ratty dreads, implanted skull knobs and lumpy lip jobs, hunks of metal hanging off their faces and even uglier places, and I realize I could get dragged through a mudhole by a garbage truck and still look like I got gussied up to shake hands with the Queen compared to those dopey looking scribbled up goofbags.  Thank you, you dumb jerks, for reminding me that I am not just smarter than you, but better looking too.

Movies

Gangway for Tomorrow (1943)  Extremely entertaining feelgood wartime propaganda piece - a carful of ridesharing war workers on the way to a day's work at the airplane plant recall in turn the past events that led them to where they are.  Not a big or flashy movie, but a set of interesting human stories.  Written by radio suspense-master Arch Oboler, very well produced and directed.  Good clean fun.  8/10

Attack the Block (2011) A gang of teenage hoodlums are interrupted in mid-crime by an alien invasion.  The problem is, they are the ones who have what the monsters want.  A pure, sharp, clean, witty and intense monster movie without a lot of fancy-ass jerkycam CGI spectacle.  A good monster movie is about people, and this story is populated by believable and eventually likeable characters, fighting guys in monster suits.  That's right, monster suits.  Not some motion capture glittery tentacled slime-dripping whooshing ray-emitting crap, but guys in big black fur suits and it totally works. Just enough woah moments and sudden grim laughs; not too grisly but the right amount to show you those gorilla-wolf motherfuckers mean business.  This is the best pure monster movie I can recall seeing in years and I don't give 10/10 easily or often but this earns it. Nice job, everybody.

This is all you need to know.

Movies

Bunraku (2010) I didn't realize when I "obtained" this that it hadn't been released to US theaters yet.  I have some standards about downloading and tend not to go for certain things as a matter of principle.  I had a vague idea this was not going to get a US theatrical release and thought this was the only way I could see it. Sorry.  Watched it anyway.  This extremely imaginative, lively and colorful fantasy never sets foot in reality for a moment, which is something I really appreciate in a movie.  You're going to have to build sets for everything anyway so why not make them the craziest sets you can, and light the hell out of them and stick greenscreens behind them to fill the background with pure art instead of just a picture of something you can see by looking out the window.  That said, it is all pretty much fight scenes tied together with a string of genre cliches.  I need more from a story than that.  It was fun to see but I would have liked it more if there had been an actual plot or some kind of relational contrivance beyond these guys have to fight those guys. Or some songs would have been cool, to go with the imaginative choreography that was already there. So, 6/10 for me.  If you like that fighty stuff go see it if you can.

Movies

Law of the Jungle (1942) is a Monogram soundstage cheapie hacked together in a few days and is crude and flat even for that.  Arline Judge was not a great actress but a good worker when she had something to work with, and a more watchable example of that is Sensation Hunters (1933).  I thought she seemed a bit unfeminine and was surprised to learn she held a Hollywood record for eight marriages long before it was fashionable.  In this thing everyone stands around waiting for a cue and chokes out their lines like they just saw the script for the first time a minute ago.  The leading man could be replaced by a hat rack and even Mantan is reduced to doing pratfalls.  If Mantan can't save a movie, nobody can.  The one item of interest is the appearance of Arthur O'Connell as a greasy traitor with a phony British accent, long before he became known for his kindly grey moustache. 3/10

Movies

Smarty (1934)  Joan Blondell is cast out of type as a manipulative upper-class featherbrain who goads husband Warren William to violence in this rather unsettling divorce farce. The message of the film is stated in so many words, by a woman, that some women need to be socked in the jaw to bring them into line and the unfortunate thing is that he didn't do it sooner and more often.  This whole movie is looking to be slapped down for its advocation of violence and adultery.  Blondell is as toothsome as always, especially in a black backless gown which her exasperated ex yanks off of her in one swift motion, but the role is outside of her range.  There are any number of actresses who could have done this irritating nitwit role to perfection, but Joan is the wrong choice for it.  On the plus side there is a fashion show at a high end couturier where the styles are pushed just beyond the brink of absurdity, and plenty of leg, back and negligee throughout.  Edward Everett Horton and Frank McHugh lend a hand but in the end this was just wrong.  Especially the end.  4/10

Watch Out, We're Mad (1974) Bud Spencer and Terence Hill just want their dune buggy replaced by the gangsters who crashed and burned it, or they will get mad.  They eventually do get mad. Watch out. Utterly moronic with no pretensions of being anything else.  Starts right off with a kind of motocross race for cars with lots and lots of jumping, rolling, crashing vehicles.  Mindless violence and ludicrous brawls, and Donald Pleasence behaving absolutely idiotically.  It was exactly what I needed to see at the time and I tittered giddily.  6/10

Hey mister, your car's on fire.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

Nowadays when people want to do an online webcomic and they know they don't have any of the requisite skills, there is a simple answer.  The simplest answer is spare us all and devote your talents to something you can actually do well, but that is not the one I mean.  What I mean is take a picture with your telephone, open it in photoshop, then go to FILTERS > ARTISTIC > POSTER EDGES. Instant online webcomic!

Like Chamber of the Arcanum, which has the added bonus of a protagonist who critiques the online webcomic itself as it is happening.

And like Searching to Be, which has the added bonus of a cartoonist who critiques the online webcomic itself and explains what went wrong and why.

Happy September 11th!

Books - The Overton Window "by" Glenn Beck

The Overton Window - Glenn Beck  I had seen this at the library a few weeks ago and had been thinking of it ever since.  Kook novels are a field of special interest for me because they contain ideas which I am unlikely to encounter anywhere else, usually packed in an especially mediocre form of utopian/dystopian fantasy.  I was in the mood for something easy to digest and I knew this couldn't have been written by Beck himself (if it had, it probably would have been 600 pages), so it would be a standard ghost-written page-turner which hit all the notes at the right time.  When a kook novel is written by the kook him/herself it can be challenging, if not impossible, to read and I regret that among the many on the shelves here at the Kooks Museum I have only read most of them.  Any book I can rip through in four hours is a well-crafted piece of formula fiction, and that's what this is.  Steeped in kook lore as I am, I got all the Global Political Conspiracy references and was pleased to be introduced to some pretty interesting social engineering concepts, including the eponymous Window - ideas acceptable to the public are within this so-called window, and to change what is accepted one introduces extreme and unacceptable ideas, which automatically widens the window making less extreme ideas palatable.  This is similar to less well-defined ideas of my own, that the existence of an obviously insane extremism makes it easier to introduce unusual or uncommon ideas which seem more reasonable by comparison.  This is a classic and very useful fallacy of argument which actually operates subliminally to alter people's ideas without their knowing it. The irony of Beck's use of the Overton Widow concept, to me, is that he doesn't appear to realize that he has been used for exactly that purpose - as a public loony introducing crank extremist theories in order to make a less radical deliberate thought control agenda more palatable.  After finishing The Overton Window I opened another book I got at the same time, the first volume of  Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities.  I knew by the time I got to the second paragraph that I held in my hands a work of genius.  The sad thing is, I am not sure I will be able to read it.

Movies - recent viewing

Narok (2005) is a Thai hell movie.  A group of people are erroneously sent to hell even though they are all still alive in the emergency room.  Buddhist hell, where they saw people in half, hang them from hooks and smash their hands and feet with mallets forever.  Not much of a story is necessary in a Hell movie - you are there and you want to get out, some do and some don't. It was great to see a Buddhist slant on it.  I don't think there are nearly enough hell movies.  This one is okay as a horror ordeal story, 6/10.  I recommend more highly the Nobuo Nakagawa film Jigoku (1960) which makes maximum use of its limited resources.

The Invisible Man vs. The Human Fly (1957) goes by other names but it is a Japanese movie about a good guy with an invisibility ray against a bad guy with shrinking gas which makes him so small he just drifts around and floats into locked rooms to murder people.  It is a movie about people you can't see.  The next day I couldn't remember what I had watched the night before.  3/10

The Nitwits (1935) is the Wheeler and Woolsey comedy said to have been remade as Genius At Work, previously reviewed.  Two goofy guys get involved with a mysterious serial murderer and there the resemblance ends.  The difference between the two movies is W&W have distinct personalities and chemistry as a team, they do and say amusing things in amusing ways, and there are jokes and humor included in the script, as well as a couple of good musical numbers.  As good a Wheeler and Woolsey movie as was ever made - harmless fun and gentle entertainment.  7/10

The Ghost Writer (2010) directed by Roman Polanski, is in many ways similar to his earlier The Ninth Gate, entering an obscure byway of literature by way of a protagonist just intelligent enough to work his way into a baffling maze but not to get back out again in one piece.  Similar too is the depiction of the soullessness of wealth and hollow opulence where genuine evil hides behind banal smiles.  Not a single ray of sunshine is seen in the cold bleak settings or in the hearts of the grim characters laboring under the weight of the contents of their own minds. Eli Wallach's brief appearance is memorable, and the stark locales and settings are simultaneously wide open and claustrophobic.  9/10

I watch all kinds of stuff.  I also recently enjoyed the second of the King Naresuan historical epics from Thailand which goes beyond any other historical epic I have seen for vast rampaging spectacle.  I sort of enjoyed Lizard in a Woman's Skin (1971), a trippy Italian giallo starring Brazilian actor/director Florinda Bolkan as a woman who appears to have dreamt the stabbing death of her neighbor exactly as it happened.  Didn't really enjoy L'anticristo (1974), an Italian Exorcist rip-off which I had seen before and for some stupid reason watched again, and didn't even make it half way through some damn thing called Female Yakuza Tale: Inquisition and Torture (1973) also, perhaps more literally, known as Story of a Wild Elder Sister: Widespread Lynch Law.  It is the stupidest and lousiest cheap Japanese exploitation flick I have ever tried to watch.

Movies

Catch Us If You Can (a.k.a. Having a Wild Weekend) - 1965  You'd think the "Dave Clark 5 Movie" would have something to do with the Dave Clark 5, but it doesn't.  This movie brought pleasurable expectations and left only boredom, regret, and a feeling of having been educated rather than entertained.  The one good thing about it for me was that they go to a place that allegedly has go-karts but they don't ride in them, or even show them onscreen.  That was a real relief to me because no matter what song they play in the background a go-kart scene is a go-kart scene and it contributes nothing to the story.  If you like wondering if anything interesting will ever happen, or seeing a movie supposedly about a band in which the band never performs or is even shown with or near their musical instruments, this is for you.  Not me.  2/10 for sociocultural education value, getting to see the Roman baths at Bath, and a lesson learned.

Movies

Genius at Work (1946) stars obscure comedy duo Wally Brown and Alan Carney, and it is a real puzzle how these guys got over half a dozen starring vehicles.  They have no schtick, no outstanding features of any kind except that one of them is not jewish.  Here they are - now you will remember them forever.

This is alleged to be a re-make of the Wheeler and Woolsey movie The Nitwits - I will watch it to find out, and I won't mind because Wheeler and Woolsey can actually be funny sometimes.  Most people don't even know who W&W are nowadays and here are Wally Brown (R) and Alan Carney (L) eating off of their table. Not even enough of a team to be called Brown and Carney.  They are supposed to be a couple of radio announcers who do a crime program and fall afoul of a Master Fiend called The Cobra who baffles the police with his nefariousness.  Studio villain Lionel Atwill is hauled in for that role and Lugosi is reduced to henchman status.  The only really notable thing in the movie is pictured below - Lugosi in spectacles and phony beard, Atwill in granny drag, in a wheelchair, using a poison needle blowgun to commit his shocking murders.  The less said about that the better.  This is a flat factory-made bill-filler cranked out to fill time, not seats, and of no conceivable interest to anyone, not even me.