Last night I watched Zombi 2 ( Zombie). There is no Zombi 1. Confused? You should be. Here's how advertising works: When an American director makes a movie and it does well, or does mediocre, it gets shipped overseas and distributed in other countries. Sometimes the titles change during this time. For instance, if you have seen the French movie, Amelie, you might also know that the actual French title translates as, The Fabulous Destiny of Amelie Poulain, (Le Fabuleux Destin de Amelie Poulain). American movie distributors didn't think Americans wanted movies with long titles, so they changed it. George Romero's Dawn of the Dead was given the title Zombi when it was released in Italy. So, since it was very popular, Lucio Fulci called his movie Zombi 2, but the films are unrelated.
But the title is only one reason why this movie is in an entry titled "WTF?" The other reason is a famous scene in which a zombie fights a shark underwater. I know! Right now you're thinking, "WTF?" I thought that too. Here's proof that this scene actually exists in a movie:
How messed up is that? So the zombie squares off against the shark and then grabs him and takes bites out of him. Then the shark bites the zombie's arm off and swims away. It was kinda crazy. The shark's trainer dressed up in some zombie gear and handled the shark for this scene. It's slow and weird but, even without CGI, it's still impressive.
Zombi 2 is pretty famous in horror circles for the above scene and one other graphic effects-heavy scene: the splinter in the eye scene. In the splinter scene a woman is grabbed through a door by a zombie's hand and he pulls her face towards a large splinter of wood which then becomes impaled in her eye. It's all very slow and suspenseful until the eye gets gouged, and then it becomes ridiculous and gory. Here's a taste ( the splinter is hard to see clearly, but is in the upper right part of the picture, just below the zombie hand):
Zombi 2 was released back in the eighties on VHS. It was quickly placed on the Video Nasties list which was better advertising than anyone could buy. More on that next time!
I hope everyone has a Happy Halloween and eats lots of candy / gets blitzed (safely).
Note to Die Frau: I may be in complete favor of "naughty" costumes, but I don't think they belong in school, nor am I into underage girls wearing things that could get them, or me, into trouble.
When I was about 13 years old I dressed up as Hannibal Lector for Halloween. I was one of those kids who had his last trick-or-treating outing at age 15. If there is a nationally accepted cut-off age for begging for candy, I don't know what it is. If two 70-year old women knock on my door tomorrow night, I'm giving them candy. As a kid I took a lot of pride in my costumes. I liked my costumes to be scary and dark. I've been the Crow, Hannibal Lector, Patrick Bateman, Freddy Kruger, etc. Tomorrow night I will be Ash from the Evil Dead movies.
Costumes have changed a lot, and my beliefs about what is and is not acceptable have changed too. For instance, when I was a young elementary-aged child I went trick-or-treating as a ninja. A close friend of mine was a clown. I was embarrassed for him. I couldn't believe he thought that was a cool costume. For me the Halloween costume had to be dark and horrific and action-packed. (Since then I've seen this movie, and changed my mind.)
Nowadays I am an adult and I know that it's perfectly fine for someone to dress up in a non-scary fashion. There are all sorts of costumes that aren't scary but are great for Halloween night: naughty nurse, naughty librarian, naughty Ghostbuster, naughty race car driver, naughty Rainbow Bright, naughty Hermione Granger. The list goes on and on. So there are many types of costumes which supersede my antiquated rule of dressing up as something scary. Guess I'm just old fashioned and want to follow the original traditions of All Hallow's Eve. I'm basically a stick-in-the-mud when it comes to having things my way, but like any old codger, I'll budge for cleavage.
I haven't been keeping up on my posts too well, so I apologize to the two or three of you who read this, and I'm going to write a little blurb in here and call myself "caught up".
The Grudge 3 trailer came out today and I cannot tell you what a waste of time it is. There are so many Grudge movies out there: four in Japan, three in America. I know, I know, there are 9 Freddy movies and 11 Jason movies and 9 Halloween movies. But those are all different - as far as they aren't remakes of each other. The Japanese Grudge movies consist of two made-for-TV movies and two features. The features then got made into the first two U.S. Grudge movies and now the third one is coming out, straight to DVD. Here it is:
Excited for this? Here's a tip for all you movie advertising newbies: If the first half of your trailer consists of clips from the previous movies in the series, then your movie is probably not going to do well. When you put a trailer like this together, you're telling people that not only does your movie not have enough cool shit in it to make it's own complete trailer, but that it isn't good enough to stand on its own. "In order for The Grudge 3 to be seen we have to get people to remember seeing the first two [seven] movies!" I think that's how the pitch meeting went for the advertising of this flick.
By the way, getting people to remember having seen the previous Grudge movies is a Sisyphean task in and of itself. Not only do they blend together in a way that only Japanese ghost stories can, but the grudging ghosts look like every other ghost/paranormal creature in J-Horror history. Here are some comparisons:
Samara from The Ring (U.S.)
Sadako from Ringu (Japan)
Kayako from Ju-on / The Grudge (Japan / U.S.)
Anyhow, as you can see, ridiculousness abounds and there isn't any difference in the outward appearance of these ghosts. They also behave in a very similar way: jerky movements. I admit that Japanese ghosts scare the crap out of me, but that's because of some latent spectral racism that I am having a hard time overcoming. (Also the language barrier would be a problem for me. I can't be haunted by a Japanese ghost because I don't speak Japanese. At least I could try to reason with an American ghost.) So these jerky movements are stupid, even though they are kinda scary. What these movies are telling our nation's youths is that when you're dead you walk like you have ten types of scoliosis in your back, with a nasty case of rickets and club feet to boot! What hope do the handicapped have if they know that in the great beyond they're going to be more crippled than they are now? I always thought that when you were dead you could move as fluidly and gracefully as you had ever thought possible. I guess I was wrong. Or maybe it's just the bad milk they have in Japan.
Every now and then movies come out in pairs. Sometimes movies are thought of in pairs, and sometimes a smaller movie will jump on the coattails of a larger one and try to steal some reflected fame. This doesn't tend to work out so much these days - Transformers / Transmorphers; Jurassic Park / Carnasaur ; Snakes On a Plane / Snakes On a Train - but there are some notable examples of movies from the past that became overshadowed, but were just as great. Let's take a look at a few shining examples of movies that fell by the wayside, but deserve a lot more credit.
In 1931 Todd Browning directed a classic to end all classics, Dracula. Bela Lugosi starred as Count Dracula and of course it was a complete success. How do we know it was a success? Have you ever heard of Dracula? Well there you go then. Browning's Dracula is a good version of the story, albeit old and gore-less and sex-less. But there's something to be said for subtlety, even if the subtlety is forced because of the time period in which the movie was made. Apparently this version of Dracula wasn't snubbed by Bram Stoker's estate (because the studio bought the rights to make the film legally), but Nosferatu, the German expressionist version of the Dracula tale, was. Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens was made in 1922 by F. W. Murnau and was found to be in violation of copyright. Bram Stoker's widow tried very hard to have every copy destroyed, and she almost succeeded. A few copies slipped through the cracks and we have Nosferatu available these days for anyone who wants to see it. Nosferatu wasn't the only casualty resulting from poor planning, however.
Carl Theodore Dreyer's Vampyr came out in 1932 and is a much creepier tale of vampirism. The film isn't based on Stoker's "Dracula", but rather a short story called, "Carmilla" by Sheridan Le Fanu. Vampyr isn't seen nearly as often as 1931's Dracula, and that's a shame. The photography is very creative and stylized, and the tale a bit darker and more cryptic in its telling. The characters don't bare their fangs, and it is left up to you to decide if the protagonist is making it all up in his head or not. No vampire film from the early days of cinema could ever hold a candle in the fame department to Browning's Dracula, but that doesn't mean they don't deserve to be seen and appreciated.
Jumping a few decades into the future from the 1930's, we come to the 1970's. In 1973 The Exorcist comes out and old Spanish Catholic women start passing out in the aisles because the movie is so graphic and scary. What old Spanish, Catholic women are doing going to see graphic horror films in the first place, I'll never know. (It really is scary if you believe in possession, though. And it's graphic as all hell too.) The Exorcist is a great flick. The special effects are amazing and none other than the gore-meister himself, Tom Savini, said in an interview that he couldn't do what he usually does when he goes to horror movies: de-construct the effects. He was just too scared and caught up to bother. By the way, if you haven't seen The Exorcist: The Version You've Never Seen, check it out. The "spider-walk" scene makes watching the movie again all worth while.
A few years after The Exorcist scared the shit out of practicing Catholics everywhere, a little movie called The Omen came out. Having just as impressive a score, toned-down yet effective violence and a disarmingly passive child in the lead, The Omen is just as powerful a movie, and is scarier since it doesn't play as directly to religion as The Exorcist did. It's easier for me to get swept up by the terror in The Omen than in The Exorcist because in the latter film I'm being constantly reminded about how religious the whole thing is. (That kind of thing prevents me from allowing myself to be scared. But I still enjoy the movie for what it is.)
Sure The Omen isn't as graphic and in-your-face as The Exorcist...it doesn't have anyone masturbating with a crucifix after all...but it makes up for the differences in spades. If The Omen or Vampyr had been released with further distance from their competition, they might have become just as popular. I'm not saying that Transmorphers deserves a chance, but Rogue was a much better killer-crocodile movie than Primeval was, and Primeval got released into theaters! Talk about injustice...
Not wanting to distract our quest for answers by providing them myself, this post concerns the mysteries embodied in the great American works by H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft's fiction focuses on exploring the deepest regions of time and space. We can discover truths about the vastnesses of reality in our dreams, as in "The Dream Quest of the Unknown Kadath", or we can go searching, such as the protagonist does in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth". Do we want to find these answers? Howard Phillips Lovecraft wrote deeply psychological stories with an archaic atmosphere and vast sense of time and space. I always feel like I've stumbled onto some parallel, or ancient history when I read his work. His protagonists, usually younger men who are curious folks with keen minds to discover everything the planet has to offer, stumble upon remnants of our pasts. Alien archeology is often at the forefront; references to old, powerful gods lying dormant tend to fill in the background. Sometimes there will be a juxtaposition between two characters: one who reacts in horror to the new findings described above, and another who embraces the newly-discovered realities. A good example of this is in Pickman's Model.Pickman's Model concerns two art students, one of which stops attending classes and begins working in his house, becoming a sort of recluse. The other student chances to meet him on the street one day and is persuaded by Pickman to come back and look at the new art he's been creating since he stopped going to class. Pickman's horrific art isn't drawn from his imagination; he just paints portraits.
The revelation in Lovecraft's stories, by the reader and protagonist, is that there are creatures/gods of immense size and power somewhere in space, either lying dormant or just waiting for some thunderous moment, to take control of, or destroy without reason or pity, this race of beings called "humans". The comment being made is do we insist upon our dominance and fight for our right to live? Or do we embrace these new realities thereby possibly forestalling our demise? Do we even have that choice?
"as I mechanically kept stumbling ahead into the stronger light I realised that my fancy had been but feeble." (The Nameless City)
Lovecraft's The Nameless City is a fictional narrative by a man who has traveled to the middle of a forsaken section of desert in the Middle East to find the titular city and learn about its downfall. Throughout the story it is clear that the narrator assumes that people once lived here and worshiped strange gods and performed strange rites. He encounters a long deep passage, which he follows, descending into the earth. On the walls of the passage are hieroglyphics telling the story of this lost race and the city. There aren't people depicted in the carvings, but reptilian humanoid creatures which the narrator assumes are allegorical. Towards the end of the story he figures out that there is no analogy. His "fancy had been feeble", and he had not been able to entertain the idea that a separate race could exist and create this city and these carvings. As he stumbles towards an actual light given off by an abyss in the bowels of the earth, he gains a deeper understanding of the truth because more is being revealed to him.
The Nameless City is one of my favorite Lovecraft stories and it is indicative of the concept surrounding most of his works: People cannot imagine anything unless those things are relative to themselves. The fact that human beings could be a secondary race, is a thought that we aren't capable of. Lovecraft's fictions attempt to prove that, even if they can't be taken literally, seeing ourselves as one tiny speck on the edge of the abyss of time and space is a positive step towards understanding.
Here's a pic of Chuck and myself at Cedar Point's Charlie Brown play area. Check out my Joe Cool-style sun glasses. I'm well outside the target age-group for this installation, but I threw caution to the wind and struck a pose anyway. No, I am not giving it to Charlie Brown, although that costume of his is certainly "easy access". (Note the great tan I have between my knee and ankle, the desirous, olive shade of which is leg hair assisted.)
There won't actually be any religion or politics in this post, so I'm sorry if you feel that I have led you on. There will, however, be The Great Pumpkin, one of the best animated specials of all time. I can't really say what I like most about It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!. Between the hilarious story and dialogue, to the water color night skies and Snoopy's battle with the Red Baron, there's a ton of material to choose from. The music ranks pretty high in my estimation, though. I can't describe in words how I feel when I first hear Vince Guaraldi's "Linus and Lucy" as the two characters walk out the door on their way to pumpkin patch when the special begins.
One of the most remarkable features of the Great Pumpkin is the water colors used for the skies. The sunset as Snoopy crawls past WWII enemy lines, the various darks and blues that blotch the night as the group goes trick or treating; this style of coloring defines the Charlie Brown specials, but is an element of the animation that is easy to gloss over. The next time you watch this show, try to look at the skies and backgrounds. A lot of great texture and depth will become apparent as the water colors bleed together and provide a soft, natural feel.
This special appeals to so many people because it covers a lot of aspects of Halloween night. Carving a pumpkin, making a costume (and possibly having trouble with the scissors), going out on the hunt for candy, venturing into unknown neighborhood territory, hitting up the Halloween party, and of course, setting yourself up for a huge night only to be let down by your crazy expectations. I've had my share of bummer Halloweens and I can sympathize, as we all can, with Linus wanting things to go just right. Sometimes it just doesn't work out.
To begin a season of any sort, be it Christmas or Halloween, there should be a single element that truly puts you in the mood. It could be the sight of a pumpkin sitting on sheets of newspaper waiting to be eviscerated, or it might start in September with the first tinge of red coming into the leaves. It might even be as late in the game as the first doorbell ring of a trick-or-treater. I can watch all the horror movies I want, but I really start to feel Halloween in my bones when I watch It's The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown. I hope everyone who reads this, all 1 of you, have seen this special and watch it yearly.
No matter how you spend your holiday, no matter if you watch The Great Pumpkin or not, here's another animator's take on the events of a Halloween night, some 50 years ago...
A well-known, but little-understood, sub-genre of horror is the giallo cinema of Italy. The giallo is defined by heavy atmosphere, harsh scenes of bloodletting, nudity, stylized camera movements and, of course, a killer lurking in the shadows waiting to be discovered by both the characters and the viewer. These movies are easy to point out if you know what characterizes them. Gialli, plural of giallo, offer great story telling and fun horror elements within a sharply defined, Italian genre.
The word giallo means "yellow" in Italian. The literary genre originated in Italian mystery/thriller pulp novels in much the same way as Mickey Spillane and Ian Fleming's novels defined their own genre(s) in the U.S. The giallo novels were easy to spot on the book rack because of their bright yellow covers with graphics suggestive of the violence and sex that awaited the reader within. As you may have guessed, the pictures usually had little to do with the actual content, but effective advertising is effective advertising.
Gialli were influenced by the French Grand Guignoltheatre. The Grand Guignol only produced shows with a naturalistic horror feel. Think about it as a sex show, but with murder instead. None of it was real, but the effects were very convincing for the day, and many people lined up to see the simulated killings and stylized murder set-pieces. (See, it's not just us Americans and our Hostel and Saw movies.)
Gialli films came about in the 60's and continued to be an entertaining draw throughout the 70's and 80's. The most famous giallo directors are Dario Argento, Sergio Martino, Mario Bava, Pupi Avati and Mario Lenzi. Lucio Fulci can be included in that list as well, but he is more firmly in the horror vein than in the subset of giallo. Gialli stories tend to be set in the present and are grounded in reality. Fantastical elements like evil spirits, witches and the supernatural prevent a film from being classified as giallo. For instance, The Beyond is a horror movie, but The Bird With the Crystal Plumage is a giallo.
For people who like horror, but find that fantasy elements tend to tame a story, gialli offer tangible terrors based in real life. The killer is not a demon or monster but a homicidal maniac with a knife. He/she can be overcome and arrested or killed, but not too quickly because the hunt is half the fun in this genre. Along the way from opening credits to discovery of the murderer there will be numerous killings, each one trying to top the previous in terms of staging and ferocity. There will also be lots of sex and nudity, often perpetrated by the next victim.
"This sounds familiar!", you might be saying to yourself. It is because of the horror rules made prevalent in the 80's here in the States, but there is a fundamental difference which must be pointed out: The sex in an Italian giallo is natural and simply a device to add nudity and excitement to the movie. Sex isn't shown as a negative character trait. In America, the sex and nudity was added to the horror movies to analogize the killings into punishments for transgressors. (It also entertains...the boobs serve multiple purposes.)
The giallo is a stylish mystery/thriller imbued with sex and violence. I like them because of the fun plots, the hot women and the 70's period clothing. If you can deal with subtitles, I suggest checking one out!
When I got to work this morning the top post on boingboing.net was about an 18-year old high school student from Kentucky who is facing felony charges for writing a story about zombies taking over a high school. This kid, William Poole, wrote a short story that he says was for English class and his grandparents found his journal and turned it into the police. In Kentucky it is a felony to posses or create any type of material that proposes a threat of some sort to a school.
If all this kid did was write a story about zombies taking over a school, then the state of Kentucky is wildly overreacting. If, on the other hand, the "...discovered materials at Poole's home that outline possible acts of violence aimed at students, teachers, and police..." take into account other materials than just this story, then it's understandable that some action be taken. However, an (obviously) fictional story about a zombie takeover should hardly be the straw that breaks the camel's back and sends this kid to prison. As stated in the article, the judge presiding over the initial hearing raised this kid's bond from $1,000 to $5,000 at the prosecution's request. This kid is a big risk, and he might raise zombies from the dead and set them on the school! I think the only reasonable option now is to issue copies of The Zombie Survival Guide to William Poole's classmates and teachers so that they can be prepared for when this kid raises zombie hell!
Bottom line, there's a lot of stuff left out of this article, so I can't really draw a firm, fair conclusion. However, my parents never screened the books I decided to read or the drawings I decided to create. Stifling creativity in its early stages is retrograde to education and development. It's unfortunate that the laws in Kentucky are such that it would be hard for any Kentuckian child to grow up to become the next George Romero, Edgar Wright or Sam Raimi.
I think Joel McHale on The Soup was the first one to make the obvious connection between the movies on the Sci-fi Channel and pornography. Even though I can't take credit for this brilliant observation, I will write a whole blog post about it! Joel, try and stop me.
Pornography...and also Bollywood movies, come to think of it...are produced on small budgets and completed within days. The audience for porn wants variety and content but not necessarily quality. Copious amounts of money shots and tits and ass definitely balance out that fact that the story lines in porns are seriously lacking. Also the acting sucks. [ha-ha]
Sci-fi Channel movies are pretty much the same. Sci-fi Channel executives know that these movies are going to be terrible, so they spend a lot of time figuring out how to dress-down their lead actresses and dress up their opening credits. Sci-fi Channel movies cater towards a select group of people and they know their audience. The audience for these movies wants blood, action, weird creatures, B-list actors quipping easily-quotable dialogue and cleavage. (Cleavage is important because you can't show straight nudity on Sci-fi.) Bruce Campbell has made quite a few Sci-fi Channel appearances and recently I watched King Cobra starring none other than Pat Morita of Karate Kid fame.
The movies on Sci-fi usually revolve around some sort of creature whose origins are unknown and whose strengths are great but who can easily be taken down by some backwater sheriff and his deputy/girlfriend/mother-in-law/hand-me-down "lucky" pistol. I'm pretty sure that in the Sci-fi Channel offices there is a giant hat with folded up pieces of paper inside that writers and interns pick from to fill out their Mad-Libs-style script forms. ("noun Jeff Smith wandered into the deserted barn looking for his noun. He had with him his trusty noun, so he knew he would be alright if the angry noun that the locals had spotted turned up and verb-ed him.")
By far, apart from seeing someone like Pat Morita get fanged to death by a gigantic king cobra, the best parts of Sci-fi Channel movies are the titles. Alien Apocalypse, King Cobra, Mammoth, RockMonster, Basilisk: The Serpent King, Boa vs. Python, Frankenfish, Man With the Screaming Brain, Supergator, Man-Thing. I want to watch them all again and again! A certain type of paradise exists where all the movies follow Sci-fi's formula: mutant creatures from the deep/outer space/pond-behind-your-house, crazy action, zany one-liners, actors I've never heard of, topped off with sweaty boobs and machine guns.
It's not just the adherence to an unwritten code of "ethics" that connects porn and sci-fi movies, it's also the variety that appears on the Sci-fi Channel on any given day. Porn viewers like variety and there's no telling what they'll want to watch next. Sci-fi Channel viewers are the same. Take a look at a cross-section of this coming weekends' fare: Fire Serpent, Pterodactyl, Dragon Wars, Fire and Ice, Chupacabra: Dark Seas, Sasquatch Mountain, Monster Ark, It Waits, King Cobra. This isn't even all of the movies playing this Saturday and Sunday! (Oh, and if you want to see Pat Morita get fanged to death by a gigantic king cobra, set your DVR's for Monday morning at 1am.)
If you have never tuned in to the Sci-fi Channel for some of these movies, then you are definitely missing out. You will get to see things that you normally wouldn't get to see like aliens that look like praying mantises eating off people's heads in one gulp and women getting their clothing torn/licked off by a large serpent. (And when it comes down it, who in the hell wouldn't want to see that?) Sure the movies suck, sure the story lines are hackneyed, sure the acting would've been accomplished to great acclaim by cardboard cutouts instead of actual people, but watching the Sci-fi Channel, wondering what the next crazy movie is going to be, is a fun way to kill a Sunday afternoon. So you can go rent The Devil in Miss Jones 5 or you can watch Decoys wherein a gaggle of sorority girls are taken over by aliens who use their bodies to impregnate men because their alien race is dying out. It doesn't make much difference to your brain. Since your body cannot chemically tell the difference between being in love or eating chocolate, it won't be able to differentiate between a hot scene of DP-DA and a mammoth using its trunk to suck out a person's life force.
Monday night I watched Don't Look Now, a great movie by Nicolas Roeg. Don't Look Now stars Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie and is a heavily atmospheric work which doesn't expose itself as horror until the very end.
These kinds of "slow burn" movies are pretty unpopular for the mainstream. A common critique is that it takes too long for these kinds of movies to get to the good stuff. I argue that getting there is half the fun...especially the second or third time around. People think they can consume a movie in one sitting. Most of the time that is true, but there are plenty of great films out there that deserve repeat viewings. Some films demand repeat viewings. The Sixth Sense is one of these. Say what you will about M. Night Shayamalan, but when the credits began to roll after you watched The Sixth Sense for the first time, it was hard not to want to start the movie over again. You want to figure out if all the pieces fit together and you want to do it on your own terms, not just by re-watching that ending montage where the whole mystery is solved for you.
Don't Look Now is a movie that deserves and rewards repeat viewings, but at first glance it doesn't seem to need a thorough study. The story is pretty simple: A couple lose their daughter in an accident and relocate from England to Venice to collect themselves. While there they meet a couple of strange characters and search for answers in their own separate ways. They end up meeting different outcomes at a result of their own perceptions. It sounds like a pretty boring drama, but it only seems that way. The paradox of a movie like this is that it's slow and kinda boring the first time around, but after you watch it you'll remember it as being thrilling and suspenseful.
The thematic elements that pervade Don't Look Now are easy to miss the first time around. I've seen this movie about 4 times now, and this past viewing kept my attention because I kept seeing the color red everywhere. I mean it's everywhere. It's the color of the main couples' daughter's jacket, it's the color of the father's scarf, the mother's boots, the jacket of the murderer, and it is everywhere you look. The more you realize what the color red symbolizes, the more you realize that it is everywhere in this story. The color red also makes quite an impact in the movie The Sixth Sense. The color red is used prominently whenever there is a ghost around, most notably when a ghost is trying to interact with a tangible object, (ie: the door knob to the basement, Cole's sweater that gets ripped, Cole's tent, blood - obvious but true, etc.) There is a connection between the color red and death in Don't Look Now as well, although it is much more a connection between elements of the living world and their perception of/proximity to death.
There are two story lines going on at the same time. There's the couple who are grieving for their lost child and at the same time, there is a murderer going around the city committing atrocities. This couple isn't much effected by the murders, other than hearing about them on the news and walking by a spot where the police are pulling a dead body out of the river. As viewers we are never really taken up by the murders and it's easy to forget that they are happening somewhere in the city while this other story is going on.
It's hard to talk about this movie any further without giving away a lot of the plot elements. Watching this movie the other night I was reminded of the first time I watched Fellini's Satyricon. There are huge lavish scenes in banquet halls and the like with lots of extras. There are people in the foreground and background. Every once in a while, as the camera passes by a large group of people, you might notice someone towards the lower part of your screen looking straight back at you. It's easy to miss at first, but when you see it, it's a little unnerving. You realize that the filmmaker is trying to communicate with you in some way. It's up to you to figure out what your role is.
Okay, so it's inappropriate to title this post "The Long Weekend" because no one I know got blackout drunk and lost their way morally and compass-wise, but it was a long weekend and it was nice. Movies were watched, video games were played, Halloween costume stores were visited, frozen Cokes were consumed. The movies I watched this weekend were: Don't Look Now, Death Note and Wicked Little Things. (I also watched two Halloween episodes of The Addams Family.)
Here's something interesting about Death Note...but it's really geeky, so proceed at your own risk. Death Note is a manga, or Japanese comic book. They usually have these huge long twisting story lines that cover tons and tons of pages. For instance, Death Note is about 20 pages per issue. There are around 120 issues. Trust me when I say that although the story is very interesting, you could probably read every third issue and still know exactly what's going on. It's a little bit like a soap opera in that regard.
Some mangas get made into animated features or shows. Examples of animated features made from manga are: Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Vampire Hunter D, Silent Mobius, etc. Some shows would be: Bleach, Samurai Champloo, Cowboy Bebop, etc. I don't like the shows very much, but some of the movies are alright. I'm a big fan of Akira, and Ghost in the Shell is really good too. Anyhow, Death Note was made into both an animated feature and a live-action feature...a movie with real people playing the parts. This has been done before many times. (Think, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Hulk, Batman, etc.) But those are American movies made by Americans based on American comics. American comic book characters look like Americans, so casting an American actor in the role seems completely normal.
Japanese comics got started in the 50's, post WWII, when America was busy helping Japan to rebuild. A lot of American pop culture was pushed into that country at that point and some of it rubbed off on the Japanese. Japanese cartoons came into being. The first way a person learns anything is by imitation. Japanese artists watched a ton of American cartoons to get a jumping off point for their own animation/comics. What American cartoons did these Japanese artists have access to? Betty Boop, Crazy Kat, Little Nemo in Slumberland, 'Lil Abner. Betty Boop was a big deal to these new animators because she was one of the first animated cartoons, as opposed to being just on the page. The Japanese artists drew a lot of inspiration from Betty Boop and the way she was drawn which is why Japanese cartoon characters have such American-looking faces and eyes. Nowadays there is more of a swing towards reality, but there are still a ton of anime, Japanese animation, that carries that Americanized facial design.
So when you are used to reading a Japanese comic and seeing these American faces or used to watching Japanese animation and seeing the same American faces, when a Japanese live-action feature comes into being with Japanese actors, it's kind of jarring to see real Japanese people playing these parts. It was difficult for me to understand why these actors had been cast in these roles because they didn't seem to look anything like the characters I had been reading about. It worked out alright, except I had to turn off the dubbed dialogue and turn on the subtitles so I could listen to the Japanese being spoken. It just works better that way.
And just because I've got time on my hands, here are the other Saw blood drive posters for Saw 2, 3 and 5: (Saw 1 doesn't have an official poster that I could find.)
Okay, so I began this post with a pretentious Shakespeare quote, but this post is not about pretension. It is about people/companies that I respect because they know who they are and they don't try to be more. Here's the short list:
- Jerry Springer - Taco Bell - Bruce Campbell - Christopher Walken - Saw (movie franchise) - Troma
It's a short list because there aren't that many things that fit this category it seems. Here's why...
Jerry Springer knows exactly what he is. he knows exactly what kind of audience his show pandered to and he was up front and open about it to everyone. Springer never claimed to be on the cutting edge of trying to better domestic bliss, nor was he trying to make the world a better place by helping people expose their problems. Jerry Springer's show, The Jerry Springer Show, existed only to give Americans people to look down upon. While that is not a noble thing necessarily, it is truth and Springer has never lied about his modus.
Taco Bell is on this list because of its brilliant ad campaign that came out a few years ago and has stuck like glue: Fourth Meal. See? Taco Bell itself knows who its target audience is. (FYI: It's drunk college kids out at 3am.) It probably took a lot of cojones to realize that drunk 20-somethings are why you're still in business and that you should advertise straight to them. hey kids, hungry? Drunk? High? Out late? Run for the border!
Bruce Campbell. I love him. He's awesome. He makes every movie better with just his usual five minute cameos. (See Congo, Serving Sarah, The Majestic, Spider-man 1-3, The Hudsucker Proxy, etc.) But his starring roles are even better. (See Evil Dead 1 & 2, Army of Darkness, Bubba Ho-Tep, The Man with the Screaming Brain, etc.) He is also on the circuit doing Old Spice commercials...I use it, so it's really just backing up my lifestyle choices when Bruce Campbell hocks it. But more recently I love him because of this quote: "Look, let's cut to the chase because you keep dancing around it, " Campbell exclaims, "if you're talking about Ash coming back again., Sam Raimi [the director of Evil Dead] has the best perspective. He says, 'Look, I can go back and do Ash vs. whoever whenever I want. I can do that when I'm 70; I don't have to do that now. Right now I'm on a fast, fat groovy rain in Hollywood.' And he's going to follow that, and he'll come back and to EVIL DEAD stuff when he's unemployed and living at the Old Director's Home." That's just truth, plain and simple.
Christopher Walken is a breath of fresh air, even if the movies he acts in are the stalest variety of crap Hollywood is churning out these days. Walken does almost ever role that comes his way. he just goes to movie sets for a few days, says a few lines, dances a bit and gets paid. He looks like he's having a ton of fun and it's infectious. (See his performances in Envy, The Rundown, Balls of Fire, Pulp Fiction, Wedding Crashers, Kangaroo Jack and Country Bears. Who the hell would want to appear in Country Bears? Walken, baby.) Also, much like James Cagney before him, he is one of the most talented dancers in Hollywood history that you'd never know about. (See this and this and this.) The bottom line is that Walken likes to act and he likes the goofy roles. He's obviously having too much fun to give a shit about being officially recognized as "great". But he's great anyway.
What can I say about the FIVE Saw movies? Five. There's no way there should ever have been five of these things. I have seen the first three, and they're alright. But five? Really? They get my respect because the tagline for the last couple Saw movies was: "If it's Halloween, it must be Saw". Why is this such a perfectly true-to-self tagline? Because Saw producers know that those movies are designed to be made within a year and be gory. That's it. Once a year we get a Saw movie. Low expectations. If it's just Halloween, it must be Saw. I can't believe that they topped themselves with their blood drive ad.
I've explained in detail about why I love Troma in a previous post, so if you're interested, you can just go read it for yourself!
If you can think of other examples of this kinda of deserving respect, write 'em in the comments section.
Once you decide that you own a part of something, then you have to let it become part of you. Case in point: My girlfriend's stegosaurus tattoo. Not too many people know as much as she does about that extinct animal, and not many people want to know that much either. She is alone most of the time when it comes to the "cult of stegosaurus". But if she signs onto a dino message forum or goes to a conference, she is suddenly surrounded by people who can learn from her and from whom she can learn. She enters a room full of people who care about every little detail and who are not run-of-the-mill in any sense. Her knowledge will be tested. She will also get to test others. My girlfriend is a geologist/paleontologist and dinosaurs are her proving grounds for others who claim to be in love with them as much as she is.
Horror fans also have their proving grounds. Evil Dead is one, although that's fairly surface-level if you ask me. Cannibal Holocaust is another. Cannibal Holocaust is the type of movie that doesn't get reviewed very often because the reviewers are too nervous/scared/sane to watch it. A favorite proving ground of mine, but one that I have to keep out of conversation too often, is Troma.
Watching Troma movies, or calling yourself a fan of Troma movies, is a covenant that you make with yourself and other Troma fans. (Laugh all you want but hear me out.) Not only are you standing up for free speech and the right to display gratuitous boobies and crushed heads, but you're also saying that you believe in independent cinema and the right of anyone to be able to make anything. You're saying that all artistic expressions are valid. You're also saying that you're crazy in the head, but only to some.
Troma is a company formed by people who had experience working from within Hollywood, but preferred, after some time, to do it their own way. Troma tends to make movies that have a lot of highly offensive content. This is for a couple of reasons: 1) Troma doesn't censor anyone's art; 2) Hollywood won't put out movies with certain brands of "humor", nor will they put out movies with explicit content; 3) Offensive content is all good fun. If you want your movie to have explicit content and offensive dialogue, you've gotta do things yourself...and Troma has helped many people do that. (Kevin Smith made Clerks before he got funded by Hollywood...and it's his most offensive movie in my opinion as well as how he became famous.)
People may tend to think of Troma movies as singularly weird and gross. This is completely true, but it's not a unique way of doing things. People have different reasons to make movies with extreme elements. A director you may have heard of, Pedro Almodovar, a director from Spain who has been making movies since the late 70's, has a reputation for visually frank cinema. Almodovar's second film, The Labyrinth of Passion, has a scene wherein some thieves hold up a bank and the teller gets so frightened that she shits her pants. There is a shot with the shit sliding down her leg. The shot doesn't mean anything, and wasn't necessary at all. (You can tell she's shit herself from several other shots around the shot in question. Almodovar also could've gotten the point across differently.) But Almodovar wanted to put that graphic scene in because suddenly he was allowed to.
Franco was the dictator of Spain from 1947 to 1975. During that time everything in that country was moderated and censored. Many films couldn't be made if they were deemed too offensive, or they were harshly edited or banned. When Almodovar started making movies he realized that this reign of censorship and tyranny had ended and he could do whatever he wanted in his movie. He didn't know when he'd get the chance to make another movie, however. Since Almodovar wanted to make the most of his opportunity, he chose to put in a scene, or two or three, that were offensive and gross and gratuitous. He was simply exercising his freedoms, freedoms never offered to anyone before.
Troma is doing the same thing. I'm not saying that Troma's movies are in the same league as Almodovar's, but The Labyrinth of Passion could easily be mistaken for a Troma movie, what with its poor production quality and gratuitous imagery. The concept is the same. Troma stands for freedom of expression.
Troma doesn't stand for good taste. It doesn't stand for "family-friendly". It doesn't stand for "moral high-ground". But I'm okay with that. The Troma fans are okay with that. Watching Troma movies is an experiment. You want to see what they can pull off next. You want to see if you can stomach what they're going to put on screen.
There's a group of people who know what Troma is, and they love it for what it is. I'm one of them, and I hope Troma is around for a long time. I can connect with others who love Troma and other movies of that ilk. Troma is how I can tell the insiders from the posers. It's a little snobbish, but I can live with that.
I thought I watched a lot of movies in high school. I got to college and slowly realized that I hadn't watched any movies. I could talk about a lot of famous movies, but you don't need to see Casablanca in order to discuss it. Everyone knows what Moby Dick is about and they know the first line of the book, but no one's really read it. Maybe no one ever has except one guy who is probably dead now.
I watched a ton of movies in college. I was shown many movies by professors and recommended many movies by fellow students. I graduated college still having only seen the movies that everyone else was seeing. I wasn't doing the recommending. I went to the movies more often in college than in high school as well. I saw quite a few "art house" films. I saw more movies than any of my friends had. I think I have watched more movies than any of my friends ever have to this day. But no matter how many movies I watched, I still didn't feel like I was watching anything cutting edge or special. I wasn't being party to edgy art. If I loved movies as much as I claimed to love movies, then I would have to define my tastes, and make them specific.
I finally realized what the problem was a couple of years ago...about four years after graduating college. I didn't belong to a cult. I needed to watch movies whose very titles summoned up feelings of either absolute dread or complete elation. Another prerequisite of these movies I would need to watch would be their obscurity. I needed to search out movies that could only be seen by people in the know.
I decided that I would delve into horror and see how it went. Horror had a lot going for it in my search for a genre to define my movie tastes. Halloween was my favorite holiday and horror movies reeked of all the ambience and character that I loved about the Halloween season. Special effects got me interested in movies to begin with and horror movies were loaded with both CGI and practical effects. I like naked women and horror movies are chock full of them. Also, horror movies were very "fringe". No one ever talked about a horror movies' accolades. Horror movies were not known for their achievements in anything except blood-letting. (I know differently now, however.)
Having made my decision to approach horror as a new home for my new sharply-defined self, I began watching all the classics: Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday 13th, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre - these movies are the foundation of horror as we know it today, and I got to know the genre from these movies. I had seen many of these canon horror films before, but I watched them with new eyes because they were now helping to define my likes/dislikes. People have always asked me what my favorite movies are and what I like to watch. Horror was going to start coming up more and more and I needed to know these movies better.
Watching the classics is easy. Everyone wants to sit around and remember when they were ten years old and they saw Nightmare on Elm Street for the first time. As I started delving into the horror genre more, I found myself watching movies on my own. The reason for this was two-fold: No one knew what these movies were and I could not bring myself to unleash the disturbing imagery on anyone else. I don't mean to say that graphic depictions of violence disturb me, but they're still disturbing. You're one cruel motherfucker if you lend your copy of Salo to some friends and fail to warn them of the graphic scenes involving, among other things, the eating of feces and razor blades and the really spectacular eye-gouging/scalping/torture finale.
I found horror on my own. I latched onto horror because once I got into it I couldn't leave it alone. Even when I take a break from it and try to watch something else, I always go back sooner than expected. It's too much fun to keep me away, and it's got an edge that most people can't deal with. I like horror because it's exciting and laid back. I like horror movies because other people don't like them. Also, you can tell the people making these movies had a great time doing it. It's a party I want to attend and so I bring as much of it into my living room as I possible can. My name is Benjamin Landes and I'm a horror movie addict.
Surprisingly, straight to DVD movies can have redeeming qualities. I'm not recommending that you start checking out every direct-to-DVD offering out there, because you'll end up with a whole bunch of wasted time. But every now and again, DVD offers us something that we should've seen in theaters a few months before. Dimension's "Extreme" label is giving us more good stuff than bad, and it's about time people started knowing about it.
When I say "us"...I mean "us [horror fans]". I realize that this will scare most people away, but a good movie is a good movie, and not all horror movies are of the Hostel variety. Last night I watched a Dimension Extreme DVD called Rogue. Rogue is about a killer "rogue" crocodile in the Northern Territory of Australia and some tourists who unwittingly stumble into its stomping grounds. The cast was good, with a favorite of mine, Radha Mitchell, headlining.
What surprised me the most about this movie was how gorgeously it was shot. I felt like I was watching a DVD travel brochure of the Northern Territory. The quality look of the film helps lend it credibility. I have a hard time giving credit to movies that are direct-to-DVD, but since last night I've had to reassess. The special effects in the movie, because after all it is a horror flick, are very decent. The good thing about the film is that the titular crocodilian is only seen in glimpses until the end. A page has obviously been taken out of Jaws' book, and it works to the film's advantage. There isn't a lot of blood or graphic killings, which surprised me, but the suspense is palpable and the speed with which the croc dispatches its victims brings some real uncertainty and realism to the whole ordeal. The acting is good too. I really felt that the characters' differing personalities gave a good example of the mixed bag of people you'd have on a tourists' outing.
From the opening credits the film seems to take-no-prisoners and have a gritty feel, showing us that amidst all the natural beauty of the Australian Outback, the closer you get, the more dangerous your surroundings can be. Yet towards the end the violence and attitude seem to abate. The croc becomes more visible during the stand off in its lair. As a result the croc effects become less scary and you can see the CGI hard at work. I don't want to give away much plot, but I found the survivors left at the end to be problematic for what was, up until the third act, a remorseless production.
All in all I happily give this film a good review because the atmosphere and visual quality were astounding and rich. The acting and the combination of visual and practical effects made the croc's stalking/killing realistic and something deserving of fear. Be sure to watch the documentaries on the disc for some great real-life context. Apparently the 25-foot crocodile in Rogue is not as large as some actual crocs that have been recently spotted in the wild...
I just watched Rob Zombie's Halloween last night for the second time. The first time I saw it was in the theaters last August, and last night I watched the "Unrated Director's Cut". There were a few differences and for the most part they're good ones. I hated the movie the first time I watched it. Upon my second viewing it got better.
One of the characteristics of this production that I latched onto was the cinematography. You might not think it's a big deal, but the way Zombie makes his films look is one of his best talents. The Devil's Rejects has a great atmosphere that's conveyed simply with the colors and tone of the film itself. RZ's Halloween cements this style and I really liked it. The blood is almost black, but you still know it's blood. The colors of Haddonfield really feel like Fall and the holiday of Halloween. The yellows and oranges and browns are a little muted and the contrast is increased. Everything looks a little grittier and dirtier, but without actually smudging props and people with grime. The action has a crisp look too.
Rob Zombie allows us to see what's happening...all the time...for better or for worse. Usually I don't think it's for worse, though. Michael Bay cuts his action set-pieces within inches of their lives, but Zombie, though he cuts plenty of times, lets you really get a feeling for the action that is occurring onscreen. You might not want to see what he's showing you, but it's there and he follows the rules so you don't get too disoriented.
I think the directing style Zombie employs is a powerful one. I think he's come a long way from House of 1,000 Corpses, (which I detested). I look forward to Tyrannosaurus Rex because Zombie's aesthetic is one that I enjoy seeing. He casts actors very well, (although at times I feel he's a bit indulgent on Sheri Moon Zombie). They aren't always pretty, but everyone in his movies has character just from existing. The casts in RZ's Halloween and Rejects are perfect. They exist in hellish worlds and it shows in their visage. But they are also good actors. I don't feel that any Rob Zombie movies ever suffered from hack acting.
The beginning of RZ's Halloween is good. I enjoyed it. I liked it a lot more the second time around - apart from the whole "Love Hurts" montage - and I felt that the atmosphere of Michael's childhood was perfectly/horrifically portrayed. Rob Zombie has a vision for the type of redneck civilization that exists within the walls of white trash homes, and he put it directly onscreen with brilliant aplomb. (That may sound like undeserved praise, but try to forget that he was simply remaking one of the greatest horror movies of all time and you'll see some quality film making in there!) The second half of the film becomes rote and it's almost as if Zombie thought that he was doing the first half as a short of prequel, and the latter half as homage to make up for it. It comes off as a faster-paced version of the original. Sure there's added blood and breasts, but there's no real touch of originality like in the first half. I usually am the first to say that more blood and more breasts make bad horror movies watchable, but in this case, if I could've traded blood and boobs for a better third act, I would've.
There's really not much to say about the second half of the movie. It plays just like a sped-up version of the original until the final confrontation between Laurie and Michael, which, I've gotta say, I didn't enjoy that much. There's no suspense. The Devil's Rejects scared me. This movie isn't scary. As soon as Michael dons the mask as an adult, I was done being scared. At least there's some element of the unknown in the scenes inside the asylum. Which brings me to what I enjoyed most about this Unrated version: the changes from the theatrical release.
The altered scenes consist of some added faux 8mm film of Michael's early years in the asylum and a different version of Michael's escape from the asylum. The 8mm stuff I could've done without. I didn't need more of Loomis' musings on why Michael is such an amoral killer. I much more enjoyed the interactions between him and the young Michael during the tape-recorded sessions. I didn't think that even more analysis added much. It certainly didn't make me fear the character of Michael Meyers any more.
The changed escape from the asylum was a move in the right direction...if you can call the addition of a brutal rape a positive thing. In the theatrical version, Michael escapes by killing a couple guards while being moved to a different location. In the Director's Cut version, Michael escapes because a couple of security guards decide to rape a new female inmate in Michael's cell. The rape itself is brutal and graphic. It reminded me of the graphic way the rapes in Day of the Woman were shown. I appreciate that reluctance to shy away from shows of brutality. Anyway, Michael finally becomes perturbed by the presence of the guards because they play with some of his masks while raping the woman and that sets Michael off.
I have to say that my time was not wasted in watching this movie again. I'm still not completely convinced that it needs to exist, but it's got its moments of greatness, and it leaves me wanting some more original material from Rob Zombie. This movie isn't Zombie's fault because I think he just felt hemmed in by the source material. A couple more movies like The Devil's Rejects, and I can completely forget that Halloween or House of 1,000 Corpses ever existed. So give Zombie a chance next August when Tyrannosaurus Rex comes out. He apparently works best with his own material, and he's got the directing chops to make great movies.
Enough of my soap-boxing. I'm sorry to put you all through that. (Even though "you all" is no one right now.) The next few posts will be about movies instead, which is really my milieu and much more in line with what my friends and family would expect from me.
I recently received The Lavender Hill Mob from Netflix and had a great time watching it. I had picked up Kind Hearts and Coronets not long before and wanted to see more from Ealing Studios. What strikes me most about those comedies are how smartly the characters behave. You have good guys and bad guys, even though the "bad guys" are usually the protagonists, but the two roles are always portrayed well. You're dealing with smart/average cops and robbers. No bumbling cops facing intelligent thieves or incompetent criminals up against genius policemen. It's a refreshing style. The only recent movies I can think of that have kept this trend in style are Michael Mann's Heat and Miami Vice as well as Soderburgh's Ocean movies.
Miami Vice is a movie about smart cops taking on smart villains from the cops' point of view. Heat is the opposite. No one is making scripting sacrifices for either side in these movies and consequently the stories are fulfilling and the audience doesn't feel cheated.
The Lavender Hill Mob is a comedy, but it still manages to treat the audience with some respect and keep the characters' characters intact. You would think that a 1950's comedy about regular Joe's who decide to commit a robbery would involve some ineptitude by either the police or all of the men involved in the heist. Surprisingly the police and the robbers all behave as well as they possibly can. These guys aren't criminal masterminds, but they are completely believable.
I get frustrated with movies like The Thomas Crowne Affair and The Score because the criminals are so impossibly smart and the cops so completely ineffectual that there's no real suspense. Those movies exist to make thieves look awesome and cops look like idiots. The Ocean movies, (11, 12, 13...well not 12 so much) are great examples of smart story-telling and great heist moments. The cops aren't really an issue, because they're never involved. It's just underworld criminals taking on corporate criminals. Ocean's 11 and Ocean's 13 are really engaging movies and lots of fun. Taken in turn with Miami Vice, Heat and older fare like The Lavender Hill Mob and The Ladykillers, they're good lessons in sound film making. Smart characters interact better with each other and provide more thrills and suspense.
You might think I'm a bit mental for the previous post, but here's some source material to show you that I'm not completely crazy. (See, other people think this Disney BS is ridiculous too!)
In other copyright ridiculousness, politicians in New Zealand are trying to pass a bill that would cut people off from internet usage after three accusations of copyright infringement. (ie: downloading illegal MP3's or movies, copying information that they hadn't officially bought, etc.) This means that, if this law passes, a company like EMI or Virgin or Warner Bros. have to accuse someone three times...without needing any evidence of any sort...and then that person will have their internet "privileges" revoked. (I don't know for how long, maybe forever?)
Big deal, it's in New Zealand. Except that the comparison has been made between copyright infringement, (MP3's), and the owning of child pornography. Do those things seem connected to you at all?
Closer to the home front, Canada's potential DMCA bill would constrict copyrights in that country to such an extent that it would become illegal to possess a region-free DVD player. It would also become illegal to backup your movies and music...copying files at your leisure, even for your own purposes would become illegal. You wouldn't even be able to send your kids' school pictures to their grandparents. This bill hasn't gone through yet, but some people are trying very hard to make it happen.
If you think that this kind of thing could never happen here in the states, I have something to tell you: There is an idea being kicked aroundthese days that would have you concede control of your electronic devices in certain buildings/areas. The up side is that movie theaters could automatically turn off your cell phone when you entered the theater. You gave them permission just by buying a ticket and walking through the door...sounds convenient. But who actually owns the phone? Who owns your computer? One would think that you do, since you bought it, but if someone else decides what you are allowed to do with it, then you don't own it anymore.
And here's something just for fun for people who saw Wall-E. Wall-E is a criminal! But Pixar works for Disney and the robot Eve looks like an iPod...
This is not going to be an indicative entry for this blog. I am not political. I am not an activist. I do not rally behind causes. I do get fed up with excess amounts of bullshit though. Today's post spawned from some bullshit that I read about today on boingboing.net...a site I will no doubt refer to numerous times over the course of this blog...assuming I keep it up to date.
Disney is a company that I like. Contrary to "popular" beliefs, I do not find it an evil world-consuming empire. I really enjoy going to Disney World and I enjoy their movies and cartoons too. However. (Notice that that "However" got it's own sentence to itself!) Disney has just jumped on the Blu-ray disc train and released their first Blu-ray disc: Sleeping Beauty. Great film. I like it a lot and used to watch the hell out of it when I was a kid and we had our own Beta-copied-from-TV version at home. Disney slapped a giant-sized disclaimer in front of the new edition of Sleeping Beauty.
Blu-ray is a new form of media. It is a highly-evolved version of DVD and Blu-ray players have capabilities much more in line with computers than with basic one-sided home video playback. Thus Blu-ray has new copyright laws and fine print associated with it that didn't used to exist.
I understand the reason for copyright laws. I understand that artists need to be given credit where it's due and rewarded for making us happy and keeping us entertained. What I fail to understand is why Disney needs to put 120 pages of disclaimer in front of the feature on their Blu-ray release of Sleeping Beauty. I'll start a new paragraph for that to help drive the point home.
120-fucking-pages of disclaimer is what you get when you first pop in Disney's Sleeping Beauty. I haven't seen this myself, so I don't know if this applies to Disney, but there are some websites which know whether you've scrolled through all the fine print or not before they let you hit the "accept" button to move on through their content. If this disc has the same coding, that means I have to hit the "forward" button on my remote 120 times at least before getting to the actual movie. If you live in a house with more than one kid, and you watch a ton of Disney movies, and you own a Blu-ray disc player, you're going to burn though three to five remotes a year if this insanity becomes the norm! It's just ridiculous and it hints at what we already know: lawyers are infesting the world with more proliferation than rats in NYC.
Remember when you'd pop in a video and that red or green or blue screen would come up with the FBI warning? You'd fast forward through it yet still have time to read the whole thing. Then DVDs came out and there was the FBI screen and then a disclaimer and then the same one in French and then finally the movie would come on. Those were the days. You'll be begging for those days soon. You'll be begging for the days of seeing just the FBI logo and knowing immediately what it all meant, but not being that affected by it. Think about how long it took to sit through that screen. It always seemed like an eternity to me. (It's enough time to get the popcorn in and out of the microwave though.) Now think about how long it would take for 120 pages of information to scroll by giving you enough time to read every word. You wouldn't be of proper Mousketeering age by the time it was done.
I'm not saying don't buy the disc. I'm not saying we should start a letter-writing campaign. I just want the word out that DRM and DMCA and all those other wonderful inventions of copyright management are bullets headed straight for the collective foot of music and movie production companies. People have been successfully sued because of illegal downloads, but that hasn't stopped or curbed illegal downloading of MP3s. Tighter grips don't offer more stability. Rant over. Seacrest out.
How messed up is that? So the zombie squares off against the shark and then grabs him and takes bites out of him. Then the shark bites the zombie's arm off and swims away. It was kinda crazy. The shark's trainer dressed up in some zombie gear and handled the shark for this scene. It's slow and weird but, even without CGI, it's still impressive.
Zombi 2 was released back in the eighties on VHS. It was quickly placed on the Video Nasties list which was better advertising than anyone could buy. More on that next time! 
