I know I recently wrote about The Twilight Zone because of their great Christmas-themed episode, Night of the Meek. But I really started to get into The Twilight Zone because of the SciFi Channel and their Twilight Zone marathons. You get two marathons from SciFi a year, one for 4th of July, and one for New Year's. This blog today is more about prompting you to check out a couple episodes of my favorite show that has ever been on television, The Twilight Zone. Tune into SciFi at any time today or tomorrow and watch a few. Some of my favorites you can be on the lookout for are, "One For the Angels"; "Time Enough At Last"; "The Howling Man"; "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?"; "Five Characters in Search of an Exit"; "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet", starring William Shatner; and a personal favorite, "Whispers in the Dark", starring Robert Redford.
Also, as a side note so you don't all think I'm losing my edge, I watched a couple interesting films last night: Blood Freak and El Mariachi. El Mariachi is Robert Rodriguez's first film, which he later made a sequel/remake of in the form of Desperado. El Mariachi has pretty much the same plot, but feels more organic in a good way. What can I say? It still holds true that the originals are much better than the remakes...even if you're doing the remakes yourself. The biggest difference in El Mariachi from Desperado is that there are two guys walking around with guitar cases: the musician with his guitar, and the assassin with his guitar case full of weapons. The two inevitably mix up their cases forcing the musician to take up arms against his confused attackers. It was an interesting twist in Desperado to have Antonio Banderas' guitar case hold weapons, but also have a guitar-top facade for concealment purposes, but in the end, I thought having the two different guys get confused worked better.
Blood Freak was on TCM Underground, Turner Classic Movies' Friday late-night cult movie show. They always air a couple interesting flicks, some more watchable than others, and none of them ever edited. Blood Freak is about a drifter who takes up work on a poultry farm and helps the scientists there by being a guinea pig for their experiments. He also uses some pretty harsh pot, man, and for his trouble winds up with a giant, fanged turkey head and a lust for drinking blood. I can tell you that the site of someone wandering around in a giant paper-mache turkey head with teeth would give anyone the creeps. It's painfully obvious that while they were filming, the titular blood freak had no way of seeing what he was doing in that mask. It's all hilarious and severely budgeted.
How budgeted was it? Well I'll tell you. The filmmakers loop the same scream two dozen times and use the same shot of the turkey-headed guy walking slowly towards the camera at least five times. Also there's a guy who comes on the screen every now and then throughout the movie to dispense wisdom and advice about drug culture and the state of this guy and his life's troubles. (As if we needed help figuring out that this guy has trouble. He's got a fucking turkey head!) The hippie-sage-advice-spouting-old-man looks like a cross between Eddie Bunker and Slim Pickens. Sometimes we joke about how high a person would have to have been to make a movie, but I have never actually thought it was true about any film until now. The people who made Blood Freak were all definitely stoned out of their gourds the entire time, from pre-production through the editing process. Blood Freak is a good movie to drink to. I wish I'd thought of that earlier instead of watching the whole thing sober.
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