Month: October 2024

Censor (2021)

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that certain films, especially of a horrific nature, should be banned because they might inspire people to, you know, imitate the terrible things shown therein, but somehow the censors who decide on banning or cutting these films never suffer any such ill effects from them. That was partly what drew me to Censor, which is about a young woman working for the BBFC in the mid-eighties in the midst of video nasty hysteria, who proves to be… not entirely cut out for the job, shall we say; Enid has a reputation for being one of the hardest scissor-wielders, but she starts facing harrassment when a film she did pass inspires a hideous copycat crime… and the personal baggage she carries, in the form of a sister who disappeared when the two girls were young, gradually becomes heavier and heavier.

So I liked the idea of this a lot, but not so much the execution, unfortunately… director Prano Bailey-Bond opts for the non-exploitative approach this could’ve taken; this still allows for one rather amazing jump-scare and a number of kills as Enid’s sanity starts to evaporate, one of which is kind of hilarious, but on the whole it’s possibly played with a bit too much restraint, and the film is left with an overall rather dry and slightly ponderous flavour. Plus it never makes much of its particular period setting and does require a certain amount of prior knowledge. Mind you, it pulls off its climax fairly well; the lighting of the night-time filming sequence (and the variable film frame size in this scene) makes the whole thing look so good that I can almost ignore the question of why the filmmaker had a real axe on set that could actually kill someone (and does) rather than just a prop one. It’s OK. I’d still be interested in seeing what Bailey-Bond does next.

Maximum Overdrive (1986)

So I watched a George Romero film the other night, but did I just watch another one? Cos apparently a rumour persists that Maximum Overdrive is at least partly his work, given the substance abuse its nominal maker, one Stephen King, was apparently engaging/rampaging in while making it*… and King has apparently never confirmed or denied beyond saying Romero was always on set to offer him directorial advice on his first (and still only) feature film. Whatever. It’s odd, I admit, that I consider myself at least a bit of a horror fan, but despite that I have so little acquaintance with Mr King and his oeuvre… only ever read a handful of his books and seen a handful of the films made therefrom. I have at least partly rectified that tonight, I suppose…

Anyway, the Earth passes through the tail of a “rogue comet”, and all the machines on the planet start going mad. From electronic bank signs insulting people to vending machines dispensing drinks lethally, the world is in trouble; ultimately the story kind of settles down to Night of the Living Dead with trucks. Apparently the film was heavily cut to avoid an X-rating from the MPAA (even George Romero allegedly found the uncut film excessive, which is… interesting coming from him) and the end result was a critical and box office flop, earning a Razzie nomination for King and its nominal star Emilio Estevez (whose role King wanted to be played by Bruce Springsteen; that would’ve been something to see). The latter is not unfair, since Estevez is one of the film’s weakest links apart from certain logical problems (why doesn’t the newlyweds’ car go berserk like the trucks, why did the truck stop owner have so many explosive devices around his petrol station and how did nothing go off, what the fuck WAS the point of the Bible salesman “returning from the dead”), and the thing runs out of puff at the end, leading to a text epilogue describing an ending there obviously wasn’t time/money to actually shoot (for which matter, why didn’t those satellites fuck up too?)… but for all its undeniable faults, I had a reasonably good time with Maximum Overdrive; King may not have known what he was doing, but he made a fairly entertaining film despite himself.

*Regarding which: King himself says he was blasted on cocaine, but the on-set translator for producer Dino De Laurentiis’ Italian crew apparently said he never saw King doing the white lines but he did see him getting hammered on booze from early morning onwards. Was King so wasted he couldn’t even remember what he was wasted on?

What every music festival needs

Metal music festival loses headliner, multiple bands after announcing Kyle Rittenhouse as guest

If you were planning to go to the Shell Shock II music festival in Orlando and you like Kyle Rittenhouse … well, you are in luck.
But if you were hoping to see a handful of the bands — including the headliner, Evergreen Terrace — there, well … they apparently don’t want to be on the same card as Kyle Rittenhouse.
So, instead, the new headliner for Shell Shock II, per Loudwire, will be a Slipknot cover band.
You read that right, the festival is now, apparently, down to a cover band as its headliner after announcing that Rittenhouse would attend.

I have no idea what this festival is like, nor do I know anything about the apparently four bands that have pulled out of it, but I have even less idea what the organisers were thinking. I mean, music festivals generally don’t need people making speeches anyway, metal festivals need them even less, and none of them need this cunt. So what do the organisers have to say for themselves?

“We have been silent,” a post on The Antihero Podcast Instagram reads. “But we are prepping. The liberal mob attempted to destroy Shell Shock. But we will not allow it. This is now about more than a concert. This is a war of ideology.”

Oh. So it wasn’t ideological when they hired (I nearly wrote that as “whored” for some reason; Kyle whores himself) Rittenhouse to speak at the festival, of all the fucking people they could’ve hired to speak at it if they had to hire anyone to speak in the first place? And getting a Slipknot cover band as your replacement headliner… THAT was the best you could do? None of the other bands still playing were good enough to promote? The Antihero Podcast, by the way, are a bunch of Trumpeters, which I learned from their Instagram and was somehow not surprised by this. I can’t find anything about the bands still playing the event, but whoever they are I’d be looking at them at least slightly askance from now on if they’re still OK with sharing the stage with Kill Rittenhouse. Damn shame, cos the festival’s actually in aid of veterans with PTSD, it’s a worthy charity event and that’s evidently what the bands thought they were signing up for… after this, though, I’d be surprised if Shell Shock III is ever a thing.

Phantasm (1979)

Well, that was something, albeit I’m not 100% sure what. I’m trying to use this month of horror viewing to catch up on some of the bigger and older hits of the genre that I’ve hitherto never seen rather than rewatches, hence tonight’s screening… Phantasm has a certain reputation for not making a lot of sense, and I can’t say it doesn’t live up to that; I’d have struggled with it had I not read the Wikipedia summary of it. I think I liked it but I am genuinely unsure. I suppose you can view it as an interesting example of low-budget independent filmmaking somewhat like Halloween, the sort of things you can do with minimal resources and a particular vision… and I will say director Don Coscarelli certainly had one of those; I just don’t know how well he explained it. I knew Phantasm had originally been nearly twice as long as the end result, supposedly mostly character development stuff that Coscarelli decided was ultimately redundant, but I feel like there was a certain amount of expository stuff that got chucked out too. Alas that, apart from the minimal sense-making, Phantasm‘s other chief weakness is Bill Thornbury in one of the main roles; there is an unfortunately good reason why his acting career has been so limited, namely that so is his acting ability… I must give it points for the things it does well, of course, especially the mood it conjures (great night-time filming too), and of course Angus Scrimm as the Tall Man. He doesn’t really do an awful lot but he also doesn’t really need to; he just needs to kind of stand there and be tall. Which, measuring at 6’4″ as he apparently did, he was very good at, and the climactic chase scene where he’s pursuing the teenage lead is particularly effective because of the size difference between them. On the whole, possibly interesting more than actually successful, but I’ll take that over dull…

This is my beloved Rusty

Russell Brand’s career has gone through some interesting changes over the years, and this is the latest one:

…Cosplaying John the Baptist in his daks. Brand’s high-profile Christian turn has been regarded mostly, and understandably, with suspicion; having been hit with a raft of sexual abuse allegations about a year ago, his big and extremely public adoption of Jesusness (read Matthew 6:5 lately, Russ?) looks like some sort of attempt to deflect from those or something. No one is seriously buying it, and nor should they, although I am interested to discover that it’s not actually a new interest as such; this is him talking about it in 2017:

After an intervention orchestrated by his agent, Brand embraced recovery—not just as a means of getting clean, but as a way of seeing the world. The experience radically changed him, and he’s since become an advocate for what’s known as the 12-step program, an addiction recovery method based largely on Christian principles that is centered on a reliance on a higher power, self-reflection and forgiveness.
The program transformed Brand’s life. And in the years since he discovered it, Brand began to see everything through the lens of the 12 steps. […]
Brand realized that cultivating a spiritual life could help free himself from the strongholds of addictions by treating the root causes of the pain he’d attempted to dull with drugs. And being raised in the U.K.—a traditionally Christian country—he turned to the Christianity. He began implementing spiritual practices every day.
“Because I come from a Christian culture, a lot of the language of prayer that I use is Christian,” he explains. “I say the Lord’s Prayer every day. I try to connect to what those words mean. I connect to what the Father means. I connect to what wholeness means to me. I think about the relationship between forgiveness and being forgiven and the impossibility of redemption until you are willing to forgive and let go.”

This was quite a change for someone who’d been such an advocate of Hare Krishna Consciousness and Transcendental Meditation, and I’m now inclined to think Rusty may actually be perfectly sincere in his beliefs… it’s just the aggressive flaunting of them now, and the fact that he’s only “officially” declared himself a Christian as of a few months ago (when he was baptised by Bear Grylls of all people), that’s suspicious. And the spectacle offered in the photo of him and some other dude baptising a third dude who appears to be fully dressed in what looks like a Starfleet uniform (?)… well, seeing Brand in his undergarments like that is kind of troubling by itself, but the whole thing has more than a whiff of desperation to it. He didn’t need a camera on hand to record that show. I just wonder how far this grift will extend now. Still, hopefully the people in the boat in the second picture enjoyed the performance…

The Amusement Park (1975)

Or, what happens when the Lutheran Church hires horror director George Romero to make a film in which the horror is… old age. The Lutherans basically asked him to make a sort of educational film or PSA about the way in which we don’t look after our elderly as well as we should, giving him a bunch of volunteer performers and a freely donated location. What Romero gave them in return was, probably, regrets, and I’ll bet they REALLY appreciated the scene in which our sorely beset protagonist finds “sanctuary” at a church bandstand, only for it to close for the day before he can get to it… apparently they actually did make some use of it, but after a film festival screening in 1975 that seemed to be the end of it until it was rescued from oblivion just before George’s death. He seems to have viewed it himself as being as ephemeral as the industrial films and commercials he was making in the 60s… but if he did, he was nonetheless clearly determined to make something more of this production than a “normal” commissioned work. The amusement park gave him room to hammer home the thesis of “old people are treated like shit” (the film has no real subtlety on that point), which he does in a manner that becomes borderline surrealist, and generates a real sense of deep unease, particularly with the use of sound. I found it interesting that, for all the thematics about old age being awful, the other elderly folks surrounding the old man in the thick of things are about as unhelpful to him as the younger people surrounding them all. And yet 54 minutes of it, short as that is, felt like a bit much; Romero could probably have brought this in more tightly and effectively in about 30 minutes. So I can’t call it a full success, and yet there’s something about the strangeness of the whole thing that’s fascinating. I think further viewings will benefit it.

Hi, I’m Pete Townshend, apparently

Stupidest news story of the last few days has been the one about the guy who bought at auction a guitar signed by Taylor Swift, which he then immediately proceeded to smash to bits.

Gary Estes, 67, says he paid $4,000 for the instrument at the Ellis County Wild Game Dinner in Waxahachie, an annual charity event that benefits agricultural-based education efforts for local youths.
When he went to get the guitar, Estes took a hammer to it in a moment captured on video that has gone viral — but he insisted he has no will against Swift.
“There was nothing malicious or anything about it,” Estes told NBC News on Tuesday. “It was just a joke at an auction that we had to raise money for kids, right? And that’s all it was. There was nothing mean about it, nothing bad about it. It was just a joke that they were making up on the stage, and we just followed through with a joke.”
uctioneer Craig Meier, a spokesperson for the event, said the guitar-smashing played well in the room.”It was a funny, light-hearted thing. I know maybe it seemed to be malicious, but everybody was laughing,” Meier said. “There were people there, at the time, who joked around that he’s mad because he doesn’t know how to play the guitar.”
But after having talked to the man, Meier said it was an obvious political statement.
“Taylor Swift, it became a political thing, and that was kind of the gist of it, just a light-hearted bit of a dig at Taylor for coming out politically and entertainers using their influence to influence politics,” Meier said.

Obviously the only people laughing at this bullshit are laughing at brother Gary, of course. Especially now that there appears to be a twist in the tale:

The guitar supposedly signed by Taylor Swift that was sold for $4,000 to a Texas man who immediately smashed it with a hammer wasn’t authentic, a source close to Swift’s merch company told HuffPost on Tuesday.
The source said an authentic Swift-signed guitar would have come with a certificate of authenticity, which Swift’s team doesn’t believe the auctioned guitar has. In any case, they said, Swift didn’t sign it.

Good grief. There is, of course, a kind of magical thinking at the heart of this sort of idiocy, I’ve noticed it for a couple of decades now; it’s like particularly stupid conservatives (I can’t think of any comparable left-leaning examples) think there’s some sort of cosmic balance they can affect with moronic shit like this. As if this actually affects Swift in any way. Oh well, at least the charity got four grand, and Taylor got something to laugh at if she was paying any attention at all…

Happy hundredth, Jim

I can’t believe it was February of last year that the 39th president of the US was at the hospice care stage, and yet in October 2024 the old bugger’s still here and just celebrated his centenary (the first US president to do so, indeed). Normally I hear “hospice” and assume the person receiving it has days to live, but what Carter said about wanting to live long enough to vote for Kamala Harris evidently worked for him… with a bit of luck he’ll not only vote for her in a few weeks but he’ll get to see her win, too. I’m pleased to see him make it this far, I think whatever the faults of his presidency, his post-presidential career more than atoned for it. And, frankly, when you consider THIS episode from his naval career…

On December 12, 1952, an accident with the experimental NRX reactor at Atomic Energy of Canada’s Chalk River Laboratories caused a partial meltdown, resulting in millions of liters of radioactive water flooding the reactor building’s basement. This left the reactor’s core ruined. Carter was ordered to Chalk River to lead a U.S. maintenance crew that joined other American and Canadian service personnel to assist in the shutdown of the reactor. The painstaking process required each team member to don protective gear and be lowered individually into the reactor for 90 seconds at a time, limiting their exposure to radioactivity while they disassembled the crippled reactor. When Carter was lowered in, his job was simply to turn a single screw. During and after his presidency, Carter said that his experience at Chalk River had shaped his views on atomic energy and led him to cease the development of a neutron bomb.

…I suspect he was probably lucky to make it to 30, let alone 100, cos that would still have been a lot of radiation to absorb. Wonder what the lifespans of the other team members were by comparison…