Month: August 2025

Oh the irony?

Furious Christians Sue Dr. Phil Over $500 Million Fraud Claim

Talk show guru and ICE champion Dr. Phil has become embroiled in a legal battle so dramatic that it might have made for a compelling episode of his eponymous old talk show.
On Tuesday, the world’s largest Christian TV network accused Dr. Phil and his production company of fraud and breach of contract as part of a “years-long fraudulent scheme” to enrich the TV personality.
Trinity Broadcast Network (TBN) alleges that Dr. Phil, whose full name is Phil McGraw, overpromised and underdelivered when he struck a $500 million deal with TBN to produce and distribute his show after he left CBS in 2023. […]
Those new episodes were supposed to be 90 minutes each and be filmed over six to seven months.
However, the network claims that the new episodes never arrived, despite TBN building a new state-of-the-art production space in Texas expressly for their production. […]
A spokesperson for McGraw denied the new allegations to The Hollywood Reporter, claiming that 214 new episodes of Dr. Phil Primetime aired on Merit TV. “To say otherwise is false,” the spokesperson noted.

I gather that Merit TV is part of the company he and TBN formed to make these hundreds of new episodes, and that it has in fact recently filed for bankruptcy and filed its own suit against TBN for not fulfilling its side of the deal. I don’t know which side is the more mockable here, cos McGraw is grotesque trash who needs a good beating, but, frankly, so are TBN, which spent decades promoting prosperity gospel bullshit. Phil screwed them out of half a billion dollars? How much have TBN and the people they exhibit screwed out of their audiences in the half-century or so that they’ve been around? Amazing how these cunts are full of the Bible but they always pretend this story isn’t in there…

Being for the benefit (?) of Mr Brown

HEY look what I just did! An honest to god/dess MIXCLOUD post! Yes, a MIX! Haven’t finished one of those since January, it seems. More to the point, I put this together for the estimable RM Brown, cos someone on a recent “quomments” episode for his Patreon subscribers said something to him about him knowing Australian music or not, and someone else put up a Spotify playlist of some, and that made me think “fuck, I should do something like that”. So, over the last couple of days, I did something like that, and here it is… focusing on the more punk/garage/post-punk end of things from 1977-88, with a few NZ acts of similar kind and vintage for additional texture; it ranges from the bleeding obvious to the “what was that?”, and has the additional benefit of you being able to hear Lubricated Goat without having to look at them naked. Hopefully Aroon finds this useful and interesting. and if he does I’ll do a followup that’s not quite as abrasive as this one sometimes get…

    1. Blam Blam Blam, There is No Depression in New Zealand
    2. Models, Atlantic Romantic
    3. Flowers, Sister
    4. Straitjacket Fits, Life in One Chord
    5. The New Christs, Sun God
    6. The Birthday Party, Waving My Arms
    7. The Saints, Know Your Product
    8. God, My Pal
    9. Hoodoo Gurus, Death Ship
    10. The Chills, I’ll Only See You Alone Again
    11. The Wreckery, Ruling Energy
    12. Laughing Clowns, Everything That Flies
    13. Radio Birdman, Descent Into the Maelstrom
    14. Danse Macabre, Torch
    15. The Mark of Cain, Lords of Summer
    16. Hunters & Collectors, Talking to a Stranger
    17. Beggars Court, Lipstick Blues
    18. Venom P. Stinger, Walking About
    19. Black Assassins, Death Take Me Now
    20. Proud Scum, Suicide 2
    21. Itchy Rat, The Sky is Falling
    22. Lubricated Goat, In the Raw
    23. Thug, Dad
    24. The Reals, Nothing to Say
    25. Box of Fish, Sex Cat Killer
    26. The Slugfuckers, Cacophony
    27. SPK, Mekano
    28. Whirlywirld, Sextronics
    29. Severed Heads, Adolf a Karrot
    30. Scattered Order, Swiss Like Knives and Forks
    31. Primitive Calculators, Pumping Ugly Muscle
    32. Died Pretty, Mirror Blues
    33. Scientists, Human Jukebox

The Pied Piper (1986)

Another film that landed in just the other day, so I haven’t taken too long to get to it either… I thought this might be the first animated film in this project, but forgot I’d already watched Adventures of Prince Achmed and the most recent Wallace & Gromit film, so it’s nothing of the sort; it is, however, a markedly different prospect to either of those. I think the story is well enough known that I don’t need to explain it, except that director Jiri Barta drew upon a somewhat different version of it by another Czech author; in this instance, Hamelin is sorely beset by rats, but they really deserve it, even before the piper shows up the burghers of Hamelin come across as, frankly, kind of scummy. (There’s no intelligible dialogue in the film, just a sort of vaguely “Germanic” gibberish, but you don’t need words to understand how godawful the people are.) This is an astonishing piece of design; Barta avowedly drew on German expressionist style, and if the human characters in Caligari had looked like the buildings in that film, I imagine the result might’ve looked like this:

An amazing thing to look at, as you may tell from these screenshots I took, albeit a bleak thing too; there’s a bit of sexual violence in this I don’t think you get from the more child-friendly versions of the tale. But what really stops me being more enthusiastic about what is, otherwise, an obviously remarkable piece of work, is, well, the animal cruelty (the human figures might’ve been puppets, but the rats are the real thing for the most part). I don’t actually have evidence that there was any during the production, but… well, just look at the film, there’s quite a few scenes that I can’t imagine were achieved without at least some. The rats might’ve been real, but I doubt they were all alive while they were on screen. It’s obviously not on the level of Italian cannibal cinema, but somehow I feel a kind of unpleasantness about the whole thing that goes beyond the film’s inherently sour tone… and the film is really good and worth seeing; I’d just feel better knowing the rats were OK…

In that order?

I know these magazine covers were meant to be kind of eye-catching, but this one really scored on that point… “BEHEADED AND CASTRATED ALIVE” (in big white capitals that stand out strongly from the other headers)? In that order? Did they castrate him before beheading and killing him? Or did they behead him first and he somehow remained alive while they castrated him next? If the latter, how long did Joey live without his head and what was the point of castrating him given that he wouldn’t have been able to feel it? Was there a connection with the bisexual thrill-killer, and what difference did it make that the latter was bi? Was Maggie Boo involved somehow? What about the axe murderer? How did the cover artist miss the opportunity to have a mass of blood dripping off that knife? Did the publisher think that would’ve been in overly bad taste unlike the rest of the contents? So many questions…

Daddy Vlad wins again

Fuck, this is grotesque even for Mushroom Cock. This little gathering was supposed to produce something towards ending the Ukraine bullshit but noticeably failed:

As Donald Trump conceded during his brief press conference with Vladimir Putin, “understanding” and “progress” are oceans apart from an agreement. At the end of a summit more notable for its choreography than its substance – frustrated reporters were not permitted to ask questions – the leaders failed to negotiate even a pause in fighting, let alone a ceasefire.
“There’s no deal until there’s a deal,” Trump conceded, while Putin described their talks only as a “reference point” for ending the conflict and, significantly, a potential launchpad for better diplomatic and economic ties between Washington and Moscow.
Putin may have been the guest at a meeting held on US territory, but the Russian leader gained far more cachet than his host. Putin spoke to reporters first – a break with convention that gave him the opportunity to set the tone of a brief and, at times, quixotic press conference in Anchorage.
Clearly mindful of his surroundings, Putin, who had hitched a ride from to the venue in “the beast” – the secure US presidential limousine – reminded the world that the US and Russia were, in fact, geographical neighbours, although he stopped short of mentioning that Alaska had once been a Russian colony.
Trump was effusive in his praise for the Russian leader, repeatedly thanking him for his time and later, in an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox, awarding a “10” for the Anchorage summit because “it’s good when two big powers get along”.
As if to underline his dominant role in proceedings, Putin ended the briefing by suggesting that their next meeting be held in Moscow – an invitation that slightly wrongfooted Trump, who had to admit that it would generate “a little heat” at home. But he did not rule it out.

Basically, for all of Krasnov’s pre-show blather about the sanctions he would impose on Russia if he didn’t at least get a ceasefire agreement, his master just pulled tight on the leash to rein him in and gave him nothing in return. Quality diplomacy right there, but we should expect nothing less from him… but that photo, though. I don’t know if it was taken before or after the discussion, but he looks terrible either way. Not that he ever looks good in photos, of course, or out of them, but still… and apparently Fox are calling him out for being the loser in this situation, so even they’re fed up with him, which won’t improve his mood any. He’s still to have a meeting with Zelenskyy on Monday, which should be interesting after this crash-out…

Don’t bread on me!

Title stolen from someone on Reddit, because it was too good not to.

So the stupidest news story of this week has been that of former DOJ employee Sean Dunn:

Apparently Subway is the Deep State. Who’d have guessed? Not me. Anyway, the only thing sillier than Pam’s response to this situation is that the poor traumatised victims of this monstrous strike against law and order wanted him charged with a felony for doing this:

The encounter happened Sunday night, when Dunn began beefing with CBP officers who were patrolling near a Subway sandwich shop on U Street, prosecutors said in a court filing. The officers appear to have been in the area as part of President Donald Trump’s effort to ramp up law enforcement in the nation’s capital.
Dunn, who was brandishing what appeared to be a wrapped footlong sandwich from the fast food staple, “stood within inches” of one of the officers, and yelled “F— you! You f—–g fascists! Why are you here? I don’t want you in my city,” the filing said.
A now-viral video shows the suspect then throwing the sandwich at the chest of the officer, who appeared to be wearing bullet proof vest.
Dunn then “attempted to flee on foot” but was quickly apprehended, the filing said.
It also said Dunn acknowledged what he’d done to a D.C. police officer while his arrest was being processed. “I did it. I threw a sandwich,” the filing quotes him as saying.

This is ridiculous on multiple levels, but at least the judge who saw him the day after the event let him go cos he realised the felony thing was stupid… which hasn’t stopped prosecutors from trying again, obviously, cos this sort of thing can’t be tolerated and Sean clearly must be Made An Example Of, and he’s got another court appearance over this assault with a breadly weapon (sorry, I stole that one too) next month. In the meantime I daresay TrumpCorp will be targeting that judge, too, cos they don’t like being thwarted in these things, however minor and foolish…

RIP David Stratton

What awfully sad news to wake up to today. I knew Stratton was going blind, which is an awful thing to befall someone whose chief love that they built their life on is a visual art, but this really is the last of him… I suppose at least he didn’t have to live too long without films. The Stratton family’s grocery store loss was very much cinema’s gain; he did well for a man who never finished high school.

And, for once when I’m doing one of these notices, I’ve actually got a story about Dave and how *I* once taught him something about a film…

…the film in question being Benjamin Christensen’s great barnyard oddity of a movie Häxan, a weird hybrid of horror and documentary before either of those film genres were really a thing. So, picture this: it’s 1999, and Stratton’s restarting his great cinema history course as part of the Continuing Education thing at Sydney University. I can’t resist passing this up, especially given how big I was on silent cinema at that time and that was where the course was. I sign up as a student. In the second semester, we get around to the first half of the 1920s, and for one of his 1922 choices, Stratton picks this. And people are CONFUSED.

Cos the version Stratton showed only had dialogue intertitles; all the expository titles for the opening lecture bit and elsewhere in the film were missing. By the end of the screening, I think the general mood was “WTF”, cos the absence of the expository titles rendered some parts (particularly the ending) kind of incomprehensible. I, on the other hand, was, well, not as confused as the rest of the class, cos I’d actually seen the film before this—got the old Redemption VHS from the UK when we were there in ’96—and so I knew what should’ve been there… so why wasn’t it? Well, I also knew the film had been reissued in 1968 with a narration by William S. Burroughs… was that what we were watching that night? That would explain the lack of expository stuff cos the narration would’ve replaced that… but the print didn’t have the narration. So I was still a bit confused.

Anyway, I got the Criterion DVD of Häxan a few years later and that confirmed my suspicion that it was indeed the 1968 print (which is on that disc as an extra), just that someone had stripped the narration from it for some reason (I can’t remember now if it even had a score or not). On that night, though, everyone was a bit bemused by what had just happened… and your humble scribe here uncharacteristically put himself forth to explain to everyone else “hi, I’ve actually seen this before and David’s copy was missing a whole heap of intertitles for some reason, so it actually does make sense than you’re all probably thinking it does”. And Stratton was quite taken aback by this cos, as he then said, he’d never seen any other version of the film, and had never realised there even was one. Well, he certainly knew by the end of that class. And that, children, is how I, of all people, got one up on the expert and professional. I don’t get to do this sort of thing often, so excuse me if I’m mildly self-impressed for a moment…

Human Lanterns (1982)

I’m counting this as a first time watch for this project, because it may as well be… I first saw it on DVD around maybe 2007 or 2008 when Siren were still handling the Shaw Brothers catalogue here; this was a particularly inadequate disc, because not only was it non-anamorphic (never a good thing, but even less so with a proper ‘Scope film like this) but the fucking disc jammed at some point so I never saw it in full. So this is technically the first time I’ve really seen it, in blu-ray form, anamorphic and complete, and GODDAMN it was worth waiting for that ending (disc only arrived in the mail today, too, so I’ve been unusually quick to get to it)… Don’t know much about director Sun Chung, other than that I have another one of his films in one of the Shawscope boxes, but I saw an IMDB reviewer claim he was an unsung hero of Shaws as an action durector, but never got as good a story to work with as Chang Cheh or Lau Kar-Leung. Our story involves a couple of rival martial arts masters in a Chinese town, one of whom hires an former enemy of his (Lo Lieh, making his second appearance in this project) to help him beat the other at the forthcoming lantern festival; the latter, however, has a more vested interest in gaining revenge on his new client. The film is never quite as lurid as I wish it was, though it certainly is that; the blood is plentiful and of a redness that Herschell Gordon Lewis might’ve called unnatural, and a couple of scenes are still kind of grisly and unpleasant. But it’s the martial arts action that works best here, especially in the aforementioned ending which is just 15 minutes of the characters going berserk. This is one I think will reward repeat viewings.

Howard Harvey rides again

DOOMLORD’s back! Well, not in actually new form, but for the first time the original photo strip is being reprinted… apparently the publisher actually wanted to do it a couple of decades ago, but the print technology for reproducing the photography in book form wasn’t quite there to their satisfaction; things surely do appear to have changed, and I for one am here for it. By the time I picked up Eagle as a young’un, Doomlord was on its third series, but a few years later I got a loan of a bunch of the earlier issues, and thereby discovered the original Doomlord was a somewhat different affair; if the second Doomlord would eventually appoint himself as Earth’s defender against his people, the first one was a man (sort of) on a mission to wipe humanity out… I suppose it might seem a bit cheesier now that 40+ years have passed, but whatever. Soon as this comes out (apparently not until next year, alas), I’ll be grabbing this…

I’m a film, not a fish!

I’m always fascinated when I come across old Australian ads for films of this sort, cos I always think of the Commonwealth Film Censorship Board (as it then was) as having been particularly censorious back in those Good Old Days, mostly because it was, of course… so I’m always a bit surprised to see local theatre ads for them (don’t know anything about this Metro cinema, but I daresay a cinema up the Cross would be the sort of place that would show this sort of thing). In this case, though, I wasn’t, cos I remember the old video shop on Maroubra Road having it on VHS back in the 90s, but it still feels a bit striking to see a local cinema ad for it even so… incidentally, Refused Classification notes that the video release was cut even more than the cinema print, though doesn’t clarify why. Ironically, you can now get the thing uncut on Youtube’s paid movies and TV channel where it’s only rated MA, so it’s technically OK for older teenagers… how times change, eh.