Wunderkind drummer for The Who, Keith Moon, left this mortal coil 40 years ago. What a loss. The legendary madman lead an alcohol and drug fueled existence that bolstered his outgoing personality and flashy, unorthodox, drum style. Alas, this very fast lifestyle also accelerated an early end to his explosive drumming style and life. As the years wore on and the intoxicants flowed, so to did his strength and lifeforce get tapped. Moon died at the age of 32 on September 7, 1978. Please examine YouTube videos of his earlier days when he was in his prime. You will be [More]
A documentary detailing the history of the vampire character Dracula, assembled using various movie clips and the narration of horror icon, Vincent Price. You’ll see clips from the silent “Nosferatu” and other cinematic appearances featuring the ancient blood sucker such as Lugosi in “Mark of the Vampire”, and the 1950’s alternative vampire film, “The Vampire” . “VPD” is a good flick to curl up by the fire to watch as we come upon the Autumn season and move closer to Halloween. Heavy on the garlic fries. Hehe.
The premise of this queasy little tale is that climate change, aka global warming, has caused the partial thawing of a wooly mammoth up in Northern climes that is infested with an ancient parasite that emerges ready and willing to infest a New Age. The roughly cockroach sized bugs burrow under your skin and lay eggs that basically feed on their host and then emerge ready to find a new home. This movie is definitely not for the squeamish! Yes. I felt my skin crawl on more than one occasion. There are numerous grotesque set pieces throughout this flick. All [More]
A mildly amusing Saturday afternoon diversion, “Graveyard Shift” was based on a Stephen King short story. Here it is fleshed out into movie length and a large part of that filling is loaded with oozing, despicable caricatures. A bunch of people you could care less about are tasked with cleaning up the lower level area of a mill located somewhere on the east coast. Maybe the extraction of all the crap which has accumulated down there over the years will alleviate some of the rat problem that infests the place. What is not known is that the mother of all [More]
A real creepy premise in this flick: giant, mutated ants are on the loose and stalking victims in isolated areas of the God forsaken desert! I bring you this cinematic, sci-fi gem because of a recent summer time invasion of the small variety of ants in our house in pursuit of the cat’s food. These little beasts are annoying enough in their present miniature state as they scamper in all directions as you try to eradicate their presence inside your home. In addition to the trouble of getting them picked up and removed, you get the sinister feeling that the [More]
Legendary science fiction and fantasy writer Harlan Ellison has passed away. Call him an iconoclast, outspoken, a larger than life character who didn’t suffer fools, especially those he felt tampered with the integrity of his work. He reached a settlement with CBS 40 years after his script for “Star Trek”-TOS, “City on the Edge of Forever” had been delivered to reclaim his share of the profits generated from his work. He had more impressions on the television industry collected in his series “The Glass Teat”. Acidic observations to say the least. I count Ellison as an early influence in my [More]
Have you ever noticed the greatly relied on device used in the movies where a character will emotionally discharge a big gun of some type? I guess the reaction is supposed to characterize a last gasp burst of attack against a nearly undefeatable opponent (Independence Day: Resurgence). Terminator Salvation has multiple examples of actors unloading weapons’ magazine after magazine in an attempt to stop a non human juggernaut. To get an idea of what I am referring to, please go to the clip. You can probably get away with this type of behavior at the target range.
I have come across this story a couple of times and see it as a truly chilling account of hunters turning into prey. Hunters off in a very remote wilderness “trespass” across an unknown creature’s domain. Things go very downhill from there. This story is given an air of credibility when it is discovered that this tale was relayed to Theodore Roosevelt by an old Mountain Man and included in Roosevelt’s book, “The Wilderness Hunter”. After reading it several times over the years, it has yet to loose its fearsome, chilling effect. Probably my favorite old time Bigfoot report. Of [More]
Art Bell just passed away. Bell was a very interesting fellow who started the Coast To Coast AM radio program. Bell was a pretty good interviewer and would let his guests discuss their topics at length. Bell followed his interests and featured a lot of paranormal topics and brought on guests who discussed UFO’s, Bigfoot, ghosts, and other strange phenomena. I spent many a night listening to his program and getting scared out of my wits and avoiding sleep. I have great memories of Bell, his beliefs and his sense of humor. The clip I linked to is an example [More]
Twisted Russian fantasy film depicting a manned trip to Mars. Propagandistic in tone in that Russian technology is capable of any space voyage/adventure in these films (see “Planeta Burg”) but the reality is that there was a long record of Russian space mission failures. It seems that the plot formula in a lot of these films is that the homeland’s advanced technology delivers men to the Moon, Mars, and The Stars, but once there, things become unraveled and life or death situations materialize. A drama is thus born. There are no shortage of beautiful and eerie landscapes rendered in shockingly [More]
Although this TV movie was released in 1982, it seems like history rolls around again and the Cold War is a timely topic again. War and aggression in the World. Some things never change. A strategic United States “listening post” located near the Bering Strait becomes compromised by Russian agents masquerading as U.S. soldiers and suddenly a gateway opens up to an invading force to get onto American soil. Hostilities have been brewing between both countries as a result of a grain embargo that would have otherwise fed starving Russian masses and then some KGB machinations take place which result [More]
Watching “The Mist” again recently got me to thinking about the original source material, Stephen King’s novella, and the faint memories I had of reading it. I watched the movie and then reread the story. The movie is very faithful to the story. But then there is that ending of the movie…. Once of the single most downer conclusions in popular culture storytelling, I would have to say. Granted, the scenario is imagined in the story but not actually executed. That grim prospect is dutifully carried out in the movie. Oh, it is an awful choice to go down that [More]
Hello. Back after a long absence of laying around. So as not to strain myself too much, I am sharing a link for an article I found which talks about what the article considers the worst horror movies of all time. I have to agree with a lot of them and then there are the many that I haven’t seen so I can’t really comment on those. For one, I thought “The Darkness” was not that terrible. I thought it had some good sequences which built up the tension of an unexpected demon settling in to a family’s home. Slightly [More]
Great World War 2 set action adventure movie starring the unlikely combo of Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood. Burton was a movie star at the time and Eastwood was suddenly hot after his run of spaghetti Westerns. Why not toss them together and pour them into this macho, adrenaline-fueled blockbuster? This picture clocks in at around 3 and a half hours but it certainly won’t seem so! In the days before Star Wars and Indiana Jones, this movie was the shit. Completely absorbing espionage caper where a team of Allied agents attempt to go deep behind German lines to recover [More]