Bill Cosby Can Eat a Dick.

As an avid fan of 50s creature features and monster movies, my 15 year old self was THRILLED in 1988 to discover that Chuck Russell was remaking The Blob because fuck if it didn't need dusting off and parading around like a cheap whore with the rent due (and, seriously, needs it again because I loves me some killer Jell-o™).

Don't get me wrong.  The Steve McQueen version was fuckin' awesomesauce but there's something about the 88 update that is near and dear to my heart.  It could be that it was one of many things that I could share with my mom (who is totally a gorehound) or it could be that violent pudding is just fuckin' cool.  I don't know and I don't particularly care.  The 1988 Blob is the shit and I'll cut anybody that says otherwise.

Or feed them to the sink.  I haven't made up my mind, yet.

This is not to say that the movie doesn't have flaws but I'll get to them, later.

So, like with any movie that has to do with gruesome goo (and I think The Blob started that trope, for realsies), some asshole has to go poking meteors with sticks.  Seriously?  Really, Billy Bob the Hobo?  We step down from the trees and gain the ability to use tools and you want to revert to prodding the scorching hot rock from the sky KNOWING, after a few decades of b-grade horror cinema, that the minute you poke it you're going to die horribly?  Step away from the Sterno, dude.  It's fucking up your head.

You asshole.

So, yeah.  Hobo McGrimypants ends up with a handful of space goo and manages to get picked up by three high school students who give him a lift to the hospital.  How nice of them.  Good Samaritans all.  Small-town America at its finest.  Well, except for Brian (Kevin Dillon, complete with a radical 80s mullet and motorcycle-jumping action).  He's a dick.  Meg (Shawnee Smith), though, is America's fucking sweetheart.  All cheerleader-y and dating the nice boy and coming home on time and watching out for her baby brother and she makes my pancreas want to shrivel up and die she's so damn sweet.  Her steady, Paul, is Mr. Football Hero and you expect him to totally save the day but this is The Blob and it totally lives up to its "bad boy makes good" roots.  Wait for it.

Anyway, the doc gets a little busy and Paul checks in on the homeless dude and finds this:

This is what you get for being stupid.

And, then, after being suitably spooked, poor Paul gets a face full of space goo.  Thanks to the joys of 1980s Hollywood special effects, Meg gets to watch Paul get partially digested and, because she's our heroine, she tries to pull him out of the gelatinous mass but she misjudges the power of the Blob and Paul's arm comes out of the mess all by its lonesome and Meg knocks herself unconscious as the goo slips off into the night finally worming its way into the back seat of the local Lothario's date.  No, really.  Bitch gets hollowed out like a fuckin piñata.

And this is what you get for serving roofie-coladas.  Date rape is never funny.

Now, because cops are fucking useless and they, apparently, hate all teenagers, ever, Meg meets up with Brian to discuss the Blob which they totally both saw and nobody believes them because they're idiot teenagers and they know nothing about how the world works, silly children.  And, of course, it's during that time that the kitchen help gets sucked into the drain.

I heart green screen... only not...

 Meg and Brian escape into the walk-in freezer where they discover that the space goo is vulnerable to the cold.  After the Blob moves on, they meet up with a federal team of scientists that have come out to investigate.  Oh, and they've quarantined the town.  Brian, of course, runs off but Meg is taken to her parents

In the meantime, Meg's little brother gets a wild hair up his ass and sneaks out with his buddy to see the new horror show down at the local theater.  I like this kid.  Of course, the theater is has a big old target on it and gets attacked mid-showing.  The kid's friend gets dissolved.  Suffice it to say that people end up in the sewers and that's just never pleasant.

And you thought YOUR movie theater's floors were sticky.

So, it turns out that The Blob (in this version) is a mutated virus that was meant to be used as biological warfare.  BAD GOVERNMENT!  BAD!  No cookie for you.  You're in time out, mister.  Now you go to your room and think about what you've done.

Do government agents ever survive?

 And that's where we stop, kids.  You know how this goes.  The first taste's free.  You want to know how this ends you have to watch it yourself.  Far be it from me to ruin the cheesy adorableness that The Blob.  Go on.  You have time.  If you don't have time, MAKE time.  This is one of those movie's that's awesomely bad.  But it's not even bad.  It's... awesomely mediocre.  I mean, you KNOW this isn't going to be winning any Oscars but for the time it was AMAZING!  I mean, everybody knew that blue/green screen was used because, frankly, everybody was using it.  What it gave us, though, was deft use of latex, silicone, and strawberry yogurt alongside some strong acting from some undersung actors.

On the other hand, I had to look at Kevin Dillon's ugly mug for an hour and a half and that made me sad on the inside.  Seriously, he has a bat nose and it disturbs me.

But, no, really.  If you've never seen this, this is one of those movies that makes a positive case for remakes.  No, I don't expect a remake to ever replace the original and this one did not.  I DO, however, expect that remakes will enhance the original in ways we often don't expect and THAT was definitely achieved, here.

Now, go get yourself a pudding pop and poke meteors with sticks.

Can Someone Shut Those Kids Up?

OK, so, it appears to me that since horror movies can't KILL kids, they may as well use them to scare the fuck out of us in other ways.  Primary among them?  Singing.

And this choir teacher was immediately fired.

Whether it's one child or many (usually many), the sound of children singing mournful tunes in minor keys makes most people's skin crawl right off of them and go to wait in the car until the movie is over.  It really doesn't matter what the song is about, particularly since it's usually about death, anyway.  Once you hear them, you KNOW that something horrible is going to happen.

Too soon?

On top of that, the kids are usually singing along with some well-known nursery rhyme that will immediately rape your childhood right in front of your horrified face.  And your childhood had it coming.  Look at what it was wearing.  One other thing to consider?  Sometimes the characters can hear this and they, like complete fucking morons, automatically yell out "Is anybody there?"

We do have some awesome examples, though, and that makes the ear-creepiness TOTALLY worth it.

There are the little girls in white in the Nightmare on Elm Street series, about half of Tim Burton's movies, Samara Morgan in The Ring, "Carol Anne's Theme" from Poltergeist and the opening to Children of the Corn to name just a few.  The tunes are catchy enough to stick in your head and creep you out FOREVER!

The reasoning behind this, of course, is that children are innocent so if they're warning us of danger in this eerie and disturbing way, something has destroyed this innocent on a level they might not even be aware of or understand.  It hurts us a little on the inside and that makes us uncomfortable.  It's really that simple.

Plus children are soulless abominations that are out to eat our organs.

Yet another reason to stay away from kids, I guess.

THANK YOU!

FINALLY!  A director that understands that vampires are fucking monsters!

It took me a while to get to this one but I'm kind of glad I did. Stake Land is a 2010 vampire film with a twist.

It plays a little like Zombieland but that's OK because this one is much darker.  Older guy takes younger orphan under his wing and teaches him the way of the vampire hunter after the vamps cause Armageddon.  Pretty simple, right?

'Cause the vamps are pretty fuckin' ugly.

Yeah.  Pretty simple.

Along the way, they rescue a nun from the local religious crazies.  They get CAPTURED by said religious crazies, they escape from the religious crazies and the religious crazies spend the rest of the movie getting all revenge-y.  Well, one of them does.

They also join up with a pregnant woman (Danielle Harris of Halloween fame) and the token black dude who, you guessed it, dies first.

But he got to help these guys look badass for a bit.

This is almost brilliant film-making and it really does bring something new-ish to the table.  Mostly in treating the vampires like zombies.  They're brainless and they only live to feed.  The fact that they evolve is interesting, too.  You see a bit of a progression with them.  The fact that the true horror is religion, though is a little anvilicious.  

As for the acting, it was enjoyable.  There weren't any cast members that could be mistaken for lumber, in any case.  Except for one but she was dead.

All in all?  Thumbs up.  Not too high, but it makes for a good watch.

Buying the Farm

So, this weekend I got a little downtime, finally, and decided to try and play catch-up with Netflix which is a fucking daunting task, let me tell you.

Anyway, during that process I came across a title with Brad Dourif that I'd not seen before called "Last Kind Words" and I settled in to watch because my husband was taking a nap and I figured I shouldn't watch anything with a lot of screaming.

Suffice it to say I didn't expect much.

The film starts, like all good films should, with a kid shooting his father.  Totally accidental, of course, but you know how these things go.  Kid gets separated from his father during a hunting trip, kid finds corpse hanging from a tree that, seeing as how it was from the civil war, should have tumbled to the ground DECADES ago.  Kid goes to cut it down and a magical negro (turns out he was an escaping slave on the Underground Railroad) appears to stop him.  Kid gets spooked and tries to shoot the magical dude but magical dude is a ghost so he really shoots his dad.  Right in the heart, too.  No comin' back from that one.  Kid returns to the farm to report to his sister.

No tact.  None.  At all.

So, here we are, years later, and a family pulls up to the farm and the father has apparently been hired by Weyland (Brad Dourif) to do, well, farm stuff.  Farm stuff that I will never understand because I don't like physical labor.  This is why I sit at a desk and talk to silly people who break their computers all day and write this blog for you.  I don't even like camping because it smacks of work.  Who wants to build their own shelter and sit around a fire with mosquitoes sucking out your life force one milliliter at a time?  Seriously.

But I digress.

So, while dad hammers out the details (such as "you get to live in the trailer in the back yard"), the kid, Eli, goes tromping around the back yard because he's a sullen, moody boy who hates being there as much as any young man, who has basically been grounded for life simply by dint of moving to a backwater farm in the middle of nowhere, would be.  Hell, I'd be pissed, myself.

Angsty McWhiney-Face

He picks up an apple and goes to take a bit when a young woman comes out of the woods and tells him not to eat it because it's full of bugs.  Good call.  Too bad his dad comes back and gets all cranky-pants about a fuckin' apple.

That's right.  Eat that apple.  Eat it gooooood.

Eli makes friends with this girl who has given him no more information than her name, Amanda, and her location, "around".  Because he's a teenage boy and can get off on a handy ball of twine, he gets all twitterpated and a budding romance emerges.  We all know this won't end pretty, right?

On top of all of this we've got his dad who, naturally, is an abusive drunk and his mom who, seriously, is the Clueless Wonder.  Not quite an example of battered woman syndrome, because she's still got some fight in her, but enough to make her annoying.

So, yeah.  Long story short, kid falls in love with the girl, girl is a ghost, ghost happens to be Weyland's sister.  Weyland is a possessive creeper.  Girl USED to be the love of kid's DAD'S life and dad's a-pinin' because his life's gone to shit ever since he lost her thinking she ran away on him.  Weyland hung her in the backwoods which is where the majority of this story takes place because filming in the woods is cheap.  Oh, look.  A pre-fabricated set. 

Somewhere along the way, dad and Weyland get in a fight and dad ends up dead.  And that's when the creeper in Weyland REALLY comes out.

Plus he ends up selling museum quality antiques to pay back a loan-shark deal.

Oh, and we've got a minor sub-plot with Eli's pseudo-ex-girlfriend that either needed to be amped up or left out completely.

Now, the ending to this is relatively predictable but I'm still not going to go any further.  You know me and spoilers.

So, let's talk about this for a bit, shall we?

This is almost a textbook example of the Southern Gothic genre.  We've got love and hate and abuse and incest and a big rotting "mansion" in the deep south.  We've got people who are resentful of "city folk" and a blatant connection to the Civil War.  There's intrigue, there's, for lack of a better word, passion.  About the only thing we're missing is the crazy grandma in the attic.

All of that being said, I didn't hate this movie but I didn't like it, either.  This is probably because I don't have a single romantic bone in my body.  Actually, that's a lie but I'm not big on the gooey-mushy stuff in my horror movies (fuck you, Stephenie Meyer).  I know it has it's place and I know that romance is a large part of ghost movies, particularly in the case of Southern Gothic films, but there comes a point where the romance overcomes the creepy and this movie crossed that line.  It wasn't a feel-good movie by any stretch but it wasn't dark enough to overcome the lovey-dovey.

I can't say it was a bad movie, though, either.  Yeah, it was shoestring and, yes, there are scenes that feel forced and over-acted but it wasn't bad from a film-making standpoint for a B-Grade plotline, either.  I also give it props for sticking with the downer ending.

I give this one a thumb's sideways because I can't really make up my mind as to whether or not I hate it.  This is definitely a case of "Your Mileage May Vary".