How TUCKER & DALE and Rikidōzan can Save America... from STRAW DOGS

America has become so ugly, violent, and bitter over its president, its policies, and its blue/red state divide we need an intervention. You can hear it in the catcalls at the Republican debates and read it in the reviews of the STRAW DOGS remake, and like everyone else in this country, I know I am right and all those other people are idiots --but has anyone turned hate to love through their hate of love? No. It's only ever worked en verso when you've...

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Daze of our Lies (or "As the Reichstag Burns"): SECRET HONOR, HITLER (1962), UFO HUNTERS, Lord Lhus!

"So this is how liberty dies... with thunderous applause."- Padame SkywalkerThere are no accidents in weird rainy accidental double features, like when I chanced upon the very strange 'forgotten' 1962 film, HITLER (with Sam Fuller stalwart Richard Basehart as Hitler? Whaaat?) after watching Altman's SECRET HONOR (1984), with Phillip Baker Hall as ole Tricky Dick Nixon, and then a UFO Hunters episode and now The Myth Behind Star Wars, with little...

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Linkage to the Past and World

 A site devoted to the 4 AM UHF TV experience, specifically the films I saw as a kid watching Dr. Shock on channel 17, Philadelphia, in the 1970s, this was my first website, and one I thought lost. Begun circa 1999 and ended in 2003 with the birth of Acidemic Journal of Film and Media. This site began when I was still drinking, and saw me through sobriety, and being scared to death (in a good way) by the Blair Witch Project (prompting me to...

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You Can't be Coughing on a Moving Train: CONTAGION and the Soderbergh/Assayas Post-Post Post

If you can't wait and must see Steven Soderbergh's disaster movie CONTAGION (2011) in a theater, be sure to sit next to a guy who won't stop coughing  --it's what this movie needs to really 'hit you' with that William Castle 'Percepto' aural 3-D meta feeling, and Steven Soderbergh must have known a coughing person in every showing was all but assured based on its early autumn release --in 2011 of all years, right before the 'man comes around' ...

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'Transgalactic Delta House Ebullience,' Comic Book Evolution, and Timothy Leary's Head - PAUL (2011)

Like most people I know who follow exo-politics, I thought PAUL (2011) looked grim from the outset. First off, this is supposed to be a brom-com about a surviving Roswell alien, and here his huge eyes aren't dark black. The black eye on grey aliens is, as we now know now, a kind of DNA-implanted contact lens, as if we humans decided we loved Raybans (tm) so much we had them surgically grafted. Without the dark eyes Paul looks just like a big E.T....

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"Glum Sex Reigns" - Choice Sin Cine Eulogizers

Every new review on Bleeding Skull (which I heaped grossly understated praise on here) is a cause for celebration, a celebration so choked with existential ennui that it prevents me from doing much of my own writing. Today they're discussing the infamous Chesty Morgan movies from relentless auteur Doris Wishman. I feel bad for that poor Chesty, cursed by gravity and a world gone mad for grotesque exaggeration of mankind's eternal panacea, the safety...

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LSD Godfather: Don Fanucci in the Vestibule

Mobsters and LSD, don't doubt they mix! But forget about Scorsese's mobsters for a minute--they're the cocaine generation --let's sink down into the swampy dark studies full of fissured old faces that was the 1970s, the LSD generation, and the Godfather Part 2 (1974). As Chico Marx would say, Ahsta mana gatsa - Aye shalom! He's got Giuliani's SmileThe key figure in it all for lysergic resonance is not, as one might suspect, Michael (Al Pacino) or...

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