Month: December 2015

The myth of the forbidden film

CategoriesFeature, MoviesPosted on

I don’t think there are anymore forbidden films like there used to be when I was growing up.

I remember when VHS was king and my family would make weekly vigils to one of the local rental shops and when the new movies were already checked out, as they almost always were, we’d peruse the stacks looking for anything interesting to watch. Sometimes we’d come across weird horror flicks like Troma classics The Toxic Avenger (1984) and Class of Nuke ‘em High (1986) and sometimes strange documentaries about odd subjects.

In the 1980s some friends and myself were into heavy metal. I didn’t look like the stereotypical “metal head” but none-the-less when the other kids were listening to Richard Marx and Kenny Loggins, my group of friends were buying, duping and trading Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Anthrax and Iron Maiden tapes amongst ourselves.

Back then it wasn’t easy to follow your favorite bands. There were a few heavy metal magazines you could buy at drug stores and supermarkets and Headbangers Ball on MTV. But otherwise you were pretty much on your own. What was the meaning of the cover painting to Guns N’ Roses “Appetite for Destruction?” Did listening to any Judas Priest song automatically place satanic suggestions in one’s brain? Who exactly was this “Walking Dude” that Anthrax was singing about? How many dead in the apocalypse constitutes a Megadeth?

And outside of these magazines and Headbangers Ball and sensationalized TV news programs about the horrors of heavy metal there weren’t many real answers. That was until a fateful day in the video store when we rented the tape The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years (1988). Read more “The myth of the forbidden film”

Direct beam comms #3

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, Toys, TVPosted on

TV

I’m really digging The Expanse on SyFy. It’s very space-opera-isa with a heavy story.

 

Last fall BBC America aired several movie-length episodes of classic Tom Baker Doctor Who. It seemed that perhaps BBC America was about to start airing classic Doctor Who alongside the new but alas this seemed to only be a short experiment where only a few episodes ever aired.

Classic Doctor Who shows usually consisted of four or six half hour episodes that were aired weekly in the UK but were sometimes edited together into two or three hour stories for overseas markets — which is how I saw Doctor Who in the 1980s on my local PBS station and how BBC America is airing the shows.

After having watched several of the episodes on BBC America it’s plainly obvious that some of the classic Doctor Who was greatly padded.

Sometimes it seems as if characters spend what would be an entire 30 minute episode running from something, or getting ready to do something. But not actually getting anything done. And a 30 minute block seems only to exist to move characters from point “A” to “B,” which though the magic of editing could be done in a few seconds of screen time.

I think that the only reason this padding exists is because four or six episodes were needed per Doctor Who story back then, not that four or six episodes were actually needed to tell the story.

Not that this is a horrible thing or that it makes classic Doctor Who bad or anything — I actually prefer it over the new series — just that there was a reason when I was a kid I almost never made it to the end of a two hour episode of Doctor Who without falling asleep.

Movies

Neca Alien 1/4 scale figure
Neca Alien 1/4 scale figure

I mean this in the best possible way — Sicario is a cross between the movies Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and Traffic (2001). A-

 

For how much reviewers disliked Terminator Genisys I thought it was a good movie. There is the issue of a big story turn in the second act of the movie that doesn’t quite work — or make sense — but it’s not enough to spoil the film as a whole. I actually liked how the filmmakers of Terminator Genisys actively played with and used the idea of time travel in different ways than in the other films and introduced the idea that just one thing amiss in a timeline can totally change the future. B

My preference of Terminator movies in order:

  1. Terminator (1984)
  2. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
  3. Terminator Genisys (2015)
  4. Terminator Salvation (2009)
  5. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)

Toys

The Neca Alien 1/4 scale figure stands a whopping 22 inches tall and has 30 points of articulation including its alien tongue. It’s everything I didn’t get when I missed getting the original 1977 Alien toy as a kid. The figure retails for around $110 which isn’t totally insane considering its size.

On the Horizon

I’m working on columns for the second season of Daredevil and the Dark Horse Aliens comic books.