tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-55910382009-12-20T22:32:21.827-08:00A place for discourse about stuff I'm interested in: movies, television, politics, spontaneous combustion.Jeff McMahonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17455194268519396055noreply@blogger.comBlogger292125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5591038.post-64157069206039728212009-12-18T18:25:00.000-08:002009-12-18T18:26:53.597-08:00

This is pretty awesome.

Jeff McMahonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17455194268519396055noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5591038.post-84090875949517690582009-12-11T21:23:00.011-08:002009-12-11T22:27:36.245-08:00

Okay, it's been a while and once again I've been reminded that people actually read this blog so here are a few thoughts on the new movies I've watched in the last month or so. First, real quick, I could use some suggestions on the design and color scheme - I went black for October because black is spooky, but in general? This gray isn't cutting it. I think I want to migrate the whole thing over

Jeff McMahonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17455194268519396055noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5591038.post-554478251196242082009-12-11T12:36:00.002-08:002009-12-11T12:39:01.044-08:00

The swearing is pretty good, but the fact that the swearer is a member of Parliament who nonetheless looks like he just wandered in off the Dublin streets after a relaxing pint? Even better.

Jeff McMahonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17455194268519396055noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5591038.post-46740380089443111392009-11-24T20:27:00.000-08:002009-11-24T20:29:23.677-08:00

Awesome.

Jeff McMahonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17455194268519396055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5591038.post-28228079340558998972009-11-19T22:34:00.016-08:002009-11-20T04:15:30.094-08:00

This was an interesting documentary that played at the Silent Theater a couple of weeks ago. Basically, it's the story of Todd Walker, a down-on-his-luck Kentuckian who strolled into a Goodwill one day, bought an odd-looking object that struck his eye for $0.69, went home, stared at it for a few hours (like you do) and realized that he was having visions of demons and pyramids and whatnot. A

Jeff McMahonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17455194268519396055noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5591038.post-20202255941243380192009-11-16T02:29:00.003-08:002009-11-16T02:34:51.002-08:00

Okay, bear with me - today is the birthday of character actor Clu Gulager, who I don't actually know, but have seen many times at the New Beverly Theater where he's a regular. He seems to be a great guy, and he was in a lot of movies, of which this - Uninvited - is perhaps my favorite. It's about a genetically engineered cat that, when angry, launches another, smaller, evil radioactive cat out

Jeff McMahonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17455194268519396055noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5591038.post-91935349181837333342009-11-13T01:36:00.004-08:002009-11-13T01:40:55.623-08:00

If I had been born about ten or fifteen years earlier, I'd probably hate the entire Friday the 13th series as much as I hate the Saw series - a bunch of pointlessly identical misanthropic cash cows. But since I've only seen them all on home video with a respectable distance, they're basically all '80s kitsch, which means that I kind of like some of them - and I like Part 2 the best of all. Happy

Jeff McMahonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17455194268519396055noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5591038.post-4723506722074314482009-11-06T22:35:00.007-08:002009-11-06T23:21:25.964-08:00

This one is going to split viewers - or at least, the small number of viewers who get to see it since it's basically been dumped by the studio. In each of his three movies, Jared Hess has walked the fine line between making fun of his oddball characters (Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre) and empathizing with them and their unusual plights. Many have seen these movies as essentially mean-spirited

Jeff McMahonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17455194268519396055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5591038.post-54163109995436222752009-11-02T20:24:00.013-08:002009-11-02T20:57:37.179-08:00

Sometimes it's the little things that stick out in a movie. Offerings is a pretty undistinguished Halloween ripoff from 1989 (way to jump on that slasher bandwagon in a timely way, guys!) and made in Oklahoma. It slavishly follows the Halloween template - weird kid gets locked up, comes back years later to kill a batch of teenagers, there's an expert who tries to track him down, etc. This killer,

Jeff McMahonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17455194268519396055noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5591038.post-75347137043880123692009-10-31T18:15:00.015-08:002009-11-03T00:55:58.802-08:00

Okay, so being unemployed for 3 weeks out of the month allowed me to watch a total of 38 horror movies, old and new, seen-before and never-seen-before. Yes, that disturbs and alarms me as well. Anyway, here's how they stacked up:WORST OF THE WORST: Canvas of Blood (1997)Mind, Body & Soul (1992)Danger on Tiki Island (1968)Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders (1996)BLAHSuperstition (1982)The Horror

Jeff McMahonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17455194268519396055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5591038.post-91357416378620425542009-10-27T22:42:00.004-08:002009-10-28T00:05:47.026-08:00

Okay, I haven't actually seen this movie, but I stumbled upon this trailer and isn't it kind of craptacularly awesome? An Exorcist ripoff with Piper Laurie riding the success of her character from Carrie and featuring all manner of wind-machine hauntings, wheelchair flops, Lesbian romances (?!) and underwater skeletonfights? Yes please.

Jeff McMahonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17455194268519396055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5591038.post-64476973700213806882009-10-25T20:30:00.007-08:002009-10-25T22:49:43.937-08:00

Typically, a big budget is considered to be the best way to ruin a comedy - Evan Almighty, Land of the Lost, name your own. Ghostbusters is a rarity, a movie that ambitiously seeks to be a whole bunch of different things - raucous comedy, horror film, tentpole adventure movie - and does them all well.One of the reasons why the movie succeeds so well, for me, is that it clearly takes place in a

Jeff McMahonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17455194268519396055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5591038.post-8495162430358264182009-10-23T20:33:00.011-07:002009-10-24T03:15:11.083-07:00

Well, it's nice to know that the totally misbegotten sequel to a big studio hit has a long tradition behind it. This movie is pretty much a failure on every level except as camp. How does a mega-million-dollar corporation let something like this happen? But if not for bizarre studio choices we wouldn't have Citizen Kane or Inglourious Basterds either, so anyways.Anyway, while it's a dismal

Jeff McMahonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17455194268519396055noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5591038.post-75496720830026116722009-10-21T22:25:00.009-07:002009-10-21T22:56:35.191-07:00

This played at the New Beverly Tuesday night in a double bill with Blacula, and even though I hadn't heard of this movie before, I think it was the more entertaining of the two. It's a pretty simple set-up: nice guy Glynn Turman gets put into a trance by a Bourbon Street hypnotist and then gets possessed (as will happen) by the ghost of vengeful 1940s gangster J.D. Walker.The trailer makes it

Jeff McMahonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17455194268519396055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5591038.post-50107177090223288112009-10-18T23:57:00.007-07:002009-10-19T00:36:57.390-07:00

Speaking of movies with backlashes, here's another one, although the backlash against this movie is less about commercial hype than it is about political correctness, so let's get this out of the way: yes, The Exorcist is ultimately a movie with a regressive attitude towards gender roles (two priests must do battle against an unruly female) and towards morality (stark medieval good vs. evil).All

Jeff McMahonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17455194268519396055noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5591038.post-88710059998289958772009-10-17T23:20:00.005-07:002009-10-19T00:08:08.096-07:00

When you have a horror movie without stars in it and without a standard premise for a marketing hook, it becomes necessary to market it as "The Scariest Movie of All Time". And then when when people go to see it and it's a perfectly respectable scary movie, but not so scary that everybody watching it has their eyeballs explode in terror and the ushers all quit because the seats are covered in the

Jeff McMahonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17455194268519396055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5591038.post-29666513146757896252009-10-15T00:52:00.006-07:002009-10-15T01:13:16.853-07:00

This scene is pretty much all you need to know about the partially-Spanish-made 1982 slasher Pieces - a college coed has just been murdered, chainsaw-style, in a locker room, and Lynda Day George here has discovered the body. What I especially like about this moment is the total bewilderment the other actor has on his face - how is he supposed to react to this insane bit of performance? I'm just

Jeff McMahonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17455194268519396055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5591038.post-88940800026622629942009-10-13T23:46:00.012-07:002009-10-14T01:12:25.630-07:00

Ugh, save me from the '80s slasher movie where NOTHING HAPPENS. There's a reason why there were so many Halloween ripoffs in the early '80s: they were cheap to make. All you needed was a small cast of unknown actors, a few simple locations (a house or two, a college gym, a summer camp) and a decent special effects guy with some gore experience. Put it all together and you have a huge rate of

Jeff McMahonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17455194268519396055noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5591038.post-6233554078455974732009-10-11T23:55:00.013-07:002009-10-12T01:16:12.567-07:00

God, I love the New Beverly, LA's grungiest non-porn repertory theater. This year, as last year, they showed an all-night horror movie marathon in the lead-up to Halloween and I was there, here's the quick rundown:Dog Soldiers (2002): I had seen Neil Marshall's directorial debut before on DVD; on a second viewing it's still a pretty kickass action/horror hybrid, but at the same time some of

Jeff McMahonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17455194268519396055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5591038.post-19926861063951548442009-10-10T18:07:00.005-07:002009-10-10T18:43:33.503-07:00

As far as I can tell, Jose Mojica Marins basically pioneered the Latin American horror movie at about the same time that the British, Italians, and Japanese were all launching into the worldwide exploitation market. And like most of those movies, JMM's work is raw, pulpy, and an expression of raw id. Marins' alter-ego, Coffin Joe, is basically the world's worst undertaker, with an ego of colossal

Jeff McMahonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17455194268519396055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5591038.post-45238601191550846392009-10-07T23:53:00.005-07:002009-10-08T00:01:22.948-07:00

Anyone who watches enough basic cable has seen these ads, and I want to congratulate the fine people at Broadview Security for inventing a new subgenre: Fear Porn. Without the services of Broadview Security, you too will be the victim of a brazen daylight attack!Basically, I think these things are terrible, blatantly exploiting peoples' (specifically women's) fears through slick filmmaking, and I

Jeff McMahonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17455194268519396055noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5591038.post-79468461439297826142009-10-06T23:55:00.008-07:002009-10-07T22:28:30.145-07:00

This one played at the New Beverly about a month ago and I didn't know anything about it except that the premise involves Barbara Hershey getting raped by a ghost. Obviously this was a can't miss premise in the post-Exorcist era even if it sounds utterly ridiculous now. And sure enough, that's what happens, about five times during the course of the movie, each time accompanied by the most

Jeff McMahonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17455194268519396055noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5591038.post-61922928777518869782009-10-05T21:25:00.022-07:002009-10-05T23:53:01.709-07:00

It's a strange feeling to be in a theater full of people who are having a different experience than yours. The best example of this feeling in my lifetime was when I went to see Eyes Wide Shut on opening weekend, and when the audience of mainstream movie-goers expecting a Basic Instinct-style erotic thriller actually got a lengthy dream-fugue on sexual morality, the audience's emotional strain (

Jeff McMahonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17455194268519396055noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5591038.post-76030820980653593692009-10-04T18:29:00.021-07:002009-10-05T22:30:42.622-07:00

Creepshow creeped me out before I even saw it. This was thanks to the Berni Wrightson graphic novel that came out the same time as the movie, which my Stephen King-loving mother bought and which I gobbled up (it being a lot easier and quicker to read than, say, The Stand). And, at the age of 5, it was my first introduction to the world of the E.C.-style comics that it was homaging, full of lurid

Jeff McMahonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17455194268519396055noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5591038.post-92195789963996932332009-10-02T21:35:00.008-07:002009-10-03T15:27:19.573-07:00

Lame. There's a lot of untapped potential here in this story literalizing the hell of high school social relations into an actual story of demonic possession, but what ended up on the screen looks like it was about three screenplay drafts away from being ready to shoot - the character relationships are underdeveloped, the structure is clunky, things are set up and then poorly paid off, if at all.

Jeff McMahonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17455194268519396055noreply@blogger.com0