Shocktober: Day 7

Eegah (1962)

Best known as the iconic steel-toothed “Jaws” from the Bond films The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker Richard Kiel may be the most famous 7’2″ actor to ever grace the screen. An advantage that gave him countless roles as various thugs and monsters it will always be this particular film that will stand as his most infamous. The film is Eegah and it’s the harrowing tale of an eon old caveman that terrorizes teens in the California desert. It’s got a heartbreaking love story, suspense, action, even a little crooning, so it has something for everyone!

Our film begins when hip teen Roxy Miller (Marilyn Manning) is driving to a party through the California desert. Roxy stops by a gas station where were introduced to her fugly, geetar strummin’, sweetheart Tom (Arch Hall Jr. the director’s son.) Sadly Tom has to wait until his shift is over to go the party but he fondly passes the time by telling gas station customers about his swell girl Roxy “That’s my girl, her father is Robert I. Miller. You should see her swim, she lives up at the club!” I’m sure that customer was really impressed.

But we all know you shouldn’t drive through the desert at night because wuh oh! There’s giant cavemen living out there! Luckily or unluckily Roxy escapes from a caveman attack and hurries back to her sweetheart and father Robert I. Miller (Arch Hall Sr.) who writes “Adventure Books” whatever those are. So instead of reporting it to the police Richard I. Miller decides to head out the next day and look for the caveman because he writes adventure books. Heading out in his explorer gear (pith helmet included) Richard somehow stumbles upon the caveman and is knocked unconscious by being lightly pushed over into sand.

Meanwhile Tom serenades Roxy by a pool in a musical segment that would make the Everly Brothers vomit with rage. The song is called “Vicki” but I guess his girlfriend “ROXY” likes it anyway. After this painfully ear shattering ordeal Tom and Roxy go to find their father in the desert in Tom’s dune buggy. Though Tom is apparently “all about” this dune buggy as they spend about two to three minutes joyriding to 60s guitar music. This is where I first notice how much dialogue and sound in general must of been recorded much later because the additional sound rarely synchs up well and never matches the same room tone.

So time flies, they worry about the whereabouts of Richard, Tom sings another song about “Vitamins” and “Galleries” or something and then boom! Roxy is attacked by the caveman and taken back to his cave. This is where we really get to know Eegah the forever grumbling and bumbling giant who actually has a heart. Here we are as well reunited with a Richard. Dead bodies surround the walls of the cave which Richard has learned are Eegah’s relatives. How he knows this I have no idea as Eegah really can’t say anything but “Eegah!” Richard also says “Eegah” is his name cause that’s all he can say, kind of like a Pokemon. Oh yeah and Eegah has survived for centuries by drinking sulfur water. Wow, Richard sure learned a lot while being held captive by a caveman who doesn’t speak english.

Seeing how much time I’ve spent on the plot let me try and wrap this up. Basically it’s your typical “Teens terrorized by a monster” movie with lots of running, yelling, and pointless filler. Characters are incredibly stupid, they faint constantly, and never seem to have anything important or interesting to say. Eegah has it’s funny moments but the filler scenes just make me cringe. Fortunately there’s a very funny Mystery Science Theater 3000 that makes this film remotely watchable, check it and you’ll have a gay old time.

American Gothic

How appropriate that in midst of “Shocktober” a show like this premieres on television? The latest from Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk the creators of Nip/Tuck and ugh Glee have returned to FX with their latest off the wall series American Horror Story. Did I say off the wall? What I meant to say is that when it comes to shows like this there are no walls. I have mixed feelings about this A.D.D Amityville Horror-like series but if there’s one thing I know for sure I’ve never seen a show like this.

The premise is your average haunted house scenario; a family already with some tension brewing under the surface looking for a fresh start blah blah, haunted house. Connie Brtton of Friday Night Lights fame stars as Vivien Harmon a former concert cellist still trying to get over a tragic miscarriage and her husband’s unfaithfulness. AS Vivien’s cheating husband Ben you have The Practice’s Dylan McDermott, a psychiatrist who also sleepwalks. Along with their daughter Violet (Taissa Farmiga) the three purchase a moody house in Los Angeles with a dark past. By dark past I mean murder, murder, and some more murder which they are all told about by a series of unusual locals, the most notable being Jessica Lange as Constance an intrusive and almost sinister-like neighbor of the family.

What follows is typical fright fest fare with mysterious sounds, sights, and hallucinations but there’s nothing typical about the way this show is presented. AHS for one has some of the most erratic quick paced editing I’ve ever seen. I assume the effect here is to give the viewer a an unnerving and disjointed experience, a gimmick I like and don’t like it. Frenetic editing in scenes that are intended to be all out crazy are a thrill. You’ll most likely just be sitting there scratching your head and asking yourself “What the hell did I just see?” That’s fun, but in moderation in normal conversation scenes it’s just simply annoying. In a way you could say this show is trying too hard not just visually but also with pacing. I get the feeling that they don’t want anyone to ever be bored so they keep loading us up with crazy images and crazy sounds. What the crew behind AHS don’t seem to realize is that sometimes viewers need more of the slower moments to create a balance, that way it will strengthen the intensity of the more intense moments.

Story wise everything is simple enough though I can definitely see this as a show that has the potential to get needlessly complicated. The fact that Dylan McDermott sleepwalks and sees things could get a little out of hand but for now it’s fine. For the most part I enjoyed the story and the characters who are all ably performed by a talented cast. Connie Britton is perhaps the standout but one can’t deny that Jessica Lange is successful when it comes to dealing out the heebie jeebies. I liked the large assortment of oddballs and nutjobs that the family encountered and look forward to what other weirdos will show up.

If the folks behind AHS really want ensure the success of this show I’d recommend they slow things down a little, though I doubt that will happen. It’s hard to see how a haunted house show will continually stay fresh or plausible. Already I’m wondering “Why don’t they just live somewhere else this place is insane!” But if they keep things under control it could work. I don’t know how much longer I’ll keep with this show considering how annoyed I am by the overuse of flashy visuals, that’s either one of those I’m going to get used to or not get used to. American Horror Story is a somewhat fun addition to FX’ already diverse lineup and though I didn’t love it I liked that it was different and I’ll probably check it out at least a few more times.

Shocktober: Day 6

The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961)

Another crappy classic I reviewed many full moons ago, let’s revisit the heart pounding thriller that is The Beast of Yucca Flats. This frightful Tor Johnson vehicle stars Tor as famous soviet scientist (yeah right) Joseph Javorsky who has just arrived in Yucca Flats, Nevada only to be ambushed by KGB assassins. Fleeing into the desert Javorsky accidentally wanders on to a nuclear test site, don’t you hate it when that happens? This results in Javorsky turning into a mad atomic beast who seems to have a lot of trouble breathing and walking while terrorizing people near and around the desert.

This low budget and infamously terrible Coleman Francis flick even manages to top Ed Wood from time to time with plot holes as big as the grand canyon. Filmed without sound the film makes heavy use of narration. The only thing is that the narrator never tells us anything we can’t already figure out. The film is so mind numbingly simple yet still contains some huge errors. For instance our protagonists which are two cops set out after the beast with virtually no leads. They don’t know what it looks like (leading to a hilarious scene where they shoot a civilian with a rifle from a plane) they don’t know where they are going and how do they even know it’s a “Beast”? No one has any evidence in the film that the killer is not human they just automatically assume it’s a monster. I never seen characters that were so willing to believe in monsters based on absolutely nothing.

Francis was well known for his less than stellar productions of the 50s and 60s but this one tops the cake. Really it was more or less an excuse to put the intimidating Tor Johnson into the role of a monster to make a few bucks, but Tor really doesn’t do much of anything here. He was severely overweight and could barely move, it’s like watching a dying sloth. A much more accurate title for this movie would of been “Revenge of the Slow Fat Guy with Breathing Problems.”

Gaze your eyes at the most terrifying monster of all time!

R.I.P. Steve Jobs

Every single day, everyone at Mildly Pleased uses an Apple product. Personally, I spend most of my day with Apple products, between all the work I do on my iMac and all the procrastinating I do with my iPhone. Steve Jobs has been the face of Apple for so long it’s easy to think of him as the man responsible for all that they’ve accomplished. That would be forgetting all the hard work that plenty of others put into each product they’ve launched, but it shows how prolific an individual he was.

I first took notice of Apple when Mac OS X came out. Before that, they were just the weird alternative computers that I saw in schools and the occasional household. But Mac OS X struck me for its UI. After years of looking at bland, grey desktops, Apple Aqua theme was amazing. It was so colorful and clean. That was enough to get me interested in Macs, and I started altering my Windows machine to emulate the Macintosh interface. Windows XP was a big step forward for Microsoft and a revolutionary OS in its own right, but we’ve had two versions of Windows since then. Apple is still iterating on OS X.

I never liked portable CD players. I tended to buy ones with skipping problems, or maybe I was just an irresponsible portable CD player owner. By junior high, most of the music I was listening to was on my computer, thanks to the magic of ripping CDs and the brief revolution of Napster. I was too lazy to burn CDs most of the time, so music was not that big a part of my life. Worse, I was stuck using the clunky Windows Media Player or the so-flexible-it-was-intimidating WinAmp for my musical needs. Then, and I clearly remember this day in 2003, Apple finally released iTunes for Windows. Obviously this was the logical, money-making move, but I thought it an extraordinary gift. What benevolence from them, to give me access to this amazing musical store and resource-hogging application! iTunes has been my only media player since. I bought my first song, “I Believe in a Thing Called Love” in March of 2004 using a Pepsi bottle cap. I haven’t bought a CD, aside from a souvenir in Japan, since. I got an iPod, a used third generation model, for Christmas. At the time, it was the coolest thing I owned, even though people were walking around with the cool color-screened fourth generation ones already. That iPod I have replaced three times, but it is still used by the family.

It was my birthday and a schoolday when my family gifted me my first Mac. A PowerBook G4, a real beauty. They gave it to me in the morning and I barely got to use it before I had to leave to go miss the bus. I waited all day for the chance to go home and play with my laptop again. At the time, I already had my own computer, a PC my dad had helped me build that was superior to my PowerBook in every way, from a technical standpoint. But instantly my Mac became my default machine. I used it every day up until my birthday in 2008, when I got my second Mac, the iMac I am writing this post on. That PowerBook has been used well beyond reason, but I can’t let it go. If it were a PC, I’m sure I’d have disposed of it long ago.

My first iPhone, now Nancy’s phone, was the most amazing thing. Imagine, a device that could deliver to me all the world’s information. That could connect me with anyone I was looking for. “There’s an app for that” might sound a little contrived to us now, but if you think of it, it’s pretty extraordinary. I walk around with technology today that would have seemed outlandish by science fiction standards just a few years ago. Time and time again, Apple has amazed me with the products they put out. I balked at the iPad, but like it or not, it’s changing the face of computers. I wouldn’t have predicted that, but Steve Jobs did.

That’s the insight and leadership the world will be missing today. Because you simply cannot deny his track record. After starting Pixar and returning to Apple, Steve Jobs led the company to Mac OS X, the iPod, iTunes, iPhone and the iPad. He turned dreams into reality. He was one of the most involved and beloved CEOs of all time. And he’ll be missed.

Shocktober: Day 5

Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

I don’t know how this film became the poster child for all bad movies but it certainly is a doozy. Ed Wood’s grand opus of sci-fi shlock has has somehow become a cult phenomenon in the last thirty years and is now considered required viewing for any fan of the strange or absurd. Who is to say what makes this film the grand campy classic that it is? Is it the cheap special effects? Is it the corny performances? Is it all of the above? Yes and more because this may possibly be the best worst movie ever made.

Let’s start with that tile “Plan 9 from Outer Space” great sci-fi title though I would of been just as amused with Wood’s original title “Grave Robbers from Outer Space”. The premise isn’t actually that bad but it’s handled with such incompetence, possibly due to the low budget or hasty production or maybe the fact that campy was all Ed Wood knew. So the humans are developing Solaranite (a sun-powered bomb) and in an effort to stop them aliens have decided to resurrect the dead because as well all know nuclear weapons are no match for zombies. This is the best plan a race of space traveling aliens could come up with? Not to mention this plan only creates about three zombies, yeah real threatening.

Aside from it’s convoluted plot Plan 9 is also infamous as Bela Lugosi’s last film, though I would hardly call silently wandering around a graveyard a performance. Of course star power can boost any low budget flick but Ed probably included Bela even more so as a tribute to his fallen friend. Other Wood notables include Tor Johnson and Vampira, they may not do much but they sure look cool doing it. What I love about Plan 9 is that it isn’t as much a series of scenes progressing the story as it is a collection of many upon many mistakes. It has the worst continuity I’ve ever seen, bad performances, the worst sci-fi effects, people knocking over cardboard tomb stones, actors reading from the script and the list goes on! Who would of ever thought that this would become a hit so many years after it’s release? What does future hold for this film? As TV psychic Criswell memorably said in his opening introduction to the film “Future events such as these will affect you in the future.”

C.A.T: Paranoid

Black Sabbath – Paranoid (1970)

I do whatever I can to get into the Halloween spirit every October and that usually includes my own soundtrack. Mostly it comprises of horror movie soundtracks but I usually throw in a few rock bands that I believe embody the spooky spirit of the season and for some reason Black Sabbath has always felt like one of those bands. First I think it has to be that name “Black Sabbath” I feel like I’ve heard several different stories regarding the name but the most common/popular story seems to be that the band named themselves after the 1963 horror film of the same name starring Boris Karloff. Second has to be that iconic dark and sludgy sound that made Sabbath the now proclaimed “Kings of Heavy Metal”. This can partly be attributed to Tony Iommi’s low brooding guitar sound of course it’s miraculous that he became a guitar player at all considering he lost the tips of his middle and ring finger in an industrial accident, that’s some Saw shit right there.

Picking which Sabbath album to do isn’t much of chore when you have a record like Paranoid, Sabbath’s second album. Just look at the names of these songs; “War Pigs”, “Iron Man”, “Electric Funeral”, “Hand of Doom” this is some dark shit but man does it sound great. This is the kind of sound that any pot smoking, aspiring garage band of the day would of killed to have but there was only one Sabbath. Iommi’s riffs were some of the best of the early 70s and more people probably would of noticed if it hadn’t been for Jimi “M’FN” Page taking the hard rock spotlight in those days (that guy’s the shit.) Bill Ward and Geezer Butler are a classic hard rock rhythm section and Ozzy had a voice that just didn’t sound quite like anyone else. Not to mention this is a band that really knows how to play off each other, resulting in some gnarly headbangers. One of my favorite elements of Sabbath’s sound is how every song is built. There is almost always that slow droning part in the beginning that overtime launches into a faster rockin’ part, but it never goes on too long. Every song on this album is exactly as long as it needs to be and every note is perfectly in place.

The songs are some of the group’s best with the iconic “Iron Man” leading the pack as the group’s most defining tune. “War Pigs” is eight minutes of pure sludge rock bliss and “Paranoid”? It’s god damn Paranoid, it’s awesome! I can’t believe the group actually wrote that song in about 25 minutes after they were told the album needed a single, wow. “Planet Caravan” is great insight into the softer side of the group but it’s the heavy rockers that make this album memorable. If you’ve never heard it I highly recommend it. You don’t have to like heavy metal (I don’t consider myself a fan) but it’s rock and roll at it’s best and everybody likes to rock, especially when it’s “Rocktober!”

Favorite Tracks: “Hand of Doom”, “Paranoid”, “War Pigs”

Shocktober: Day 4

The Killer Shrews (1959)

“Those who hunt by night will tell you that wildest and most vicious of all animals is the tiny shrew.” I don’t think you could ask for a better introduction to one of the best films about giant, poisonous, rodents ever made.Thorne Sherman (James Best) and first mate Griswold (Judge Henry Depree) have sailed to a remote island to deliver supplies to a small research team. What kind of research team? There’s a drunk guy, a swedish woman who believes shrews are “The most horrible animal on the face of the earth” and this scientist that plans to eliminate world hunger by shrinking people. Yeah, he’s gonna make people smaller so they don’t have to eat as much, flawless logic.

With the report of an incoming hurricane Sherman is advised to stay on the island but we doesn’t know is that the island is also inhabited by somewhere between 200-300 giant shrews that weigh between 50-100lbs! I don’t know if somebody went out and counted or weighed them all, they just know. Somehow these shrews were accidentally created by the German professor’s experiments. I mean that makes perfect sense, he’s trying to shrink stuff so he ends up with giant shrews, I’m sold.

The bulk of the action (or lack thereof) in The Killer Shrews is expository dialogue about the science of the shrews. Did you know that killer shrews are “More poisonous than snakes” and that their appetite is so great that if you trapped two of them together one would eat the other? If that’s so then why are there 300 Killer shrews on the island? There’s only like five people and they’re pretty hard to get to so why so many shrews? And for a movie about shrews there sure are a lot of cast members that have trouble saying “shrew”. Both the German scientist and Swedish woman always sound like they’re saying “shoes”, “Watch out for the shoes!”

How does this film address it’s own gaping plot holes? Why with more plot holes of course. I mean who really wanted to write a second draft of The Killer Shrews? It’s either that or they felt like they’d immediately struck gold and didn’t feel the need to “polish” the story. One scene that comes to mind is when the swedish woman threatens our hero with a gun because he wants to go out in the woods with the shrews. If you’re so concerned about his well being than why are you pointing a gun at him? Oh and I’ve almost forgotten the crowning achievement of the whole film, the “giant shrews.” They’re dogs, clearly dogs dressed up in ridiculous costumes. They act like dogs, they perform like dogs and they’re hardly scary they’re actually kind of funny.

But you know what? This film was a joy to watch, parts of it anyway. So if you’re really drunk, or really bored, or really stupid, maybe you’ll enjoy watching these ravenous shoes.

This scene right here actually scared me. Look for the seamless blending between puppet and dog.