Sexy clown pictures! NOT SAFE FOR WORK!

Hey, I've never seen clown erotica before, but I found several examples of it here in this forum thread. (Scroll about half-way down the page; it's not explicit.) Oy, did I laugh! While you're at it, check out this painting of two clowns eyeballing a "gentleman's magazine."

My stuff Saturday

This bloggin' habit is a bit tricky. It doesn't pay anything, so you don't want it to become too much of a chore. On the other hand, if you only post when the spirit moves, you sometimes don't post often enough to get people to visit regularly, and your audience dwindles. (And God knows I need an audience.) Well, ya can always post movie reviews, but, hell, everyone does that. SO, I'm gonna share fantastic factoids on Thursdays, and posts about about weird stuff I own on Saturdays. And post on everything else at other, unscheduled, times. (Like the recent, first-time Dracula Con in Winber, PA, more on Wonderfest in Kentucky, and a trip to a costume shop.)

One thing in all "my stuff" is a full set of 1979 Alien bubblegum cards. I love having them. I was very young in 1979, and Alien scared the crap outta me. It's still one of the most atmospheric, claustrophobic, and suspenseful films I've ever seen. I rushed to buy the cards when they came out. I wanted to preserve those amazing images, in those days before most people had access to a vcr, to remind me how I felt watching the movie.


The photos above are ones I borrowed from someplace on the web years ago. My cards are all now in an album, although the stickers, gum, and wrappers are long gone. (Wish I still had the stickers and one wrapper.)

You can imagine how excited I was to meet the movie's title monster at the recent Wonderfest con! He was shopping in the dealer's room, but when he realized I'd recognized him (his sunglasses didn't fool me!), he left. I caught up with him in the display room and asked for his autograph, and THIS is how he responded:


In case you can't tell what he's doing, he's flipping me the bird:

Guess some celebrities still cop an attitude, even when they aren't a box-office draw anymore. Jerk. I bet none of the other stars from that film act like that toward fans, even though none of THEM have worked much in recent years EITHER!

I hear the alien from Mac and Me gladly signs autographs.

Triple Trivial Thursday

Every Thursday for weeks to come TDSH brings you three random "fun size" pieces of strange and useless knowledge!

Confederate General Richard "Baldy" Ewell sometimes believed he was a bird during the War Between the States, cheeping and eating only a small amount of wheat grain.



"Father of Computing" Charles Babbage (1791-1871),

inventor of a calculating
machine and designer of an "Analytical Engine,"(a computer that was never made), once calculated the odds of a man rising from the dead to be one in 10 to the twelfth power.


When someone is very ill in the Celebes, fish hooks are attached to the sick person at various points on the body, on the theory that if the soul were to begin to escape, it would remain trapped, caught on the hooks. (Click here to see an actual photo of a fisherman with a fishhook lodged in his eye.)

Believe It or Don't! I don't care.




Sources: Useless Facts of History, Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into the Great Lives, and The Joy of Trivia.

Back again, oh weird world o' blogging...

Well, except for a coupla cursory posts, I've been pretty quiet around here. That's because the Voodoo Queen and I took a vacation. We took in the first day of Wonderfest in KY (that's KY as in "Kentucky," not jelly) and went on to Arkansas, my home state, to visit family. I saw my parents and my half-brother and half-sister. (Oops, that sounds like I've got a hermaphrodite sideshow sibling!) I mean my half-brother AND my half-sister. They were a full brother and sister, but later worked for a bad magician.

Wonderfest was amazing. I spent a lot of time wondering and festering! (Gawd, I love that joke. I used it two years ago when I first went to Wonderfest, and I'll probably use it again.)

Some pictures and wonderful comments have been posted at message boards about the Universal Monster Army's displays at Wonderfest this year. As Memorial Day, a day for remembrance, has just passed, I want to focus on the exhibits remembering two people very important to me, Forrest J. Ackerman and artist Linda Miller.

Robert Taylor, Raymond Castile and Joe Moe created a touching and awesome tribute to Forry Ackerman and to Famous Monsters for the display.

(Right click on larger photos and click on "view image" to see the full photo.)






The images used here are from Harry Woodbury and Raymond Castile, two gracious, nice guys who are both excellent photographers!

One of the many highlights of Wonderfest (for me) was talking to uber-collector and gorilla-suit actor Bob Burns about the late Linda Miller. "Meek" is still missed by many.

I helped just a bit with unloading and setting up the UMA display, but the contribution I'm proudest of was helping to produce an exhibit of Linda's monster art for the display. I had the idea and the photos. Raymond produced and shaped the exhibit, and then we arranged the art together, with much assistance from Robert Taylor and my wife Jane. Raymond and I worked on the text.





An article on Linda will appear in the next issue of SCARLET magazine, which will debut at next month's Monster Bash.

A limer-sick

By Fritz Frising and me:

"The blood flows down the Countess' street

"Collecting at the peasants' feet;

"It's from Bathory's bath--

"If you follow the path

"To its source, you won't live to retreat!"

Inspired by this woman.

Image source.

Sci-Fi film come to life!

Really Big Spiders Invade Australian Town!

PUN TIME IS FUN TIME

My brother, who has nooooo interest in politics, made a topical pun last week that was so inspired I had to share it here:

"Bigots back in the day said a black man would be elected President 'when pigs fly.' But Barack Obama was elected President and what happened? Swine flu!"







Thanks to my brother, President Obama, and my friend Ted, who made the image above.

Shane Briant's Worst Nightmares! (Part 2: An Interview)

Shane Briant and his wife Wendy at the Montreal Film Fest.
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Worst Nightmares, by Shane Briant, is a new novel I recommend. (My endorsement is probably HIS worst nightmare! He'll need to keep better company among reviewers if he wants to be taken seriously!) Anyway. Mr. Briant, stuck with having a drunken severed head chattering about his book, graciously gave me an interview. I spoke with him last month by phone, calling him at his home in Australia.

The interview actually happened twice; but the recording device used for the first interview failed to work. So we had to do it again a couple of days later. This is why you'll hear me refer to having talked before with Mr. Briant; please don't think he has the bad judgment to hang out with such as I. He's actually a smart, charming, imaginative man!

Each segment is about twenty minutes. In Part One, Mr. Briant talks about his new book, about his writing process, and working on Dan Curtis' The Picture of Dorian Gray. He does a cool bit of impersonation when reminiscing about two of the people involved, actor Nigel Davenport and producer Dan Curtis.

Part One.

In Part Two, Shane Briant talks about HIS nightmares and phobias, what working at Hammer studios was like, what he likes to drink, Dave Prowse's feet, and shares his impressions of actors Peter Cushing, Cliff Robertson, and others.

Part Two.

In Part Three, Briant remembers Jack Palance, Paul Newman, John Hurt, Quentin Crisp, Lance Henriksen, and director John Huston. He recalls the use of REAL blood on the set of Hammer!

He also riffs on a few "dysfunctional" fans, but told me afterward he considered himself a bit odd, too! He also wrote to say, "I might have been rude when I suggested that some horror fans were....'dysfunctional'. That’s high praise as I see myself like a literary ‘Dexter’."

As an interview subject, he was certainly fun and functional!

Part Three.

Scenes from the novel can be seen at Shane Briant's YouTube channel page, and you can buy Worst Nightmares at any of the seller links on this page.


Shane Briant’s Worst Nightmares website.

Shane Briant’s blog.

You can read more about Shane Briant at the Shane Briant tribute site.

Above, right: Shane Briant as the brain-eating Kaavok in an episode of the series Farscape.

Shane Briant's Worst Nightmares! (Part 1: A Review)

A couple of months ago Jane and I watched Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell on dvd. I couldn't have guessed then that one of the figures from that film would later frighten me so much merely with his words that I wouldn't be able to sleep! But that's exactly what happened the evening I finished the new novel Worst Nightmares, a thriller by the co-star of FATMFH, Shane Briant.

Having enjoyed Mr. Briant's work as an actor (in Hammer horror films, the tv drama The Naked Civil Servant, and Dan Curtis' The Picture of Dorian Gray), it was a surprise to learn that he's now a writer living in Australia. Worst Nightmares is his debut in America as an author, and should be the start of a very successful career in the U.S., as his new book is an intense and dread-inducing psychological thriller.

The novel is about an author named Dermot Nolan, an acclaimed author who is out to discover the truth about a manuscript, left at his home by a man calling himself Albert K. Arnold. It describes a series of murders by "the Dream Healer," who uses the internet to find victims, their deaths patterned on the personal nightmares his website's visitors describe to him. After Nolan decides to rewrite the manuscript and publish it as his own, he becomes entangled in a web of deceit and horrendous murders.

As the Worst Nightmares website puts it, "Could the Dream Healer be real? Could these innocent cyber-surfers have fallen victim to a raving maniac? And could Dermot be writing his own ticket to death . . . his very own worst nightmare?" Dermot Nolan rewrites a story not his own, but it becomes his, and he is unable to rewrite his fate.

Worst Nightmares is very engrossing and effective. The night I finished reading it, I actually stayed awake in spite of myself. The horror of the last chapters hit me so hard viscerally that I was unable to get the awfulness of it out of my mind; it had a power worthy of Edgar Allan Poe. (But don't you dare read it before you read the rest of the book; the story very carefully and intricately winds it way to the conclusion, and won't have the same power if you cheat and skip ahead.) The rest of the novel kept me racing to finish it.

The novel develops the characters of Dermot Nolan and the Dream Healer very well, and I desperately wanted to read a sequel when I finished. (And it turns out I'm going to get my wish; Mr. Briant was so intrigued by his characters that he has completed a follow-up to the novel.) The two characters are fated by events to be entwined with other in ways that reminded me of the story of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and his creation. Nolan, like Frankenstein, is led in pursuit of the Dream Healer, who is, in some ways, Nolan's creation. (I can't spoil the mystery and reveal just how, though!) As in Shelley's novel, the two main characters are tragically flawed. Nolan, like Victor, is marked for a downfall by hubris, and the Dream Healer is twisted in his hate-filled obsession with his 'creator.' (There's even a severed head in one powerfully awful sequence! Awesome! Maybe readers can persuade Mr. Briant to create a cameo for me in the sequel.) I highly recommend that you buy this book.

It's not without flaws. In an early sequence, one victim is attacked by scorpions and tarantulas in ways that aren't truly believable, dangerous as they are. (The scene seems written with a CGI-fx sequence in a possible film version in mind.) But other images Briant creates linger in the mind.

At times Nolan does things so unwise--just like characters will do in horror movies sometimes--that you want to roll your eyes and scream at the character. A friend of mine read the novel, and responded to my trying to rationalize why Mr. Briant would have Nolan sometimes act so foolishly (when he suspects he's dealing with a real murderer) by saying, "Moral ambiguity my ass." However, the plot is so engrossing, and the characterizations of the driven Nolan and the vengeful Dream Healer (a character as clever and as memorably evil as Hannibal Lecter) are so well-developed and interesting, that a few lapses in likelihood don't matter. Also, as Mr. Briant emphasized in an interview with me to be posted here soon, he had Nolan only do things that he felt he was himself capable of doing in the same situations, and the Nolan character finds himself in some pretty extraordinary circumstances.

In the world Shane Briant creates in his novel the lines between dreaming and waking, between fiction and terrifying fact, become blurred. Few books or films ever unsettle me, but Worst Nightmares did, its resonant shocks a testament to the skill and imagination of Shane Briant. I wish his book much success.

Coming in Part 2: An audio interview with Shane Briant.

Zoc and Me Look at "Experiments in Terror 3"

So I was sent a screener of a new dvd release titled Experiments in Terror 3. As it's a group of bizarre indie shorts, I was intrigued, of course, and wanted to see it. As Tenebrous Kate described it at her blog Love Train for the Tenebrous Empire, it is "a diverse grouping of weird little films...lovingly assembled by curator Noel Lawrence." It's part of Lawrence's continuing Experiments in Terror series, which has screened (as TK notes), "in a variety of venues from indie cinemas to art galleries."

I proposed to Iloz Zoc of Zombos' Closet of Horror that he, Tenebrous Kate, and I review it together in chat, and cross post our thoughts. Sadly, the alluring and smart TK (who is more than a "technical knockout"!) had to drop out the day we set up this experiment of our own. So Zoc and I reviewed it in chat and just kept referring back (or ripping off, if you prefer) to Kate's review.

The films in EIT3 are:

• The Psychotic Odyssey of Richard Chase (dolls are used to tell the true story of a serial murderer)
• Satan Claus (clips from a horror film mashed up with footage of the Mexi-movie Santa Claus)
• Loma Lynda: The Red Door (a condensed demo reel of a "blood-drenched psychological mystery")
• Terror! (a clip reel of similar slasher-film scenes from the 80's, mostly)
• Born of the Wind (an 8mm teenage horror-film short, both an homage and a spoof of '60s horror films)
  
• Manuelle Labor (a surreal short by Guy Maddin and a partner, Marie Losier)
• It Gets Worse (a parody of both silent film expressionism and silent comedy)
  

Below, edited for typos, is our "Siskel and Ebert" imitation. ("Roeper and Ebert"--feh.) If EIT3 intrigues you, you can buy it at the Microcinema site. (You'll support the indie film preservation efforts of Noel Lawrence, who works hard to find and offer unusual film shorts.)
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Zoc: I looked for EIT3 on IMDB, but didn't see it.

Me: To hell with the corporate fellatio that is IMDB! (Raising clenched fist in the air) ;)

Zoc: Swish! and another proletarian head hits the basket.

Zoc: Hey, no fair, you're using emoticons! I can barely type.

Me: YOU can barely type? I don't even exist! I'm a roomful of monkeys--one of us at a time accidentally producing coherent sentences!

Zoc: Well, then send a few of them over to help me out. While I'm waiting let's discuss the first film on Richard Chase.

Me: You know, when I was told that the first film on the review screener I was going to get was a Dick Chase film, I thought it was going to be a different sort of film!

Zoc: Long pause as I look up Dick Chase...

Me: Aw, Zombos, you don't look up subtext!

Zoc: Ohhhhhh. I did find Deck Chairs, though.

Me: Well, moving on from a latently homoerotic bit of wordplay (Are you as turned on as I am?), I liked the film.

Zoc: Very jarring given the use of action figures, wasn't it? (Choosing to ignore your subtext...)

Me: Very much so. Tenebrous Kate of Love Train for the Tenebrous Empire (who was supposed to join us here in chat) wrote "Psychotic Odyssey prefers hand-painted cardboard sets populated by fashion dolls, children's drawings and non-documentary found footage to tell its story of gruesome mayhem, somehow making the already-creepy into something creepier-still while eliciting a nervous laugh or two."

I very much agree! Made me remember some of the pretty outrageous stories I acted out as a kid with G.I. Joes and monster figures!

Zoc: TK obviously came to her senses. But getting back to the film, at first, I didn't know what to make of it; was it supposed to be funny or serious. Then I realized it was supposed to be both and neither.

Me: Needless to say, it worked.

Zoc: Funny, but I also played with GI Joe, Barbie, and monsters. Hmmmm...
I liked dressing up Barbie more than GI Joe. But he had the cool stuff.

Me: The use of dolls and paper figures, etc., distanced us enough to allow us to be absorbed into the story, which was tragic and repellent.

Me: BTW, I laughed when dressing up GI (gastro-intestinal?) Joe AS Barbie!

Zoc: The use of the slowed-down, muffled narration was odd, though.

Me: Meant to suggest the inner distorted "voice' of Chase himself, mebbe?

Zoc: Not bad; I hadn't thought of that. I'll have to steal it for my review.
So I think we both agree this first movie is a keeper.

Me: Hey, I'm running this chat in toto, pal. Thievery will be obvious. ;) Yes, it's a keeper!

Zoc: Satan Clause didn't quite make sense, either esthetically or storywise. Too choppy for me.

Me: Not for me, but the extreme soft grain was very distracting for me. How was this preserved? Did he shoot an 8mm copy while it ran, then later transfer it to tape, and then dvd? Looked like it. It was just amusing enough to be a keeper. (Liked it better a second time, watching it on my small computer monitor.) Works best knowing the back story behind it. TK ran an expanded version of the back story for SC, and reading it first helps.

Zoc: Must have scared those poor kids like crazy.

Me: Yeah! I like to think I'd have dug it!

Zoc: Knowing you, I don't doubt it. Just felt the editing could have been better. What's with the corpse and the cops? It doesn't quite make sense when strung together with the big bad red Satan.

Me: Okay, the liner notes say SC was 16mm. Sure didn't look like it!

Zoc: So with this one I'm more nay, and you are yay...

Me: Well, the whole thing was cobbled together from what J.X. Williams had on hand as a projectionist. It was bound to be somewhat disjointed. Worked for me, but your mileage apparently varied.

Zoc: It does make you uneasy watching it, which was its intent. So points for that. Moving to Loma Lynda: The Red Door, I'm not sure I can say much about this one because we only see a snippet of it here. I'd rather see the whole film before critiquing it. TK wrote: "Bognacki's visuals are striking and I'm curious to see how he works what look like trademark effects work into feature-length piece. I particularly dug the scratchy block-out that's superimposed over the actress' eyes. As an appetite-whetter, this piece certainly succeeds..."

Me: It's described as a "demo reel" for a feature-length film, and I thought it succeeded as that--it made me want to see the whole she-bang. (Pun intended, given the story seen in the clip.) I thought it succeeded in being a surreal and nightmarish representation of a violent experience, as seen through the eyes of someone with a fragmented personality. And it was blessedly crisp and professional and WELL-DESIGNED looking!

Zoc: That's what makes it visually interesting at first. The slow-motion walk, in closeup, through the city streets. Then all of a sudden, the tirade begins, and it is so vitriolic and insane, it goes on and on. I found it hard to watch as he unravels.

Me: It was hard to take in a GOOD way, unlike, say, It Gets Worse. But I'm getting a HEAD of myself.

Zoc: Very bizarre. One psychotic man with insane hatred, and one girl split into two personalities. Quite a pair. I found it too outre, though. Which may make it more appealing to a smaller fringe audience (he says, ignoring the big HEAD.)

Me: You ignore my big head at your peril! (Mwah ha ha ha ha!) A keeper for me, a maybe for you?

Zoc: I think we both found it fascinating and well-done (the movie, that is); although I'm just not sure how sustainable it can be at feature-length.

Me: I'm also a bit doubtful, which is why I'll happily recommend this Reader's Digest version.

Zoc: Now, both of us agreed that Ben River's Terror! didn't quite pass the mustard.

Me: Were you terrified by Terror!?

Zoc: No, just disgusted at the end with the explicit gore scenes.

And if you work another Big Head joke into this I'll come over and gore you myself.

Me: Don't worry, you can look for head elsewhere. I expected the gore, if not exactly "my cuppa." What I didn't expect--and was let down by--was the lack of anything new made by editing together the like scenes from all those slasher films.

Zoc: (groan) It's an overlong 24 minute or so bunch of clips with a punch line. And the punch line isn't worth it the wait.

Me: It struck me as a not-very-interesting academic film history exercise.

Zoc: TK found it fun to guess that film, but I wanted more. His editing of the scenes didn't quite gel, either.

Me: Assignment: Find similar scenes in American slasher films, and leisurely string them together, grouped by type...Well, outside of a film class appreciation, not much to recommend. No creative editing, no fun or implied commentary (except maybe "See how alike these films are?")!

Zoc: Agreed. Even devout horror fans may find it more tedious than enlightening. Not so with Kuchar's Born of the Wind; this mummy brought to life story, at first, made me wonder why they bothered to preserve this one. But as a critic, I realize I really can't feel that way. On further examination, there are a few interesting setpieces here that may make for a really good film.

Me: Born of the Wind sure has a misleading title, but it was fun.

Zoc: The acting was stiff, of course, and the silent treatment, with acting suited toward it, doesn't really help the storyline. Some scenes are oddly framed, too. In one instance, the mad scientist is mixing his potion by a flowering plant. The camera angle frames the plant better than him. Go figure.

Me: It plays exactly like what it is: a no-budget, 8mm, horror-film-trope mashup with a goofball ending, made by horror and sci-fi-loving teenagers.

Zoc: Yes, that ending reminded me of Plan 9 From Outer Space and Ed Wood zaniness.

Me: It was included largely because it's an early film project by noted underground filmmakers the Kuchar Bros.. It reminded me of the stuff found on the Monster Kid Home Movies dvd* of a few years ago. Thumbs up from me, even if not as original and interesting as the also no-budget Psychotic Odyssey of Richard Chase.

Zoc: Kuchar did not create any emotional depth here, which keeps the film more curiosity than drama, but I agree it's interesting enough.

Now why didn't we ever do home movies?

Me: What you mean "we" white man? (He said, quoting an old joke involving the Lone Ranger and Tonto.)

Zoc: I did horror radio dramas, but no movies. Oh, did you do them?

Me: Well, to be honest, I wrote home movie scripts, but shot only one reel.

Zoc: Oh, my God, you actually used film?

Me: You were expecting chopped liver, maybe? But I bet my scripts had as much story and characterization as Emmanuelle in Labor, the next film on EIT3.

Zoc: That's Manuelle Labor. Sometimes I wonder where your head is at.

Me: I thought we were leaving out head jokes, but you sure have set me up for one! I was a breech baby, by the way. No, I think I was created in a lab--it was so long ago, it's hard to remember.

Zoc: Moving right along...TK notes it plays like a Dame Darcy comic strip without the lovely illustrations or high level of wackiness. I don't think I've ever read Dame Darcy.

Me: Me neither!

Zoc: What's the deal with use of the silent motif? Dialog is important to the story, yet once again, we get visual interpretations poorly formed and conveyed.

Me: It sure was pretty looking with the gauzy focus and bright lights and all, but the central image of a woman giving birth to a pair of arms with a roomful of approving people on hand is all there is! Where's Guy Maddin's eccentric story-telling? It was like a segment out of a longer film by Dali.

Zoc: Right, and end the story there. Instead it continues, like one hand clapping.

Dali Lama? Hello Dali? Corner Dali?

Me: No, a camera Dolly! So, no passing grade for ML from you and me, eh?

Zoc: Not much here to critique. We agree it's pretty much the weakest link. Great opening idea, no story to follow it up. And minimal cinematic grace to cover the deficit. Which brings us to Clifton Childree's It Gets Worse. And all I can really say about this one is, No It Doesn't.

Me: A giant turd flies out of a fat, middle-aged guy's ass and lands across a room atop an open hot dog bun. Then he shoots a giant load of jizz across the room on top of it, and another guy, who didn't see any of this, eats it. That's all you need to know about the sensibility of the film.

Zoc: TK found this to be a guilty pleasure. I find it a guilty shame. And "visionary" is not a term I'd use here for Childree. He aims to insult, disgust, and mortify, and by God he does it quite well and then some. But in place of visionary I'd use incendiary. He incites either awes or godawfuls, and nothing in between.

Me: It took me back to when I was twelve and laughed at anything "taboo." I admit I nervously giggled a few times, and rolled my eyes. I watched it with someone else, who said, "This is the most retarded thing I've ever seen."

Zoc: Precisely. The movie has hit its mark. But what's so annoying is the man has incredible talent. Misguided, yes, but quite a boatload of it. After watching this film I can't watch a Max Fleischer Popeye cartoon without thinking about Master Bates and the Dong Clock.

Me: John Waters and the Farrelly Bros already blazed that trail; I'm too grown up to care about that kind of "daring" film anymore.

Zoc: Damn you Childree! Maybe then we are too old for this type of film fare. Then again, maybe we are too sensible.

Me: Damn him all to Hell!

Zoc: I still don't know what his story was all about, when you take away the visual scatology.

Me: No. No one who knows me ever says I'm sensible. But there was an attempt to do a sort of homage to silent expressionism, I think, but it was so weak that nothing much was on offer.

That about wraps up our review of EIT3. Until next time, shall we close the balcony?

Zoc: Sure. On the whole, was Experiments in Terror 3 worthwhile?

Me: Yes, but just barely. 2 films were strong offerings in my view, 2 were less so but fun, 2 were just okay at best, and one made me wish I could get my 32 minutes back.

Zoc: I agree. Perhaps a longer collection would be better overall, esthetically. That would give more opportunity for anyone to find gems among the baubles.

Me: I'd have settled for more sparkly baubles, even, but you're right. The annual Spike and Mike collections of short films offer so many at one time that there's enough to please anyone's taste. Wish that was true here.

Goodbye Zombos' Closet of Horror, and may you find loose change under your theater seat!

Zoc: Hell with the change, I want bills, baby. Until next time...
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*Recommended!