TUBI TIME - Household Covid Blues Edition

 The whole household was invaded by Omicron last week due to the depredations of the local public school system, so I had a lot of time on my hands.  I spent that time marathoning media in short chunks while tending to the sick and running hours of PBS Kids for the tiny human. 

BATMAN - 1989

An old favorite. Watched this as a family with the teenager in order to illustrate the humble beginings of super hero films and inform him of how lucky he is to be part of nerd culture in the present date. My main point was that at one time having a "fandom" past the age of 10 or so was broadly considered strange and socially unacceptable. That stands in stark contrast to today. Today, having a "fandom" of some kind is a necessary identifiable trait. NOT having some sort of fandom clique to belong to is weird these days. Anyway, this still mostly held up for me. Nicholson's Joker is still fun to watch, and the whole shebang really rests on his shoulders. It was kind of neat watching Joker be genuinely funny and colorful. Keaton still feels like a weird choice for Batman to my present-day eyes. I'm not sure that Bruce Wayne really works for me as the stammering, neurotic lead in a romantic comedy. He's fine, but it was pretty jarring. I don't really buy him as a badass, and I prefer my Batman to be a bit more cool and haunted as opposed to twitchy, overcaffeinated, and vaguely charming.

DEAD END - 2003

This was a lot of fun and felt like a real find. Ray Wise and Linn Shaye make for a really fun, bitter married couple, and when they start losing their minds they don't mind acting to the rafters. I like how this movie felt like an overextended Twilight Zone episode. That's not something you see done well in horror movies anymore, and I appreciated it here. There are some bits played for laughs that fell flat for me, but I came away from this movie with a sense of pleasant shock at how good it was for something hanging around at the back end of my Tubi reccomendations.

MAMA - 2013

An old favorite that still holds up really well for me. I'm a big sucker for a good, sad ghost story. The Mama creature effects are a bit dated to today's eyes, but the scares still land. The infamous scene where Mama is finally fully revealed and SPRINTS at the camera ranks as a top ten all time jump scare in my opinion. Guillermo Del Toro's "tragic fairy tale" take on the genre is a personal favorite. I know he has detractors, but it is really nice to see a horror filmmaker have a unique style and a dedication to certain ideas. Plus, kids in peril really resonates with me. The teenager watched this with me and it got his seal of approval, so it must do something right. That kid usually hates everything that isn't a Fortnite streamer.

TURISTAS - 2006

This was a boring retread of Hostel from the golden age of torture flicks that didn't really do much for me. The whole thing really felt like an excuse to get a bunch of soaking-wet and attractive young people together in as little clothing as possible watch them walk around and trade zingers. I gues that there's bit of credit due for being willing to tackle themes as potentially fraught as "traveling is dangerous" and "brown people are dangerous" tropes in your horror film, but there's not much meat on the bone. There's no worse sin in my eyes for a horror film than to be boring, and this is pretty boring despite selling itself as something edgy and interesting. Plus, it really irks me to be put into a position where I have to say that Eli Roth did it better.

LORD OF ILLUSIONS - 1995

Much better. I am an unabashed mark for Clive Barker, and this was a really compelling and fun Clive Barker flick. It's kind of an amalgation of a number of his books where he writes about how magic is real and the people who practice it are fucking dangerous and weird. It felt like we had a sort of a minor golden age in the "supernatural private eye" sub-sub genre in the mid-nineties. This movie really worked for me. It wasn't afraid to just shoot its shot, and just throwing wild ideas at the wall is almost always going to land for me regardless of execution. The effects are super dated, but in a way that I found charming. There's a really sweet nostalgic vibe to the whole thing as well, and when it was done I found myself really wanting to fire up an old point-and-click adventure game on PC like Gabriel Knight or Harvester. This movie felt like a snapshot of a very specific time and place in horror culture, and one that I remember fondly. Perfect sick-day viewing for me.

KING OF STEVES - Needful Things (1991)

NEEEDFUL THINGS was the first King book I ever read, and it kicked off an obsession with his work that lasted me from middle school until I was in my late twenties. I've read it cover-to-cover at least a dozen times. In hindsight, I think my affection for King during those years really hinged on the feeling of being seen. One of his major strengths as a storyteller is his ability to be affectionate toward American small-town culture while also being fabulously cruel and sarcastic at the same time. That's something that I think a lot of readers in small towns can relate to. You grow up loving your family and your neighbors, but you also get exasperated with their ignorance and self-sabotaging behavior. A lot of authors do this sort of thing with the cultures they were raised in, but not many do it as well as Uncle Steve does. This particular book lives and dies by his ability to evoke both sympathy and disgust toward the characters because most of them are sort of lovable oafs who fuck themselves over in hilarious and tragic ways.

Spoilers ahead in case you're worried about me ruining the plot twists of a thirty-year-old book.

NEEDFUL THINGS concerns a mysterious and fabulous curio shop that opens in a small town in Maine (of course). The shop's owner sells the simple townsfolk their heart's desires (a Sandy Koufax rookie card, a splinter from Noah's Ark, a picture of Elvis, etc) that have terrible mind-altering side effects including hallucinations, sexual ecstasy, and the opportunity to relive the past. Basically, he's selling dreams at a high price. At the shopkeeper's bidding, the townsfolk trade seemingly harmless pranks for these dreams, all of which are designed to push the townsfolk into blackmailing and murdering each other while destroying themselves. The shopkeeper is opposed by the local sheriff, who himself is crippled with grief and depression after the untimely deaths of his wife and son, and the whole thing ends with the demon defeated but most of the town dead or destroyed.

THE GOOD

Many of the minor characters and their plights are quite compelling. I found myself wanting to spend more time with them within the narrative. The little subplots spread throughout are really fun. I find this happening a lot for me in King's books. I find the secondary stuff a lot more interesting than the main protagonists. (In that sense, this book reminded me a bit of THE STAND in the sense that I really liked all the little vignettes of people dying tragically of the plague or of Flagg collecting criminals from the wasteland and I got sick of chapter after chapter of "Stu and Frannie are talking" or "Larry is an asshole but he's trying.") The child characters are also good, but that's no surprise. King has always been really good at writing kids. There are some genuinely unsettling parts that stick well. The overall message seems to be along the lines of "people are stupid but also generally good, and that goodness always wins out in the end" and it comes together well at the end. The Catholics vs. Baptists subplot that ends in a massive bloody riot is very fun. Buster is good. Ace Merril's return to Castle Rock is good. Leland Gaunt is a fantastic and memorable King villain. King makes memorable characters. He's always been very, very good at that. Like, ridiculously good. He's one of the best character crafters in popular fiction in my opinion.

THE LESS GOOD

This book is bloated and feels overlong. King is really gifted at writing long books that don't feel as long as they really are, but this book is undeniably longer than it needs to be. I don't necessarily dislike the main protagonists, but I'm not a fan of the amount of time we spend with them in this book. Their stories are fine, but it feels like a problem to me when Sheriff Pangborn gets more page time than anyone else and he's the least interesting character out of a slew of really good ones.

NEEDFUL THINGS is also billed as "The Last Castle Rock Story," and that presents some problems as well. Castle Rock is the fictional little Maine town that serves as the setting for many of the early-mid career King novels and stories. This was supposed to be the last one to take place in what must be one of the most snake-bit towns in all of fiction. What this means is that we get consistent and overt shout-outs to CUJO, THE DARK HALF, THE BODY, THE DEAD ZONE, and several others. I found it quite fun at first, but it started feeling insufferable before the ham-handed climax. I mean, Sheriff Pangborn literally scares Gaunt with shadow puppets of Cujo and the sparrows from the Dark Half, and it was a less than satisfactory way to end things. King's always done this shared-universe gimmick to a degree, but I think this was the first time he was quite as up front with it. I'm not a fan of that idea at all, and I think his insistence in creating a Stephen King multiverse is what ruined The Dark Tower for me.

KING TROPES PRESENT

Heavy baseball references

Small Town in Maine

Evil defeated by barely-explained inner magic or mystical outside force

"Ayup!" or "A-yuh!"

Wise grandmotherly figure

Prophetic dreams/visions

Kids in peril

Overweight people being foolish and/or evil

Cocaine and/or Booze

Salvation found in childhood imagination or childhood ephemera

Amusing and colorful colloquialisms ("gay as old dad's hatband," "Bet your fur," etc.)

BUT IS IT GOOD?"

It's good. Not great, but good. I have a lot of affection for it, and it's a fun read despite the length and some irritating bits. I doubt that it makes my personal Stephen King top ten, but it probably makes the top fifteen.  

KING OF STEVES

Stephen King is a guy you can't avoid if you're into horror, or books, or movies. He's the titan looming over my weird little niche within a niche of semi-educated rural creative-types who are into horror, reading, and rock n' roll. I mean, that's pretty much the encapsulation of what he is. I was so excited to get my first "adult" library card when I was about ten years old. I had to work for the damn thing, including getting a note from a teacher indicating I was trustworthy and sincerely reading well above my grade level. I also had to butter up the head librarians in no less than three one-room tiny farm town libraries (bless them) and try to convince each that I was merely interested in reading Jack London and Charles Dickens. Of course, the first three books I checked out from the adult section were INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE, SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, and THE DARK HALF.

Me and Uncle Steve go way back. I spent a huge chunk of my adolesence curled up in some corner or another and reading his books. I kept that going through most of my young adulthood, and there was usually a dog eared King paperback in my lunchbox or my back pocket when I was headed to work. King and I didn't really part ways until I was fully entering my post-modernist phase and he got hit by a van.

Talking about King and his work was one of the few things my dad and I could reliably achieve together. We watched the TV miniseries of THE STAND on ABC back when it first came out, and it was an event in our household on par with the Super Bowl or a funeral dinner. Stephen King's work is one of those things that's always been around in one way or another. So I thought I'd start going back and seriously rereading some of the books that I fondly remember.

I'm starting with NEEDFUL THINGS, which was the first King book I ever read. I'm not sure yet if I'm doing full on reviews, walks down memory lane, or some kind of combination of both. But it should be fun, and I'm excited to see how much more I relate to King's work now that I'm a 40 year old father rather than a middle-school dork.

CRUSH GALS vs GOKUAKU DOMEI - THE MATCHES (Chigusa vs. Dump Hair Match 2!)

Chigusa Nagayo vs Dump Matsumoto Hair vs. Hair (11/7/1986)

When we last left our heroes, Dump Matsumoto had engaged in some hillariously over-the-top cheating and bullshit to defeat the beloved Chigusa Nagayo and claim a chunk of her hair, thus sending an arena full of teenaged girls into hysterics and giving Chigusa an excuse to leave Japan and wrestle some other places (including the WWF!!) for awhile.

Pro-Wrestling's favorite narrative trope is "underdog hero wins against all odds." It's a Rocky/Karate Kid sort of thing. So of course we are due for Chigusa's redemptive revenge arc. We are due for Chigusa vs. Dump 2, REVENGE OF CHIGUSA.

This video helpfully gives us a little recap of the 1st hairmatch in addition to some footage of Chigusa's live in-ring Crush Gals concert upon her return to Japan, which Dump ruins because she is Dump and there is No Fun Allowed when she's in the house. Because god is good, we also get their prematch press conference in which shit is talked, challenges are issued, and Dump carves up a raw chicken. I wish I had a translation, but it's not hard to figure out what's going on. Chigusa is beyond pissed off. Dump is hate incarnate. The time has come for Chigusa/Rocky/Daniel-San to strike back against Dump Matsumoto/Apollo Creed/Cobra Kai. We're gonna have ourselves another hair vs. hair match.

For starters, we're pretty clearly at the end of this feud. Pro-Wrestling in general, and Japanese wrestling in particular, LOVES the idea of wrestlers assuming a "final form" or a new persona when their backs are against the wall. So we get Samurai Chigusa vs. Demonic Dump complete with elaborate costumes and swords. SWORDS. Surely this will end well.

Dump is notably wearing a Heavy Metal magazine T-shirt, which earns her my eternal love and respect. Chigusa does a fantastic job at coming across as older, wiser, and more aggressive. She's not the same girl who Dump massacred over a year ago. She's done the wrestling equivilent of learning the crane kick. Dump is Dump, and she immediately beats the shit out of the referee with a chain and busts his head open. I am guessing she's establishing dominance.

Chigusa's job in this match is to be sympathetic, overcome the odds, and triumph at the end. Dump's job is to be a tremendously hateable monster and give Chigusa odds to overcome. Both of these women are very, very good at those jobs. The match follows the same pattern as the previous one, with Dump pounding and stabbing poor Chigusa with everything she can lay her hands on and Chigusa simply fighting to survive. It's a blood bath from the start. Chigusa is really, really good at staggering around dazed while this beast-woman stalks her with a chain and a sword and whatever else she can lay her hands on. We veer pretty closely to slasher movie territory before we're done. Dump looks unbeatable and inhuman. Chigusa looks barely alive. She's like Daniel-san covered in blood hopping on one leg. Chaos reigns. But we have hope that the brave little pop star who could can dig down deep and find the strength to finally get one over on her nemesis. The biggest difference this time is that Chigusa isn't backing down and crying. She's fighting back.

AND THEN...a miracle. Chigusa scores a surprise roll-up and pins Dump out of nowhere. Madness ensues. Dump beats the shit out of everything that moves. The monster will not lose her hair. She refuses to serve her comeuppance. Consequences are for other people, not for Dump Matsumoto. She runs away.

Chigusa gets on the mic, backed up most of the rest of the roster, and demands the Dump return to give up her hair. Dump comes back with a bottle of booze LIKE A FUCKING BOSS and drains it before she starts fucking up everything that moves and tossing girls out of the ring. She's willing to lose her glorious mohawk, but she'll be damned if anyone except an actual barber cuts it. She will NOT give Chigusa the satisfaction of claiming it herself.

After her haircut, Dump rampages around the ring and leaves. The monster is full of rage, but it's an impotent rage. She's beatable. In the end, no matter what she does or who she bullies next, she lost. Chigusa stands victorious, and that's the difference between the hero and the villain in this story. Chigusa learned a lesson from losing. Dump never will, because Dump cannot accept the idea that she can lose at all. Everyone wanted to see Dump the Great and Terrible be laid low, but for her losing at all was a fatal blow. Dump was never again quite what she was before this loss. That's one for the good guys.

THE BELIEVERS (1987)

What we have here is a Santeria flavored occult thriller starring Martin Sheen and Robert Loggia as a psychiatrist and cop (respectively) who must solve the murders of ethnic children while avoiding curses. They, of course, do not believe in curses so we waste a lot of time dealing with that when instead we could be watching the curses unfold or learning about the bad guy or literally doing anything else.

I despise the "convince the skeptic" trope. It is my least favorite thing in horror/thriller movies.

Martin Sheen plays Cal, a widowed psychiatrist who gets wrapped up in a mystery. It's a mystery that involves bad Santeria, Good Santeria, trances, child sacrifices, and assorted insects. It also involves him yelling at his son, hooking up with his landlady, yelling at his maid, and generally getting his groove back.

It's OK. I mean, director John Schlessinger did MARATHON MAN and MIDNIGHT COWBOY, and it has a cast full of heavy hitters. It's not like it's bad. There are nice, tense moments here and there. The opening bit with the coffee machine got to me. One of my issues with the film is that is deeply entrenched in the world of boomer thrillers. The racial politics are less than savory to modern tastes, though it is definitely better in that sense than others of its ilk. The whole plot has some clever things happening here and there, and in the end the villain pays for engaging in wholesale capitalistic cultural appropriation. I guess you take what you can get from this particular subgenre. My bigger complaint is that I found this movie to be sort of boring. That's a pretty big problem when you're making a alleged thriller. I think overall I would say that it's at the high end of average, but nothing I'd go out of my way to engage with ever again. If you're into upper-class single middle-aged white dads solvin' problems and rightin' wrongs, then it might be for you. It was fine, but not really for me.

I give THE BELIEVERS a rock-solid 3/5 under-the-counter Cialis prescriptions.

Shufflin Along 03

Taking a break from Joshi Wrestling footage from the 80s to do another one of these while I am supposed to be working.

NIGHTCALL by KAVINSKY

Okay, so I liked Drive as much as the next person. It feels like one of those movies like Batman Forever that will forever be associated with its soundtrack. I get a sense of menace in the song that I didn't pick up on at first. "I'm gonna tell you something you don't want to hear / I'm gonna show you where it's dark, but have no fear" sounds awfully threatening when issued through a monotone robot voice. Couple that with the female counter-vocal in the chorus and the whole song is a cool little microcosm of the relationship at the heart of Drive. That's a neat trick for a film soundtrack, and I appreciate it. We could have gotten something like The Black Keys doing a song called "Scorpion Jacket" so let's just count our blessings here.

YAMA TRANSFORMS TO AFTERLIFE by GRAVE MIASMA

Metal subgenres are completely out of control, so I'm not entirely sure what to label this. Blackened Death Metal, maybe? Anyway, there's been this trend over the past few decades to take a world religions 101 approach to your blast beats and screaming. So intead of endless songs about Satan and/or Odin, we get songs about Kali, Yama, and the occasional Yokai. I appreciate that even if I suspect that the entire exercise feels a bit cynical. I don't know. I enjoy it for what it is. Sometimes you get metal performed by legitimately scary people and sometimes you get metal performed by dudes with undergad degrees who go to a lot of Ren fests. I like them both, but I think it's important to remember how to tell the difference. If you're going to be stupid and frightening, lean into it. If you're doing art school metal, lean way into that as well. Get esoteric with that shit. This song and this band are JUST ok enough for me to keep them on my liked songs, but I'm not sure how much longer that's going to last. This is an inherently ridiculous genre of music. You really need to be legimtely dangerous or deeply creative and weird for me to get into it, and this song doesn't strike me as either of those things. I do get the sense that they probably have some songs somewhere that I could get into. More research may be needed.

MISERY IS THE RIVER OF THE WORLD by TOM WAITS

I love Tom Waits with all my heart and soul. This is off the album Blood Money, which I beleive was written to be part of a musical or something. You can really tell since this track begs to be sung along to. I always thought of this track as something you'd hear the donkey-children on Pleasure Island sing in Pinnochio if you gave them instruments and time. I sing this song all the time in my best Tom Waits / Cookie Monster voice, which is probably part of why people in my office regularly side-eye me.

GODDAMN LONELY LOVE by DRIVE BY TRUCKERS

Back in 2004-2005 I was living a pretty rough, mean, and pathetic sort of existence. I had a lot of bad habits, including heavy substance abuse and listening to lots of Alt-Country. I was freshly divorced, basically homeless, and thoroughly lost. I went on a fast sprial from gifted kid with a future to a factory worker with no friends. I refer to this time as "The Cold Times" in my head, because my truck didn't have heat and sometimes I wound up sleeping in the backseat and shivering under an old Mickey Mouse blanket when I wasn't crashing on my mom's floor or a friend's couch. My affection for this song comes from those days. I played this CD alot, particularly the last two tracks. I have a lot of memories of singing along to this song at the top of my lungs while peering through a little hole in the frost on my windshield and barreling down the highway at 2:00am on my way to do something ill advised. I don't have any more use for Drive By Truckers these days than I do for eating Xanax out of the trash, but sometimes you hold on to things. This song and "Lookout Mountain" are two things I held on to.

CRUSH GALS vs. GOKUAKU DOMEI - The Matches! (Dump vs. Chigusa hair vs. hair)

Chigusa Nagayo vs. Dump Matsumoto (Hair vs. Hair 8/28/1985 - AJW)

This is probably the pentultimate match in the feud in addition to one of the most infamous wrestling matches of all time. Dump and the Crush Gals had been going back and forth through all of 1985 since Dump and Crane Yu defeated Chigusa and Lioness Asuka for the tag team titles, and the personal rivalry between Dump and Chigusa deepened to the point where it could only be settled in a match with very high stakes. We're going to have a hair vs. hair match.

If you're new to this concept, the idea goes back a long way in professional wrestling. You need matches with high stakes in order to "blow-off" your feuds. From a story telling perspective, it makes perfect sense. These fighters have gone past the point of no return. This feud is no longer about titles or championships. Things are personal. So you have your various gimmick matches that are traditionally used to end feuds such as steel cage matches, Last Man Standing Matches, etc. There are a ton of them, but there's something special about a hair match. The rules are simple. The loser has their head shaved. More than just a blow to their vanity, the bald head following a hair match is the ultimate badge of failure.

Hair matches in particular are a Lucha Libre thing, and often you see combinations of these matches ("Apuestas Matches") as the bloody, brutal climax of a long standing rivalry. You see hair vs hair, mask vs mark, mask vs. hair, hair vs. career, etc. In the old-school days, apuestas matches were a big fucking deal. This one is no exception. If you lose this match, you lose something tangible and critically important to your very identity. If you lose this match, your enemy has changed you against your will. Some luchadores who have won many apuestas matches keep trophy rooms with the lost masks of their opponent hanging on the wall. Some will even keep their foe's hair in a plastic bag for enternal bragging rights. "This is a part of you that I took away. An intimate piece of you is just another award for me. I own you."

Apuestas matches are awesome.

Dump Matsumoto enters first accompanied, as always, by her loyal soldiers in Gokuaku Domei. They have the swagger, the costumes, and the kick ass flags. Yet they are not talking shit or waving their weapons around as they normally would. This is serious. Their leader's hair, intricately colored and punked-out as always, is on the line. Dump doesn't look like the shitty, cocky bully she normally portrays. She's deadly serious and silent. Somehow that's more frightening. The Crush Gals enter next, and the fans erupt at the first notes of their theme music. There's no question who the heroes are of this tale. Chigusa, stone faced in her samurai gear, rides to the ring on the strong shoulders of her partner Lioness Asuka. She has no army. But she has a friend. Perhaps that will be the difference maker.

Japanese fans typically throw streamers when they are excited, and they are very excited indeed for the start of this match. It takes several minutes for the ring girls and Dump's crew to clear the enormous tangle of colorful paper out of the ring. The streamers are red and white; the colors of Chigusa Nagayo.

Dump, being Dump, wastes no time pulling off the dirty tricks. She pulls a fast one on Chigusa right away by using a DECOY DUMP and blindsiding our young pop star. Then a member of Gokuaku Domei hands Dump a chain, and the mauling begins. Brave Chigusa gets tossed all over the ring and strangled with a chain. She fights back valiantly with kicks, but something is wrong. The referee is telling her that her kicks aren't legal. But fuckin' Dump Matusmoto is allowed to use a chain as a weapon? The ref is dirty! Dump got to him somehow! Chigusa isn't even being allowed to fight back.

Out of desperation, Chigusa takes the fight outside the ring and decides that what's good for Dump is good for her as well. She's fighting for her life in there. Squeaky clean and cute little Chigusa grabs a metal can and starts battering Dump's skull. She even grabs the scissors intended for the post-match haircut and stabs Dump in the head. Of course, the ref has to put a stop to that immediately. Then Dump gets the scissors and goes to work. Dump has abandoned the idea that this is a legitmate sporting contest. It is now a massacre. Chigusa is bleeding all over the ring and flailing helplessly. She cannot continue. The crooked ref calls for the bell and ends the match.

Dump Wins.

This is where it gets good.

Dump struts and puts on the smuggest face you've ever seen. You'd think she'd just hit a game winning home run in the world series rather than brutally beat up a woman half her size with the help of four other people and a crooked ref. Chigusa is furious. The fans are furious. A venue full of teenaged girls come unglued. There are tears. Lioness Asuka attempts to save her best friend's dignity by throwing herself at the bad guys, then by trying to cover Chigusa with her own body. The ring girls, all wrestling students who normally just clean up streamers and provide security, are offended by all this treachery and try to brawl their way to Chigusa to save her. To no avail. Dump and her gang drag a bloody and broken Chigusa to a chair in the center of the ring and CUT HER HAIR. Chigusa gets free and covers her head in shame. The hero has been beaten and humiliated. Dump Matsumoto stands victorious and bathes in the tears of of thousands of school girls. There is no justice in this world.

Or is there?

Next time: REVENGE.

CRUSH GALS vs. GOKUAKU DOMEI - Overview

VICTORY THROUGH GUTS!

Pro-Wrestling has traditionally been a male-dominated art form. Its most famous stars are men and everything from its tropes and storylines to its merchandising and marketing strategies have almost always been geared exclusively to men and teenaged boys. Women-only wrestling promotions have always been treated as, at best, a novelty in the United States. Until relatively recently, women's wrestling in mainstream WWE-style wrestling has been an excuse for the fans to ogle unathletic lingerie models as they participate in pudding matches and pillow fights. But that has not always been the case. Women's professional wrestling has enjoyed periods of relative popularity and fan interest, particularly in Japan. That trend appears to be on the rise again, as today's women wrestlers are generally treated as badass fighters and media superstars rather than eye candy.

Once upon a time in Japan, it was teenage girls rather than boys who drove fan interest. The golden age of women's professional wrestling (Joshi) in Japan started in the late 1980s with a long-standing feud in All-Japan Women's Pro Wrestling between two groups of women who could not be more different. It started with Crush Gals vs. Gokuaku Domei.

Imagine if, say, the Spice Girls were also serious martial artists who partcipated in live simulated combat on television every week. Or maybe imagine what it would look like if your typical Disney channel starlet was also presented as a serious athelete and fought cartoonish villains in a wrestling ring on a regular basis. That's something similar to what Crush Gals did, and it was a huge hit. AJW television events featuring Crush Gals regularly did 12.0 ratings on Japanese television. Their records sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and their live appearances often sold out.

Partners Chigusa Nagayo and Lioness Asuka began in storyline as rivals who joined together to form a wrestling tag team and pop band. (As an aside, this kind of thing is why I love the wild world of pro wrestling. I mean, just imagine the idea of rival boxers gaining mutal respect for one another after a hard fight and then just deciding "fuck it, I love you. Let's do songs together now.") Crush Gals were presented as cute, fun loving sporty girls who were also serious athletes and martial artists who posessed superior skill and a spunky never say die attitude. They were a bona-fide sensation. Chigusa Nagayo in particular is often referred to by serious fans as the greatest babyface (good guy) female professional wrestler of all time, and Lioness Asuka isn't terribly far behind. The AJW wrestling shows were soon packed with legions of adoring teenage girl fans screaming and chanting their names. Chigusa has often claimed in interviews that she had to move multiple times because fans kept finding her home and camping out in her yard. Crush Gals were EVERYWHERE in Japanese mainstream pop culture in the late 80s. That's something that modern day male wrestlers would love to achieve.

CRUSH GALS THEME SONG Are you ready for action? I assure you that you are not.

CRUSH GALS Ice Cream Commercial Wholesome!

CRUSH GALS LIVE! Performing their first single "Bible of Fire." YES I SAID BIBLE OF FIRE.

Ikki ni Rock 'n Roll Another Crush Gals song! And it's good!

Unfortunately, there's always some motherfucker who can't stand it when other people are happy. Some dirty rotten asshole always has to go out of their way to piss on the picnic. Put another way, some people just want to watch the world burn. Some people are like Dump "Motherfuckin' Matsumoto and her minions in Gokuaku Domei (The Atrocious Alliance).

GOKUAKU DOMEI. You are fucked.

Dump Matsumoto and her Atrocious Alliance were everything that the Crush Gals were not. They were presented more or less as a street gang of girl-bullies who just hated the Crush Gals and wandered into the building one day to fuck them up forever. I'm not sure about their actual motivations, but I like to think that there was a punks vs. preps element happening here. Gokuaku Domei may have just been the world's coolest and most violent hipsters. Membership was pretty fluid over the years, but the core trio consisted of Dump, Crane Yu, and Bull Nakano. (Bull went on to surpass everyone else, but we'll talk more about her later) They made the lives of the Crush Gals a living hell. All heroes need good villains, and the Atrocious Alliance were very good indeed. Their post-match attack on Chigusa that resulted in the leader of the Crush Gals getting her head forcibly shaved on live television while teenage girl fans went into hysterics and threw themselves against the barricades to try and save their hero was, well, a pretty big deal at the time (again, more on that later). Dump's antics were dispicable (and awesome). I mean, they look like Final Fight gang members and they hit pop stars with sticks. What's not to love? Gokuaku Domei forever.

Dump ruins a slumber party

Dump ruins school

Dump and Bull take New York

UP NEXT: The Matches. The Mayhem. The Fallout. And where are they now?

THE NESTING (1981)

"I got better things to do than type on your writer!

Back in the late 70s and early 80s, there was a huge trend in thriller/horror world to dig into parapsychology, psychic powers, and psychological trauma resolution. Everybody had a phobia or a hang-up of some kind that needed to be resolved by confronting ghosts and/or using clairvoyance/telekenises to right the wrongs. THE NESTING comes out of that little family of tropes and adds in a heaping dollop of "urban professional vs rural louts" for good measure.

Lauren is a neurotic writer who rents a house in the country in order to deal with her agoraphobia. The house is, of course, haunted. The locals are, in fact, dangerous. The town is, in fact, consumed with secrets. None of this is gripping or particularly interesting. The film itself looks and feels like every other slow-burn gothic ghost story of its time; it's all shot with soft edges and there's a lot of screechy melodrama. Characters spend a lot of time chain smoking indoors, lounging around on afghans, and talking about their pasts and unresolved issues. Everyone has very fluffy hair. Furniture flies around in often hillarious ways.

It turns out that Lauren's new dwelling was once a brothel where some bad shit went down, and Lauren's past is tied to its former residents. The whole thing is as predictable as Taco Bell heartburn, but that's not why this flick has a small cult following. Folks say that it has interesting gender poltics for a flick that's as old as I am. I found that to be true, but as I was watching it seemed to me that contemplating the film's take on gender roles served as a useful distraction from the fact that it's not very good. I mean, the plot was just interesting enough to keep me watching until the end, but it's not like we're seeing anything revolutionary on that front. I agree with the central thesis of a woman becoming empowered by confronting her hidden past without the help of the bumbling men in her life. Unfortunately, the movie arguing that thesis isn't very good. Characters know things that they have no way of knowing. People are murdered and everyone else just, kind of, moves along with their lives. Nothing remotely scary happens at any point. The rural louts are cartoonish and goofy, and there are good moments here and there. However, what we're left with is sort of a dry lecture disguised as a paranormal thriller, and that's not something I'm going to be into. THE NESTING is worth checking out if you want some insight into the gender politics of 1981, but not if you're looking for a fun/scary/transgressive obscurity. This was not for me. Might be for you.

I also remain entirely unsure what "Nesting" has to do with any of this.

SHUFFLIN ALONG 02

CANNIBAL by SCRATCH ACID

Scratch Acid is one of those bands that you come across after you get into that stage where you start exploring bands that influenced the bands that influenced the bands you enjoy. This song has this sort of lurching, kinetic feeling to it; like a dinosaur trying to lunge out of a tar pit. These guys tend to get lumped into the same loose category as bands like Big Black, Melvins, and Daughters. I really like all of those bands a lot, but if I'm being honest with myself it all seems to appeal primarily to people who dealt with substance abuse problems in art school. There's nothing wrong with that, but it kind of needs to be said out loud. Music for depressed/furious creative types is definitely very much my thing.

THE NIGHT by MORPHINE

Morphine is the band that got me interested in listening to jazz, and I have a major soft spot for them. There's this unique quavering, dark-yet-deeply-vulnerable quality to this song and many others in their catalog. Most of Morphine's music has this underwater sort of sound that appeals to me, but I enjoy their sad/horny songs a lot more than their more loud swingy stuff. Most of their more upbeat songs feel like they're journal entries by this charismatic yet sweaty lounge lizard sort of character who sleazes up to your wife and starts talking about all the people he knows in Las Vegas. You can picture this fucking guy in his tight paisley button-down spitting game and shooting dice, and it's not pleasant. There's a compelling barfly vibe to some of them, but some of those songs feel so 1992 that it causes me physical pain to listen to them. They sound like something you'd lay over the opening credits for a dramedy staring Richard Lewis as a divorced dad with a gambling problem in Queens or something. Not this song, though. This song is good. I am also a straight up sucker for a sax solo. Ask anyone. If you put a sax solo in your song, it will probably end up in my rotation at some point or another. I can't explain why exactly that is. I can't think of any formative experiences involving a saxophone. Anyway, all jokes aside, I love this band. When Morphine was good they were as good as anything.

SKITSO by BUSHWICK BILL

Man, I love Geto Boys so much. Their music feels legitimately dangerous in a way that a lot of other acts could only dream of. These guys were the real deal. Bushwick Bill is such a wild character and in a just world he'd be an icon. I mean, who could possibly invent the idea of a Jamaican dwarf jacked up on PCP and rapping about all the people he wants to kill? You'd think it would be cartoonish, but it isn't. Instead it's just a real expression of emotion expressed in this urgent, sincere way. You can't beat it, and it makes me miss the days when rap music was deeply invested in shock value. I got called into the principal's office once for listening to MC Hammer tapes on my walkman, which is wild. Rap music in those days shocked the squares long after rock music devolved into a parody of itself. It was like this underground thing when I was in middle school. Like, you had to know a guy who had a cousin or something in Kansas City or St Louis just to get a whiff of something like this. Which is funny because a lot of people I grew up with could relate a lot more to something like Mind Playing Tricks on Me than something like Friends in Low Places. Shit. I guess you really have to put in work to find art that resonates with you sometimes. I really need to listen to more Geto Boys. Everybody does.

WAIT AND BLEED by SLIPKNOT

I get why people dismiss Slipknot because I also dismissed Slipknot for a shamefully long time after I tried going to college and went through rapid fire punk/goth/post-punk phases. This was the first song of theirs I heard way back in '99, and I remember just being totally entranced by it. The lore is that this band was born out of dudes bullshitting and fantasizing with their buddies over 3rd shift at a Sinclair gas station. That is the most thematically appropriate band origin story that I have ever heard. Slipknot makes music for 3rd shift gas station workers. They make music for folks who hang horror movie posters on apartment walls with bent thumbtacks and buy Jack Skellington hoodies at Wal-Mart. Dismissing them was one of the biggest lies that I ever told myself about myself. I get the costumes, I get the masks, and I get the songs. I am a dude who engaged in a lot of 3rd shift bullshitting and fantasy. I had a buddy once, big handsome devil who was captain of the basketball team and also a member of NHS, who was really into this band that used to talk me about them all the time before he got into a bad marriage, drugs, and jail in that order and died way too young. Anyway, this was made for me, and I was a fool for turning it aside. Slipknot deserves their success and this song is the 1st example why. They do a lot of interesting things in two-and-a-half minutes and I find it fun to listen to. It's not nearly as dull, turgid, and meat-headed as something like Staind or Korn, which are two bands they often get unfairly lumped in with. Slipknot does an admirable job of straddling the line between mass metal appeal and experimental weirdness. They are far more interesting to me than shit like, say, Metallica or Tool, and I'm having fun rediscovering them now.

RIGHT PLACE WRONG TIME by DR. JOHN

I am a guy who appreciates theatricality in my music, and so it was only a matter of time before Dr. John and I found each other. I love the grooves, the genre-blending, the fearlessness, the grit, and the silly hats. There might be a case to be made compareing the theatricality of Dr. John to that of Slipknot and what the line between those two acts looks like as well as an exmanination of how working class musicians feel more comfortable expressing themselves from behind an invented persona, but I ain't got time for that kind of nonsense. I think this song is untouchable as far as pop/soul ear worms go, and it's the wide-open door to dig into the world of New Orleans music which is so wild and different from everything else that it's considered it's own genre. Dr. John is a really fun rabbit hole to drop into, and this song is a certified stone cold classic in this idiot's opinion. Plus, I am a shriveled and petty soul and I appreciate it when musicians have legit criminal records.

STRAWBERRY LETTER 23 by BROTHERS JOHNSON

This is just one of the coolest songs I've ever heard. Everything about it just oozes laid back charming smooth coolness. That little synth chime run is untouchable as far as licks go, and it's really hard to listen to this song and not bop your head a little bit. This is one of those songs that can make even the fattest, greasiest, beardiest dork on the planet feel like a sex machine and a mythically profliic cocksman, and I say that from a place of experience. What a jam. This is one of my very favorite treadmill songs of all time. I snatched this off of the Jackie Brown sountrack, and I'm so glad I did.

GRAPPLERS OF YORE - Dump Matsumoto

Some of the best professional wrestling of all time was performed by Japanese women in the 80's and 90's, and one of the most compelling things to come out of that scene was the ultra-villainous monster woman known as Dump Matsumoto. Most pro wrestling villains maintain a certain level of coolness and rapport with the audience. Not so the mighty Dump. There was nothing likable or redeeming about her. Her only goal in life was to bully Chigusa Nagayo and Lioness Asuka to tears. She hated happiness, she hated fun, and she hated everyone else on Earth other than her army of minions. Dump would cheat constantly, beat up the referees, stab girls with scissors, beat audience members with a stick, and push a grandmother down the stairs. Dump was a high octane hate machine with a grudge against the world. The feud between her army of bullies and teen idol team The Crush Gals lives in infamy as one of the greatest spectacles in all of wrestling history. Nobody else in wrestling embodied gleefully petty and violent villainy as much as Dump did in her day. Long live the queen.

I will probably get into the Dump vs. The Crush Gals fued in greater detail at a later time. It set Japanese pop culture on fire in its day and is one of the wildest stories I've experienced in any medium. Dump's Theme Song

SHUFFLIN ALONG 01

In which I put my liked songs on shuffle and attempt to justify my taste and go off on weird tangents.

DEJA VU by ATARXIA

This comes from the reissue of a synth project from 1975 meant to be played during tarot readings and seances and the like. It is obviously way up my alley. The result is a bonkers synth/prog album that sounds a bit like the score to a long lost hard boiled cult film where somebody like Tom Atkins whips the entire ass of some groovy devil cult. The whole album is very moody and moog-y with little flourishes that probably influenced a lot of folks. I find it sort of ingenious and a blast to listen to. It's fun to sit in my office and answer e-mails while pretending that I am, in fact, an ultra-masculine private detective / professorial occult expert who could at any moment don a tweed jacket and punch a ghost.

I'M A KING BEE by SLIM HARPO

I put together a long-ass playlist for a Call of Cthulhu tabletop game many moons ago, and the process of selecting over 100 swamp blues / big band / spooky jazz / dark cabaret songs for that project really opened my eyes to the fun to be had listening to old recordings. This song is funny, and I really like Slim's nasally deadpan delivery to the overtly sexual lyrics. You can tell that The Cramps really got a lot of their ideas from listening to people like Slim Harpo. I think it's a fun toe-dip into the primordial ooze that birthed rock 'n roll as we know it. The google machine tells me that Slim was never a full time musician and spent most of his time running a trucking company when he wasn't touring and playing music. That's pretty badass. There's always a trucker connection to most of the things that I like.

BLACKEN THE OTHER EYE by STREET SECTS

Industrial Harsh Noise is one of those music things that you can't really talk about without people thinking you're an insufferable asshole. There's a part of me that really rejoices in obscure oddball genres and subcultures because I think that that exploring the human experience by poking through the wild twists and turns that people will take while searching out a unique identity is a fun and worthy activity. There's also a working class redneck nihilist part of me that loathes everything about those ideas and would rather just sip cheap beer and take the easiest artistic roads possible at all times because life is short, cash is dear, and none of this matters. Anyway, I like Industrial Harsh Noise music because it is complicated and busy and it sounds like how I used to feel working on the line around dangerous machines while nodding out on six Xanax, two Oxys, and three hours of sleep. This song in particular sounds like it can't decide whether it is sad or angry so it just makes loud noises hoping that somebody will listen and that is me to the bone.

ETERNAL REST by SIDEWALKS AND SKELETONS, CASHFORGOLD

People call this sort of thing "pastel goth," and I really like that classification. It sounds to me like this is what kids these days who listen to old Portishead tapes and take lots of anti anxiety medication are making. I like the slow, lush narcotized cadence and the layers of noise. For me it evokes images of thick velvet comforters, fake rose petals, fancy drinks in plastic cups, and misplaced glitter. It's kind of grimy, kind of sensual, and really feminine all at once. It's cozy and psychedelic and sometimes you need that kind of thing. I listen to this stuff quite a bit and I almost always find it to be an interesting little corner to sit and nod off in.

DOGMA by KMFDM

Hoo-Boy. KMFDM was a sort-of industrial metal project that was a big deal for many edgy weirdos in the nineties. For the unintiated, one of the Columbine shooters was a big fan and it lead to endless stupidity and recriminations. Those tired discussions aside, KMFDM's biggest sin was writing songs that did not age well. Like going back to look at pictures of yourself as a teenager, it's kind of fun in a sad way to go back and listen to some of these tracks with German dudes who are into synths rapping lyrics like "This is counter culture...this is underground." This is the band that provided the soundtrack to a thousand 1st gen LAN parties. It's not all bad, but it's kind of amusing in hindsight that people found this sort of thing scary. Plus, the dystopia is no longer theoretical. We didn't have it so bad back in '96. Anyway, Dogma is a kind of a spoken word thing about about how shitty and shallow society is. It's a little cringy, but I do enjoy the bit where the girl goes "this is your life, this is your FUCKING LIFE" and she's mad about it. This song usually ends up on my gym mix somewhere.

GRAPPLERS OF YORE - "Rowdy" Roddy Piper

I spent part of my copious free time during 2020 working on a project where I would talk about my favorite professional wrestlers in a paragraph.

At his best, he made for a flawlessly violent motor-mouth who’d never stop talking shit. Roddy played the kind of asshole who would pick a fight with a coat rack after he’d had enough drinks. At his worst, he was the painfully lame out-of-touch dad with a beer gut hanging out of his motorcycle jacket. His acting career proved his ability to play the sardonic everyman hero able to wisecrack his way out of any situation. He may have been the great lost action-star of the 90’s. His ring skill never rose above average, but then again his character was always one who’d rather bust a beer bottle over your head than test his grappling. Fans loved him despite his tendency to gouge the eyes of their heroes. Even at his worst, he was unpredictable and charismatic. In his day he captured the imaginations of millions of people. Not bad for a guy with a plastic hip. We’ll always have Frogtown.

GRAPPLERS OF YORE - Mick Foley

I spent part of my copious free time during 2020 working on a project where I would talk about my favorite professional wrestlers in a paragraph.

A charmingly disheveled everyman who played multiple characters but never achieved success until he just started being himself. Famously unathletic, but gifted with schlubby charisma and a willingness to do just about anything to entertain the fans. To that end, he’d fall off rooftops, set himself on fire, cut himself with barbed wire, and rack up a sickening number of concussions and grievous injuries. He somehow sold himself as a cuddly geek combined with an unrepentant masochistic killer. Imagine a version of Patton Oswald willing to throw himself onto broken glass to sell the punchline. His wrestling style was such that you’d wear yourself out beating his ass, and he’d still be alive to capitalize once you’d run out of things to do to him. His willingness to break his body for applause veered into a legitimately uncomfortable pathology as the years rolled by and he published his autobiography. After you learned the names of his wife and kids, It was no longer funny to watch the clown fall down. No matter how much we begged him to stop, he refused to believe that we didn’t want to watch him suffer and bleed.

BLACK XMAS (2006)

BLACK XMAS (2006)

Say what you will about your standard Holiday movies, but there are few that feature this much incest and cannibalism. The much-maligned horror remake mania era of the early aughts tended to trend toward the "take an old(er) thing and make it gross" school of thought, and this is no different. There's some fun to be had with that mindset. It's not like the original Black Christmas was a sweet and cuddly bit a fluff itself. This particular remake eschews the tension of the original in favor of lurid visuals and outright lunacy. Your mileage will vary. This will truly be one of the worst Christmases ever.

We have sorority girls, and they are in peril. This is nothing new. What is new is that one of the traditions upheld by this particular sorority house is that they leave a present underneath their tree for "Billy." He's one of the former occupants; a legendary figure who murdered his own family on Christmas. The sorority sisters navigate their own dramas (relationships! rivalries! strong drink!) while a snow storm rages outside. In a somewhat inspired bit, Billy escapes the local asylum via the clever use of a sharpened candy cane. The rest goes on more or less as you might expect, save for the flashbacks of Billy's origin story.

This is the good shit.

Billy's origin story is one for the ages. He's an abused child, like you may expect. He has a liver disease that makes him look like Sin City's Yellow Bastard, which is a bit less expected. He falls victim to a series of unfortunate events. His alcoholic mother murders his father, marries her brutish lover, banishes Billy to the attic, and eventually rapes him and becomes pregnant. When Billy's sister/daughter is born, he goes a bit off the deep end which culminates in the enthusiastic murder of his stepfather, the partial blinding of his sister/daughter, and death by rolling pin and cookie cutter for his mother. When the police arrive, our boy Billy is happily munching on Christmas cookies made from his dead mother/lover's cooked remains. We even get some nice close-ups of Billy crunching on prop bacon covered in frosting to sell the idea.

This all culminates in Billy and his long lost sister/daughter crawling through the walls of the sorority house like the People Under the Stairs and murdering the everloving yule out of our paper-thin sorority sisters with icicles and broken ornaments. There's a moral here somewhere about the importance of family, but let's not kid ourselves. We're here for the blood, and there's a lot of it. In it's best moments, it is colorful and manic and fun to watch in a mean-spirited way. It feels a bit like a gross cartoon created by a disturbed teenager. Black Xmas is one of those slasher movies that spends a lot of time building sympathy for its villain and contempt for its alleged protagonists. I'm not sure if that's a reccomendation or not. Perhaps it will work for you. I've had fun with the occasional rewatch. Something about a neon yellow Christmas enthusiast and his genetically cursed child/sibling menacing Lacey Chabert and Michelle Trachtenberg tickles me. I am probably not a good person.

I rate Black Xmas 7.5 out of 18 acts of holiday matricide.