TUBI TIME - Unga-Bunga Edition

I'm still working on how to transfer some of my fiction from docs to blogger. Keep in mind always that I am a Neanderthal despite my many pretentions otherwise. I haven't tried to manipulate online content since the days of Angelfire and Geocities, and my usual problem-solving process culminates in blunt force trauma, public urination, and tears. But I can still watch my Tubi movies, and I can still use my reaction to flail away at a keyboard. THUS:

LILY C.A.T. (1987) - I generally don't care for most anime or anime-adjacent things, but I have an eternal soft spot for 1980s hyper-violent neon-dytopia anime. Artforms evolve, but occasionally my heart cries out for simpler times. LILY C.A.T. is a pleasant, undemanding experience. Nothing particularly unexpected happens, but there are enough twists on the formula to keep things engaging. We get some psychedelic alien violence, but nothing too harrowing. Our lizard brains are placated, but not overly stimulated. Psychedelic body horror is presented, but nothing that provokes any more engagement than a solid "neat!" The plot is smart and cohesive and utterly inoffensive. LILY C.A.T. asks for very little from the viewer and delivers just the right amount of entertainment in return. It crosses up ALIEN with THE THING in ways that fans of both will appreciate, but it also puts forward some interesting ideas about the whole "1 year in space is like 40 years back on Earth" thing. In the end, this is my comfort food; the Saturday-morning Cinnamon Toast Crunch of animated sci-fi horror features.

REAL CASES OF SHADOW PEOPLE: THE SARAH MCCORMICK STORY (2019) - This, on the other hand, is far less than the sum of its parts. (There are only, like, two parts. Maybe three.) I get the sense that this, like so many other micro-budget found footage horror flicks littering the virtual bargain bin, was either a very cynical attempt to cash in on a horror meme or a flimsy excuse for some college friends to go on a road trip. Perhaps it was both. I suppose that's fine, and I hope they had a good time and are living very rich and fulfilling lives to this day. I did not have a good time watching their movie. Nobody possibly could. There are no scares. There is no plot. Nothing compelling happens for long periods of time. We are treated to multiple 10+ minute stretches of time watching three people engage in obnoxious car banter that serves no purpose. It is an exercise in frustration and futility. I think its most valuable use is as a counter argument to the idea that anybody can make a found footage horror movie. That is not the case.

CONTRABAND aka THE SMUGGLER (1980) - When Lucio Fulci is good, he's really good. This is Fulci's take on gangster/mob films shot in his usual blood soaked grindhouse style. This is some damn good Fulci. As it happens, being good at filming creative and gory horror executions means that you're also really good at filming creative and gory gangster executions and shoot outs. Who'd have thought? The plot actually makes sense and leads to a tremendously satisfying climax. The macho posturing is both amusing and compelling. On the downside, you do have to deal with a lot of explicit and uncomfortable rape scenes. CONTRABAND is grindhouse through and through. It knows itself and works to be the best version of itself it can be. It's flea market pulp trash, and it's very much for you if you're into that sort of thing. I'd go as far as to put this in my personal Fulci Top 3 alongside THE BEYOND and CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD. Bless you, Tubi.

THE RESONATOR: MISKATONIC U (2021) - A big part of the charm of Full Moon Features is that the house style is fully self aware. That is also one of the main drawbacks. Self Awareness in a microbudget genre film will kill it dead 9 out of 10 times. Compare the hillarious majesty of SAMURAI COP to the dull shit show that was SAMURAI COP 2, or compare EVIL DEAD 2 to any one of its many peer clones. This stuff just works better when the creative team is sincerely trying to do good work within their means as opposed to fucking around, winking at the camera, and eblowing the audience in the ribs every thirty seconds. "It's a joke! Get it?!" Get fucked.

THE RESONATOR is one of the good ones. From the get go, it wears its intentions on its sleeve. This is a straight-up tribute/remake of Stuart Gordon's FROM BEYOND, which is one of my very favorite horror movies. I absolutely expected to hate it, and I ended up kind of loving it. It is not perfect. It has some cringey moments. They were clearly working under a tight budget. Yet, the passion and the talent shine through. There's something very fun and compelling about a movie where you can just tell that they had a specific slime budget. I don't love some of the CGI effects, and nothing about it is surprising or new if you know the material. Despite this, it moves very quickly, the run time is exactly right, and that lovely microbudget passion project vibe is firmly in place. It felt very much to me like a Lovecraft themed R-rated episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was a great way to spend an hour, and it was a very nice, well-intensioned fan project that worked for me. It looks like this is Part One of a series of sorts, and I'm going to try and check out the whole thing.

Delays

Blogger does not seem to care for the big, juicy chunks of text that I am trying to feed into it. Blogger hates it, precious. Chapter 1 of Evergreen is going to take a bit longer than I had anticipated while I figure a solution.

In the meantime, because I cannot help myself, here is the EVERGREEN project music playlist if you're interested. I have a lot of these laying around, and it is often my custom to create various playlists to accompany my writing projects. It's sort of meant to be a companion to the process. Like, it helps me stay in that space even when I'm at work or making dinner or some other activity. It keeps me tethered to that world in a way. Anyway, here it is. I'll be listening to it while I try to remember how to HTML.

Very short Youtube sample version

Much longer shuffle 'n write Spotify version.

EVERGREEN: Project Overview

I'm working on a couple of fiction projects at the moment, and I've decided that the time has come to start sharing and potentially workshopping them a bit.

The first project is tentatively titled "Evergreen," though I'm 99% sure that's going to change as I get further into it. I'm about 80 pages deep so far with most of the main story outlined. My biggest motivation for sharing is for funsies and mild accountability purposes. I also need to get used to the idea that the endgame of writing a story is that people should eventually read that story and provide feedback. That's a terrifying thought and it provokes mucho anxiety. So, fuck it. Full speed ahead.

EVERGREEN: THE ELEVATOR PITCH

A Post-Apocalyptic/Weird Western story that's roughly 1/3 George Miller, 1/3 Rio Bravo, and 1/3 Trailer Park Boys mixed together in a discarded Big Gulp cup and hurled against a brick wall. Serve at room temperature.

EVERGREE: Sypnosis found on the back of a hypothetical paperback:

After two decades of roaming, robbing, and reaving across the wild wilderness that was once the American Midwest, Rochelle Dellacourt has finally stumbled ass-backwards into something resembling a settled life. The former outlaw has become the elected Sheriff of an isolated pot farming commune known as Evergreen. She'll have to set aside her moonshine jug and draw on every bloody lesson from her shady past when the seemingly random murder of a drifter leads to crazed road gangsters, a rogue military detachment, and a sinister post-human terrorist descending upon her little backwater town. They're all searching for a legendary stash of long lost Old World tech. Rochelle's ragtag militia of outcasts, mutants, and burnouts must defend their home against long odds; and a bad situation becomes exponentially worse when the diabolic cult leader known as The Diesel Witch descends from the Ozark Mountains with a fist full of secrets to claim Evergreen for herself. Rochelle's going to have to face down a lot of monsters, including the one in the mirror, to save her quirky little adopted home. That is, if it's even worth saving at all...

Chapter One to follow.

SHUFFLIN ALONG 08 - Life Shifts Up and Down / Everybody Knows It's Wrong

HAUNTED by CRESCENDO

Pleasant shoegazy Dream-Pop that sounds a bit like a less kitschy version of The Casket Girls. I like the "narcotized play date with troubled girls" vibes that you get with a lot with 2010s-2020s indie dreamgaze bands.

DIVIDE ET IMPERA by ROPE SECT

From the cover art and the introductory Bible verse, you'd think you're in for something ridiculous and insane like Coil. Instead, this is straight-forward goth rock. You get some guitar solos and traditional structure and a singer with a pleasantly spooky baritone voice. Kind of a breath of fresh air to be honest. Like, there's room in the goth tent for bands that sound like The Cult and bands that sound like Anaal Nathrakh AND bands that sound like Ghost. No need to be exclusionary.

BLADE RUNNER BLUES by VANGELIS

Top 5 Film OST of all time? I dunno. It's definitely Top 10, right?

SHOW ME THE WAY TO GO HOME by JULIE LONDON

I find this track really funny because I am the kind of person who imagines Julie London replacing Quint in JAWS when I hear it. It is also really funny to imagine a modern trailer for JAWS that uses the "moody cover of a well-known song" trope.

I AM THE LIVING DEAD by HARLEY POE

I get the sense from this song that Harley Poe could be one of those artists (like Voltaire, Alestorm, and Abney Park) who ends up on a lot of Renassaince Festival-related roadtrip playlists. (Not to play into stereotypes, but any home that contains a Voltaire record will also contain multiple sets of polyhedral dice, at least one book by Neil Gaiman or Charles de Lint, and at least one set of steampunk goggles.) I usually like DnD flavored folk/cabaret/goth lounge stuff in small doses. Harley Poe, however, is a little bit different from that because there's a midwestern crust-punk edge to a lot of their work, and I find it very appealing. They also get bonus points for writing this catchy folk-punk song about walking through the modern world feeling like a zombie who just wants to bite people. I relate to all of this. More exploration is needed.

SMOTHERED HOPE by SKINNY PUPPY

Probably my favorite band. One of the appealing things to me about Skinny Puppy is that I always find something new and interesting every time I listen to them. There's always some weird sound low in the mix or some crazy esoteric sample with a backstory or some new piece of unsubstantiated lore. For example, allegedly this song is about the time that Ogre accidently smothered his pet mouse in his sleep. I don't think that's true at all, but I'd never read that story until today.

SUPER CHARGER HEAVEN by WHITE ZOMBIE

I have, like, a seriously longform piece on Mr. Zombie's artistic output in me somewhere. Suffice it to say that when he's on, he manages to capture these perfect little glimpses into a low-bar trailer-trash scumfuck horror aesthetic that feels completely honest and true to both itself and the culture that inspired it. When he's off, he gets really self indulgent and kinda silly. This whole album is a blend of those two things, but this track in particular is really very silly. But's it's my kind of silly, and sometimes I just want to yell "DEVIL MAN! DEVIL MAN!" over and over to achieve catharsis. Mr. Zombie might actually be the true king of the Ren Fest Roadtrip Playlist microgenre now that I think about it.

TUBI TIME - I Can Explain! It's for the blog! Edition

No cover art images today, because I'm not sure how comfortable I am executing google searches for this material on my work computer. So, here is a puppy instead.

EVIL TOONS (1992)

Your enjoyment of this film rests heavily on how funny you think it is when the cartoon wolf looks at a pretty girl and his eyes pop out and he says "AH-HOOGA!" There's a certain lame-uncle charm to the proceedings, and a couple of the jokes are genuinely amusing. You only get one cartoon monster for about 4 minutes of screen time. The rest of this is just adult actresses cracking bad jokes. It's all in good, stupid B-movie fun, but this is nothing worth going out of your way for unless you're really into nighties and fluffy hair. David Carradine makes a lot of silly faces and wears a floppy hat. Finally, kudos to "Madison" for leaning into the extended physical comedy routine with the wine bottle. It didn't quite work, but the effort was there and she committed to the bit. I'm not sure how much slapstick experience she got out of her previous roles in ANAL REVOLUTION and EDWARD PENISHANDS 2, but she really made the most of it.

FEMALIEN: COSMIC CRUSH (2020)

Okay, so I was actually into this for the first 20 minutes. Like, the production values are pretty good for a film of its type. The storyline moved along and made sense for awhile. The idea of alien beings composed of pure energy who are fascinated with sex for some reason was genuinely funny to me. I could overlook the quality of the performances, which ranged from "shockingly plausible" to "objectively horrible," because once again there was a certain "we're all just having fun here" charm to this movie. I like that all these female space adventurers were sporting modern e-girl style tattoos, and some of the comedy bits did land for me. It goes off the rails once you realize that you're literally watching a 90 minute porn movie with all the porn cut out. It drags, and everything gets pretty dull after awhile. Boredom shouldn't be an issue in a movie with lines like "It's my turn with the pleasure beast!" and "I've got 8 penises, we're going to be here for awhile." Sad!

WITCHCRAFT 10: MISTRESS OF THE CRAFT (2000)

I've been toying with the idea of watching this entire series for a long time. When you haunt the trashy horror sections of the world, you see the covers of a lot of Witchcraft movies. You've seen them too: Big gothic font with a pentagram and some combination of sexy girls in goth attire making faces. You see that there's 15 of these fucking movies, and you think to yourself, "I wonder why there are so many of these things. There must be something good about them to have lasted this long." But then you move along and put something like BLOODSUCKING FREAKS on the counter because you have dignity and self-respect. Some of the WITCHCRAFT films popped up on good old Tubi, and I figured "Why not?"

I'll tell you why not.

This is bad. It is not "fun" bad or "charming" bad. It's just bad. I don't often shut movies down without finishing them, but I didn't make it longer than about 30 minutes into WITCHCRAFT 10. Part of it is the fact that nothing is lit or mixed properly and you end up watching vaguely humanoid dim blobs mumbling. Part of it is the fact that it appears that every performer was simply reading lines from a cue card just off camera. Part of it is that literally nothing interesting ever happens. My first impression is that the WITCHCRAFT universe is set in a world where everyone is a 1st year theatre student at community college. (And I say that from a position of authority as a former community college theatre student) I guess that could be a fun idea to explore, but it's pretty rough to actually sit through. If the whole series is like this, then I am left with no choice but to conclude that the WITCHCRAFT series is a long running money laundering scheme for some kind of cartel. And even then, money laundering schemes could be fun! I mean, it seemed like Christopher Moltisanti was really into his money laundering movie on THE SOPRANOS. He may have been a murderous coke fiend with major mafia connections, but he expressed passion for the process and wanted to contribute ideas. One could say that Chris had something resembling a vision. WITCHCRAFT 10 lacks even that amount of vision. The only spark that I found here was the one I created myself when I tried to chainsmoke away my disappointment.

A WORMHOLE - Baby Huey, Deacon Jones, and the quiet dignity of session dudes

I am excitable and easily distracted; sort of like a rabbit or another small mammal. The internets are a dangerous place for me sometimes, as I will consistently fall into these obsessive explorations of some random thing or another. One time it was serial killers, which then lead to a lot of reading about the Thuggee cults of India, which then lead to me looking at artistic depictions of Kali for hours. Another time it was the animatronic hobbyist scene and all the drama involved with the various inventors and key figures behind Showbiz Pizza. My most recent wormhole involves a highly influential funk/soul/bluesman named Baby Huey and a bunch of words about session musicians.

I've been listening to a lot of heavy soul music of the 1970s lately. I have developed an interest in this sort of music for two reasons: I think that "shirtless with an open vest and a massive afro" is a fuckin' tough look. Part of that is afro solidarity. (I can grow a mighty, virile afro at any time, and you never know when that sort of thing could come in handy. It never will. But it could. But it won't.) The second reason is Baby Huey.

Baby Huey (aka James Ramey) was a singer/songwriter from Indiana who moved to Chicago in the 70s and got into a band called Baby Huey And The Babysitters, which is an objectively amusing name. They were a popular and well-respected live act to the point that they were invited to Paris(!) to perform a private concert for the Rothschild family (!!). I have no idea why that particular tale of a 400lbs heroin addict and his Chicago bar band traveling to Paris to do a show for aristocratic conspiracy fodder has not been made into a movie, but I guess it boils down to the fact that life isn't fair. Anyway, Baby Huey was a big fella and he had a lot of bad habits, as many musicians inevitably develop. He died at the age of 26 due to heart issues complicated by heroin abuse. Baby Huey and the Babysitters didn't release an actual album despite recording some tracks for Curtis Mayfield. "The Living Legend" was ironically released after Huey's death and is pretty much universally prasied as an all-time classic. Their song "Hard Times" alone has been sampled dozens of times in the hip hop world by everyone from A Tribe Called Quest and Ice Cube to Biz Markie and Ghostface Killa. It's a great, great, GREAT fuckin' song. I am far from an expert, but there are few funk/soul songs of that era that I've found with the level of grit found in Hard Times. I mean, you hear a lot of songs about sexy girls, outer space, and Jesus. You don't get a lot of songs about eating Oreos and Spam while fighting depression. Huey can definitely sing, but it's his groovy yet weary lyrics that get me every time. The whole album is like this. Give it a listen. It's undeniable.

THE BABY HUEY STORY - The Living Legend

One of the founders of Baby Huey and the Babysitters was a Chicago blues journeyman named Melvyn "Deacon" Jones. If you're a reader of liner notes or a browser of wikis, you see the name "Deacon Jones" pop up a lot. He provided horns and keys for a whole lot of people in that scene after Baby Huey's death. His list of collaborators includes some pretty major players like John Lee Hooker and Gregg Allman. Everything I've found on Deacon indicates that he's been a well respected sort of gun-for-hire in and around the soul and blues scene. I find these sort of session musician types fascinating. I'm a guy who really, for better or worse, gets into the theatrical rock-star metaverse. Give me stores about bat-eating and weird religious practices and bizarre stage customs, and I'm a happy listener. I eat that shit up. I think most people probably do. But with Deacon Jones, and a ton of other actual musicians, that's not what you get. You get regular ass dudes doing a job. Check out this clip of Deacon Jones.

MELVYN JONES live

He's just an old fella doing a show in some dive bar somewhere. A guy who played with an all-star lineup of legitimate stars in his day, and here he is just having fun fronting what sounds like any one of a thousand regular-ass bar bands. That's part of the magic for me: you never know who that old guy on stage is. That's quite a dichotomy compared to his old buddy Baby Huey. Better to burn out or to fade away, as they say? I don't know, man. I'd rather fade away. Melvyn looks like he's having a good time up there. There's a very specific kind of dignity in living a rock and roll life and living long enough to be a grandfather. It doesn't always have dignified results, but hell. I'd rather be an embarassing grandpa than a dead rock god, but maybe that's just me.

Speaking of Gregg Allman, I've got a longform thing about Southern Rock in me somewhere, but that's a fucking daunting task at the moment. So I'll just share this clip of Gregg playing Midnight Rider with Zach Brown and Vince Gill real quick. GREGG ALLMAN live at Fox Theatre

As an aside, I met Vince Gill once and he was really nice. Like, he took the time to go back up onstage after the show and thank all the techs one at a time. We got handshakes and everything. I'm not a Vince Gill guy, but I'm totally a common courtesy guy. A simple gesture like that can really make your day after 16 hours on the clock. I'll defend Vince Gill to the bitter end. He's really good at guitar too.

Anyway, your feelings about the Allman Brothers aside for a moment, did you notice the drummer? I am like 99% sure that guy is Kenny Aronoff, former touring drummer for Smashing Pumpkins and a billion, billion other bands. I recognized his whole "bald guy with big arms and goggles" gimmick and started googling. He's really noticable in a number of the Adore-Machina era performance videos. I always thought he was the drummer for Filter, but NO. I was wrong, and I learned something today. See? Here he is!

SMASHING PUMPKINS - Perfect live

Kenny Aronoff has had quite an interesting ride as a session guy as well. He's played drums for everyone from the Pumpkins to the Allmans to Bonnie Raitt. That's a wild career right there. That's something to be proud of. It has to be an interesting experience to be one of these session dudes. You spend your whole life honing your craft and practicing your guts out. You make sacrifices. You network like a madman, and at the end of all that you get a paycheck and your name in the liner notes. I don't know Deacon Jones or Kenny Aronoff, and they could be allmighty assholes for all I know, but there's just something compelling about these figures. These players who lived right at the edge of stardom and made a career out of being "the guy with the goggles." Of course, when you compare Kenny's image (goggles guy) and Deacon's image (bar band grandpa) to that of Billy Corgan (all-time king of the assholes and living punchline) and Baby Huey (fuckin' dead)...I mean, I don't know. Maybe there's something to the idea that there's a limit to how close to the spotlight you can really get before it fucks you up. Genius seems to have a price, but maybe you can just be a person who works really hard and gets good at their trade while still getting a whiff of that rockstar fantasy life. After all, Vince Gill is a super nice guy and I don't think he's had a hit song since like 1991. Of course, he's also won something like 30 grammies, so what the fuck do I know? Nothing. I'm just a goon with some kind of ADD and an internet connection.

TUBI TIME (among other, lesser streaming services) - Weekend Chores Edition

It has become my custom to watch Tubi on my phone while the kids watch their programs and play their video games on the TV. Sometimes I'll start two or three movies at a time and switch them around as I'm doing laundry or cooking dinner through the week. Does this make it hard to follow the plots? Am I missing critical subtext? Disrupting the flow of the narrative? These aren't those kinds of movies, baby. I usually start 4-5 movies on a Monday afternoon and wrap all them sumbitches up by Sunday night. And it's Sunday night. And I ain't going to church. Where we're going, we don't need plots.

ROME, ARMED TO THE TEETH aka THE TOUGH ONES (1976)

If you ever wanted to watch Will Ferrell beat the shit out of The Strokes, then boy do I have good news for you! The opening credits established this early on as very much my kinda thing. That funky score! The fonts! The car chases! What we have here is your usual psychopathic cop driven by the urge to do violence to crooks. So he does. Then the crooks kidnap his liberal girlfriend and threaten to toss her into a car compactor. Things escalate from there in typical Italian grindhouse fashion. All of the crooks seem to be physically handicapped in some way, and our hero is a monstrous asshole. The streets run red with marinara. It's fun!

MUNCHIES (1987)

What was the deal with 80s B-movie culture shitting on 50s kitsch? You see that a lot. It isn't enough to make fools of their boomer parents, but these 80s guys had to keep turning them into these weird over-the-top parodies with massive beehive haircuts and pink Cadillacs. Anyway, this is Gremlins ripoff #147. It's kinda funny in parts, but not in any of the ways the filmakers intended. The main protagonist is an insufferable wannabe stand up comedian with a fluffy mullet and jokes ripped off from every Star Search 2nd runner up you ever saw. The gremliny munchie monsters act like a gaggle of 8th boys on coke. They can talk, and they use stupid accents and have an endless supply of terrible one-liners while they menace people playing mini golf. This is probably what it was like to hang out with Dave Coulier in 1989. I make it sound more terrible then it really is, but MUNCHIES is pretty tepid. It is, however, colorful, amusingly dated, and energetic. You might have a good time with it playing in the background while you're stoned and doing something else at the same time.

THE DEEP HOUSE (2020)

Imagine a haunted house, but underwater! That's the gimmick. And it's good! This movie seems to follow the Stephen King school of creativity, where you start off with a cool "what-if" idea (what if a St. Bernard got rabies? What if you got snowed in at a haunted hotel? Etc.) and build a plot around it. This movie does exactly what you want it to do based on the premise. It's exciting, it doesn't overstay its welcome, and the lore-discovery phase is entertaining enough to get us into the jump-scare phase without showing ass. It's a lean, mean machine and a good way to blow 90-ish minutes. I suffer from a touch of Thalassophobia and I am a lifelong sucker for spooky underwater shit, so I caught a buzz off this movie. Good stuff!