Album Cover(s) of the Whatever

Here's the deal.  I'm sitting on three supercalifragilisticexpialidocious album covers for the site, but I want to use them before I take a break.  Prepare yourself!  Gaudy, chromatic monsters were harmed during the making of this column.

Power metal!  Probably my favorite piece from today's selections.

Black metal!  Spooky trees rule.

Death metal!  I honestly didn't mean to play "subgenre hopscotch," but it worked out, didn't it?  DIDN'T IT?

Break Pending

Once in a blue moon, I'll become ensnared by the oncoming traffic of life and be forced to cancel this project or that project.  I don't like it, but it does happen.  For example, I was hoping to have a review of 1985's Girls School Screamers posted by, like, now.  Clearly, it didn't come to pass.  Do you want reasons or excuses?  I have both, but in all probability, you're not too concerned.  You might enjoy my little write-ups, but you don't see the occasional gaffe as the end of the world.  Neither do I, although I'm harder on myself than is necessary.  NOTE TO SELF: The world is absolutely ending.

It has gotten to the point where I schedule "offseasons" whenever I feel the stress of writing grip its constricting grip around my throat.  I feel a break coming on.  Just letting you know.  I won't actually take a break without letting you know beforehand, so cool your jets.  As for my targeted terminus, I want to finish my Cannibal Corpse discography review ahead of the sabbatical.  Hmm, what's the right word for it?  A respite of sorts, stationed betwixt a coffee break and a maternity leave...I mean, I'm not your mother, but I need my caffeine, you dig?

PS-Screamers is a sleepy slasher that doesn't make a lick of sense.  Apart from the stylish prologue, it's not worth ferreting out.

Album Cover of the Whatever

So what the fuck is Toxoplazmoziz?  I'm not sure how I came across it, but apparently, this is an experimental metal project of sorts.  No opinion on the music.  To be fair, I didn't give it much of a fighting chance.  The artwork is the star of the show.  Yowza!

C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud

C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud is critic-proof.  It's a sequel, yes, but you can't draw parallels to other sequels.  It doesn't act like any sequel I know, and I'm widening my net to accommodate in-name-only consecutions.  Something keeps getting in the way.  Tone!  1984's C.H.U.D. was a leaden, grim-faced horror film that seemed to look down on entertainment.  It was about as much fun as a lecture on the lithosphere-asthenosphere boundary.  Seriously, all I remember is Daniel Stern stressing out over the sewer.  Nothing else.  Just 90 minutes of the cracker from Bushwhacked lobbying the Environmental Protection Agency and occasionally clobbering a cannibalistic humanoid underground fuckwad.

To Bud's credit, it dares to be different.  Well, different-ish.  It plants a comedic camber and assigns the creatures with fresh garb.  Well, fresh-ish.  These dwellers are a little more human.  They are inherently zombies, which makes sense when you realize that this project was originally Return of the Living Dead 2.  Bud is strikingly similar to the ROTLD2 that we did receive.  If I'm being honest, this is the lesser zom-com.  Before our relationship gets serious, you should know I'm not big on zom-coms.  The fact that I managed to finish Bud without execrating myself and bearing a grudge against God is a small victory ("it shouldn't bother me/but it does").

Gerrit Graham plays the titular goon, a chipper cadaver inadvertently stolen from campus grounds.  The, shall we say, precarious plot sees the three leads (Sensitive Nerd, Party Jock, and Babe Girl) try to maneuver around town and return Bud to his morgue slab.  Are you thinking what I'm thinking?  You don't need to see C.H.U.D. II to conclude that it doesn't contain enough storyline for a feature.  It's barely enough for an episode of Moesha, although I admit...I wouldn't mind seeing that episode of Moesha.  When you consider the advantages, ol' Bud works as a rainy day rental.  The pacing is pert.  I didn't get the chance to become bored.

Unfortunately, those are the most glowing accolades I can throw at C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud.  At the end of the day, this is a comedy, and I didn't laugh.  Maybe it would have panned out with exaggerated gore and childish levels of nudity, but I'm not even certain that this thing was slapped with an R rating.  Okay, I checked, and it was!  But it could have been PG-13.  Yawn.  Keep an eye peeled for Norman Fell (yep, Mr. Roper's in the fucking house) and a creepy Robert Englund cameo.  Robert Z'Dar says, "The pick-up truck on the poster?  That's me peering over the tailgate.  I'm banging your mom."

 

Geek Out #154

What was Sawbones?  It was a direct-to-video riff on my precious Dr. Giggles.  It wasn't particularly entertaining, nor was The Surgeon from that same year.  Medical horror needs to stage a comeback in the worst way.

Dead Review Collection #15 - RED!

    Dom looked at the front door with longing in his eyes.  A sadness.  A seismic sadness.

    "You know you can come with us, right?"  Scotty asked, mainly just to fill in the awkward silence.  He was Dom's roommate, and for days, he had tried to peel the disabled writer away from his laptop.  A night of debauchery would do the trick, wouldn't it?

    "I know, but you know that I won't.  I can't."

    Scotty interjected to no avail.  "You do realize that the review will be there when you--"

    "I'm so close now!  Once I finish Red Before Black, I'm practically home-free.  It's just giving me issues."

    "What issues?"

    "It's A Skeletal Domain all over again.  Well, almost."

    Scotty furrowed his brow.  "But the Skeletal review was well-received, was it not?  You were plastered on every journalism magazine cover.  Think of how many kids want to be music critics because of you."

    "If that's the case, it's because I am my own worst critic."

    Scotty reared back and punched a hole in the wall.  "Goddamn it!  Let yourself breathe!  Enjoy one night out!"

    "You don't think I want to?  Skeletal took forever to come together, and I'm seeing the same signs with Red.  I have nothing to say.  The music doesn't speak to me."

    "Didn't you say it was a step in the right direction?  That the band sounded more comfortable with Erik Rutan as producer?"

    "Yes, on both accounts.  That doesn't make the review easier to write.  The first two tracks are stunningly bland."

    Scotty punched another hole in the wall.  "Goddamn it!  That may be so, but you owe it to yourself to hang out with us tonight.  Sluts will be there!"
    Dom sighed a reflective sigh.  "I got into the writing game because of the sluts.  But I'm an elder statesman now.  And like you said, I'm a role model."

    Scotty peered out the window.  "Z-Dawg and Poonthomas are here.  Last chance."

    Dom didn't need to give it much thought.  "Go ahead.  This will be good for me in the long run.  You'll see."

    "I hope so, man.  Dom, just out of curiosity, will you rate Red any higher than Skeletal?"

    "I will.  It's a quivering mass of sameness with 20% more life in its muscles.  And I don't have it in me to deplore a ditty called 'Heads Shoveled Off.'"

    "The main riff on 'In the Midst of Ruin' is badass, too."
    "Hey, I thought I was writing this review."

    The pals laughed together as Scotty waved a goodnight wave.

    Dom was alone now.  If he had to, he would stare down the witching hour and win a blinking contest against time itself.  Red Before Black wasn't a great record.  His readership would just have to deal with it.  Thankfully, the band seized the chance to square it straight with their next long player.

    So about those sluts...

  

Groovy?

I might give Evil Dead 2 a crack soon.  I've seen it a few times, but it's been a sweet while.  I've long held the position that the original is a superior horror film.  I expect to maintain that position.  Look, Dead by Dawn is a fun jaunt through a bargain-counter carnival, but the groan-inducing comedy doesn't work.  Don't get me started on Army of Darkness.

Vanity Scare #15

CASTLE OF FRANKENSTEIN (#25, June 1975)

These days, we take certain things for granted.  For instance, you have incredible writers like Dom Coccaro churning out steadfast, high-principled content in the field of horror journalism (he also excels in other fields and is said to be "about that life").  But horror journalism didn't always exist.  You couldn't always rely on Fangoria or Rue Morgue for knowledgeable reviews of current flicks.  Of course, those are fusty, outdated references, but you couldn't always fall back on the Internet either.

Records indicate that serious commentary on the genre didn't transpire in magazine form until Castle of Frankenstein.  Print editor Calvin Beck started the rag in 1962.  I imagine that it carried an underground vibe, seeing as how there was no corporate advertising and it was honor-bound to its own unorthodox publishing schedule.  New issues were simply made available when they were completed.  All told, CoF reached twenty-five installments before Beck decided to pull the plug in favor of writing fiction.

I'm surprised that it took so long for monster movies to be seen as art.  Why shouldn't they have their own omnibus of editorials, their own glossy gazettes?  Reading anything from decades past, you're going to matriculate the way perspectives have changed over time.  Just glancing at the fan letters, I learned that film critics were once valued with brighter esteem.  What happened?  You can barely call "film critic" a job nowadays.  No one will pay you for your opinion, unless you have held that post for a perdurable spell (Leonard Maltin comes to mind).  Film itself has depreciated in worth, so it tracks that coverage of the medium has been devalorized.

Fuck, that's depressing.  Why don't we talk chainsaws?  You and me!  If you don't know (and you should, excepting the condition that you're new here), my favorite motion picture is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  The original, you human dunce cap!  Don't ever ask again!  Anyway, Richard Buonnano pens an excellent piece on Tobe Hooper's magnum opus.  The whole article is about the badassery of the thing and how it's infinitely scary.  Remember, this was written less than a year after its release.  Do I really need to explain why it's such a fun read?

I enjoyed the interview with Darren McGavin, conducted in between seasons of The Night Stalker.  Man, what a nifty show.  It wasn't given much of a chance to succeed, but it prospered in spite of a baleful slot at the anus-end of primetime.  The George Pal sit-down is merry stuff.  It made me revisit The War of the Worlds, and it made me want to revisit The Time Machine. Speaking of inspiration, I really want to check out Andy Warhol's debauched double feature after leafing through words of praise on his Dracula and Frankenstein (well, words of praise and words of...nevermind).

Clearly, there is a wealth of material for nerds to bite into here.  I don't need to sell it.  Kudos to Marcus Boas for the eye-catching cover, which wraps around to the back.

Album Cover of the Whatever

Well, I finally did it.  I found a death metal band simply called Die.  They sound as fruitful and resourceful as their name, but I'll be honest.  It's not bad!  If you know how to riff, you can get around a lack of creativity.  The cover is what matters and that's an impressive ghoul.  Goblin?  Imp?  Maybe it's the guitarist.

Rassle Inn #28

I don't know, man.  I may end up deleting all of this shit and going to bed.  I had a dentist appointment this morning and it took a lot out of me.  I'm not mining for pity, but fuck.  Dentists are evil.  It wasn't that painful or anything.  It was just the fuck of it all.  They (well, she) "operated" on me for close to an hour.  It was scheduled as a deep clean, which means I didn't have any cavities...in my youth.  Actually, it was the pandemic that caused me to miss my dental appointments for too long.

Teeth are stupid.  Should I say something about WrestleMania?  I will be watching.  I swear to fuck (sorry, my decommissioned mental state doesn't allow for witty, inventive writing), Vinnie Mac has no clue how to book Raw in 2022.  Let's look at the two biggest matches, shall we?  Kevin Owens vs. Stone Cold Steve Austin...holy shit, right?  I know, I know; it's pitched as an episode of The K.O. Show, but I have a feeling that we'll get a match out of this segment.  And the build-up!  It's an angle that writes itself.  Man, imagine the promo battles.  Wait--there were none.

Austin delivers a single promo via tape, and that's supposed to be...what the fuck is that supposed to be?  He didn't appear live on Raw once.  Fuck!  The other big deal?  Seth Rollins vs...yeah.  It's probably Cody Rhodes, but here again, where are the promo battles?  Where is the build?  WHERE???  When I said "imagine the promo battles," I was telling you to imagine the promo battles because that is where they reside - in the imagination.

Hey, how you doin'?  Dom here.  My dentist appointment was yesterday.  That's when I put pen to paper, and that's when I eventually stopped writing to retire to my bedchamber.  I can now stew with a clear head (the rest helped).  I'm equally unzipped and blunderstruck in relation to Vince's non-booking.  This used to be an elevated time of year for WWE Creative, a span of however many weeks that called for easy, simple booking to lift and dignify the biggest names in professional wrestling.  It would start with Royal Rumble (my favorite PPV, coincidentally) and it would end the night after WrestleMania.

Well, WrestleMania is now held on two nights.  The main events are not built properly (Brock/Roman notwithstanding).  The NXT special used to be the sleeper hit of the weekend, but the rainbow brand is no longer a foregone conclusion.  The celebrity contingent buzzes in to put itself over.  And they wonder why it's so hard to build stars.  Celebs used to put wrestlers over at 'Mania.  The McMahon empire has admitted defeat in conceding that the current roster is stacked with nobodies.  But yes, I will be watching.

I can't believe that I didn't drop one reference to Dr. Isaac Yankem.  I'm slipping!