Now Playing #25

Dissection - Reinkaos

I'm a late bloomer when it comes to Dissection.  I've apprised myself of the classics.  Yes, there is something special about The Somberlain and Storm of the Light's Bane, but if I'm being perfectly honest, I...almost prefer Reinkaos?  Don't lynch me.  Okay, lynch me.  I've tried to "get into" the first two albums because as a metalhead, that's what I'm supposed to do.  But yeah, no.  I put off listening to Reinkoas, perhaps in response to its reputation as a subordinate clunker.  I genuinely don't get it.  Why is it scorned so?  The riffs are less melodic, but the leads are still silky smooth.  I dig the solos on "Black Dragon" and "God of Forbidden Light."  The title track, a layered instrumental, might contain my favorite bits of guitar lickery here.  "Dark Mother Divine" is epic, even if it's mostly mid-paced.  I have to say, if we had gotten a fourth Dissection long player, I wouldn't have been opposed to more material in this vein.  Oh well.

Hey, why do Satanists love dragons so much anyway?  Inquiring minds want to know.

Hooded Menace - Lachrymose Monuments of Obscuration

In the lead-up to this album's release, I went back and devoured the entire Hooded Menace discography.  Geez, what a band.  As much as I'm enjoying Lachrymose, I'm going to start with some constructive criticism.  The guitar tone.  Dude, Fulfill the Curse and Never Cross the Dead are bone-crushing.  This record (and 2021's The Tritonus Bell) sounds homogenized.  The riffs themselves are fine, but they come off as sterile.  Maybe it's the shift in songwriting.  Musically, I hear just as much traditional metal as I do doomy death metal.  Exhibit A: The closing riff of "Pain Masquerade."  That's very nearly Skid Row.  Now, I love Skid Row, so that's not a gargantuan obstacle.  Whatever.  On the whole, Hooded Menace has retained their Hooded Menace-ness.  "Lugubrious Dance" is my favorite cut of blind dead meat.  I'm all about the fiendish leads.  The leads, man!

These tunes may not be stupidly heavy, but they're worth playing in your cemetery of choice.  Year-end list?  It's very possible.  Oh, the Duran Duran cover.  I usually skip it.  It is what it is.

Blood Capsule #340

CRAWL (2019)

Crawl is twelve minutes shorter than Rogue.  So I'm tackling Crawl.  Normally, I wouldn't let you in on my selection process, but you should know that I'm just as brainless as the movies that I review.  Perhaps that's unfair.  This flick does have a brain.  It has the heart, however, of a French "survival horror" endurance test from about fifteen years earlier.  It was directed by Alexandre Aja, and it feels more like his High Tension than Alligator.  But is that a good thing or a bad thing?  From where I'm sitting, it's merely a thing.  It does hit strange to watch a gritty, ultra-realistic take on the "nature runs amok" subgenre.  To that end, I was reminded of 1977's Day of the Animals.  Again, that's neither good nor bad.  Crawl tells the simple story of a woman checking on her father during a hurricane.  Tempestuous flooding forces them into the crawlspace where they butt heads with a deadly mongoose.  Kidding!  There are gators afoot and afloat.  What happens when the levee breaks?  If only it was just a Led Zeppelin song.

Crawl's sizeable budget allows for polished special effects that extend to cool, atmospheric shots of inclement weather.  Sometimes, stormclouds are creepier than monsters.  The characters are sympathetic, but bits of exposition that develop their backstories come across as forced.  I get it, though.  There are only so many ways to establish that two people have a fractured relationship.  Thankfully, the acting from Kaya Scodelario and Barry Pepper is on-point.  Props to the stunt crew.  This couldn't have been an easy film to shoot.  It makes me wonder what other reptile romps would have been able to accomplish with the same amount of money.  In any event, Crawl is a suspenseful, well-structured sit at the cinema.  If I'm being honest, I prefer Alligator and Lake Placid.  There is something to be said for cult appeal.  Recommended for fans of Doppler radars.

Dom reacts!?

Check out my latest boring reaction video!

Blood Capsule #339

THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE (1959)

I didn't recognize her, but Beverly Garland also starred in 1957's Not of This Earth.  Man, she is the cat's pajamas.  Sorry, I think I started in the middle of this review.  Let me back up a bit.  The Alligator People is a hard film to describe.  The story is relayed via narration.  An amnesiac nurse (that would be Garland as Jane) is sent on a sodium pentothal trip to recover repressed memories.  Her psychiatrists decide later that these memories are better left repressed.  What does she divulge while under psychoactive hypnosis?  I don't want to reveal too much.  This flick functions as a mystery, and part of the fun is stumbling upon plot twists along with the main characters.  I guess I can tell you that alligators are involved.  That much is obvious.  The less obvious stuff has to do with a secluded plantation, a radioactive cobalt ray, and gratuitous limb regeneration.  Oh, and Lon Chaney Jr. as a hook-handed drunkard who hates alligators as much as I hate paragraph breaks.

I need to rave more about Beverly Garland.  She anchors The Alligator People.  That's not to say that the other cast members aren't up to snuff.  They are, especially Chaney.  It's strange to fathom that he was only a handful of roles away from his last, as he's certainly spirited here.  Pun intended?  You be the judge.  I highly recommend this one, mainly because there is a payoff.  You want to see a gator dude run around the wetlands of Louisiana, and that's precisely what the film offers.  Are the make-up effects silly?  Yes.  And they are magnificent.  Ironically, I was reminded of The Fly.  Fox distributed The Alligator People on a double bill with Return of the Fly.  Who do we have to petition to bring back double bills, preferably at drive-in theaters?  No, Barbie and Oppenheimer don't count.

Rassle Inn #56

A scene from AEW's WrestleDream.

Every time I order an AEW pay-per-view, I question my existence on this blue marble of ours.  The fact is, I crave mindless entertainment.  And last night, it didn't get any more mindless than WrestleDream.  First off, I'll say that it was a fairly typical AEW PPV in that there were too many matches.  Of course, most of the matches were too long.  Are we actually supposed to react when there are ten false finishes in every single contest?  You could even argue that the wrong person won half of the time.  Case in point, why isn't Toni Storm the (only) women's champion?  She's the most over talent you have, bar none.  I guess the women's titles are going to be unified now?  I have so many questions and not enough answers.

Then you have the main event.  What the hell are they doing with Darby Allin!?  This isn't professional wrestling anymore, not when the scrappy underdog is effing waterboarded in the middle of the ring.  Eventually, Darby is going to be gangraped on live television.  Actually, he'll probably die before that could ever happen.  The bumps he took - before nearly drowning - were so violent and so unnecessary, Tony Khan should be arrested for aggravated assault by proxy.  What does this do for the Death Riders?  "Boy, those are some tough fellows."  Give me a break.  The fans in attendance were cool with the ridiculous nature of it all, but they have already bought their ticket, both literally and figuratively.

What do I mean?  I mean that PPV's like WrestleDream do nothing, absolutely nothing, to rope prospective viewers into watching AEW, much less pro-wrestling as a whole.  Tony Khan currently has a built-in audience that will never see an increase in number as long as he's the guy in charge.  For the love of God, give the book to someone else.  It doesn't matter what the "sickos" want.  The ratings are dropping.  If Darby Allin has a death wish, so does AEW.  Yes, I'm about doom and gloom today.  Sorry.  I'm not exactly happy with WWE right now either, so don't think I'm picking on AEW.  Where did A.J. Lee go anyway?  She'll make everything better.  She always makes everything better.

Blood Capsule #338

STANLEY (1972)

My favorite bit of IMDb trivia regarding Stanley?  And I quote - "Screenwriter Gary Crutcher wrote the film's script in only three days while high on amphetamines."  I think that says it all, folks.  What am I doing with my life?  Alright, I'll curb the melodrama.  Stanley certainly plays it cool.  Twice in the first thirty minutes, we watch our main character fall asleep.  Our main character is not Stanley, by the way.  No, we follow a Native American Vietnam vet named Tim(my).  You could call him a serpent empath of sorts.  He loves...loves his rattlesnakes.  He finds humans to be pathetic wastes of flesh, so I guess we do have one thing in common.  Anyway, Tim wants revenge on the poachers who "accidentally" killed his father.  That's where his slithering friends come into play.  If the premise sounds familiar, director William Grefe is pretty open about the fact that he was directly influenced by Willard.  Just replace rats with snakes, add Floridian swamp water (Stanley was shot in the Everglades), and voila!

Grefe also helmed Sting of Death, which I covered late last year.  Scientifically speaking, it was fun on a bun.  Stanley doesn't have that same blithe spirit.  Part of the problem is ol' Tim.  He's so miserable, it's hard not for the viewer to share in his misery.  The laggard pacing further weighs heavy on the body of the film.  Oh, and it runs for 108 minutes.  Why 2.5 Z'Dars?  The acting is actually decent.  It would have been easier to invest in the story if it didn't ask us to identify with a guy who beds a 17-year-old (after killing her father, no less).  If Stanley were resculpted for modern audiences, it would stand a chance of being an intriguing character study.  There's a prizewinner in here somewhere.  Alas, it's obscured by crawling mounds of future wallets.

DOM RANKS Every Opeth Album

Check it out!

Blood Capsule #337

LAKE PLACID 3 (2010)

I'm feeling trapped by this particular theme month.  It's like wanting to play outside with your friends when you're stuck inside because of a downpour.  As much as I would enjoy writing about aliens or...well, anything else, I'm stuck with reptiles for the time being.  More precisely, I'm stuck with gators.  Crocodiles?  I don't actually know which creature populates Lake Placid 3.  All I know is that I haven't seen Lake Placid 2.  I hadn't even spent time with the original until earlier this year.  It was a pleasant surprise.  Why did I skip a sequel?  Look, you should be used to my questionable tastes by now.  Do I know why I popped in Lake Placid 3 yesterday afternoon?  No, not entirely.  It worked out in the end, as this flick achieves quite a bit with very little ammunition (read: funding) in its firing chamber.  Let me get the negative stuff out of the way first.  The CGI is dreadful.  I think I saw digital waves at one point.  Egads.  And yet, the film manages to maneuver around these obstacles to deliver high-energy action sequences in the third act.

Plot, plot, plot...a little boy has been feeding meat to a pod of small-ish alligators behind his parents' back.  His excuse?  Boredom.  Personally, I've never been restless enough to risk losing a limb, but whatever.  He gets plenty of attention when a big-ish alligator shows up at his family's cabin.  There are also subplots concerning a hunting party.  They are not terribly interesting, but screenwriter David Reed does a tidy job of tying all of the characters together.  The kid I mentioned may have been bored, but I wasn't.  Lake Placid 3 premiered on the Syfy Channel, but it's worth noting that several boobs were added for the DVD release.  Apparently, the nudity was expurgated on Amazon Prime.  Okay, it wasn't worth noting.  My bad.  I had fun with this random sequel, although I doubt that I'll be trying out Lake Placid: The Final Chapter anytime soon.  The same goes for Lake Placid vs. Anaconda and Lake Placid: Legacy.  As if!

Dom's Nightmares

Because of the nature of this website, you can't tell that I've totally been slacking off the last few days.  Well, I'm about to get my rear into gear.  Over the next couple of weeks, you'll be seeing new editions of Now Playing and Iron Supplements.  To be honest, I haven't even watched many movies as of late.  I have watched episodes of Freddy's Nightmares, which is apparently on Tubi now??  Those folks must have the best legal team on the planet to be able to offer the stuff that they offer.  I'm not 100% sure who owns Freddy's Nightmares, although you would think that it falls under the New Line umbrella.  Who knows?  I had seen the pilot - "No More Mr. Nice Guy" - yeeeears ago, but it was a treat to revisit it.  There are scenes that function as a straightforward slasher where Freddy (in human form) creeps around the neighborhood and kills police offers Michael Myers-style.  Incredible.

I also enjoyed "It's a Miserable Life," an episode that happens to star Lar Park Lincoln as a requisite girlfriend.  Curiously, most of Freddy's Nightmares seems to work off of a blueprint, that being "bad things happen to a teenager."  Hey, it works.  Usually, when I try to binge a TV series, I lose interest after a few episodes and move onto something else, but I'm committed to watching all of this one.  Ask me how I fared come Thanksgiving.  Or better yet, don't.

Blood Capsule #336

RATTLERS (1976)

Muscle relaxers.  They give, and in the case of today's subject, they take away.  Man, about an hour into Rattlers, my eyelids were beginning to drag on the floor.  I managed to pull myself together, though.  I came close to hitting eject.  By that I mean, I came close to hurtling myself through the ceiling, as I watched this film on Tubi.  Rattlers feels like a made-for-TV cheapie.  But it's not that inviting.  I should have known better.  Any horror freak worth their Himalayan pink salt could tell you that snake movies are only rewarding propositions if the snakes involved are either giant or mutated in some way.  Or preferably, both!  Rattlers concerns...rattlers.  Technically, their genes have been modified by nerve gas, but big deal.  That just makes them aggressive.  And if I've said it once, I've said it a million times; an aggressive snake is not as interesting as a 50-foot snake.  Wait, have I ever said that?  I'm probably lying.  Let me start another paragraph before I divulge another untruth.

Our main character, a herpetologist (of course), is played by some guy named Sam Chew Jr.  How he wasn't a bubblegum mascot is anyone's best guess.  As an actor, he seems to be on the ball, but I don't think anyone told him that he was in a fright flick.  His blood pressure couldn't have eclipsed triple digits.  I know mine was low, but I wasn't dealing with live snakes.  Rattlers is humdrum through and through.  The script is floating with small talk, and I do mean floating.  There is no memorable score to punch up the scares.  Any screams you hear on the soundtrack merely break up perpetual lulls of silence.  If I wasn't an obsessive-compulsive when it came to logging my cinematic conquests, I seriously doubt that Rattlers would have made the cut for Random Reptile Month.  Hey, someone has to raise the red flag over this fiasco.

Sam Chew Jr.  No way that's his real name.

Bluetooth Grin?

What's this?  Another new column???  Check it out!

Blood Capsule #335

KING COBRA (1999)

If I could give this film a standing ovation, I would.  It's not overly impressive as a "giant snake" vehicle, but it has three magic words on its side - the Chiodo brothers.  They handled F/X duties in a stunning show of anti-CGI sentiment that took me by surprise.  The technology was there.  Anaconda (don't worry, we'll get there soon enough) used CGI two years earlier, and it looked slick, but of course, that particular serpent was backed by a significant studio.  While King Cobra was released by Lion's Gate, I can't confirm whether the funding came from big wigs or regular-sized wigs.  Either way, there is no digital duplicity on display.  The title monster, a cross between a king cobra (Ophidiophagus hannah) and an eastern diamondback rattler (Crotalus adamanteus), is one hell of a creation.  The thing has palpable personality, more so than our human leads.  The acting isn't bad per se; it's just that the characters are offensively uninteresting.  I did like Erik Estrada as a gay-for-some-reason event planner.  Yeah.

It goes without saying that the plot insists on throwing a major shindig in a small town.  This time, it's a beer festival, and I have no idea why.  I guess they're opening a brewery or something.  Pat Morita stars as the herpetologist who knows everything.  For what it's worth, I enjoyed watching him condescend to government officials.  King Cobra starts and ends strong.  The second act...that's where I had problems staying awake.  If I wasn't so won over by the Chiodos' handiwork, it would be hard to recommend this flick.  Still, we're in solid 3-Z'Dar territory.  The directing team of David and Scott Hillenbrand also shepherded Survival Island, which I believe is about an evil piñata.  Now that's a resume.

DOM REACTS To R.L. Stine's Pumpkinhead!

Check this out!

Blood Capsule #334

GAMERA THE BRAVE (2005)

One look at my rating, and I know you'll think I'm crazy.  Apparently, the powers that be completely disagree with me, as this film effectively ended the Gamera franchise as we know it.  This is the best Gamera jaunt I've ever seen, and folks, I will die on that hill.  I think it's fair to say that most genre fans are familiar with our turtle warrior's Showa series, the string of cheese-grade kaiju epics that ran from the mid-60's to the early 80's.  They would usually depict a universe where austere government officials would be led around by cloying groups of children.  They were absurd.  Plain and simple.  Gamera the Brave answers the question, "What if those goofball movies were made by actual filmmakers?"  I won't denigrate the Showa era (I own half of them), but this Gamera should be seen as the Gamera.  Yes, I dig the 90's trilogy.  There is plenty of room for high-quality Gamera-based entertainment, and that includes bottles of Mtn Dew Code Red.

The plot is basic.  A little boy named Toru stumbles upon Gamera's egg and raises it like you would any pet.  Eventually, this cute leatherback levitates and triples in size.  It soon becomes obvious that Toru is dealing with the same kind of Gamera that saved Tokyo from Gyaos (kaiju Pterodactyls, essentially) in 1973.  And wouldn't you know it?  A new monster has risen from the ocean depths, and it's up to Gamera to save Tokyo from certain doom.  Again.  Maybe I'm getting soft with age, but lead actor Ryo Tomioka has expressive eyes that will pierce your soul.  You might even feel...emotions?  In all seriousness, the child actors are splendid.  They come across as real kids, ordinary individuals in extraordinary situations.  The script has more heart than all of the Showa films combined.  I was totally sold on the human drama, which is why I'm trying so hard to sell Gamera the Brave to you.  What's more, the special effects are just right.  Are they worthy of five Z'Dars?  I think so.

It's a shame that this flick was a box office failure in Japan.  I would line up next to myself to see a sequel with the same creative nucleus.  Why do I have a feeling that Random Reptile Month is peaking early?

Iron Supplements #8

MOTHER AUGUSTA

Mother Augusta is an Italian black metal band.  They're one of the more pleasant surprises I've come across thanks to this column.  However, their appeal is, shall we say, limited.  Allow me to explain.  I'm currently listening to Low Lights, the band's most recent full-length album.  Certain tracks could pass for 90's-style alternative rock...with black metal retches anyway.  The bulk of the record is mid-paced.  That's alright with me.  I realize that most metalheads would disagree, but I don't need a tune like "Pills" to launch into blast mode to keep my ears mollified.  If there were any doubts as to Mother Augusta's intentions, the "Similar Artists" tab on their Metal Archives page is littered with depressive black metal acts.  That's probably going to circumscribe their listener base or at least put a check on it.  It shouldn't, but you know it will.  And it's a shame because if you ask me, Mother Augusta delivers.

To date, these gentlemen have released an EP and two studio albums.  I hear a little bit of Forgotten Tomb, which can only be a good thing.  Highly recommended.