Kathy Shaidle's Blog, page 25

Joe Bob Briggs on fellow Texan Tobe Hooper, the “Last of the Hippie Filmmakers”

I’ll self-indulgently remind longtime 5FF readers that I don’t think Chainsaw is scary.

The “making of…”, as chronicled in an instant classic Texas Monthly oral history, was way grosser, what with all that stinking slaughterhouse offal laying all over the broiling set. And all the damned hippies…

Anyway, Joe Bob is the perfect guy to look at the movie itself:

Chain Saw was the first baby-boomer horror film, in which sheltered but idealistic suburban children, distrustful of anyone over 30, are terrorized by the deformed adult world that dwells on the grungy side of the railroad tracks. There had been other films that treat rural America as a place of seething, barely-contained violence—notably Deliverance—but never one in which the distinction is so clearly made between an old America, of twisted deranged adults, and the new America, of honest right-thinking children. Hooper and Henkel had finally made their counterculture film after all. (…)

The problem with the New York critical debate was that every commentator made some kind of basic factual error about what is actually in the film. The idea that the story could take place only in Texas informed a lot of the more hysterical articles, ignoring the fact that the principal source material was from medieval German folklore and Wisconsin court archives. If you read enough of the reviews, in fact, you start to think that the scariest word in the title was neither “chainsaw” nor “massacre,” but “Texas”!

Hooper also directed Poltergeist (Briggs calls rumours that it was really Spielberg “slanderous” and explains how they got started). And here’s an early Hooper film:

Trying to flesh out a plot in a movie that had none, Hooper invented a ghostly spirit that dwelt in the basement of the house, a mysterious force that Burns eventually dubbed the “cryptoembryonic hyperelectric presence.” (It was mostly pulsating lights and spinning colors and fast-motion film—what passed for psychedelic special effects at the time.

Joe Bob Briggs remembers his friend Herschell Gordon Lewis

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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Mark Steyn: “We are losing. I think that’s undeniable. But why is that?”

Well, we have the best trained and technologically advanced military – and nothing else (…)

I’ve tried to ease up on the “As I wrote some years ago…” shtick, not only because it irritates some readers but because it sows the fatal seed in my own self-doubting breast that I’ve said it all before and it made no difference.

Mark Steyn: ‘I find these anniversaries more dispiriting with each passing year’

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

          Related Stories“Somehow, I’d (deliberately) forgotten that CB radio was the Twitter of the seventies”Steve Sailer on academic affirmative action: “Is something radically wrong with African-American culture?”Dark Corners: “Queen of Outer Space” (1958)  

“Somehow, I’d (deliberately) forgotten that CB radio was the Twitter of the seventies”

decides (sort of; they add “apparently,” in parentheses no less) that “CB radio wasn’t just for sad, lonely middle aged men” (somehow they left out “white,” to my surprise…)

I doubt they “forgot” this so much as they picked up, through the ether, that same observation made years ago by Ed Driscoll and Glenn Reynolds, who actually ran with it:

Originally, a license was required for Citizens’ Band, too, but masses of people simply broke the law and operated without a license until the FCC was forced to bow to reality. It was a form of mass civil disobedience that accomplished in its sphere what drug-legalization activists have never been able to accomplish in theirs. No small thing. (…)

CB was valuable — as songs like Convoy! and movies like Smokey and the Bandit illustrated — because it allowed citizens to spontaneously organize against what they saw as illegitimate authority.

“DUNKIRK” — “People Should Be Hung From Lampposts, They Should Be Burned Alive, For What They’ve Done To Britain”

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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Steve Sailer on academic affirmative action: “Is something radically wrong with African-American culture?”

Wrapping up his pocket-sized history of affirmative action in American universities, Sailer writes:

After a half century of America obsessing over theoretically overlooked blacks, where is the actual ignored talent?

Caroline M. Hoxby of Stanford and Christopher Avery of Harvard have been studying who are the high-potential high school students who don’t think about applying to, say, Stanford or Harvard.

These ignored students tend to be not the more fashionable ethnicities, because our society has been fixated upon recruiting blacks and Latinos for a half century now, but, typically, white boys in flyover states. The most disregarded students today are the same kind of people who got us to the moon in 1969.

 

 

Steve Sailer: Reconstructing Race

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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Dark Corners: “Queen of Outer Space” (1958)

I wrote about Queen of Out Space here and here:

Along with the awful set design, genre fans treasure the “giant spider” that’s the size of a kiddie pool (and slightly less menacing) and, especially, the racy costumes worn by what looks to be Sylvia Plath and her fellow Mademoiselle interns.

Then there’s Zsa Zsa, throwing awkward “sexy” shapes and breathlessly warning the astronauts that the Queen possesses “weaponsh made by her schientishtshs that can deshtroy da Earthsht.”

Vaguely related bonus!

 

Dark Corners looks at ‘Reptilicus’ (1961) (VIDEO)

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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David Cole: “What we’re seeing now is the domestic version of ‘denazification.’”

pens a must-read history lesson:

This hysteria and fearmongering is nothing new. Since the end of World War II, every few decades, self-proclaimed “watchdogs” decide that America has a Nazi problem. In the 1950s and early ’60s, the ADL’s Arnold Forster and Benjamin Epstein made a cottage industry out of writing books warning about creeping Nazism on the American right. 1952’s The Troublemakers (“Intolerance is one of the most serious menaces in our country today!”), 1956’s Cross-Currents (“Anti-Semitism did not die with Hitler!”), and 1964’s Danger on the Right (“It has been estimated that some 20% of the American electorate can be grouped as Extremists on the Right Wing!”) are among Forster & Epstein’s greatest hits. In 1963’s The Extremists, New York Post editor Mark Sherwin claimed there was no difference between William F. Buckley and George Lincoln Rockwell (something tells me Sherwin’s nickname was not Señor Subtlety).

David Cole: Black America, Summed Up in Four Minutes

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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Mark Steyn: “Did anyone ever say ‘pipperoo’?”

Mark Steyn on “(I’ve Got a Gal in) Kalamazoo”:

We no longer have wires or flyers, so that’s a moment – America, 1942 – distilled for all time. But, much as I like the rhyme, neither is my favorite word in that couplet: that honor is reserved for “hoppin'”. He doesn’t catch the flyer, board the flyer, buy tickets for the flyer, reserve passage on the flyer; he hops it – and it’s just the perfect choice for the song’s debonair urgency. Just lovely.

Reading Mark Steyn on the songs of Burt Bacharach…

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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Jim Goad: “Well, they’re rioting in Missouri again”

Jim Goad writes:

Opportunistic whites were quick to condemn the phantom demon of “racism” for what happened between Stockley and Smith. Not one seemed to utter a peep about the idea that whether or not you’re actually dealing heroin out of a parking lot, it’s probably not a good idea to ram your vehicle into a police car and then lead them on a high-speed chase.

Jim Goad: What If Those Bikers Had Been, Like, Another Color?

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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Rick McGinnis: Dunkirk highlights today’s social divisions

Rick McGinnis writes:

A Dunkirk today would be livestreamed and endlessly reposted on social media, and while we might be able to follow the disaster in nearly real time, our responses to it are endlessly filtered through ideology and bias. Our leaders carefully choose their response based on how it will damage their opposite numbers, while the public either joins a cheering section or – an option growing in popularity – turns away in disgust, overwhelmed not just by once-scarce information but by their access to the thoughts and actions of their fellow citizenry.

Perhaps this is the key to Dunkirk’s unlikely success. Nolan’s film, while apparently a war movie based on actual history, actually plays on the screens of our minds like a fantasy.

Rick McGinnis: ‘…sitting down together for a movie regularly has always been as important as sitting down for a meal’

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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Mark Steyn: Meeting Hillary now “a bargain at only $250/second”

‘Is Mark Steyn’s P.R. firm accepting new clients?’

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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