Justin Robinson's Blog, page 10
November 5, 2015
Tread Titan Perilously: Episode 5
At long last, the worm turns! After Eren gets a well deserved beating, Attack on Titan reboots with an emphasis on Titan Hunter Lestat and Dr. Hengle. Erik and Justin are appreciative as the characters they enjoyed in one scene seven episodes back come to the forefront. Mikasa, Armin and the rest of the cadets take a back seat … only to return to two episodes later. But with the show seemingly fully animated, the character models changed and a mid-season credit sequence change is it possible Erik and Justin will finally like the show? The Craft, Worf and The Muppets also get discussed.
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Filed under: Transmissions Tagged: attack on titan, the craft, the muppets, tread perilously
November 2, 2015
DAUGHTERS OF ARKHAM. Free.
October 31, 2015
Free Brand New CITY OF DEVILS Story!
And to celebrate Halloween, here's a brand new free story! Happy Halloween!
October 30, 2015
Lifetime Theater: Amish Grace
Certain things are intrinsically funny. Marching bands. Things getting trapped in wells. The Amish. By that metric, the funniest thing in the world would be an Amish marching band trapped down a well. I’ll stand by that. So when Mrs. Supermarket recorded this week’s Lifetime Theater for me, I’m pretty sure she only saw the “Amish” part of the title and figured it was in for a barn-raisin’, butter-churnin’, English-distrustin’ good time. She was so, so wrong.
Amish Grace is rough. The roughest Lifetime movie yet, and that’s saying something considering I’ve covered a Stephen King adaptation, two teens murdering a third, a rape investigation, and Daphne Zuniga at the holidays. I thought I’d seen some shit. I thought Lifetime became hardcore when they quietly turned themselves into a horror network. What I didn’t know was that this was them softening the blow. They can be so, so much worse when they decide to do Christian entertainment. Seriously, those guys are messed up. All those pictures of Iron Age torture just hung up on their walls like it’s nothing.
“Little Help?”
This story is based on a school shooting, or as we call them now, a well-regulated militia. Charles Roberts rolled up to a one-room Amish schoolhouse with a rifle, shotgun, and a pistol because apparently he was such a pussy he needed three guns to murder a room full of Amish children. He let the boys go and shot all the girls, killing five, severely injuring the other five, before shooting himself.
In the wake of this senseless tragedy, the Amish decide that instead of being angry, they’re just going to forgive everyone because barns don’t raise themselves. After all, God has to deal with Charles Roberts now, and probably wonder why the hell He planned to have five little girls shot to death. Mysterious ways, I guess. The shooting occurs in the first twenty minutes of the movie, and the rest of it is grieving parents trying their best to make sense of a world that aggressively cannot make sense anymore.
I don’t know what to tell you. Here’s a puppy.
The lead is Ida (Kimberly Williams-Paisley, who you remember from Father of the Bride) a woman who lost her elder daughter in the tragedy. She’s having trouble forgiving Amy, the widow of the killer. The other Amish are almost pathologically nice to Amy, and to be fair, Amy didn’t do anything wrong. The leader of the community, Levi, points out (when he offers his condolences along with Ida’s husband Gideon), that Amy lost a husband as well, and her children are now without a father. It’s a two hour struggle to forgive, or at least understand, the unforgivable and insensible.
I can’t. That should be pretty obvious by now. I did find the explanation of forgiveness, couched in the Amish religious tradition, compelling. The characters explain that people are up to God to judge, which was actually pretty nice of Him. By taking the burden of judgment, he can clear human hearts of hatred. It’s really poetic, until you run into that whole problem of why He caused a bunch of little girls to be murdered in the first place. (That, incidentally, is called the problem of evil, and is not why I don’t believe in God, although it’s why I find certain beliefs maddening at best.)
It might sound like I’m running the Amish down a little here, and I’m not. Well, not entirely. I do think that living without technology and oppressing women is stupid, and the Amish are all about that. However, I have more respect for the Amish than I do for wealthy white evangelicals who preach that deeds are unimportant and only faith matters to get into heaven. In my eyes, the more your religion makes you sacrifice, the more I regard it as sincere and worthy of my respect. The more it makes someone else sacrifice, the more I see it as just some bullshit method of control. For all their flaws, Amish walk the walk. Well, until they need modern emergency services, medicine, or even a ride somewhere.
The forgiveness element is also extremely attractive. However, you run into the other weird side effect of this brand of religion: there is no altruism. While the Amish response was incredible, a few lines point out that they are in fact expecting something in return. If they forgive, then God forgives them. Tit for tat. Granted, this is a situation where that is really put to the test, so it’s clear they mean it. Still, its always disturbing to me how religious people only seem to be moral as long as they can expect punishment or reward. What ever happened to love of the game, people?
While in reality, Roberts wrote four separate suicide notes and claimed different motives for the crime, the movie latches on to the most Christian of all of them. He was mad about losing his daughter, so he wanted to offend God by committing an evil act. I could have saved him some time and pointed out that there were plenty of options that didn’t involve killing a bunch of kids. Check the Old Testament. Maybe wear a cotton/poly blend. Call his mother a name. Have you read that thing? Technically we aren’t even allowed to go to the bathroom.
In the real case, there are hints Roberts was a pedophile. In his notes, he confessed to molesting several relatives, though all of them deny it. There were claims he was going to molest, or did molest several of the girls prior to murdering them, but the cops got there quick enough that not much happened. The movie alludes to that last with a quick line, but they never dwell. This isn’t one of Lifetime’s horror movies about gun-toting pedophiles. This is 84 minutes that will wring every last drop of moisture from you through the eyesockets. It’s like some weird Arakeen vampire.
Now I desperately want a Jodorowsky Lifetime movie.
Eventually Ida comes around when another little girl (who lost her leg in the shooting), comes out of her coma and can tell the complete story. Mary Beth, before being murdered, already forgave Charles Roberts. Ida crumbles, and after that is able to forgive Amy. If Mary Beth can forgive a monster, Ida should be able to do the same for a woman who, let’s remember, didn’t actually do anything. Not that I’m saying it should be easy to forgive Amy. The human heart is a dank and sweaty place, clogged with chicken fat. It’s a wonder it can do anything at all, let alone something so difficult.
What never gets mentioned in the film is gun control. I realize that this isn’t a political blog, and I should keep things as apolitical as I can. Be funny, funnyman and all that. The problem is that it’s nigh impossible to say anything without being political. When scientific fact like vaccines, human-caused climate change, or evolution are considered political issues, it’s time to just throw oneself into the mine field and see what happens.
Lifetime clearly didn’t want to do that, and to be fair, the movie itself wasn’t about stopping another tragedy from happening. It was about the community recovering from one in an extremely unorthodox and uplifting way. That’s a good story to tell. It’s even a worthy story to tell. I just tend to be a solutions-oriented person who thinks maybe we should stop letting children be shot in schools.
It gets even more difficult to decide what to do in this case. Roberts used three guns that even most anti-gun folks think it’s probably okay to own. He probably wasn’t mentally ill from a clinical standpoint. Hard to believe, but true — mentally ill people are usually not behind mass shootings, and are in fact more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators. So what do we do? What’s the solution to the problem? Maybe the Amish had it right and all we can do is throw our hands up and assume God’s a douchebag.
What did we learn? Amish does not automatically equal funny. I may have to consult with the boys at the lab on this one.
Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: Amish Grace, barn raising, Lifetime, Lifetime Theater, school shooting
October 29, 2015
Tread Titan Perilously: Episode 4
Donald P. Bellisario and Twilight end up as part of the discussion as the Attack on Trost finally ends. Marco dies and, wait — who was Marco? Eren titans up to plug the hole in Wall Maria and Titan Hunter Lestat shows very little emotion. Erik is convinced the two have a meet cute, though. Erik and Justin discuss the problem of saying “people are dying” without showing it and General Prixis shouts a lot.
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Filed under: Transmissions Tagged: attack on titan, tread perilously
October 23, 2015
Now Fear This: Pontypool
“It’s a faaaaaake!” Like one person laughed at that.
Words are constantly on the precipice of meaning. For a word to have value, it has to be specific enough to differentiate it from all other words, yet versatile enough to come up more than once or twice in a conversation. The life cycle of the word is similar to the life cycle of a star: either expanding to a red supergiant and fizzling out, or collapsing into a super dense white dwarf and just never coming up in conversation. One of the words presently undergoing such an expansion is one dearly important to both hardcore horror fans as well as casual enthusiasts: zombies.
What the fuck is a zombie? Much like porn, it’s a judgment call. You can’t quite define it, but you know it when you see it. While many pop culture observers like to place the line with Danny Boyle’s modern classic 28 Days Later, the definition has been muddled from the beginning. After all, the undead creatures in the ur-zombie classic Night of the Living Dead are referred to as “ghouls,” and never even developed their memetic love of brains until 1985’s Return of the Living Dead. We call them “zombies,” lumping them with the undead slaves of Caribbean myth (and semi-reality), to the point that a classic horror film like White Zombie is not even recognizable to modern viewers as a zombie movie.
I’m not suggesting more precision in the term. That’s a level of academic fuckery I can’t handle, or at least not in this case. No, I’m far more interested in fighting my losing battles against “alright” or people saying “nice” after any sentence. You know, important shit. The reason I bring it up is that I don’t know if I can call this week’s Now Fear This, the lean and mean 2008 horror flick Pontypool, a zombie movie.
In the loosest sense of the term, sure. The afflicted people are “infected,” a Boyle-coined term for the living-zombie variant. They’re violent, but never toward each other, and move around in mobs. Yet they’re not all that interested in biting people, and the plague is spread not through bites and scratches, but through words. It gets pretty weird, but that’s what makes Pontypool such an unexpected gem. Bruce McDonald, the director of the film, refers to the creatures as “conversationalists,” but with all due respect to McDonald (who does fine work), that’s not catching on.
Disgraced shock jock Grant Mazzy (professional scary face-haver Stephen McHattie) has been exiled to morning talk radio in Middle-of-Nowhere, Canada, after his “taking no prisoners” schtick pissed off the wrong, or enough, people. With his rugged radio voice, cowboy pretensions, crippling alcoholism, and plethora of catchphrases, Mazzy is a compelling if unpolished radio persona, and he’s stuck reading missing cat notices for an audience numbering in the three figures. He’s punching well below his weight class, but he’s stuck in a bad situation and can’t see a way out.
The horror starts as a slow burn. First, it’s a strange woman Mazzy encounters on the way to the radio station, still pitch black and freezing in the Canadian winter morning. Then the reports start filtering in of mobs attacking the offices of local doctor John Mendez, a shady figure under investigation for writing unnecessary prescriptions. The citizens in the mob are disoriented, insensate to pain, and most unnervingly tend to parrot back whatever is said around them. While Mazzy, his producer, and his technician in the radio station initially think it’s a hoax, pretty soon it’s apparent that the tiny town of Pontypool has been quarantined by the military.
The innovative part of the storytelling is, with the exception of that early morning drive, the entire film takes place inside the radio station. It allows the viewer to experience the confusion and mounting terror along with the protagonists. We know it’s probably not a hoax since this is a horror movie, and it’s never a hoax unless there’s four teenagers and a dog trying to solve the whole mystery. What I appreciate is seeing a zombie — sorry conversationalist — outbreak from a new perspective. A lot of zombie entertainment glosses over the initial outbreak simply because it’s the hardest to envision, but that’s what makes those few movies that attempt it so valuable.
Setting this particular one in a radio station is the next bit of brilliance, building on the theme of language as the true enemy. Going from the weird verbal habits of the infected, eventually Mazzy, his producer, and comic relief Dr. Mendez work out that the plague itself is a linguistic one. English is infected. Certain words get stuck in the throats of the unfortunates, and as their bodies desperately repeat them over and over to rob them of their meaning, the disease compels them to find others to infect.
That concept, of repeating a word until it becomes a useless slurry of sound, is a familiar one to just about everyone, but a horror movie hinging on such a universal idea is only obvious in retrospect. Tying it to the body’s auto-immune response has it make sense the way good movie science should: intuitively and without sweating the small stuff. The film rather heavily hints that the radio station was unconsciously complicit in the spread of the virus, lingering on the posters of that missing cat. Yes, this might be the first case of Chekhov’s cat on record.
While Pontypool is a scary movie regardless of your origins, I can’t help but interpret it as a pointed commentary on the United States. After the plague’s origin is traced to English, the characters switch to French, and although they’re not as comfortable with the tongue, they can get by. This is while America is constantly in the grips of xenophobic terror that someone might expand our Spanish vocabulary beyond the Taco Bell menu. For bilingual Canada, an infection of English is a natural disaster of vast proportions, but for the United States it would be downright apocalyptic.
Pontypool is a must for zombie fans, even if you only want to argue about whether or not they’re precisely zombies. After all, as the definition of that word grows, it becomes as meaningless as other bizarre exclamations coming from the advancing horde.
Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: Canada, French, infected, Now Fear This, Pontypool, Stephen McHattie, word slurry, zombies
October 22, 2015
Tread Titan Perilously: Episode 3
Erik’s delight in Eren’s death is crushed as the master of shouting returns with the ability to become a Titan. Armin cries some more, but somehow saves the day. Justin’s love affair with Annie grows as he grafts the personality of director Werner Herzog onto her. John continues to doubt his leadership skills and Erik and Justin ponder what it would be like if Johnny Lawrence and the Kobra Kai were part of the Garrison. Justin praises one of Armin’s plans and Erik finds something to hold onto with the brief introductions of Levi and Petra. While the series finally has cool moments and ideas, the lack of characters continues to frustrate Justin and Erik as the attack on Trost enters its fifth episode.
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Filed under: Transmissions Tagged: attack on titan, tread perilously
October 16, 2015
CITY OF DEVILS month continues!
But there's more!
Come up with the title of a monsteriffic B-movie and hit us up on twitter with it with the hashtag #CGCreatureFeature2015 and it doesn't hurt using my handle @JustinSRobinson. Check out the whole thing at Candlemark & Gleam!
Yakmala: Yor, the Hunter from the Future
“Fuuuuuuuuuck Yooooooooooou!”
Yor, the Hunter from the Future has been enjoying something of a cult renaissance, which delights me, as I was fortunate enough to catch this one in its original theatrical run back during my larval state in the early ‘80s. While a lot of ‘80s cinema is defined by a level of insanity that can only be achieved by mainlining raw neon off the hood of a Ferrari Testarossa that’s also somehow Brigitte Nielsen’s flattop, Yor manages to look that in the face, give its glorious rocker mullet an insouciant flip, and ask, “What else you got?”
Tagline: He is from a future world. Trapped in prehistoric times. Searching for his past. A hunter of incredible power and strength. In his quest for his origin, he and the woman he loves must fight hostile tribes. Battle deadly beasts. And try to survive the violent forces of a newly born Earth.
More Accurate Tagline: He’s the man.
Guilty Party: Noted Italian vulgarian Antonio Marghetti, credited here as “Anthony M. Dawson,” had a six decade career and never directed a single movie whose title you wouldn’t be embarrassed to tell your grandfather. Taking an Argentine graphic novel called Henga, el cazador, — which, I guess “Henga” is Spanish for “Yor” — he adapted it into a four part miniseries that was later turned into this. Calling it the best movie of his career is inaccurate. Calling it the best movie of anyone’s career is coming a little closer.
Synopsis: Yor (Reb Brown) enters this movie like he entered every room in the early ‘80s: mostly naked, covered in oil, and followed by his own cheesy theme song. He’s got everything a caveman superhero needs: a loincloth, some ragged boots, a big stone axe, a mysterious medallion hinting at Chosen One status, and Markie Post’s hairdo from the third season of Night Court.
Post’s world, she’s the maaa-aan!
Meanwhile, a pair of cavemen go hunting. There’s Pag, an old guy with a bow who turns out to be inexplicably awesome, because everything in Yor is inexplicably awesome, and Ka-Laa, a young cavewoman who looks like Adrienne Barbeau’s much hotter younger sister. They catch a baby pig in dinosaur makeup, but wouldn’t you know it, the thing’s mom shows up. This monster is some kind of Tricerastegatopsasaur, and it has needle sharp teeth because the creature creator was Napoleon Dynamite or something. The first thing the Tricerastegatopsasaur does is utterly annihilate its kid with an errant tail swipe. Good move there.
Yor prances in, jumps around like an asshole, and straight up owns the Tricerastegatopsasaur. Pag lets Yor know that he’s seen a medallion like Yor’s on a woman who lives with the desert people. She’s a daughter of the gods. “Sweet,” Yor thinks, chowing down on the monster meat and watching Ka-Laa belly dance.
Then some purple cavemen attack because the movie abruptly remembered it’s awesome. Yor gets knocked out, Ka-Laa gets taken hostage, and Pag wanders around looking grouchy like an Italian Wilford Brimley. Once Yor comes to, he decides that he is just not prepared to take any more shit, like, ever, and utterly crushes the purple caveman tribe. He was going to rescue the women of the village, but about halfway through decided to fuck everything until the end of time, and just drown everyone instead. Yor is so fucking metal, he’s basically just a guitar solo with a stone axe.
Then he wanders off to the desert with Ka-Laa and Pag in tow. Eventually he finds the diseased people, who have made a hostage/goddess out of Roa, the only other blond in the world. She’s from space or something. Who knows. Yor has never seen a civilization he wasn’t prepared to raze to the fucking ground for looking at him funny, and promptly does the same to the desert people, “rescuing” Roa along the way.
Roa decides she’s in love with Yor, and he’s no dummy. Even Pag tries to talk Ka-Laa into a sister wives situation. She’s not having it, and eventually tries to kill Roa. The remnants of the purple cavemen show up, and Yor kills them, but not before Roa dies. She gives her medallion to Yor and points him in the direction of an island castle she’s “suddenly remembered.”
Yor heads to the coast where he kills another dinosaur, and someone else tries to hand him a second wife. Yor’s like, “When did my life become a fire sale on bitches?” and turns the guy down. He’s got Ka-Laa, and that’s all Yor needs. Well, that, hairspray, baby oil, and civilizations to destroy. DING DING DING! I said “civilization” so it’s time for a little genocide! Only this time, it’s lasers coming out of nowhere, so shit’s getting weird. Yor isn’t even involved in this one. It’s like God is following him around.
Yor sails to this island and finds an entire civilization of Jim Carrolls, ruled by a creep in a cape calling himself Overlord, living in a giant power station or something. Overlord has an army of robots whose resemblance to Darth Vader I’m sure is purely coincidental. The Jim Carrolls are in revolt, and their leaders are Blind Ricardo Montalban and French Jenny Agutter. Anyway, Yor was the son of their rebel leader who got exiled, and now he’s back, so the rebellion is on.
As the theme song was so helpful in informing us, this is Yor’s world, and he’s the man. The rebellion is a success, and Yor flies off through fire in a goddamn spaceship with the Jim Carrolls to start a new civilization.
Which he will destroy because this is Yor we’re talking about.
Life-Changing Subtext: Only our Aryan superiors can rescue us from savagery!
Defining Quote: “Damn. Talking. Box!” Yor has found an artifact from the Jim Carrolls, but doesn’t get it. He knows he’s not having a single minute of it, though.
Standout Performance: If I give this to anyone but Reb Brown, I feel like he’s going to come back in time go full Zabka on me.
What’s Wrong: Nothing. Everything. This is 90 minutes of delirious ‘80s insanity, featuring cavemen, dinosaurs, robots, lasers, and of course nuclear war. Oh yeah, it’s a big plot twist that this is the far future after a nuclear war, but the fact that we’re in the future is given away right in the title.
Flash of Competence: Yor, the Hunter from the Future is unconcerned with such prosaic concepts as “competence.”
Best Scenes: When Yor wrecks shop on the purple cavemen, he destroys one of their bridges. The cavemen sensibly have a backup bridge. Also, I’m overselling “bridge” a bit here. It’s a ladder held together by dried eels and poop or something. Anyway, this exact thing happens to Yor at the end of the movie in Overlord’s base. Does Overlord have a second bridge? He does not.
What he has is a fucking trapeze. Yor swings across, and that’s fine, because we’re talking about Yor, a man so virile that 50% of the women who watched this later gave birth to arm wrestling. Then he’s stuck, because the wire went to the other side, and Yor doesn’t really get how pendulums work. Well, Pag to the rescue. Pag swings over like it ain’t no thang, and halfway over, just flips over to hold the goddamn trapeze with this withered old man legs and catches Yor with his hands.
Pag was sitting on some Cirque du Soleil-level shit this whole time.
Transcendent Moment: I glossed over exactly how Yor mounts his rescue for Ka-Laa. You were probably thinking, “Well, it’s Yor, so maybe he sneaked in or just charged the front door.” You can be forgiven for thinking that, because the level of awesome Yor employs just getting from place to place doesn’t even have a word for it.
Yor sees a giant bat flying around, and thinks to himself, “Well, fuck that thing. Fuck everything,” and then the theme song starts rattling through this head and he knows he’s on the clock. He needs to do something that’ll be commemorated on the sides of vans for all eternity.
He fells the giant bat with a single arrow and literally the only thing that’s surprising is nothing is on fire. The thing isn’t quite dead yet so Yor just punches it over the threshold, and when that monster gets to giant bat heaven, it’s going to march right up to Bat St. Peter and be like, “Dude, you will not believe what just happened to me.”
Yor isn’t done yet. He picks up the bat’s carcass, and suddenly the theme song isn’t just in Yor’s head. No, it’s blaring on the soundtrack, telling us this is “Yor’s world,” and “he’s the man,” two useless pieces of information because this motherfucker is hang gliding on a giant bat corpse to double-kick a caveman in his goddamn stupid purple face.
Even typing that sentence made my balls grow balls.
Yor, the Hunter from the Future is a must see for anyone who likes anything, really. This is Yor’s world, after all. And he’s the man.
He’s the maaa-aan.
Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion, Yakmala! Tagged: cavemen, dinosaurs, He's the man, reb brown, robots, Yakmala!, Yor, Yor the Hunter from the Future, yor's world
October 15, 2015
Tread Titan Perilously – Episode 2
After a one week sabbatical, Erik and Justin return to the Bavarian future realm of Attack on Titan to watch episodes 4-7 of the series. It does not go smoothly. Erik cheers at the apparent death of Eren and both Erik and Justin wonder why Armin is still alive. Whole squadrons of scouts are slaughtered as the Titans advance on Wall Rose and, much to Erik’s surprise, we learn Eren was homicidal from age ten. While Mikasa gets the spotlight for a few fleeting scenes, the rest of the unknown cast bog down the proceedings in crises of the soul as the Titans continue their attack.
Our hosts have been told the show will soon get good, but it is already too late?
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Filed under: Puffery Tagged: attack on titan, tread perilously
