Avast Matey! Arr! Uhhh... Avast!

So I took a quiz, and here's my pirate name:

My pirate name is:

Mad Tom Kidd

Every pirate is a little bit crazy. You, though, are more than just a little bit. Even though you're not always the traditional swaggering gallant, your steadiness and planning make you a fine, reliable pirate. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from fidius.org.

The funny thing is that I took a Myers-Brigg test last year, and I'm an ISFJ. This personality type is all about the "steadiness and planning" that will make me a "fine, reliable pirate".

Sigh. I guess even in the swashbuckling pirate world, I'm the same person. Arr!

This Week's Movie (Posters) No. 2

A quick peek at the posters for this week’s opening movies:

Legend of Zorro – This falls into the “big head on top” family of movie posters (like last week’s Dreamer). Like I said before, there's nothing wrong with it – it’s a tried & true format for a movie poster. Catherine Zeta-Jones (or as we call her around here, CZJ) is looking good. If I’m not mistaken, this is the sequel to the movie that made her into a household name.

Here’s what bugs me about the poster for this movie: there were a couple of teaser posters realeased earlier this summer that showed Antonio Banderas and CZJ individually. On the final poster, they simply took these images, enlarged them or decreased them in size and pasted them together. Sin City did the same thing with the all the characters grouped together. Now, there’s nothing wrong with the final layout, but would it kill them to use some different images between the posters?

Prime – Sparse, clean layout. Simple text at the top, main characters at the bottom. No other miscellaneous clutter on the poster. This movie isn’t about the setting or the time period, it’s purely about the people. This poster says to me it’s a comedic drama about the emotional interactions between these three characters.

Somehow, I don’t think there’s going to be any explosions or gunfire in this movie.

It also says to me that Meryl Streep is doing this movie to collect a paycheck. I guess for every Bridges of Madison County needs to be balanced out with a She-Devil.


Saw II – I really like this poster, although the layout kind of reminds me of the one done for Hannibal. Nice colors, cool "Saw" title font, really good tagline: “Oh yes…there will be blood”. Tells you exactly what you need to know (It's safe to say that this won’t be a double feature with Prime). I would have left off the two fingers in the “2”, but I guess that’s the cheeky humor in this movie.

Another thing that I like about this movie is that I've seen a bunch of posters for this movie that are all very different. I really like the variety between them – tells you someone was thinking. Movies spend so much on marketing, why can't they pay their graphic designers a little more to produce a few more designs?

The Weatherman – This is the type of movie that Nicholas Cage should be in. I like him much more as a sympathetic loser rather than the action hero (I know he’s going to be Ghost Rider, but that’s going to be more about the special effects). Who else can do that forlorn expression? He also does good stoned look, like he did way back in Valley Girl.

This is a pretty good poster which probably highlights the funniest part of the movie – Nicholas Cage getting pegged by food and drinks. During the trailer, I always get a kick out of seeing him get nailed in a head with a Big Gulp. That’s comedy.

Come to think of it, I have spilled a whole super-size Coke in my car before. That wasn't funny.

The End At Last! The Horror!

Great Caesar’s Ghost! It’s the final installment of my Halloween tribute (my list of top 13 horror movies that scared me, made me go “yeesh”, or ones that were just memorable to me in some way, even if the movie sucked):

3. Hellraiser (1987) – Why do I like this movie so much? Do I like seeing people without skin? No. Do I like seeing people get hit in the head with a hammer? No. Do I like seeing a guy eat a handful of crickets? Ummm…no. Maybe I’m just a fan of Andrew Robinson, who played the killer in the first Dirty Harry movie. Uh…no.

Then why do I like this movie?

Cenobites, of course!

Before I get ahead of myself, here’s the story of Hellraiser: Frank, a guy who is in search of new sensual “pleasures”, acquires a mysterious cube puzzlebox. He solves the puzzle and opens the box, then all these hooks and chains appear out of nowhere and tears him to shreds.

Later, Frank’s brother Larry moves into Frank’s old house with his daughter Kirsty and his new wife Julia. Larry cuts his hand in the house and somehow brings Frank back to life, although he has no skin and requires more human blood to become whole. He gets Julia to help him lure victims to the house so he can drain their blood. Kirsty finds out what’s going on and runs away, taking the puzzlebox with her. She manages to open the puzzlebox, and suddenly appear the Cenobites, demons from hell. Before they take her away, she makes a deal and brings them to Frank, who had escaped from their clutches. The Cenobites tear Frank to shreds again, and everyone lives happily ever after. Got it?

When I first saw this movie, I thought the Cenobites were the coolest thing since sliced bread. They all wear black leather, and they are all distorted or mutilated in some way. Look at these guys, they’re like rock stars!

They should be in a band, although they wouldn’t move around too much on stage. In all the Hellraiser movies, I’ve never seen a Cenobite run. They just kind of move slowly and stare at you. That’s what makes them so cool. They’re a different type of monster that doesn’t need to chase you around with a big knife; just being around them means that you’ll have hooks and chains flying at you.

Unfortunately, none of the sequels to Hellraiser (six so far, with a seventh one coming) have matched the quality of the first one. Heck, one of them even had the dreaded “Alan Smithee” as a director. But as long as Pinhead and his Cenobites are around, I’m sure they’ll keep churning them out. Hooray!


2. The Shining (1980) – There are scary movies, and there are SCARY movies; The Shining fits neatly into the latter. I’ve seen the film a few times over the years, and I still get chills when I think about it.

As you probably know, The Shining is based on a book by Stephen King and was directed by Stanley Kubrick. The story is about a man who takes a job as a caretaker for a large hotel which was closed for the winter. The man settles into the hotel with his wife and young son. Unfortunately, the previous caretaker went insane and killed his family. Slowly, the man loses his grip on reality and begins to acting irrationally and interacts with people who aren’t really there. He finally loses it completely and goes after his wife and son in a murderous rampage.

This is not your typical horror movie with monsters and pop-up-from-behind-the-bushes scares. It works more with mood and atmosphere, turning the hotel setting from something innocuous into someplace you really don’t want to be. It kind of makes you appreciate smallness of your typical living space instead of being in a huge empty building – it leaves way too much to the imagination.

One of the scariest scenes is where the son is riding around the corridors on his Big Wheel. Following along with him in a first-person view, you would think it be lots of fun riding down corridors with out any obstructions. That is, until you see little twin girls standing in front of you. The way the film forces you to view this perspective is pretty effective, as if you are standing there with no where else to go.

There are a lot of other things in the movie that are really freaky. Old women in bathtubs. Little boys saying “redrum” in squeaky voices. Shelley Duvall.

The sequence towards the end where Shelley Duvall is running through the hotel and seeing everything go to hell is one of the most unsettling things you’ll ever see in a movie.

I would call The Shining one of the scariest movies of all time. If you haven’t seen this movie, check it out. I guarantee it will stick with you for a long time afterwards.

1. Carrie (1976) – Another Steven King movie. Go figure. Hard to believe that this is the same guy who wrote Maximum Overdrive, the movie about trucks that come to life and kill people. Oh well, they can’t all be winners.

Carrie is the story about a high school teenager who is constantly abused and teased by her classmates. She also has a psycho mother at home, who is super-religious and forces Carrie to stay in the closet all the time. During the school prom, some of the kids play a prank on Carrie, by pouring a bucket of pig’s blood on her when she goes onstage to win the rigged prom queen event. Unfortunately for everyone involved Carrie has telekinetic powers, and she unleashes them on the student body and gets her ultimate revenge.

OK, here’s my story with the movie: I was about nine years old when I saw Carrie on TV, and it scared the bejeezus out of me. The stupid thing was that I clearly remember thinking I was “grown up” enough to handle this movie. Boy, was I wrong.

The evening I saw this movie, my Dad was away on business, and my sisters were at summer camp, leaving only my Mom and me in the house. Our family house was two levels, and my bedroom was the only one on the bottom floor, while everyone else slept upstairs. My room was adjacent to a dark corridor that led to the garage. Since I was nine, I still had quite got used to sleeping in complete darkness; but I tried.

That evening I went to bed, Carrie’s bloody image plastered in my head. I couldn’t sleep at all, in fear that she was going to come get me. She was probably going to come out of that dark corridor right next to my room. So I’m lying there, wide awake in a pitch black room in utter silence.

Then I hear a crash come from the corridor next to my bedroom.

Let me tell you, I made a beeline for my parent’s bedroom. I woke my Mom up, telling her that I had a nightmare and couldn’t sleep (I guess I figured it would be a little foolish to tell her Carrie was downstairs). She let me sleep in their bedroom for the rest of the night.

So it turns out that it wasn’t Carrie walking though our house. A box that was stacked in the hall had fallen down. But how did it fall? Hmmm…..

The image of Carrie covered in pig’s blood with all the uplighting is one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen. The big prom scene is done with a split screen: Carrie’s bloody face on one side, and the destruction she is causing on the other. It’s really an effective technique, because it gives you no rest from the terror and the carnage that you would get if they had spliced the scenes together.

To this day, I’m still freaked out by this movie, which I’ll never see again. I’m also still afraid of Sissy Spacek. I don’t believe I seen any of the movies she’s done after this. Who can blame me? I look at her today, and I still see that young girl bathed in blood. Yeesh. My number one scariest movie, without a doubt.

Yes, it’s finally over. Maybe if I see at least ten worthwhile horror movies in the next twelve months, I’ll do another list. Pray that I don’t….Bwah ha ha!!!

Next: My Top 10 Thanksgiving Movies

Just kidding.

Yet Even More of The Horror!

Hang on, folks; we’re almost there. Continuing my Halloween tribute with my list of top 13 horror movies that scared me, made me go “yeesh”, or ones that were just memorable to me in some way (even if the movie sucked):

6. 13 Ghosts (2001) – The critics (and apparently the general public) didn’t like this movie, but I did. Sure, it wasn’t a masterpiece, but I though it had some ideas that were really cool.

13 Ghosts was a remake of a 1960 film about ghosts inhabiting a haunted house which could only be seen through the use of special glasses. In the original film, people in the theater were given red & blue “Illusion-O” glasses that were supposed to enable them to see the ghosts on the movie screen. The glasses were even supposed to help you see ghosts outside of the theater! Zoinks!

In the remake, the special glasses are still integral to the story (although the audience sadly doesn’t get a pair). The new movie takes place in a house with constantly shifting glass walls designed to trap the ghosts inside. The walls where the ghosts can’t pass through are inscribed with a special writing. It’s a pretty clever update to the traditional spooky haunted house.

The 13 ghosts in the movie are all tortured souls with different names and characteristics: The Bound Woman, The Angry Princess, The Jackal, The Hammer, and so forth. On the extras sections of the DVD release, each ghost even has its own little mini-biography about how they came to be. For a comic book-geek like me, it’s a nice touch to give further definition to the characters in the movie.

This isn’t a scary movie, but it’s a fun one.


5. Audition (1999) – This is a Japanese movie directed by Takashi Miike, who apparently is the master of making disturbing films (I haven’t seen any of this other movies). Audition starts off as somewhat of a romantic drama, and then gets progressively weirder until the very last scene, which sneaks up from behind you and whacks you in the back of the head.

Audition is the story of a widowed TV producer who holds a fake audition to screen potential female companions. The one he selects is a meek, demure young woman with a mysterious past. Over the course of the film, the widower discovers more and more of her past, from her involvement with a gruesome murder to her troubled childhood. Both the viewer and the widower can see some potential trouble on the horizon, but it doesn’t prepare you for what’s to come.

Without giving too much away, the final sequence of the movie reveals his girlfriend’s true nature. It’s shocking, hard to watch, and may make some people blow chunks. Wow! What a movie.


4. The Ring (2002) / Ringu (1998) – I’m grouping these two movies together because while one is a remake of the other, both are particularly good.

Both movies have identical stories, about a female reporter investigating the deaths caused by watching a mysterious video tape. The story goes that if you watch this tape, you only have seven days to live before you die a horrible death. The reporter watches the tape, and then has to race against time to unravel the truth behind the curse before her fate is sealed.

It’s interesting how closely the US version mirrors the Japanese version. It kind of makes you wonder why they bothered to make another movie in the first place. Even better, they could have just brought Ringu into US theaters (and dubbed it into English for the vast majority who don’t like subtitles). However, it’s not surprising that the film was “Americanized”, since it’s been done before (like with Godzilla, where scenes with Raymond Burr were added in the US release).

The good news is that they didn’t do a bad job with the remake. I really liked the gray, bleak colors used throughout the film. The quick little subliminal snippets of the videotape were effective. Also, the US version did manage to add some additional scenes exploring the story behind the little girl that wasn’t in the original Japanese version.

Ultimately, the scariest parts come from the Japanese original, especially the little girl emerging from the well in the end. I prefer the Japanese version, which pretty much shows just the eye of the girl. The US movie showed more of a monster in a dress, which kind of cheapened it for me.

All in all, both movies are definitely worth watching, and both will make you wary of little girls with long black hair.


Next: The Big Finale! Eeeeeeee!

More of The Horror!

OK, on with the list. Continuing my Halloween tribute with my top 13 horror movies that scared me, made me go “yeesh”, or ones that were just memorable to me in some way (even if the movie sucked):

10. Creep (2004) – I bought this DVD in London last summer as a souvenir because a) the movie takes place in the Underground, the subway system we used to get all over London, and b) it had a special lenticular cover of a bloody handprint sliding downward….I’m a sucker for those sort of things.

The movie is about a young woman (Franka Potente of Run Lola Run) who gets trapped in an Underground station after the system shuts down. She encounters a horrendous creature in the tunnels, which was a product of a secret experimental project, in a secret underground lab facility….in the Underground tunnels. Hey, it could happen, right?

As it turns out, the movie wasn’t that great. It wasn’t extraordinarily bad; it was just kind of your run-of-the-mill horror movie: a little gruesome, but not particularly scary. I just added it to my list to get the most out of the ten pounds I paid for it.


9. Dog Soldiers (2002) – This movie was an underrated and ignored horror film when it first came out. It’s a small-budget British production about a group of soldiers out in the forest on a training exercise who get attacked by werewolves. The chase ends up in a small cottage in the woods, where the big soldier versus werewolf battle takes place.

The movie works because it’s a simple story with plenty of excitement and thrills, good characters, and loads of blood & guts thrown all over the place. It’s also free of any CGI effects, and the werewolves surprisingly look really good. Who knew a guy in a werewolf suit could be so convincing?


8. The Exorcist (1973) – I actually saw The Exorcist on TV when I was young. Back in the day before cable and VCR’s, network TV used to show movies on prime time. If you didn’t see a movie in the theater, chances were that it would be shown on TV a year or two later. This is how I saw The Exorcist, because there was no way in the world my parents would take me to see this movie at the theater.

That was a good thing, though. I probably would have been traumatized if I saw this thing in a dark theater. A really scary movie is a little less frightening with regular commercial breaks. The images of Linda Blair in that movie are still very vivid to me: thrashing around in her bed, turning her head 360 degrees, spewing vomit all over priests. Pretty freaky stuff for a little kid. The weird thing is that it didn’t really keep me awake at night. What the movie did do is burn its images into my memory, which says a lot for it.


7. Magic (1978) – OK, I actually didn’t see this movie. But the advertisement on TV still had a big effect on a young, impressionable child in the late 70’s.

Magic was a movie starring Anthony Hopkins as schizophrenic ventriloquist who suspects his dummy is committing murders. The movie also had Ann-Margaret as the love interest and was directed by Richard Attenborough (that’s right, John Hammond from Jurassic Park).

What freaked me out was the commercial for this movie: it’s hard to describe, but it only featured the head of the talking dummy, saying some sort of scary rhyme. I don’t remember what it said, all I remember this evil little wooden head almost made me crap my pants. I had to turn away whenever that commercial came on. You think ventriloquist dummies are harmless? Not this one; this is one scary dummy. You’ll crap in your pants too.

Will I ever actually watch this movie? No way, man. I like my pants nice and clean.


Come back soon, more of the list to come! Aieeeeeeee!

This Week's Movie (Posters)

I’m going to take a quick detour from my horror movie list; don’t worry people (all three of you), it will be back next time.

I was looking at an e-mail showing the movies that are opening this weekend, and I was paying close attention to the movie posters, none of which I had seen before. Here are my two cents:

Doom – This one kind of grabbed me because it’s not your usual movie poster. Obviously they are giving tribute to their source material in a big way, which I don’t believe any of other video game movie has done before. You have the game’s original logo, and you also have the classic first-person shooter view.

Does it work as a poster? I’m not really sure…something seems a little off about it to me. Maybe the first person view just doesn't work as a static image. I think a large segment of the population won’t get it, but they are probably the ones who won’t see this movie. I’m really surprised they didn’t put The Rock’s picture on here since he’s the star of the movie. Everybody loves The Rock. I’d be shocked if they didn’t use a different illustration for the DVD.


Dreamer – A movie about a horse? With Dakota Fanning? I’m so there! Just kidding. What struck me about this poster is that I think I’ve seen this layout about a million times before. It’s the “big heads on top, smaller story-related depiction on the bottom”. I could be wrong about this, but I bet I could find a bunch of posters that look awfully similar.

Not that there’s anything wrong with it. As far as little girl-meets-horse movies go, I think its fine.


Stay – This one kind of comes close to the “big head on top”-type poster, but they managed to do something different with the diagonal framing of the actor’s faces. I actually like this poster; it’s got a nice color scheme and I like the font they used throughout. The poster is intriguing enough where it teases you enough so that you’re curious to find what it’s all about. I’ve seen the trailer for this movie, and I think it does a good job of portraying the schizophrenic theme of the movie. I don’t know if Stay is any good, but I would give the poster an “A”.


North Country – When I look at this poster, here’s what it says to me: “Hi, I’m Charlize Theron, Academy Award-winning actress. I didn’t really want to star in Aeon Flux, but my agent convinced me that it would establish my credibility as a well-rounded actor. Plus, it would give me a whole new fan base among the science fiction geek crowd. But didn’t I pay my dues already with Reindeer Games?”

“Now this is the kind of movie an A-list actress like me should be making. An underprivileged single mother who is forced to fight for what she believes in against overwhelming odds. Come see North Country and then watch me steamroll my way to another Oscar.”

I actually have nothing against Charlize Theron. She seems like a very nice person.

The Horror! The Horror!

As a Halloween salute, I’m going to jump on the bandwagon and do a list of my top horror movies (because I can never resist a good cliché). My list contains movies that scared me, ones that made me go “yeesh”, and ones that were just memorable to me in some way (even though the movie may have sucked). It’s my list, so I can do whatever I want. I’m even going to make it a top 13 list, not a top 10 list. Bwah ha ha!

13. Trilogy of Terror (1975) – I saw this movie on TV when I was about eight years old. The movie was an anthology of three stories that featured Karen Black in different starring roles for all three. I couldn’t tell you anything about the first two, but the last story was about a lady who acquires a tiny little African doll with big teeth. Somehow it comes to life and chases her around the apartment, biting at her feet. For an eight year old kid, this freaked me out. Little toys aren't supposed to come to life, and if they do they're supposed to be your friend.

A few years later, my family went to Universal Studios for vacation, and I saw the same little doll on display in an exhibit of horror movie props. Luckily, it didn’t chase me around the park.


12. Happy Birthday To Me (1981) – When I was in junior high, this was the very first slasher movie I saw in the theater. It was one of the many copycat movies made during the craze started by movies like Friday the 13th and Halloween. The gimmick for this movie was that a) the murders were supposed to be gruesomely unique, and b) the movie starred Melissa Sue Anderson, Mary from Little House on the Prairie!

Besides the shish kebab impalement depicted on the movie poster, the only other murder I remember went like this: a beefy teenager was bench pressing weights, and the killer (who the teenager knew, but didn't know he was the killer) was spotting him. Somehow the teenager gets stuck with a weight that he couldn’t get back on the rack, so he’s trapped holding the barbell directly over his neck. The killer takes a weight and holds it over the teenager’s groin; he drops it, and the teenager drops the barbell on his own throat. Splat! Nothing hurts more than getting a weight dropped on your package.


11. Carnival of Souls (1962) – I first saw this black & white movie on late-night TV, and it creeped me out. Many years later I saw it on DVD, and it didn’t really do anything for me. But it’s still a unique film, given that it’s a low-budget movie by a director that had previously only made industrial and educational films. Intentional or not, the movie has an eerie visual style that rises above B-movie cheesiness.

The movie is about a woman who survives a car accident and moves to Utah to take a job as a church organist. As she settles into her new life, she begins to see ghostly apparitions that only she can see. The ghostly encounters become more frequent, and she starts having her own trippy experiences where no one can see her. Ultimately she ends up at a deserted carnival for the big finale, and we learn the secret of her connection with the ghosts.


Stay tuned for more of the list! Wooooooo!