TARZAN AND HIS MATE (1934) AT BAM THIS SUNDAY!

Tarzan and Jane: one of the movies' great couples.

The best Tarzan movie ever made, 1934's TARZAN AND HIS MATE, is playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, aka BAM, this Sunday at 2PM and 6:50PM and I cannot urge you strongly enough to see it. I've already written about it and its predecessor at length and that piece can be found here, but let it suffice to say that this pre-Hays Code masterpiece features amounts of sex and violence you would never have expected from a film of its era. We ran it during a now infamous Saturday afternoon during my days at the barbecue joint and unintentionally scandalized the patrons who were telling their young kids about how mom and dad grew up watching the wholesome thrills of Tarzan movies on Channel 5 back in the days, but none of them had ever seen the uncut version of TARZAN AND HIS MATE, and believe me when I say the flick's a major eye-opener. HIGHEST RECOMMENDATION.

ST. TRINIAN'S (2007) OPENS IN A U.S. RELASE TODAY-TAKE YOUR TWEENER DAUGHTERS IMMEDIATELY!!!

Britain's 2007 reboot of the venerable ST. TRINIAN'S series gets an American release starting today, and I strongly urge you to drag your tweener daughters to see it immediately. I already reviewed it a few months back after seeing it in England and bringing back the DVD, and that review can be read here. Face it, America: our young ladies need some humorous corruption and the girls of St. Trinian's are just the ones for the job, so I recommend the film for girls of about ten and up (and also for boys who've figured out that girls are a bit of alright, as well as boys who are budding "Friends of Dorothy" with wicked senses of humor). And parents will more than likely enjoy it too, so it's a win-win. TRUST YER BUNCHE!!!

REGARDING DAGON

It's once again time for the annual gorging on horror flicks in anticipation of and setting the proper mood for Halloween, so in case you find yourself in need of a terrific horror film that you haven't yet seen, allow me to recommend DAGON without hesitation, a movie I first saw during my trip home for Thanksgiving back in 2002 or thereabouts (in a double feature with the equally excellent DOG SOLDIERS, but that's a totally different animal). It's rather low on gore and violence, but it has a creep-factor of about 9 out of a possible 10, and if you've ever read any H.P. Lovecraft, it perfectly captures his mood and tone while transplanting the events to a modern day setting. There's a very to-the-point review of it that says everything I would have written about it over at TELEPORT CITY, so check it out if you're intrigued.

Sing along, kids: "Under the seeea...Oh, shit!!!"

DAGON's by the same people who did the superb and much more over-top-gory RE-ANIMATOR and FROM BEYOND (both highly recommended), but it's my favorite of the three for reasons the review nails perfectly. And despite my well-known love of gore, violence and mayhem, give me real, creepy scares and a compelling story over that stuff any day, and I hope we're on the same wavelength about that. But one brief caveat before you read the recommended review: TELEPORT CITY's reviews tend to start of with lengthy preliminary info before they get down to reviewing the movie in question and that's certainly the case with DAGON, but I urge you to read the whole article. The reviewer gives the newbie a crash course in Lovecraft basics and what he writes is both accurate and very funny, so don't skip over it!

ZOMBIELAND (2009)

It's been said by various highbrow film critics and analysts that horror movies reflect the societal zeitgeist, so I don't know what the past decade's spate of zombie movies has to say about our collective state of mind. Films about the undead are nothing new, but there just seems to be a lot of them lately and they vary widely in quality and I'm not really the guy to comment on them fairly from a zombie fan's point of view — something my pal Jim Browski is definitely well suited to do, and so I extend the invitation for a guest post — but I will say that ZOMBIELAND is a fast-paced and fun take on the whole "it's the end of the world and the hungry dead are everywhere scenario." Kind of a comedic head-on collision of a Romeroesque apocalypse scenario and the visceral thrills of a "shooter" video game, the film has little on its mind other than being an amusing, violent popcorn flick, and that's a goal at which it succeeds quite well.

Just a typical day in ZOMBIELAND, U.S.A.

ZOMBIELAND drops the audience right into a world already crawling with zombies, and while it's bad enough that legions of ravenous flesh-eaters are literally every goddamned place, what's even worse is that these aren't the rigor-ridden shamblers as seen in most horror films of yore; rather they're quite spry and able to sprint after you, so unless you're in good shape, that's your ass.

The film's ostensible hero is "Columbus" (Jesse Eisenberg), so named for his intended destination, where he hopes against all odds to find his parents still alive. He's a college-age nerd and loner whose lifetime of friendlessness has given him time to think and develop an analytical mind, and once the zombie plague breaks out he's ready for it with a list of basic common sense rules relating to the world's new and utterly deadly status quo. With damned near everybody (un)dead, it's a simple matter to appropriate vehicles and high-gauge weapons, but when Columbus totals his car, he hits the road on foot and eventually is given a lift by "Tallahassee" (Woody Harrelson, looking exactly like a comedic version of his Mickey Knox from NATURAL BORN KILLERS), a redneck genius at zombie-killing who shows up in an SUV equipped with a cow-catcher up front. The two set off together and then encounter a pair of sisters, "Wichita" (Emma Stone) and "Little Rock" (Abigail Breslin), a couple of smart, ruthless and totally survival-oriented chicks whose personal philosophy can be summed up as "trust no one but each other and look out for Number One." These two give the guys quite a hard time and outfox them on a few occasions before teaming up with them and more or less aimlessly journeying through "Zombieland" (the nickname for the world at large) and becoming a loose-knit family in the process.

The family that slays together, stays together: (L to R) Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), Wichita (Emma Stone), Little Rock (Abigail Breslin) and Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson).

To say more would give away a lot of fun stuff — especially a major surprise cameo that I know for a fact has been let out of the bag on many sites and in many reviews, but I'm not gonna do that; in fact, if anyone starts to tell you about the cameo sequence, punch them in the mouth, Hard — So I'll just stop right here and instead off a little advice.

Go see ZOMBIELAND while it's in the theater. It's thoroughly entertaining, very funny, and is definitely worth paying full price to see. In terms of attitude, it's America's answer to SHAUN OF THE DEAD (though admittedly not as good), and the appetite for destruction that is so hard-wired into the American psyche is given full unintentional (?) reign. However I do have two warnings about the film:

1. As previously stated, do not let anyone tell you about the cameo sequence.
2. Giving away nothing in the plot, much of the film's running time is spent clearly establishing Wichita and Little Rock as ruthless, cunning, survival-minded opportunists who are perfectly suited to strategically getting by in a world overrun by flesh-eating zombies, yet during the final act they do something completely stupid that the audience by that time understands with absolute certainty that they would NOT do. The move in question violates what they (and we) know about what attracts zombies en masse and no one in the audience I saw it with bought it when the script called for a needless bit of conflict. Luckily there was still a lot of gore, violence and humor to follow, and what came before was so good that I was willing to let the major scripting fuckup slide.

So with that said, check out ZOMBIELAND. And if you have kids who want to see it, I say it's perfectly suitable for any who are around ten and older, provided they can handle the gore. The cursing is nothing they don't hear everyday at school (or, if truth be told, at home), there's no sex, and the violence is nothing new to them if they've played some of the more violent adult-oriented video games (c'mon, don't delude yourself into thinking that they haven't), and when you add a general sense of good-natured fun to those elements, I'd say it's really little worse than an exceptionally gory PG-13. And for those of you who like to have these things spelled out on a numbered rating, I'd give this a very strong four out of five, with the one star it requires for a perfect score being held back solely for the very stupid script fuckup near the end.

Lesson to be learned: let no zombie stand in the way of Tallahassee's quest for Twinkies.

DOWN AT THE OL' SWIMMIN' HOLE

NOTE: While technically not occurring on the sidewalks of New York, I do feel this entry warrants inclusion in my category chronicling the wonderful sights experienced in this magnificent Rotten Apple.

So here it is, Monday again, and another work week begins. I arrived at work this morning and headed toward the kitchen to snag my frosty mug from the freezer — can't have mt dose of Dr. Pepper-provided caffeine without it! — and heard revolted groans of disgust issuing from the humble eating area. I walked in and found my co-worker/pal Nick staring aghast toward the sink after washing his hands and apparently catching sight of something nasty, so I asked him what had set him off. With eyes bugged in disbelief, he gestured toward the right of the sink with his head and my gaze followed his lead, finally freezing on the following charming sight:

Four good-sized NYC cockroaches had been doing their thing in the kitchen over the weekend while we humans weren't infesting the place, and from the look of things it seems they decided to use the jar where people leave utensils to soak as a a swimming pool. Most likely Borgiaed by the dish-washing soap that saturated the water, the four little corpses bobbed silently amidst the spoon and two knives in what reminded me of a blattidae performance piece.

Though several of my co-workers were revolted by this tableau, some of us whipped out our cameras and captured it for posterity, far more intrigued by the unintentional beauty of the composition than grossed-out by the fact that there were four thumb-sized insectoid vermin bobbing deceased in a receptacle for instruments used by humans to eat and handle food with with.

If I were an ancient Greek I might read some sort of omen from this happenstance, but what could it possibly harbinger?

IT WAS FORTY-FOUR YEARS AGO TODAY...

L-R: Terry Jones, Graham Chapman (R.I.P.), John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin. Fucking geniuses all.

Today marks the fortieth anniversary of MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS, a landmark in comedy and still one of the most balls-out bizarre things ever to pollute the televised airwaves and warp the minds of youth, first in the United Kingdom and then later here in the United States.

There are few things in life that I find funnier than MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS and that includes the Python's subsequent work (although I do love that stuff too), and next to the Warner Brothers animated cartoons and NATIONAL LAMPOON (circa 1975-1983) there is no more significant influence on my sense of humor. I accidentally stumbled across the show one night back in 1975 (or thereabouts) during its initial run on Channel 13, a local PBS station, and I just didn't know what to make of a comedy show featuring Hell's Grannies, trippy animation, and a bunch of British weirdoes dressed as women and shrilly shrieking about a bunch of shit that didn't make sense. In fact none of it made a lick of sense, but it did make me laugh my ass off and got me interested enough to tune in again the following week. And the week after that. And so on for year after year.

The musical "What the fuck?"-ness of "Anything Goes."

I truly love the utterly insane work of the Pythons during that seminal series, followed and enjoyed much of their later work, both Python-related and not, and I openly wept when Graham Chapman, my favorite of the lot, died of cancer. In fact, if I may be totally honest, even though I've never met them I always looked upon the Pythons as beloved uncles who influenced me with their "I don't give a fuck what people think" attitude and refreshing offensiveness, especially considering that my generation found them during a time when comedy was mostly a wasteland of bland, "safe" family comedy. Python hit the comedic landscape with the impact of an aggressively stupid, tasteless and silly thermonuclear warhead packed with rude language, weird historical references, nonsensical songs (their version of "Anything Goes" being of particular note), and god knows what all else.

The short but sweet insanity of "Dad's Pooves," an alleged new BBC sitcom about "the wacky exploits of the oddest couple you've ever seen" who exist in "the kooky, oddball, laugh-a-minute, fun aplenty world of unnatural sexual practices." That's future BRAZIL director Terry Gilliam in the women's undies wielding the whip of sausages. NOTE: this sketch aired forever when the show was seen on PBS and other venues, so why was it missing when the series hit VHS and does it remain an omission on DVD? Anyone out there have an explanation for that?

It was and still is idiotic as hell, and we would all be much poorer had it never happened, so I extend the warmest of thanks and a heartfelt "Happy Anniversary" to the mad geniuses behind MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS. Thanks for everything, guys. And never, ever voluntarily be normal.

Tea with Mr. Neutron: about as normal as it gets in the world of MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS.

FUN WITH CAPTIONS!!!

Lesson to be learned: never do hallucinogens on Christopher Street.

FUN WITH CAPTIONS!!!

Overcoming a certain stiffness of motion, the Mummy swept the air guitar competition with his stunning tribute to Yngwie Malmsteen.

DESTROY ALL PLANETS (1968)

For the first time in about thirty years I once again saw former 4:30 MOVIE "Monster Week" mainstay DESTROY ALL PLANETS, and again I was reminded of exactly why I hated Daei's Gamera series, even when I was of the age the films were targeted to, yet at the same time also appreciated them for some occasionally very inspired ideas for monsters.

As we all know — or at least as we who are giant monster movie-junkies know — , gigantic flying (?) turtle Gamera is the "friend of all children" and protector of Japan (and by association the entire Earth), and woe to any tatty rubber-suited foe who offered threat to either. That was the formula for the majority of the films in the series — the lone exception being the initial installment, in which Gamera was itself a destructive threat — and in some cases Gamera's monster adversaries were more fun and interesting than our ostensible hero. A perfect case in point is DESTROY ALL PLANETS' bizarro antagonist, Viras, a technologically advanced kinda/sorta space-squid with designs on conquering the Earth with the aid of some henchmen who look like beret-wearing, besmocked elementary school art teachers.

Evil space-squid Viras: Cthulhu by way of Sid & Marty Kroft.

Viras is cooler than penguin shit, but rather than fully concentrate the narrative on him and his inter-galactic evil, the filmmakers once again give us annoying kid protagonists, this time a pair of boy scouts, one a precocious Japanese genius and the other apparently an American (making the film potentially more lucrative in the non-domestic market). The boys steal an experimental mini-submarine and require rescuing by Gamera and once the rescue is accomplished, Viras's spaceship scans Gamera's mind to learn exactly what kind of creature offers such fierce opposition to its tentacled world-conquering.

Viras's beach ball-like spcecraft.

That mind-scan leads to the most egregious example of one of the flaws that the Gamera series is justly infamous for, namely padding out the running time (and saving on budgetary expenditures) with stock footage from previous films. DESTROY ALL PLANETS was the fourth Gamera flick, so the filmmakers had three previous movies to cherry-pick from, culling twenty solid minutes (!!!) of monster fight footage that brings the film to a complete halt as the audience is forced to sit through tons of low-budget stuff they'd most likely seen in the theater during the earlier films' original releases. There's no attempt at editing the stock footage in such a way as to make it exciting or even interesting, to say nothing of trying to hide the fact that the first film was in black & white, and when the stock footage parade finally ends, Viras puts Gamera under mind-control, which leads to...more stock footage from the first two films, again not giving a fuck about some of it being in black & white. (At least no one can complain about the film lacking in tons of monsters and scenes of destruction, whether or not it's stock footage.) Anyway, Gamera is eventually freed from Viras's thrall and sets about kicking ass in earnest. To counter this, Viras surrealistically beheads its followers and absorbs their bodies into its own, causing it to grow to a size comparable to Gamera's.

Viras emibiggens itself.

The rest of the movie thankfully more or less forgets about those irritating kids and lets fly with some impressive and fun giant monster ass-whuppery, merrily displaying the one thing Daei's flicks had over Toho's Godzilla series: mildly graphic gore! In Gamera's battles, serious injuries were commonplace, both for the hero and the villain, replete with spewing (blue) blood and the occasional maiming or dismemberment. This time around, it's Gamera who gets the worst of it, especially once Viras folds its head up into what amounts to a spear and damned near succeeds in putting it all the way through the heroic turtle's chest. And it looks like it really hurts!

"In the midst of world-conquering, romance steals a tender moment": is it just me, or do monster fights sometimes look like the creatures involved are having passionate sex?

Eventually Gamera wins and the Earth is saved. THE END.

DESTROY ALL PLANETS is flawed, to say the very least, but it's a time-waster of a kiddie movie and works well enough as such. But the one thing that sets it apart from the legion of rubber-suited monster opuses unleashed in the 1960's is Viras, a goofy-looking and truly inspired creation that's the first creature fought by Gamera possessing an intelligence above that of an animal (the later Zigra being another). Viras's features bring to mind an unholy fusion of a character from an old Sid & Marty Kroft show, H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu, and a pissed-off Cockatiel, so with those elements factored in and a bunch of flailing rubbery tentacles for accent, what's not to love? Not only is Viras my favorite monster in the original Gamera series, he's also one of my favorite Japanese monsters, period. If you see this film for no other reason, check it out for Viras.

Poster from the original Japanese release. Note how Viras' head is shoved through a crumbling skyscraper. Now that's how you do a movie poster!

DEADGIRL (2008)

It’s finally October and only a few weeks until that most glorious of days, Halloween, and I intend to review as many horror movies as possible until then. So what better place to get the pumpkin rolling than with the incredibly dark, utterly sick and completely fucked-up DEADGIRL?

Initially wearing its indie/arthouse origins on its sleeve and getting off to a slightly slow start, DEADGIRL is the story of two high school-age friends, Rickie (Shiloh Fernandez) and JT (Noah Segan), both awkward losers, who, while ditching school, go to the local long-abandoned mental institution to drink warm beers and commit vandalism, and in its deepest tunnels they discover a beautiful naked woman (Jenny Spain), covered in plastic and chained to a medical gurney. The boys soon realize that the woman is undead (with no explanation given) and it’s a good bet that no one knows she’s there, so JT suggests they use the animate, bound corpse as their personal “fuck slut.” Conflicted but definitely not down with that plan, sensitive Rickie urges his friend to leave with him, but JT is a horny adolescent whose urges far outweigh any sense of morality or common decency, and he knows a good thing when he sees one. They have a falling out and from that point it’s clear that their friendship will never be the same, but they agree to keep the dead girl their little secret. But since when were teenagers any good at keeping secrets? Once the dead girl is no longer a commodity known solely to the two friends, things escalate into incredibly warped territory and offers up what may be the most disturbing coming of age story yet committed to celluloid.

Despite its obvious horrific elements, DEADGIRL is at its heart a realistic drama about the fears and disillusionment of adolescence, to say nothing of shedding light on the darker aspects of the young male psyche and how it can run rampant without supervision or guidance, providing a telling allegory about how some young men are raised to view and treat women. Rickie’s unrequited love for JoAnn (Candice Accola) is a heartbreaking plot point as he hopelessly pines for her, a wholesome and pretty girl who was his sweetheart during pre-pubescence but now won’t give him the time of day and dates a vicious jock. So on the one hand we have sleazy JT getting his hump on with a zombie that’s basically a piece of meat, there to serve as a receptacle for his seemingly endless supply of semen, while on the other we have Rickie’s exercise in romantic/emotional futility, and while those paths lead to a descent into grisly madness, the film is a strong examination of the agonizing teen years of the heterosexual male human condition. It’s all about the having of power or the complete lack thereof, and believe me when I say that it rings all too true.

Sick, dark, twisted, and highly morally questionable though it may be, DEADGIRL is an excellent piece of not-afraid-to-go-there cinema, and comes from out of nowhere to stand right next to the original DAWN OF THE DEAD as my favorite zombie movie. Not for all tastes and definitely not a date movie, this one is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.