The House By the Cemetery

Of the four of Fulci flicks I've seen so far, House By the Cemetery is by far mah least favorite. Now to be fair, I'll credit Big Lucy for his adeptness in creatin' a genuinely spook-tastic atmosphere and for givin' me the heebiest of heebie-jeebies during that scene where the screechy bat starts chewin' on that one dude's hand 'til he stabs it to death and makes it bleed Sherwin-Williams blood onto the kitchen counter, but when it comes down to it this picture is a lame-o slasher flick without enough gnarly effects to make up for a story that doesn't make a lick of sense. And could they have picked a more annoying voice-over actor to dub in for that blond-headed kid? Oof. I think not.

Facing Ali

If there ever was a case for outlawing the sweet science of bruising, Facing Ali might be it. These guys went from real-deal heavyweight champeens to dudes so slurred we need subtitles just to understand 'em. Ouch.

Until the Light Takes Us

Norwegian Black Metal? Don't we all know this by now? You want to talk about Darkthrone instead? Alright!

Eaten Alive (1980)

While you'll be surprised that director Umberto Lenzi had the gall to combine religious cults with topless cannibal gore so soon after Jonestown, you'll be seriously fucking flabbergasted that the people of New Guinea never sued the guy for defamation. Good lord.

The Beyond

So I think the story's got something to do with a hotel that sits atop the Gates o' Hell, but if ya ask me all you need know about The Beyond is there's this five-minute scene where tarantulas gouge out a man's eye, eat his tongue, and then tear the shit out of his face. I haven't squirmed that much since I watched the circumcision episode of that Penn & Teller show. Outstanding!

Knocked Up

Some time ago I got it into my head that comedies weren't real movies and that there was no way I was gonna waste my time on 'em no matter how many fawning Terry Gross interviews I heard. But now that I watched the Knocked Up on the tv and found it pretty great, pretty funny, and pretty well-made I guess it's time I admit I was wrong. Damn.

Tyson

Hey, don't listen to them talking heads, 2009's best films were clearly this one right here and Bobby Goldthwait's World's Greatest Dad. Seriously, nowhere have we ever found such an entertaining collusion of exploitation, brutality, sportswriterly romanticizin', and sheer motherfucking thuggery as in this ninety-minute pugilisticacious gem. James Toback, you are forthwith known as the AJ Liebling of the new millennium. Bravo.

Swamp Thing

Hey, who'm I kidding here? Really just wanted to see Adrienne Barbeau's boobies.

Command Performance

Big Dolph Lundgren mans the drumkit and kicks some Russkie hiney. Well-done like the Dolph movies I loved as a youth, but still kinda boring like the Dolph movies I watched as a just-past-a-youth. There's also a hot babe.

King of New York

I'm surprised more folks don't quote this movie.

The Godfather: Part II

Don't believe what they said in that Scream movie -- The Godfather: Part II does not trump The Godfather: Part Original.

The Godfather

I rented this movie in the summer of 1990 when I was nine years old. You had to switch tapes after the scene where Sonny gets killed. I was a pretty awesome kid.

Mad Men -- Season One

Ooooooh, look how different things were back then.Hey, where are all the seatbelts? Dresses and pearls? On a Monday??? My goodness, is that a Xerox machine?!? Weiner's constant reminders that we're watching a period piece are insulting, condescending, and unnecessary. Did you know that underneath that happy family exterior everyone was enveloped in sadness and Glenlivet? Please.

Elite Squad

Man, does Brazil get a bad rap or what? All the movies are about drug dealers, paid-off officials, thong bikinis, and dudes with bleached-blonde afros. Seems like the country's tourist board should get in touch with those guys behind the Las Vegas campaign or something 'cause the media sure ain't doing Rio any favors.

Falling Down

It surprised me to see Joel Schumacher's name in them there opening credits, but once I put aside my seventh-grade nostalgia for No Fear hats and free Showtime weekends, I realized Falling Down really isn't that far removed from nipples on the bat suit.

Sons of Anarchy -- Season One

This felt like a TV show so I quickly lost interest, but Katey Sagal was so good I stuck around through the finale.

Shakes the Clown

Let's see what I wrote about Shakes the Clown on the Electrical Audio forum all the way back in July of 2006:

that one clown, she has the peanut butter pussy: brown, smooth, and easy to spread.

doesn't adam sandler have a cameo?

only saw some of this on hbo over ten years ago. time to netflix it.

when i was but a mere child I thought bobcat was hilarious.

Wow, I'm actually pretty impressed with this comment. I know it's a prime example of internet-bred triviality, but look at how well it encapsulates the Highland Cinema's style! Notice how now that I've finally sat down and watched this thing I still don't have anything to say 'bout it other than a vagina joke and a memory from my childhood. Can you think of a better juxtaposition? Didn't think so!

The one thing that really really sticks in my craw is my damn "cameo" remark. Talk about ignorant! Sandler's in over half of this darn movie and there I am acting like he was Glenn Close in Hook. Now Steve Albini will never think I'm cool.

Thrilla in Manila

Jesus Christ, man. The sweet science sure fucks you up.

What We Do Is Secret

I've listened to (MIA), read Lexicon Devil, and seen What We Do Is Secret.

There ain't a medium yet that'll make me like this band.

Rocky Balboa

My friend's lady told me that if I was serious about wanting to ramp up my flirtations with that gal at the coffee stand then maybe I should try to engage her in conversations about, say, a good movie I saw over the weekend.

Considering I like to watch Nekromantik and Rocky Balboa I might want to try something else.

Curb Your Enthusiasm

My entire life is a Larry David moment to the point where I strangely look up to the guy. Is that a bad thing? Such a seriously funny show that the Cinema is this close to paying for HBO just so we can watch season seven.

Faces of Death

When I was a child the mere mention of Faces of Death gave me nightmares, but now that I'm an adult and the thing's thirty years old I think it's the greatest piece of exploitation I will ever see. Hilarious and outstanding.

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

That last third of the movie where Warren Oates is all batshit crazy and talkin' to a maggot infested severed head? That shit was fucking awesome.

Wassup Rockers

Some folks say Larry Clark must like boys 'cause his movies have lots of scenes where shirtless fifteen year olds make out and act silly. The Highland Cinema says Larry Clark must like boys because Wassup Rockers feels like it was written by one.

Fugazi -- Instrument

Totally not into Fugazi. Sorry, guys.

Crazy Love

When we were in fifth grade we adored Paul Simon's Graceland. And we think that when you like something at that young of an age that even when ya get older and find out how lame that thing really was ya can't help but still enjoy it. Sure, we've long known that Graceland is about as embarrassingly yuppie-fied as you can get: it's got that awfully dated '80s gated reverb production, that middle-aged, upper-class worldview, and that shameful appropriation of Apartheid folk music masqueradin' as enlightened multi-culturalism. Oof. And just recently discovered that ol' Rhymin' Simon downright stole one of Los Lobos' working tunes, put it on his record, and then didn't give the guys any credit for writin' it! Geez, that's pretty indefensible, right? What a jerk! Makes us wanna chuck that Graceland cassette out the car window and listen to Big Black instead!

But then when we hear a line like "Crazy Love, Vol II"'s "sad as a lonely little wrinkled balloon" and start thinking 'bout when we learned long division...well, we just put all that stuff aside and smile.

Rory Gallagher -- Live at Montreux

Rory Gallagher plays the kind of blues music we can't stand, but he has some great guitar tone and an even greater fashion sense. This Montreux collection spans the R-man's performances from '75 to '94 and it's a mixed bag of Robert Cray-isms and funny-faced skull-meltin' freak-out guitar solos. Totally recommended for guitar nerds like us, but your results may vary.

Joy Division

The cool thing about Control, Anton Corbijn's 2007 Ian Curtis biopic, is that it never tries to convince you that Joy Division are a bunch of geniuses. The whole movie is just a great looking black and white tale of some twenty-year old kids playing music in run-down pubs. It's nothing special, it's nothing extraordinary, and it's fucking fantastic. Control saddles itself with the Sisyphean task of making the guys in Joy Division real people and strips them of all the bullshit mythology that twenty-five years of NME-infused hagiography has bestowed on "She's Lost Control" and Closer. Somehow it succeeds. What a great film.

This American Life -- Season One

This Showtime series sucks, but you guys should all go out and download Episode 207 of the This American Life radio show. It's called "Special Ed," it costs ya a buck, and it's the most heart-breaking and charming thing we at the Cinema have ever heard. It's got three stories about people with developmental disabilities, and while the second two are respectively depressing and boring, the first one is so fucking great we've kept it on our iPod for almost as long as we've had a portable mp3 player! Don't wait any longer -- the sooner you get some Ron Simonsen in your life the better!

Cat Stevens -- Majikat

We think it's pretty cool that Cat Stevens could fly around on a private jet and have backup singers and magicians and still make a big ass US tour stop like this feel like a sit-down club gig. Majikat is about half early Cat's acoustic troubadourin' and half mid Cat's synthesizer garbage. We dug the lack of corny hippie cut-scenes, and those awesome clips of him yelling at his backing band, and fiddling with the flowers clipped to his microphone stand. What a guy!

James Ellroy's Feast of Death

Man, Ellroy's fucking great, ain't he? It's rare we come across an author who can affect us so profoundly, but when we read My Dark Places we knew we were onto something goooood. The guy's a goddamn beast, pure and simple. His tone is flawlessly brilliant, brutal, and oozing with a cynicism that's as pragmatic as it is malicious. Every novel comes with a plot only a hair shy of the unnecessarily complex, but one that's wound tighter than a drum.

Feast of Death is courtesy of our friends at the BBC. It's a nice piece that amounts to little more than Ellroy riffin' about his aforementioned memoir* and his 1987 hard-boiled crime novel The Black Dahlia** for a too-short ninety minutes. Our favorite author spends the screen time chewin' the scenery and leanin' in all close and serious-like while he's talkin' his no nonsense Mike Hammer speak with some paunchy off the job detectives as they dine in a swanky Hell Lay restaurant. He retells his own gnarly history and accentuates his haunted and obsessed connections between one Jean ("Mom") Ellroy and one Elizabeth ("hot mama") Short. Then, right as you think the whole thing's done and over, he tops the whole thing off with Larry Harnisch, a reporter so equally consumed by the Dahlia case he claims he uncovered the killer's identity! Whoa!

In short: captivatin' stuff. We couldn't have been happier.

Now go read a book, dammit. Might we suggest:

* My Dark Places, of course -- the tale of Ma Ellroy's murder, Son Ellroy's descent from broken-home child to panty-sniffing bottomed-out drunk, and how a publishing advance paid for a brooding author and a retired LAPD dick to reinvestigate a forgotten woman's unsolved case some forty years later

**about, well, the Black Dahlia...that and a veiled examination of one man's obsession with mysterious mutilated women [see above]

Poultrygeist -- Night of the Chicken Dead

If there's one thing people can't stand it's shit. Poop. Feces. Hershey Squirts. Why, just the sound of a damp fart will send most of ya runnin' out the room screaming. If you wanna dish our some squirms, and we're talking some serious squirms, then you best leave that eyeball stabbin' and fingernail pullin' on the cuttin' room floor and plop yourself into the nearest toilet stall pronto.

Guess that's our way of saying, "Poultrygeist? What a fantastic film!"

The Strangers

Funny Games for the learner's permit set.

Lost Highway

One of our favorite movie experiences (and probably one of our favorite anything experiences) was heading out to see Mulholland Drive back in 2002. See, we'd checked us out some David Lynch during our high school days and each time found ourselves horribly disappointed. Our Clearasil-addled minds were dead set on thinkin' that if something was s'posed ta be "nightmarish" then that'd mean it'd be all gory and Cronenberg-y. You can imagine our surprise when we discovered "nightmarish" really meant "weird and slow." Guess it's no wonder we didn't like Blue Velvet. But we grew up in the next two years and once we were filling up on some good ol' university style tweed sportcoat mumbo-jumbo we thought to ourselves, "Yessir, we think we're finally ready to give that other Big Dave another try. Which way's the theatre, dude with the Peta shirt and At the Drive-In 12"?"

Armed with lotsa Foucault learnings and auteur philosophies, we sat in that cineplex and hung on every image and every word the Drive threw at us. We scratched our chins and let out a "hmmmmm" or two, and when we walked out of there we felt pretty good 'bout having seen a real-deal smart guy flick. And that feeling only got better as we headed down the block to share our pontifications 'bout Mulholland's deep meanings, character inversions, dream imagery, and sweet sweet boobies over a couple of frosty brews.

And now here we are. It's a few of years later, we've abandoned our hairy armpit constructivist affinities, and we've finally sat ourselves down for some Lost Highway. The experience was similar, yes, but this time around there emerged a difference so great that we're not sure we will ever recover. No, it wasn't that we stopped paying attention. It wasn't that we hit the sack without our gray matter a-analyzing. It wasn't that we decided against working on a Highway magnum opus. Our Achilles heel turned out to be something so simple we'd failed to consider it in the first place. It was...

The Internet.

Yup. It was a simple Google search for "Lost Highway." Before we knew it we were ankle-deep in a host of ancient frames-enabled webpages, each one more chock full o' Lynchian theorizing than the last. We never thought it'd be a big deal. Normally we love the imdb trivia and the Ebert review. We want nothing more than checking out the superhighway's infinite peanut gallery. But this time, as we sat in our chairs scrolling through David Lynch tribute pages, we felt like we were committin' adultery against our brains. Here we were, armchair Sarrises who'd put some real time and energy into putting together an amateur tract 'bout meanin' and interpretation and then what do we do? We go and ruin the whole thing with a few simple mouse clicks. We threw away the fruit of our cranial churnin' and bubblin' all 'cause we wanted to read some pretentious nerd's sub-thesis. Sure, maybe it was more thought-out than what we were comin' up with, but goshdammit it wasn't ours, and we walked away feeling a little bit sad and a whole lot dirty.

So sometime in the not so near future when we actually decide to sit down for Inland Empire we're making the commitment right now to get us a trial version of NetNanny and put "David Lynch" into the banned searches list. It may interfere with our Transcendental Meditation research, but you can bet the Empire post will be pure Cinema.

The Funhouse

We don't have anything new to add to the canon of The Funhouse discussions (that canon being one where it is reiterated that, yes, Virginia, lightning sure don't strike twice), but we would like to point out that we were darn shocked to see Rick Baker's name in the end credits.

C'mon, dude wins an Oscar for American Werewolf and the Funhouse mutant stumbles around wearin' the kind of clawed Halloween gloves you find at Rite-Aid? Sheesh.

Gram Parsons -- Fallen Angel

Going into Fallen Angel we knew Dinosaur did a Burrito Bros tune. Coming out of Fallen Angel we knew we should check out some Merle Haggard.

Yusuf's Cafe Session

We figured since we could finally give Dylan a chance maybe we should give this Cat Stevens cat another go-round. We have an inherited copy of Stevens' Classics disc in our library, an album that we spun once or twice in our younger days and disavowed forthwith. So full of hippy dippy cliche, we thought. Such a cornball collection of find-yourself, Give Peace a Chance nonsense. But with No Direction Home running through our minds we decided to pop ol' Cat Steves into the hi-fi, sit our broke asses on the sofa, and prepare ourselves for the shock of havin' our minds...changed?

We didn't know what to expect when we pushed play. Would we pull a 180? Would he still sound like a '70s era softie? Well, as it turns out the Cat is, yep, a dyed in the wool dippy hippy. He toured with magicians! Clowns! He has a whole bunch of songs about hittin' the old dusty trail and strikin' out to find yourself. But behind all that bearded open shirtiness is a lot of stuff that sure gets our gears a-turning, by which we mean fingerstyle guitar pickin' and upper register falsetto-in'. Hmmm...maybe Cat Stevens wasn't so bad, we thought. Half these tunes -- the ones without the awful AM radio soft rock overdubbing -- were awfully sweet and poignant. Cliched folk singer themes to spare, but performed with lots o' honest heart and soul, and lots o' honorable love and tenderness.

So, Cat Stevens... No, wait! We meant to say: So, Yusuf Islam, we've done changed our opinion of ya. We think you're pretty neat. Maybe you grew a funny beard, maybe you wrote a (yeeesh) children's book, and maybe you wore some of them godforsaken beaded necklaces, but we think you've got integrity in spades and a damn fine singin' voice to boot. The Highland Cinema seal of okayness? It's all yours. As-Salamu Alakum, brother!

Derailroaded

Wild Man Fischer: developmentally disabled vagrant or exemplar of unadulterated self expression? To our eyes he looks like a guy hollering at passersby for nickels, but to Mark Mothersbaugh he's a Platonic form. We've tried to put ourselves on both sides of the Outsider Music fence and as far as we can tell the dialogue is equal parts record geek snobbery, half-baked and horn-rimmed undergraduate theorizing, and the privileged elite's sublimated mocking of retards.

One thing we do know is that someone really should do a documentary on this Dr. Demento fella. We thought he was just a trivial novelty like Weird Al, but it turns out he's a music historian like Tiny Tim!

The Beast Within

When The Beast Within showed up on our front step we were like, "Goddammit!" Not like we haven't wanted to see this thing since, like, '95, but it'd been on the back burner for so long we plain weren't thrilled to have it in our hands at all. Just weren't in the mood, ya know? And most of the time if ya ain't feelin' it, it ain't worth it, right? But tonight we'd committed to watching something by Jove, and thankfully once we loaded the projector and fired the sucker up this flick turned out to be not so half-bad.

The Beast Within is a standard issue monster movie, the kind of old-timey picture that's an hour and fifteen of talking and a final ten to fifteen of darn cool special effects. That much we liked. That and the parade of under the radar character actors and early '80s film stock. But the thing troublin' us was why was such a piss poor etiology of why that teen turned into an insect monster in the first place. 'Cause he was possessed by ghost of a murdered townsman? Come on! If ya gotta get one thing right that's gotta be it, don'tcha think? We're fine with explaining one crazy thing (murderous half-man/half-insect chimera) with another (vengeful demon spirit), but we think these filmmaker guys owed it to us to hammer it home better than that.

Eh, oh well, guess that's what you get for doin' it when ya ain't in the mood.

Masters of Horror -- Imprint

The Masters of Horror episode so unsettling Showtime refused to air it! Takashi Miike strikes again with both a needles under the fingernails torture scene and a few good ol' flashbacks of countryside abortions. Strange and dense, Imprint is exactly what we expected: second-tier pay cable production values coupled with impenetrable hallucinogenic story arcs that could only come from the Ray-Banned mind of Miike hisself. What the hell was that end about anyway? You see that head and hand grow out of that prostitute's right temple?!?

No Direction Home

Looks like we're finally comin' to terms with the fact that even though it all reminds us of a super lame dumbed-down basic cable documentary, some of this stuff from the sixties was pretty fucking good.

Talk Radio

So there was this one Saturday Night Live sketch that pitted Eric Bogosian against Spalding Gray. It was an epic battle of wits, and a rather clever one at that. There in the ring sat two thespians trading barbs, spinning yarns, and vying for the illustrious title belt. Who will be the Master...of...the Monologue?!?

At least we think it was pretty clever. We can't remember much more than the premise. And by "not much more" we really mean the only thing we do remember is how stoked we were to be high school freshmen getting such an erudite bit. Thinking back on it right now, we're still pretty impressed with ourselves. Guess some things never change....

Now if only NBC would archive all o' them SNL skits on the YouTube. That way we'd know for sure if this thing was anything at all like what we've made it out to be. If nothing else, at least we could spend every night refreshing Eddie Murphy's "Hymietown" sketch just like the good Lord intended.