Category Archives: PC Thugs

We are Cinema Crazed and We're Here to Talk about Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and Stuff! One! Two! Three! Four!

Posted on by

NOT SO LONG AGO IN THE MYSTERIOUS LAND OF NEW YORK, FELIX VASQUEZ JR. WROTE A SCOTT PILGRIM ARTICLE…

At this time I’m still trying to decide if I love or hate “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World” for what it is. I am convinced years from now young kids will be declaring that Edgar Wright’s film is something of a cheer for their culture, a love letter to the nostalgia obsessed Canadian hipster society, but many will fail to realize or even admit that in reality this movie is a practical joke. Deep down while it looks like a celebration of our nostalgia obsessed technology based generation, Edgar Wright actually makes fun of people he purportedly appeals to with his 2010 action romance movie. While many have described it as a bright and colorful movie, it is actually the most cynical statement about our culture in years. Many won’t accept that or be willing to even admit it’s a possibility since Edgar Wright is a pop culture fanatic and has always hung around pop culture fanatics in his early years.

Continue reading →

The Uncanny Boris Karloff

Posted on by

boris-karloff-thriller-eyesI would love to be one of those movie geeks who explain that the first time they saw a Hollywood legend like Boris Karloff was in a movie only five people have seen for years, and I explain the details of the plot and make you feel bad for not having watched it and give you some impression of my knowledge of movies because you have yet to see it or can’t even find it. But no. My first time ever coming close to Boris Karloff’s insane greatness was during “The Grinch That Stole Christmas.” Yes, it was “The Grinch,” a half hour animated movie animated by Chuck Jones that played on television every single year. Not very impressive? I don’t care.

Continue reading →

A Love Letter to Trick 'r Treat

Posted on by

trt1A shimmering pumpkin lit from the inside as if illuminated from the fires of hell, a young trick or treater with a sack over his head braves trick of treating the night of all Hallow’s Eve as we’re treated to glimpses of Missing posters hinting at the rash of disappearances across the town our young trick or treater is perusing. He manages to visit a few houses and is met with a mysterious figure who sucks him in to the darkness and after splashes of blood and sounds of beating, minutes later the small trick or treater emerges from the darkness of the alley with the body of his attacker in his sack. The mask this young trick or treater is not an elaborate mask built from a sack, but instead his face upon which he gazes back at the audience with an evil grin welcoming us in to the world of Halloween.

Continue reading →

R.L. Stine: Introduction to Horror Geekdom

Posted on by

STINE

Often these days whenever I’m talking with other horror geeks, I hear the common response that they never read RL Stine when they were children. They were instead reading Stephen King. Well, for some of us who went to middle school, the folks that ran it often felt King was beyond the comprehension of most of its students. That never stopped me of course from reading “It” and grabbing amazing books like “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.” That book, while touted to children, was grotesque, disgusting, gory, and featured some truly scary stories that I continue to remember fondly. I’m mad at myself for not keeping my original copy which was pretty worn out by the time I was in middle school.

Continue reading →

Mandy Lane: Pretty Poison

Posted on by

Women are trouble. They always have been and they always will be. To the lovelorn man with a taste for old fashioned romance, women are their poison, the source of inspiration, bliss, torment, and their downfall. “Double Indemnity,” “King Kong,” “Cleopatra,” “MacBeth,” the list goes on, but the one true defining theme in all of fiction is that women can make or break the man, and Jonathan Levine’s “All the Boys Love Mandy Lane” is the truest depiction of the power of the beautiful woman and what they can do in a world that idolizes, idealizes, and fetishizes women. Levine’s film is something of a slow boil horror thriller, one that is based around love for a blond beauty named Mandy Lane, and how she inspires a stalker, male admirers, female admirers, and a slasher lurking in the shadows. This is all set to the tune of the real monster. Her name is Mandy Lane and in the final scenes of Levine’s cult classic, we learn that even the dirtiest of monsters can have an angelic face that few men can resist.

Continue reading →

Jolting Tales of Tension in the EC Comics Tradition!

Posted on by

ECI know that I may not be touching on anything novel here when I say that horror comics aren’t a dead art form, but you have to appreciate that people keep saying it after the horror comic was officially dead for a number of years. For a long time I suffered through endlessly cheesy and insipid “horror” themed comics from Marvel and DC both of whom always possessed a respectable amount of monsters and goblins, but no blood and zero realism whatsoever. Even when they evoked the moods of EC Comics, they chose to adamantly steer away from anything grisly or disgusting, thus it was PG horror that felt often like a dry hump for the respectable horror fan.

Continue reading →

28 Days Later: The Soundtrack Album (CD)

Posted on by

While Danny Boyle’s “28 Days Later” from 2002 is without a doubt one of my favorite horror films of all time, one of my favorite movies of the first decade, and my favorite film from Boyle, more so I love the soundtrack that comes along with the film. The soundtrack is such an obsession of mine I have managed to sit through the entire film until the credits end to hear the music, and can fondly recall listening to the soundtrack in the waiting room of the theater before the press screening of “28 Weeks Later.” I mean they were giving critics cupcakes, water, and a bad ass press book with newspaper clippings from the sequel and the entire time all I could think was “Cool! The music from the first movie is playing overhead!”

What many directors and studios fail to realize these days is that every element is very important for a horror movie, especially the music. The frantic punk rock complimented “Demons,” Dario Argento and the Goblins perfectly complimented “Dawn of the Dead,” and surely enough the compilation of chamber music, electronica, and choir music from the amazing John Murphy brilliantly compliments an already excellent piece of genre filmmaking. While the movie would possibly have been just as much a masterpiece if there were UK pop tunes playing the whole time, Boyle and Murphy turn the soundtrack in to a character, and the soundtrack is quite superb all on its own if you’re the kind of movie fan who enjoys soundtracks.

Continue reading →