its actually very funny to me that lynchs work has this reputation of being very weird and confusing and opaque and so when you watch it you kinda go in expecting to have to sus out a lot of subtle metaphor and symbolism and like certainly its got its fair share but mostly the thing people find so weird about it i think is that he creates these story worlds where the rules of reality are bent to allow for as much literal communication as possible. so much of his work is just characters telling you whats going on and what it means to them so bluntly that it like loops and sounds completely bizarre, like listening to someone describe a dream they had with perfect recall and clarity. it rules. i love being autistic actually.
me: im gonna go to bed early and get a good nights sleep
netflix: here’s a bunch of 45 minute documentaries on the wildlife inhabiting coastal islands
me: hhhdbhnnnnnnnnnnddndkkj coconut crab
L.A. Noir 2 please. much better facial mocap nowadays and they could probably actually do an open world like they wanted to in the original. now imagine the open world has clues scattered around it that you have to find, mankrik's wife style. throw in an ARG and rockstar has some gold right there.
hello. I regret to inform you all that I have three more movies that I am compelled to tell you guys about. believe me, I'm not happy about it either.
After a several month hiatus, I sat down this last week and watched the three movies featured in RedLetterMedia's tenth episode of Best of the Worst. Aside from being pretty busy this summer, I've been putting this project off because I got it into my head that I should be watching these all in one sitting in order to get the authentic experience… but god do I ever just not want to do that. So I watched these separately. It was a good choice.
The theme this episode is sleazy, gross 70's slashers. yuck! Write-up under the cut.
Best of the Worst 10: Bloody Birthday, Crazy Fat Ethel 2, Psycho From Texas
Movie 1: Bloody Birthday
Bloody Birthday is like Black Christmas mixed with Village of the Damned, but sleazier and way dumber. Three kids are born on the same day under an eclipse of some sort which makes them evil - ten years later they go on a killing rampage Bloody Birthday style. It doesn't matter how convoluted or weird things get, this simple idea did hold my attention, so I didn't hate it. But as fun as the premise sounds, there's some weird shit that gets in the way of this being more enjoyable.
I'll start with the fun stuff. The child actors are really funny. The kills are cartoonish and satisfying in the way you'd want from a movie like this, even if the effects aren't Savini-level. Each kid having a specific weapon of choice like the Ninja Turtles was also really funny to me. My favourite was the Rick Moranis-looking kid with the gun who kept threatening to shoot people with it but never shooting. Until that one time he does. For being a shitty slasher about killer kids, the movie delivers.
Now for what was not so fun. On top of all the obvious and mundane things I could bring up about why the movie wasn't a good movie, the primary issue for me was that from the very start, the sleaze dial is turned up way too high. The evil girl is charging the other two evil children to watch her older sister change through a peephole, and the whole sequence goes on way too long. I do appreciate that the peephole is brought up later and used as an actual plot device, but like… I don't know. I can understand why it's there I just don't like it. The killer children didn't also have to be perverts.
Despite that though, I didn't think this was too bad. I missed these terrible movies, and this was a decent one to ease back into it. Bloody Birthday gets the Robot Jox placement - a rating of 4/10 from me.
Movie 2: Crazy Fat Ethel 2 (aka Criminally Insane 2)
I had a lot of fun with this one. I've only seen one other movie sequel that is mostly recycled footage from the first one, that movie being Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2, a notorious so-bad-its-good movie (and one that is featured later in this series!) In the spirit of that classic, Crazy Fat Ethel does not disappoint.
This is barely a movie. The most competently made portions are the flashbacks to the original, but those aren't the scenes you'll remember. As pointed out in the RLM video, the original movie was shot on film and the new scenes were shot on video. It is so so so apparent when it switches between the two, because in the shot-on-video shots there is a loud buzzing from the lights in the room, and as far as I can remember, no score or soundtrack whatsoever. I don't think they could edit the sound in the camcorder they were using. If you're a millennial and ever watched home movies your parents made, you know what I'm talking about.
It's so delightfully jarring to have a flashback sequence with multiple shots, special effect blood, and a dramatic soundtrack… only to cut to a flat, blown out shot of Ethel laying in bed for the next straight minute because they need to pad for time. Which is something they do a lot of, almost every scene lasts at least 20 more seconds longer than necessary so that they can hit sixty minutes. It's kind of great.
My favourite character is the autistic man who does hand stuff on the wall in one scene and plays touch-butt in the park in another. I'd explain further but genuinely that's the best I can do.
Before I finish up, I have to point something out. Crazy Fat Ethel is a crazy woman who is fat and kills people. She Does Not Eat Them. I find this choice to be super interesting because you'd think that's the logical conclusion to this character trope of psychotic fat woman is that she must eat her victims. No. But it's not like eating isn't a component to this because it is - Ethel's murderous rampage starts in the first movie because Ethel's grandma wouldn't let her eat as much as she wants. So Ethel kills because she must eat, but she Does Not eat her victims or engage in cannibalism. Ethel wouldn't do that, that's too far.
2/10 with a like. This movie is a beautiful mess. Please watch it.
Movie 3: Psycho from Texas (aka Wheeler)
I knew I couldn't have a good time. I wasn't allowed to have fun doing this. This is a project of pain and suffering and this is my allotted punishment for making this post. Let's get into it.
This weird redneck thriller follows Wheeler, Chevy Chase's (more) evil twin, as he does… stuff. He is the Psycho from Texas. The synopsis you find on wikipedia or letterboxd will have you believe that things happen in this movie, that Wheeler kidnaps an oil baron which leads to a plot that the average human can comprehend... but all I can remember about this movie is that it is fucking awful.
This has all the boring mundane shitty movies things; bad editing, terrible acting, confusing plot, needless pervert shit, etc etc. A few examples. The ADR is so cheap and terrible, the music is cartoony southern banjo plucks and stuff, and there is a chase scene that runs as a B-plot for over half the runtime. It's boring, it's poorly made, it's not a good movie. But there are two scenes that I need to address to stress why I don't think this movie deserves to be watched by anyone.
The first is only kind of terrible. On it's own in another movie it could be deemed acceptable in a laughably-bad capacity, possibly. Wheeler's character as a psychosexual predator (great premise btw T_T) goes back to his trauma of watching his mom have sex when he was a kid. This is shown in a flashback that lasts way too long, cutting between the sex scene and the child actor making disgusted/scared/sad faces in reaction to it. Because the child actor has nothing to base his reaction off of, he's making these wildly over-emoted faces that look absolutely insane in context. I was laughing a lot, but I was also pretty uncomfortable. Why is this the second movie about children being exposed to sexual shit in the same episode? I think I hate the 70s.
The second scene is the most notorious part about this movie, and from what I can look up, probably the only notable thing about it. Three years after it's release, an additional scene was filmed and put into the movie. Linnea Quigley, a young actress who would go on to be in a ton of fun movies like Return of the Living Dead and Nightmare on Elm Street 4, appears in one of her first film roles here and is, to put it frankly, essentially abused in the name of the movie. I'm finding it hard to even describe the scene because it's very gross and clearly only conceptualized to exploit a young actress trying to get work. She later said of the scene, "They made me take my clothes off and poured beer on me. It was stupid." It's really bad and lasts way too long. I hope everyone involved in making it aside from her is dead.
1/10. I can't find a redeeming quality about this one, so it gets the second 1/10 in this project's history. The worst part is it won't be the last.
Best of the Worst
This episode's panel (including the first and only BOTW appearance of RLM collaborator Gillian Bellinger!) voted 3-1 for Crazy Fat Ethel 2 to be Best of the Worst! Although 3-1 votes have happened quite a few times before, this is the first time Mike specifically has been the sole dissenter, a pattern that will soon become his trademark… Mike voted for Bloody Birthday because he isn't insane. Psycho from Texas got a taste of it's own medicine.
My personal vote is also going to go to Crazy Fat Ethel. For the first time I'm picking a movie that is rated lower than another movie! This is because uhhhh movie ratings don't make sense, are stupid, and don't matter at all. Crazy Fat Ethel is not a good movie and sucks so so so bad but it didn't have ANY weird pervert shit in it and I laughed a lot. Although Bloody Birthday is an acceptable shitty b-movie, I will forget it in time... but I think I'll always fondly remember my hour with Ethel.
The next episode is a Halloween-themed episode that I'll do in the next few months. Thanks for reading, ok I leave <3
it was an entire radio show built around perpetuating a very simple joke, but it was uniquely powerful in its capacity to prompt the reaction I was looking for.
so my slot was at the tail end of rush hour, and i got a fair number of listeners/callers who were on the way home from the office. And like, I had a lot of callers, who almost all wanted to request songs that really didn’t fit with the aesthetic. I had pitched a power pop show when i got my slot, but the callers were not having it; they invariably wanted classic rock.
this made sense in a way. if you think about the demographics of the people who listened to the radio for music in 2010 instead of their ipods or cds or whatever, you’d expect them to skew older right? accordingly, i quickly realized that almost all of the people who called to request songs were Dads of a Certain Age. It was honestly annoying at first - I’m all for most classic rock, but that wasn’t what the show was supposed to be.
And so one day, when i was feeling particularly annoyed with requests that just didn’t fit thematically, i came up with the joke that rapidly became the only reason I kept the show going. Per station rules, I had to play a certain number of pre-recorded PSAs during my show, and before I cut to one I was supposed to read out the song titles and artists for all the music i had played before the break. So this one day when i had to inform the world before the break that the song they just heard was, per a listener’s request, Hey Jude by the Beatles, I decided to do a goof. I said:
“and finally, that last song you heard was Hey Jude, which was of course written and performed by the Rolling Stones.”
I barely had time to get the ads going before the phone started ringing. See, I had been assuming people would realize i was making an obvious joke by claiming one of the most well-known Beatles tracks was a Stones song, but i had failed to consider that my listeners were mostly 55-70 year old dads who were irritated from a long day in the office.
And when those dads heard me, a millennial woman, get the artist of an extremely well-known beatles song WRONG???!
they HAD to call in to correct my ignorance. never in a polite way either, it was condescending and annoyed or nothing. and like, they were just SO personally insulted by my inaccurate reporting that it took a massive amount of effort for me to avoid cracking up during the call. I had never understood why some people would enjoy trolling random strangers on the internet before, but in that moment, I understood the appeal entirely.
obviously i did it again right before the next commercial break, immediately after playing Don’t Stop Me Now by Queen David Bowie.
the phone immediately began to ring.
“ARE YOU AN IDIOT?” one of the callers began, “DAVID BOWIE???? THAT WAS QUEEN!”
“I thought David Bowie was the lead singer of Queen though?” I replied with as much innocent earnestness as i could conjure.
I could hear an intake of breath as the infuriated boomer on the other end of the line struggled to figure out where to even start.
@eduards-stuff I kept doing the same joke for an hour a week for an entire year, and the dads NEVER caught on. After episode 1 of the new format I started taking the angry dad calls on air, which added another layer of hilarity to the whole concept.
My friends on campus knew that hay I was doing and enjoyed tuning in, but only one actual listener ever figured out what I was doing, and he was literally a random 30 year old guy from the netherlands with access to an early internet connection radio service. He was possibly my only actual fan. I only know about him because he went to the effort of making a skype and paying for international service so he could call in, and while I got a few calls from him, the first remains my favorite:
me: hi there, you’ve got TST-
him: *strained, wheezing dutch laughter*
me: hey, is everything o-
him: pfffHAHAHAAH YOU MAKE THEM SO MAD. THEY THINK SO LITTLE OF YOUUUUUUUU BUT THE MEN ARE THE ONES WHO ARE FOOLISH! HA! HA! HA! YOU HAVE DUPED THEM!
me: sir i do not know you and i have never even seen you but i am in romantic love with you.
ok I’m back you and your boyfriend and your dog and your dog and your dog and your dog and your dog and your dog and your dog and your dog and your dog and your dog and your dog and your djinn can go
areudirty
amandla
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