Review – The Incredible Melting Man

Astronaut gets cooked by radiation and returns to Earth looking like a Fudgsicle on a hot July afternoon. This would have been an "unfortunate accident" movie rather than a horror movie if not for the guy's attempts to stave off his gooey demise by eating people. The production looks like Rick Baker probably had some fun putting together the melting dude effects, but none of the pleasure in the creation process translates into fun for the audience. In particular, the pacing is dreadful and the script's feeble attempts at humor were almost enough to make me feel sorry for this stinker. Almost. See if desperate

Review – Dead Sleep

Poor Linda Blair. She’s having trouble finding a job as a nurse. Her junkie ex-boyfriend steals her rent money. And then when she does land steady work, it turns out her new boss is placing mental patients in comas and then killing them because … well, other than the fact that he’s a creep, his motive isn’t entirely clear. The result is a low-end-of-medium-budget Australian reheat of Coma. See if desperate

Review – Paranormal Entity

In the fine Asylum tradition, this is a cheap knock-off of someone else's popular movie. And given that Paranormal Activity wasn't exactly a lavish Hollywood blockbuster, the word "cheap" here takes on whole new dimensions. There's more gore and nudity in this one, but of course that just robs the production of the subtle chills that were the only reason to watch the original to begin with. Wish I'd skipped it

Review – The Executioner's Song

This is another movie that I could have sworn I already reviewed some time ago. What a drag it is getting old. Sigh. In any event, this is a made-for-TV-but-still-strangely-full-of-nude-scenes docudrama based on Norman Mailer's "true story novel" of the same name. Ne'er-do-well Gary Gilmore (Tommy Lee Jones) bumbles through a series of menial jobs, petty crime and tempestuous episodes with his girlfriend (Rosanna Arquette). But once he adds murder to his robbery routine, it's a fast track from arrest to conviction to Utah's firing squad (indeed, the real Gilmore made himself famous by demanding to be executed rather than cooperating with the lawyers trying to appeal his sentence). The story itself isn't all that interesting – certainly not significantly different from hundreds of other hard luck death row biographies – but I did appreciate the guts it must have taken to seek financing for a movie without a single heroic character. Mildly amusing

Review – Invaders from Mars (1953)

This is Invasion of the Body Snatchers Cold War paranoia, only on a much more cartoonish level. After a boy sees what looks like a meteor hit the ground not far from the family farm, he goes to investigate. In short order his parents, the chief of police and many of the other local grown-ups start behaving like mindless robots. Fortunately the Army and its scientist allies are able to locate the Martians’ space ship and put a stop to the invasion before it gets out of hand. The Martian shock troops look a little like oversized Muppets, but their lack of scariness is more than made up for by the spooky Tiny Guy with a Big Head Who Rides Around in a Bubble. Mildly amusing

Review - Fantasia

This is worth watching for the sheer shock value of watching a Hollywood studio actually attempt to make a movie with artistic integrity. Of course they can’t resist the temptation to plug Mickey Mouse into it, but fortunately that sequence is offset by some of the more innovative work elsewhere in the collection. Personally I’m fond of the abstract, Oskar-Fischinger-inspired animation that accompanies the Bach toccata, though most of the rest of it is quite good as well. If nothing else, it’s astounding that a movie like this could be made back in 1940, when a lot of the rest of the animation world was making silly cartoons. Worth seeing

And the Moon turned to blood

Last week I watched a documentary (for want of a better word) about the Rapture and the End Times. It brought me mindful of the self-defeating nature of the whole Rapture thing. These guys always ascend to their pulpits (figuratively if not literally) and proceed to assure us that we need to give our hearts to Jesus right away because the end is near.

If the end is so near, wouldn't it be smarter to just wait for it? I mean, if the Rapture snatches away all the fundies, the Sun turns black, the Moon turns to blood, the temple gets rebuilt, the plagues hit and the whole Book of Revelation nine yards, I'm absolutely willing to believe in the literal truth of the whole thing. So when the Rapture-ready squad absolutely assures me that the End Times are imminent, all they do is give me a strong incentive to adopt a wait-and-see attitude. If I end up Tribulated, I've every reason in the world to accept Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior. But until what they say is going to happen actually happens, skeptics are entitled to our skepticism.

I will say this for the show I watched: they're the only Rapture-ready pundits who ever tried to address this. "You can wait," they warn, "but if you do, then God will cloud your mind so you still won't believe in Jesus." Nice try. However, this ignores two major problems. First, it violates the scripture they're preaching, which specifically says that people will come to Christ after the Rapture (not to mention that the "clouding your mind" thing is an extremely strained interpretation of the verses they cite).

Second -- and more important -- it turns God into a deceptive jerk and the End Times into a big practical joke on the human race with eternal damnation rather than a jock strap full of itching powder as the ultimate consequence. Perhaps it's just natural for people who are themselves deceptive jerks to want to remake God in their own image.

And of course all of this as usual side-steps the actual important value of the Christian faith in favor of stupid, pseudo-theological parlor tricks.

Sorry about the religious rant. That isn't really the function of this blog.

Speaking of which ...

After my flurry of MSG activity yesterday I have nothing new to report. Still waiting on news one way or another about the hard drive in the laptop I've been using for years to work on 8sails. Fingers still firmly crossed.

In the meantime, I'm waffling back and forth about the current background art for this blog. I can't decide if it looks like an extreme close-up of Turner's "Sunrise with Sea Monsters" or an extreme close-up of Serrano's "Piss Christ." So if you're looking at it and it doesn't look like either one, that means the Serrano impression won out and prompted me to change it to something else.