The Eyes Seem to Follow You



When I feel stressed out, I just look at the postcard of Jim. J. Bullock and find the strength to go on.

Comic strip mashups I think the Sin City one is my favorite, but they're all good.

No One Should Die at a Concert, But Everyone Should Die at a Rave
Some music reviews:
Megadeth - Endgame - If Dave Mustaine would drop the whole Jesus thing, get back on the drugs, stop talking about how he was unfairly kicked out of Metallica, and just concentrate on thrashing, he might actually write an album that’s as good as Rust in Peace. As it is, he’s written that’s almost as good Countdown to Extinction. It could have been worseI don’t even know why I even bother with Megadeth these days. Not only did he throw a hissy fit over having to play appear at the same festival as Rotting Christ, he won’t play “Black Friday” in concert anymore. Lame.

Gorgoroth - Quantos Possunt ad Satanitatem Trahunt - My marriage has undergone considerable strain due to the legal battles surrounding Gorgoroth. My wife was firmly in Infernus’s camp, and I was supporting Gaahl and King ov Hell. I’m not a violent man, but I was ready to throw some dishes when my wife said that Twilight of the Idols sucked. But I’m at fault too. Honey, I’m sorry I said that Under the Sign of Hell was overrated. I listened to it again, and you’re right, it is awesome.
This is the first Gorgoroth album to feature music from Infernus since Incipit Satan, and to be honest, things are a little shaky. I like that Pest is back on vocals, but the music is uninspired. There are too many mid-paced songs, and the production is way too slick. I suppose if you’re a Gorgoroth fanatic you’ll want it, but I was disappointed by this one.

Liturgy - Renihilation - This is nice. I’ve been told the members of Liturgy are all secret hipsters, but I don’t care. After listening to this, I say more albums should be recorded in the icy depths of an American Apparel dressing room. This is blisteringly fast black metal , reminiscent of Darkthrone’s Transylvanian Hunger or Ulver’s Natten’s Madrigal. My only complaint is that the vocals are a little too deep in the mix, but other than that, this is one of the best albums of the year.

Trapped Under Vice Looks like Fenriz of Darkthrone put together a mix CD for Vice magazine. As you might expect, Fenriz has impeccable taste in music. Money quote - " I also start with two tracks that have a really underground sound, so I will lose all posers that try to listen to the mix."

Oh Mummy!


This is only really funny if you've seen the Doctor Who episode "Pyramids of Mars" about 20 times, like I have.

Good Thing My Professional Football Career Never Got off the Ground I'm sticking with Dance Dance Revolution.

Kate Gosselin Does not Deserve Our Pity So true, but I don't know if we'll ever be rid of her. The problem is that if you watch Jon and Kate Plus 8 then you have to get someone else to watch an episode within seven days, or else Kate Gosselin will crawl out of the television and eat your soul.

Regretsy I really need that brushed fleece poncho.

Clearing Up a Few Misconceptions


After watching this classic W.A.S.P. video, you may be under the impression that nurses spend their nights capturing the souls of young women, putting them in test tubes, and then dancing around in skimpy outfits and working out on exercise machines. My wife is a nurse who works the night shift, and from what I understand this video is incredibly misleading and not at all an accurate representation of a nurse's typical workday.

Random Thought from a New Homeowner
Surely there's a easy way to tell the plants from the weeds in my yard. Maybe I should just pave it all over to be safe.

Paul Levitz out at DC What does this mean for the future? Who knows. If it means more money for DC to keep doing what they're doing, then that's a good thing, even though I detest all the mega-crossovers DC has been releasing. At least I can ignore all that and read Fables. Unfortunately, what will probably happen is that Warners will get rid of Vertigo,find new and interesting ways to screw up the superheroes, and release a big-budget Captain Carrot and the Zoo Crew movie. Time to start reading more manga.

The Footnotes of Madmen Fun historical trivia about each episode. Even more exciting: official Patio T-shirts.

The Wolf is at your Door The shirt is lame as hell, but the user comments are pure gold.

Cheer up America
Only the biodegradable portion of Michael Jackson is gone. With all the plastic surgery he's had, we will still have parts of Michael Jackson around for years to come.

Hipsters That is all.

Philadelphians don't want slot machines in the Gallery I can understand this. When you're at The Gallery, and you have to deal with the drugged-out homeless people, the incredibly fat women with their broods of feral children, and the bathrooms that look like a scene from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, you wouldn't that magical ambiance ruined by the presence of a slot machine or two.

Gorguts covering Morbid Angel


Awesome!

I Did Not Know Haemorrhage Has a Music Video

Oh happy day!

Voivod tearing it up


Good times.

Information Wants to Be Free
But sometimes there's just a little too much information, especially on Facebook -

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

Some of this stuff is not safe for work. Also, some of it will want to make you throw up.

Goodbye Dario
Lisa and I lost one of our guinea pigs to an infection today. Dario, whom I named after horror movie director Dario Argento, was not the most sociable of animals, but he was our pet, and we will miss him very much.

Memo from the Department of Irony I was at the supermarket, and I overhead a man saying to his wife, "I'm not going to those self-checkout lanes. They're taking jobs away from people." He said this right after taking money out of the ATM.

Other Bands Play, Manowar Live With Their Parents I know this really shouldn't surprise me. I'm pretty sure 99 percent of heavy metal musicians have boring jobs and normal lives. Still, it's hard to wrap my mind around the fact that the members of Manowar don't live in a castle guarded by dragons.

One of the commenters on this post claimed that Abbath from Immortal runs an in-home daycare center, which if true, is disconcerting, yet somewhat cool. I like the idea that there's a child care center in Norway where nap time is refereed to as "grim and frostbitten slumber".

Let's not even get into poking
How true.

Metal Maniacs closing down I loved Metal Maniacs in high school. It was the only way to find out about new death metal bands in those days, although it was frustrating reading it at times, because they were always writing about awesome bands whose albums I had no way of purchasing at the Camelot Music in the Colonial Park Mall in Harrisburg. I don't think the magazine ever topped the glory days of when Mike Williams and Ula Geheret graced its pages, but that could just be nostalgia talking. Marty Rytkonen, Nathan Birk, S. Craig Zahler and many others made it a magazine worth reading for many years. But all good things come to an end, and I guess it's time to say goodbye to Metal Maniacs. At least Terrorizer magazine is still alive and kicking.

MBAs applying for Theme Park jobs I hope this recession doesn't mean I have to go work at Hershey Park again. I still have nightmares about the Frog Bog.

My poor newspaper
The Triangle, the student newspaper at Drexel University, just went a month without having an editor-in-chief. What the hell's going on over there? And more importantly, why did they ever get rid of Vlad the Impaler's Lotto Numbers? That's when things really started going downhill.

It's official: Hollywood hates Isaac Asimov I didn't think it could worse than the I,Robot movie. But then I found out that Roland Emmerich is directing a movie of Foundation. Kill me now.

I'm concerned that my son has a secret girlfriend I don't think she should worry.

It's times like this I wish I was 50 years younger,and a woman

I would would leopard-print pants if it meant that Lemmy Kilmister would drive a motorcycle into my living room.

The best interview with a band I have ever read in my entire life
Part 1. Part 2. This is an absolutely hilarious interview with the black metal band Vondur. I think they were probably just joking around, but I like to think they were completely serious.

Rockin' version of my favorite Christmas song

King Diamond doing "No Presents for Christmas" with a little help from Metallica.

The Benny Hillifier That's what the R. Budd Dwyer video has been missing - Yakkity Sax playing in the background.

Let's Go Get Sushi And Not Pay A sequel to Repo Man? Alex Cox is writing and directing, so there's a slight possibility this might be good. The idea certainly doesn't make me want to vomit blood the way that proposed remake of They Live does.

My Favorite Bit from A Bit of Fry and Laurie

Hey it’s Thanksgiving so why not write about what I did on Halloween?
I just didn’t realize I didn’t post anything about the Exhumed Films 24 hour film festival I attended on Halloween. This was the second year they did this, and as awesome as last year’s marathon was, this year’s was even better. Here’s what we watched and what I thought -

John Carpenter’s The Fog – If I had to watch one movie about zombie sailors, I would choose Shockwaves, but this would be my second choice. As a small town prepares to celebrate its 100th anniversary, a mysterious fog rolls in, and as we all know from watching the Weather Channel, that means zombies. I have an unhealthy obsession with all things involving John Carpenter to the point where if my wife said something like “Ghosts of Mars was lame”, I would hit her in the face with a sock full of quarters. So, big ups to Exhumed Films for showing a movie made by one of the greatest men in the history of the world.

Destroy All Monsters – This is a giant monster movie, featuring Godzilla and about every monster the Toho company ever came up with, including the incredibly stupid Baby Godzilla, whose only superpower is that he can blow smoke rings at people. For a movie called destroy all Monsters, I was expecting more monster-destroying action, but much of the movie focuses on the aliens who are trying to invade Earth and are using the monsters to carry out their evil plans. The aliens look like a bunch of sexy Japanese girls in silver jumpsuits, so I was rooting for them throughout most of the movie. This really isn’t the best Godzilla movie I’ve ever seen, but it’s not bad. And of course, it’s much better than the American Godzilla movie.

Wicked, Wicked – This is a pretty standard thriller about a psychopath murdering beautiful women staying at a hotel, but it does have in interesting gimmick. The movie was filmed entirely in split screen (billed as “duo-vision” by the producers), so you can see what the killer’s up to while people are searching for him. Although the producers try to keep the identity of the killer hidden for a while, it’s pretty obvious who it is, so there really isn’t a whole lot of suspense. Also, the acting is pretty terrible all around. Even the split screen concept, while effective at times, is kind of a waste when it comes to scenes where they’re just showing two sides of a conversation in split screen. So, high marks for trying something new, but I’d like the see this concept deployed with a movie that was actually good.

The Incredible Shrinking Man – This movie’s title reminds me of the shows they air on the Discovery Health Channel. They don’t even bother trying to come up with interesting titles; they just name their shows things like “Face Eating Tumor”, or “Fat Man With Halitosis”, and when you tune in, that’s exactly what you get. So, if you’d like to watch a movie about a man who shrinks in a manner that could be described as incredible, you might want to check this out. Good stuff.

Phantasm 2 – James LeGros stars in a movie he no doubt leaves off his resume these days. James Legros plays an older version of Mike from the first movie, and reggie Bannister is back playing Reggie, a balding ice cream salesman. Much like the first Phantasm about 90 percent of the budget for this movie went into the special effects, and the story still doesn’t make any sense. There’s an old guy who steals corpses so that he can turn them into undead dwarves and then send them to his home dimension where they do manual labor. The old guy travels around in a hearse, but sometimes he teleports places. Only Mike and Reggie can stop him from completing his fiendish plan.I can believe Don Coscarelli directed the movie, but I refuse to believe that he wrote a screenplay for this. I’ve seen Japanese horror movies with more coherent, logical plots than this movie. The appeal of this series is lost on me.

Nightmare on Elm Street – Although some of the sequels to this movie are some of the worst horror movies ever made, I think the original holds up pretty well. Freddie Krueger really isn’t seen that much in the movie, and when he is, he’s menacing instead of cracking terribly jokes like he does in the later movies. Most slasher movies suck, but Nightmare on Elm Street is one of the good ones.

Fright Night – A teenage boy thinks that a vampire has moved in next door to him and turns to the only man he thinks can help him – a washed up horror movie actor who hosts the local late-night monster movie show on TV. One of the few horror/comedies that actually works, although I think the scenes where they try to make Amanda Bearse look sexy don’t work that well. Everything else is great though.

Dead & Buried – The highlight of the entire fest for me, as this is one of my favorite horror movies. It was written by Dan O’Bannon shortly after his success with Alien, yet pretty much disappeared shortly after it was released in 1981. When visitors to a small New England start turning up dead, the local sheriff tries to get to the bottom of things. But the more he digs, the more it becomes clear that he’s the only person in the town who’s not killing people. I can’t recommend this movie enough, not just because it’s a very well made horror movie, but because it also has one of my favorite twist endings in a movie ever.

The Boogeyman - On the other hand, this movie is hilariously bad. A little boy kills his mother’s boyfriend. Somehow the boyfriend’s soul gets trapped in a mirror, and when the mirror breaks 20 years later, the boyfriend’s evil spirit goes on a killing spree. The only noteworthy thing about this movie aside from it being so ludicrous is the brief appearance by Jane Pratt, founder of Sassy magazine, playing one of the hapless teenage victims.

Island of the Damned – I always get this movie confused with the movie where that guys rapes a goat, but that’s Island of Death. Silly me! This is actually the movie Who Can Kill a Child?, but I guess Island of Death was the name it was originally released under in America. A young couple visits a Spanish island on vacation only to learn that the children of the island have killed all the adults and are now trying to kill them. There have been way too many movies about evil kids, but I think this movie is surprisingly effective. Not sure why, but it just works. I'm disappointed it wasn't more violent, but if you see only one movie about kids killing people, make it this one.

Equinox – A group of teenagers head to the woods and find a book that allows them to summon up monsters. Imagine Manos: The Hands of Fate with some pretty decent special effects and you’ve got Equinox. The creators went on to win numerous awards for special effects work in Hollywood films, which I think is what’s keeping this film from falling into obscurity. Kind of fun to watch once, but I don’t think I’d want to sit through it again.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 – I’ve long had mixed feelings on Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and having watched it again, I’m still not sure how I feel about it. On one hand, I have to give Tobe Hooper credit for not rehashing the first movie. This is very much its own movie, and I can understand why people like this. However, TCM2 is basically a horror comedy, with Leatherface basically being turned into Sloth from The Goonies except with a chainsaw, and his family being turned into a bunch of wisecracking hillbillies. So, it's kind of a mixed bag, but at least it's better than Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3

Food of the Gods – Giant rats eat people. That’s pretty much it. Not that good.

Return of the Living Dead – I’m pretty sure that this is the movie that brought fast zombies to the screen (unless you count Nightmare City, but let’s be honest, those hardly count as zombies). A lot of people have philosophical problems with fast zombies, and I can respect that. But if you handle the fast zombies, this movie is pretty good, and not just because Linnea Quigley spends most of the movie completely naked. There’s also a ton of gore. After a long night of watching movies, this was the perfect way to cap things off. I hope they have another film fest next year, because this year’s was awesome.