Criminal Minds 118: Somebody’s Watching

The Criminal Minds team is headed to LA! Which is actually pretty easy, since the show is filmed there! Mandy and Elliot are at a gallery showing, which is owned by a high school friend of Elliot’s! They quickly meet the episode’s guest star, a TV star! And then it turns out that Elliot’s name is actually Reed, and I’ve been getting it wrong for a few episodes now. Huh. How about that. Then it’s time to establish the episode’s theme (stalking), when a papparazzo shows up and snaps some pictures of the starlet.

Reed and the starlet flirt for a while (he’s socially inept at it, of course), while Mandy spends time with one of the starlet’s artist friends. They explain that they’re in town to give the LAPD a class on serial killing. In an amazing coincidence, on the very day they’re giving this seminar a masked killer with a really, really small gun turns up at the house of an actress, then proceeds to kill both her and her boyfriend.

It may seem like I’m making too big a deal about the gun, but believe me, it’ll be important later.

The Makers of Alien Raiders would like you to know...

That they’ve seen “John Carpenter’s The Thing”

Seriously, that’s the only piece of information that they would like you to have. Based on the film I just watched, it may be the only piece of information that they actually possess. How do I know this?

Let me remind you of something – You know that scene from The Thing where Kurt Russell ties everyone up in the rec room so he can prove, through his blood test, who’s an alien and who isn’t?

Cool scene, right? Yeah, I know.

So why am I reminding you of that scene? To save you the 90 minutes it would take to watch Alien Raiders. Because the film only exists to remind you of how great that scene was.

The Ultimate Method of Dealing With Vampires

Kiss of the Vampire, or "Immortally Yours", depending on which title you prefer, is a recent direct-to-video film that acts as sort of a bizarro-world version of Twilight. Instead of the story of a human woman who falls obsessively in love with a vampire, leading to her wanting to become a vampire, and then nothing happens, it's the story of a vampire who falls obsessively in love with a human woman, leading to him wanting to become human, and then far too much happens.

Last Week's CSI Miami

You may notice that CSI: Miami skipped the end of October, robbing us all of the joy of discovering what Horatio Caine would dress as for Halloween. It’s not a cheat, though. Apparently they just don’t have Halloween in Miami. Who knew?

Someone’s in a costume, anyway, as a bride freaks out because her husband and his groomsmen have yet to appear for the wedding ceremony. Obviously she doesn’t know that she’s on CSI: Miami, or else she’d understand that weddings tend not to go well there. Although at least for once it looks like the bride isn’t going to get shot on her wedding day.

Hey, the father of the bride is that guy from Murder One! Neat!

As anyone who’s ever seen a television show can predict, the wedding turns out to be nothing but hitches, as some groomsmen are lying, unconscious, in a fountain, surrounded by human blood! And they’ve got no idea where the Groom is, but that’s probably his blood!

Oh, look! Someone in the CSI: Miami writer’s room saw The Hangover during the break!

Credit Ads Finally Get It Together

Wow, is that a load of my mind. I’m not sure why it took so long, but here’s a credit ad that conveys a clear message. Green=good, red=bad. Hell, they even listened to me and did away with that confusing blue strip that was ‘worse’ than green.

Well, credit agency people, you’ve finally gotten there. You may still be employed by one of the most corrupt and pointless parts of a disgusting, rotting-from-the-inside industry, but at least you’ve reached the point where you’re as good at crafting banner ads as a jerk with no design or computer training of any kind.

Congratulations.

Saturday Night Live RapeWatch: Taylor Swift Edition

Oh, god damn it, SNL. Here we are, just one episode from me calling the whole thing off, and you go an resurrect the sketch that led me to start the thing in the first place!

Do you even want to turn into a less abhorrent mess?

So, time for the count- In addition to the horrible 'scared straight' sketch, where Kenan Thompson (and Taylor Swift in drag) recount the plots of films and then uses those plots as the basis for clever turns of phrase by which they threaten petty criminals with brutal gay rape, there was an offhand joke in the news segment about an adorable puppy being raped by another adorable puppy.

It was small enough a reference that I was going to let it slide had the rest of the show been clean, but that scared straight sketch just sickened me. So now I'm back chronicling just how low SNL can sink.

On the upside, it was a light wee for Homophobia, with just threatened gay rape in the Scared Straight sketch counting. Smuggy Smuggerson even managed to make a joke about the election's anti gay marriage referendum without taking a shot at gay people. Good for him.

Final joke tally:

Rape - 2
Homophobia - 1

Criminal Minds 117: A Real Rain

It’s raining in New York, and a doughy man tapes tin foil to the windows of his apartment to keep the voices from getting into his head. With that done he heads out onto the street (where the voices live, apparently), and gets in a cab. The doughy man has this cabbie drive him out into the middle of nowhere, then murders him with a pistol!

By shooting him, in case you were wondering. What so strange about this murder? The killer also blindfolded the cabbie and stabbed him in the ear with an icepick. There are two other murders with the exact same MO, but there are no leads of any kind!

While on the way to way to New York the team pauses for a little character stuff, including blonde girl flirting with Reed, but none of it is relevant to the case, so we’ll keep going.

Trips to the crime scenes reveal that the killer had the murders meticulously planned out. Unfortunately they don’t have enough evidence to put together a helpful profile, and only manage to waste the time of the police and the audience alike. Their conclusion? That he’s a white guy who has a day job (because he kills at night). Great. Way to narrow down the field.

Joy Ride 2: We were unable to secure the return of Buffalo Bill from Monk!

This isn’t meant as an overall complaint about the film, which is an utterly servicable thriller and perfectly fine follow up to the first Joy Ride, which is notable for being the last film J.J. Abrams wrote during the ‘hack screenwriter’ phase of his career, before moving on to the ‘genre visionary’ phase. It was also the second time that year Paul Walker had appeared in a film with Ted Levine, although in Joy Ride Ted just did a voiceover once production was finished.

The plot of this film is fairly similar to the first, in that people driving through the desert get menaced by a trucker, but differs in the villain’s incitement to action. This time, rather than the main characters going out of their way to mess with a stranger and earning his ire, it’s a random, somewhat understandable error that causes the problem. This leads to kidnapping and sexualized violence/humilation, as you see more and more often in film these days.

My problem with the movie comes right at the ending, and it’s kind of a key one – the sequel setup.

And The Credit Score Ads Just Get More Confusing

Here’s another two ads that I grabbed in the last couple of months.

Okay, let’s look at this one for a second. They’ve made the odd choice (like the dinosaur ad before it) to associate different levels of credit-score-having. In an apparent attempt to avoid my criticism from last time they’ve kept the animals from having expressions that might be mis-interpreted. Instead they all have the same flat, vacant expression, like they have no idea what they’re doing in a credit ad. Sadly, I have no explanations to offer them.

Happy Halloween!

That's right, it's the 31st, which means that it's time to celebrate Halloween in the only appropriate way! By screening a copy of Ghostwatch!

Of course, since Ghostwatch doesn't currently seem to be in print you'll have a hard time buying a copy... but luckily some industrious soul has uploaded the whole thing to youtube! So get some candy and hot chocolate, settle down in front of the monitor, and enjoy!

Part 1

Criminal Minds 116: The Tribe

This episode is going to take the team out into the desert, it seems. The story begins at a house party that some sexy teens are throwing in a unfinished home in the middle of a development. Among the teens is a blonde girl who seems slightly out of it. After saying that she’s looking for the bathroom she heads outside, leaving the back door wide open. She doesn’t get more than a few steps away from the house when she’s grabbed by some men who were watching her from a van out front!

Amazingly, that’s not all the horror that happens, as just moments later a team of killers rushes down out of the hills behind the house and attacks the rest of the teens in the building with long knives! What’s going on here? Are these two events connected, other than spatially and temporally? I guess we’ll find out after the opening credits!

The Saw Diaries

In preparation for theavod’s definitive Sawcast, I kept copious notes while watching the films. I was going to toss them, but then it occurred to me, ‘hey Count, you’re trying to post things more often, right?’ And you know who’d love to read a running commentary of these movies in text form, with a few illustrations? People, that’s who!

Just a warning – the section on Saw 6 may be a little fractured. I took notes in longhand in a dark theatre, then attempted to transcribe them. Also that section doesn’t have any illustrations, for obvious reasons!

Time for a SawVod, Everyone!

Yes, it's true, the Divemistress and myself actually watched all the Saw movies in a row, then stepped out to see the new one in theaters. And I've got to say, you're probably going to be surprised by the things we've got to say about the series over the course our epic 3 and a half hour discusson. Just right-click and download away!

Part 1 - Jigsaw is a Dick
Part 2 - Jigsaw's Corpse is a Dick
Part 3 - Circular Saw is a Dick

As usual, you can also listen to this by heading over to theAvod website (link just over to your right), and streaming it, or just downloading it from the iTunes store, which I should really have a link of some kind to, come to think of it.

What's that I hear about show notes? You'll find my most comprehensive show notes just slightly above this post! Although, since they're going up at the same time, I guess you'll probably see them first!

Is Medium Screwing With Me?

Or am I just that bad at math?

In a late-last-season episode of Medium the oldest daughter, whose name escapes me at the moment, was taking the SATs (or a practice test, whatever), and a single math question appeared on screen. Being obsessive about fake books produced for TV shows, I captured an image of it:

Okay, am I crazy, or are none of those the correct answer?

The World's Most Mixed Metaphor

I know I like to avoid giving any real context with these images, but there’s one thing you have to know before looking at this one:

The Crime Smasher! (that's what Spy Smasher did after the war ended. He smashed crime) is chasing a criminal named Spider. Take it away, panel!

They didn’t just mix that metaphor. They threw it in a blender and turned it on ‘grind’ for five minutes straight.