Tales From the Darkside 114: Snip Snip

The opening credits of this week's episode immediately caught my attention - Carol Kane is guest-starring! Oh, those lovely childhood days of listening to her shrill voice scratch at my ears from the confines of some syndicated Taxi re-runs. The episode also features 'Bud Cort', who the internet tells me is a successful character actor, but who I know only from his hilarious cameo on Arrested Development, replacing the star of 'Mister Reinhold's Courtroom'. I wonder what Carol's going to be up to this week? Whatever it is, it certainly involves lighting a lot of candles!

Actually, it's Bud lighting the candles - he's using them as part of a spell to try and rig the lottery! He's so sure that he's going to win that he calls the headmaster of the university where he works to gloat about his coming success and quit! Which seems a little presumptuous, but he explains that his years of teaching Algebra have left him with the ability to 'hear' what numbers are saying to him - which is the kind of thing you'd expect someone who'd, Pi-style, unlocked the numerical master code of the universe to say, as opposed to a guy who's exploiting magic to his own ends:

Yeah, that's a flying lottery ticket. So it's definitely magic, and not math, that's responsible for his coming riches. Although I can't imagine that there's going to be much money in the Jackpot - while the MC of the drawing referred to it as the state's first mega-jackpot, he also mentioned that five million people have bought tickets. If there are only six numbers on the ticket, however, aren't there only a million possible combinations? Won't Bud be sharing his win with at least five other people? Or more likely hundreds, given that he's selected a combination sure to be favoured by would-be-witches and self-identified goths all across the state.

Turns out the whole thing is moot - it turns out he didn't pick the right number after all. The winner was 666667! Yup, he was one number off, and is, as a result, out some TEN MILLION DOLLARS!

Seriously? There were only a million possible tickets. How could the prize possibly be ten million dollars? How much did these tickets cost?

Saturday Night Live RapeWatch: Jesse Eisenberg Edition

Another week of clean-yet-tedious entertainments here at SNL!

With Jesse Eisenberg hosting the lion's share of the sketches were given over to the depiction of nervous, self-conscious dorks humiliating themselves. Were I some kind of a cruel wag I might note that, of late, the guest hosts haven't been given much to do in the show, possibly because te writers can't relate to the Jeff Bridges and Robert DeNiros of the world, or imagine how they could possibly be involved in a comedic situation. Give them a gangly, pasty, awkward twenty-something however, and the floodgates open! Maybe the only sketch to not revolve around Eisenberg was a likeably silly take on 70s Blaxploitation cinema that featured the "Bride of Blackenstein". There wasn't really a joke beyond her having a large ass and being bossy, but the fact that the musical guest (who portrayed the titular bride) wore the wig in her second musical number raised the bar for the entire show.

Oh, and despite the appearance of John Waters, the digital music video was a damp squid - not catchy, not especially funny, not cameo-packed. Just a mess all around.

Now for the numbers!

Homophobia - 1 (A sketch about drugs for pre-op transsexuals had a single joke: Isn't it gross that men want to turn into women!?)

Rape - 0!

Good work, SNL! If I thought you'd respond to positive reinforcement, I'd send you a cookie bouquet to reward you for your lack of rape-themed humour!

How to Ruin Your Own Movie: Jennifer's Body Edition

I've established well and thoroughly just what a plague on the film industry this whole 'start the movie at the end' thing is, and in the process of covering these films I thought I'd seen nearly every way imaginable for a film to spoil its entire plot in the opening seconds. Even I, jaded though I am, was wholly unprepared for how bound and determined Jennifer's Body is to murder any attempts at suspense. If you're at all interested in learning how to ruin your own movie, look no further than Jennifer's Body - it is a master's class on the subject.

So, with no further ado, here's the first shot of the movie:

Criminal Minds 408: Masterpiece

The episode opens as most Criminal Minds Episodes do: piano music plays while we see shots of a woman and some children trapped in a small room, being photographed by a surveillance camera.

Okay, so maybe this is a bit of a departure, and it seems like a clever enough one that it’s worth getting excited about, except for one thing: when we get a look at the killer’s lair (which is directly adjacent to the murder room), we see that it’s full of famous paintings with geometric lines drawn over them. If that doesn’t tip you off to how annoying this is about to get, the show drops in a lingering shot of this:

Yup, it’s the spiral of a shell. So we’re in for an hour of nonsense blathering about the golden mean and Fibbonacci. Fantastic. You know what the crazy part is? I bet most of the characters act like they’ve never heard of it, even though it was prominently featured in the Da Vinci Code (that’s how I learned about it, after all) – and don’t tell me they all haven’t read the Da Vinci code. These people spend a thousand hours a year on planes. Of course they’ve read the Da Vinci Code.

Okay, it might actually be time to move on to the story now, in which Joe and Reid are talking to a group of college students about life in the FBI. As the speech continues Jason Alexander slips into the back of the room, wearing what can only be described as a preposterous getup:

What’s he up to, other than being this week’s guest killer? We’ll find out after a quick trip to Quantico, where Todd, the temp-JJ sucks at her job. The show lets us see her completely botch an interview with a detective who’s looking for help on a case, and then gets incredibly defensive when Derek swoops in to help out. Will she get good at her job before being transferred, or simply get fired for incompetence when it’s time for JJ to get back?

At the college Jason walks up to Reid and Joe and introduces himself as ‘Professor Rothschild’, then shows them a few pictures of his murder victims:

Which are very effectively creepy, and do a good job of organically hiding the faces of the victims. It seems the art department has really stepped up its game since that collage disaster back in season 1!

Jason boasts that he dissolved them all in acid, and that there are five more victims, who will all be dead in the next nine hours unless they can beat his game. Can they? Let’s find out after the opening credits!

Adventures in Fake Journalism: Thankskilling

It seems almost like kicking a dead horse to complain about a lack of verisimilitude in the movie Thankskilling, which featured a long sequence in which a killer turkey wore a dead man's face, and a number of people were convinced they were talking to that man. Despite the fact that he was three feet shorter, and a turkey.

Still, I want to point out the film's one attempt at building a prop book because, within the annals of weird/awful prop production, it stands out from the crowd, both because it was entirely unnecessary, and because the filmmakers solution was so utterly bizarre.

Mid-way through the film, the nerd character pauses to flip through a book about the history of thanksgiving, in the hopes that it might offer some clues as to how to defeat the evil turkey that's chasing them. It does, but the 'prop department' was unable (or unwilling) to write a few paragraphs about an evil magic turkey so that the book would look good during the quick insert shot when he's reading. So the product was this:

Overlook the fact that it's clearly a computer printout and focus on the text with me. The left side is largely illegible, but I was able to spot the name 'Bill O'Neal' and reference to his book 'The First Thanksgiving: It was in Texas!' (it wasn't, BTW). The right side is where the real action goes down, however - the bulk of the text comes straight from the most reliable source possible: the Thanksgiving Wikipedia page, but then the text following it is supposed to be in code. But rather than actually write a code, the 'prop department' did this:

A series of algebraic equations cut and pasted in sequence. I'll give the producers this: what they lacked in authenticity they certainly made up for in sheer 'never-seen-that-beforitude'.

Time for an Avod Bitchfest!

That's right, in struggling to come up with another themed episode, DM and myself wound up scraping the bottom of the barrel this week. In our defense, it didn't seem like such a bad idea when we found out that there was a movie called "Run! Bitch Run!' - How could you turn that down?

The answer, of course, is that you could turn it down if you had the sense in you that god gave a gnat. Still, though, watching it, BitchSlap, and Jennifer's Body did lead to a spectacularly bitchy episode of TheAvod, so, in the end, all was profoundly not lost!

If you'd like to hear more about the films, just right-click here to download the episode, or head on over to TheAvod's own website and stream it for yourself!

The Thirty-Fifth-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics!

So thoughtful of that guy to stop the fight just long enough to explain the plot. And then immediately start it back up again.

Tales From the Darkside 113: Anniversary Dinner

This week's episode opens on an elderly couple out in the woods, sharing a nice dinner... not the anniversary dinner of the title, however - is this because... they ARE the anniversary dinner?! Okay Count, calm down, you're half a minute into the episode, too early to be calling twists. Just enjoy for now.

The husband cuts his finger on a knife, and while the wife, while sucking it clean, refers to the contradiction of an 'old sourpuss tasting so sweet' which I know is meant to be comforting, but she's tasting blood and calling it sweet. Ick. Also, who's playing the wife?

Her face isn't especially familiar, but I swear I know the voice... which I now realize isn't in the picture, so let's move on. The anniversary of the title is mentioned fairly quickly - it seems they've been married for twenty-five years, and the wife is feeling empty-nesty. Holidays feel empty without their children around, you see. And who should come sneaking up outside the house just as she comments on that?

Probably not their children.

The next day Wife sees two backpackers headed up the drive to her house, and reacts with an understandable level of wariness. They claim to be looking for the 'old Anderson place', and admit to having spent the night in the orchard. Wife offers to let the couple stick around and do some chores in exchange from room, board, and perhaps a little spending money. When the male backpacker laughs at the idea and starts to leave, husband comes rushing out of the house with a shotgun-

Which seems like a bit of an overreaction, if you ask me. The backpackers leave - which they'd been planning on doing anyhow, mind you, but the wife tells the female backpacker, 'Sybil', that she's welcome back if the male backpacker seems like trouble. Sybil doesn't find this offer as ominous as she ought to, but then again, she doesn't know that her exit is framed by the handle of an ax:

Ladies and gentlemen, I think we've just met our 'Anniversary Dinner'.

In the very next scene the wife is chopping up meat and complaining that it's too tough. This naturally leads to an expressed hope that Sybil will return, and the creepy suggestion that she reminds wife of their children. Sybil does, in fact, return that bery night, and is welcomed into the house with open arms. Proving that she's basically the ideal victim of cannibals, she doesn't run screaming from the house when wife explains that their children still live with them 'In a way' and that they 'become a part of you'. So yikes, these old people ate their children.

That night at dinner wife tells husband that Sybil's run away from home, and hasn't talked to any of her family members in two years. Which, again, if there were a checklist for the perfect victim of a serial killer... Sybil swiffs another chance to run screaming from the house when they offer to show her... 'the play room', which is actually hidden behind a creepy false wall in the kitchen!

The wall is covered with hunting implements and trophies (in the pieces of dead animals sense of the term), but the real centerpiece of the place is, incongruously enough, a large wooden jacuzzi!

Husband starts up the jacuzzi as Sybil runs off to grab her bathing suit. Then, as if the situation weren't creepy enough, wife all but freaks out when the pool doesn't start up immediately. Then they proceed to watch Sybil, um, hungrily, as she enjoys her bath.

As if it wasn't clear enough what was coming next, they even whisper conspiratorially about how great their 'anniversary' is going to be with a kid in the house. Then, naturally, the subject of dinner comes up, and husband starts opining loudly about how their dinner may have been ruined because the butcher they get their meat from doesn't know how to kill animals! It's husband's theory, you see, that killing a frightened, abused animal poisons the meat, and ruins it. That you must care for the animals that you're going to kill and devour. He says this, remember, to the runaway girl who he and his wife have taken in, bathed, fed, and generally cared for. Yet she doesn't flee.

Although, to offer an explanation for this disturbing inaction, I will point out that Sybil isn't aware that, once again, she's been framed next to that ax and stump:

Poor sap.

One scene later and it's the couple's anniversary - Sybil wakes up alone in the house, so naturally she goes to explore the play room. Which is naturally killed with animals who were totally content before being shot in the neck from hundreds of feet away. Finally she gets a little creeped out when she gets a gander at the couple's knife collection:

But, again, not so creeped out that she does the sensible thing. Instead she just starts up the jacuzzi once more and prepares to hop in. Is she going to figure it out? There's just five minutes left! Poking around a little more she uncovers the stereo, and turns on some brassy classical music, then finds a mysterious button hidden among the knives. Before she can press it husband and wife arrive home, and freak out more than a little. What's behind the wall of knives? Sybil is too busy apologizing for poking around in their stuff to bother wondering.

Husband comes out of the play room and apologizes for snapping, then gives Sybil some wine and tells her to hop back in the tub at her leisure. Things then take a turn for the bizarre when wife walks in, carrying a ladle and a plate of vegetables. Sybil's too drunk to be concerned when wife starts tossing the vegetables into the water with her, and I can't believe I didn't realize that the jacuzzi was actually a giant stew pot! The drugs in the wine finally kick in and Sybil slips below the surface to begin cooking.

This leaves just a single thing left unexplained - what's behind the wall of knives? Wife says that they really ought to 'share' their meal with the children, which they do by heading over to the knife panel and opening it to reveal...

The skulls of their dead children! Or just the children they kidnapped and murdered, the origin of these kids isn't exactly made explicit. Still, though, them old cannibals don't mess around. Except for the fact that there's a guy out there who knows where they live and whose girlfriend ran off to go back to their house before mysteriously disappearing.

That could easily come back to bite them, come to think of it.

Frightmare's War With the English Language - Part 2!

As promised (threatened?) by the title of the last post on this subject, here's the other notable scene from genre classic 'Frightmare':

The fascinating thing about this film is that the writer/director 'Ash Smith' demonstrates a level of competence in the film's other dialogue scenes. When characters gather together to discuss their charity haunted house or their attempts to solve a murder the use of English is, while perfunctory, still appropriate. It's only when Ash Smith attempts to write people on television that dealing with a second level of unreality causes him to become crushed by an avalanche of self-consciousness, leaving him unable to produce anything other than bizarre-sounding gibberish. Albeit bizarre-sounding gibberish that he was able to convince actors to read off of cue cards.

Now, for the record, and setting aside the fact that it was a scene about two characters debating the deeper meaning of a malapropism, here is a partial list of the words that Ash Smith doesn't know the meaning of, yet feels comfortable using:

Common

Processing

Intuitive

Platoon of the Dead isn't a comedy

Despite what's going to appear below:

That's the crawl which opens the film. Seeing that, one might well expect the content of the film to be relatively serious; to, for lack of a better term, 'mean' what happens.

And then the actual film starts. We're presented with a soldier wandering through the woods, having survived an ambush. He comes across an injured man, and immediately checks the man's pulse:

Despite the fact that the man's injuries consist of having been impaled on a branch:

The soldier then attempts to call for help, while his body language suggests that he's, you know, just hangin'-

And his radio proves to be a slightly outdated cell phone, held upside down.

That's nothing compared to his gun, however-

Which proves to have incredibly visible holes where the screws connect the two pieces of plastic.

It's strange, because were the rest of the film to be a broad comedy, all of this would work as a perfect setup. It's not, however.

More's the pity.

Criminal Minds 407: Memoriam

Part 2 of the cliffhanger,folks – we’re going to find out what was going on with Reid’s nightmares! Was his dad a murderer? Of course not, but I’m sure there’ll be an interesting story to explain the dreams.

Speaking of his dreams, Reid announces to the team that he won’t be heading back to Quantico with them, but doesn’t explain why he’ll be remaining in Las Vegas. Every but Derek accepts his alibi of wanting to spend some more time with his mother, but Derek doesn’t say anything, so Reid is free to head over to a local police station and ask after the case file. It’s delivered to him by Xander Berkeley, of 24 (and a million other things) fame! Xander was one of the cops on the case – he compares this murder to the Jonbenet Ramsay case, which may be the most open they’ve ever been with their talking about the real case an episode was based on. This episode, like that true-life tragedy, revlovles around a child found dead in the basement of their own home, with no sign of forced entry suggesting that an intruder had committed the act. Will the similarities to the Ramsay case continue, or will this week’s case actually be solved?

The latter, I’m guessing.

Helping the latter occur is… the rest of the team! Yeah, Derek and Joe didn’t get on the plane either. Knowing full well about Reid’s stress, they’ve decided to hang out and help Reid solve the crime, for which he’s already got a prime suspect… his own father!

Chocolate Cannibalism Exposed!

The world of children's candy can oft be a disturbing one. Giant balls of resin designed to literally break jaws. Incitements to eat worms and miniature bears, each constructed from some manner of gelatin. The terrifying image of a rabbit laying chocolate eggs...

All of these have, in one way or another, scarred children for life. This year, however, Cadbury has thrown off all pretense of marketing chocolate treats, and instead released a product that seems to exist for no other purpose than to disturb anyone foolish enough to look upon its packaging. That product? The Choc-Men.

Look at his wild eyes! The abandon with which he tears his chocolate brother apart with his teeth! Only one question can be asked of this situation - has resorting to cannibalism driven him mad, or did madness cause him to resort to cannibalism?

Not satisfied with this relatively tame depiction of snowman cannibalism, Cadbury released a second edition of the Choc-Men, this one branded under its popular 'Caramilk' line.

No, you're not seeing things, that chocolate snowman is bleeding profusely as his head is being torn apart. The Caramilk secret, it would seem, is devouring the living as they scream for mercy.

This, ladies and gentleman of the jury, is a face that has gazed into the abyss. How can he be found legally responsible for his actions, abominable though they may have been, when he'll never again understand what they were?

On the Subject of Impaired Avods...

Tried something very strange today - recorded an Avod despite still being quite ill. I think it went over fairly well, although, and this is the unusual part, I've already forgotten almost everything I said in the show, despite wrapping it just under two hours ago.

I suppose there's an upside to finally having an Avod that I can listen to 'fresh', but I'm more troubled than anything else by what horrible things I may have said in my state of diminished faculty. Well, it's not like the Divemistress stopped the show due to offensiveness or anything...

Tell you what, right-click to download here, and judge for yourself! I apologize in advance for my 'sick guy' voice. That literally could not be helped.

Fun Fact about this Week's Episode: The Zatoichi series that was mentioned this week featured both 26 films and a television series that ran more than one hundred episodes!

The Thirty-Fourth-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics!

This isn't a superhero torturing a criminal for information - which is a pretty common sight in the golden age, truth be told - it's a superhero taking a criminal to the police, then offering them advice on the best way to torture him for information.

Join us next time for more adventures of The Clock - Enhanced Interrogation Consultant!

Tales From the Darkside 112 : In the Cards

The episode opens with a saucy woman tempting fate - how, you ask? She's flirting with, and dismissing, a man on the phone, while placing an ad for her new fortune-telling business. Which she clearly doesn't believe in! Man, is uppance coming fast.

In the form of an old lady, it would seem!