Comic-book movies, in their own sprawling simulated narrative universes, have been raising the stakes to this level for years: Every summer we watch dozens of villains plotting to blow up the entire universe, but the motivations are always hazy. Why, exactly, does the baddie want to destroy everything again? Now we know.
Tag Archives: Movies
Lo and Behold
Herzog’s latest (trailer).
(Sample quote: “The Internet is a manifestation of evil itself.”)
Tokoloshe
Die Antwoord investigates.
(Yes, Die Antwoord are appalling degenerates and I should try harder not to like them. Also, Chappie was Satanist as hell.)
Heretic
Twitter cuts (#72)
Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now (1979) as Photojournalist#DennisHopper #ApocalypseNow #MovieQuotes pic.twitter.com/s9Ae3HXjyX
— Movie Buff (@MovieBAnonymous) May 17, 2016
Deadpool
A gonzo, hyper-violent superhero parody, until suddenly:
… now it’s eighty-nine, about to be ninety.
Underlinings (#59)
The plot of House of 1000 Corpses, as related by Wikipedia:
On October 30, 1977, Jerry Goldsmith, Bill Hudley, Mary Knowles, and Denise Willis are on the road in hopes of writing a book on offbeat roadside attractions. When the four meet Captain Spaulding, the owner of a gas station and “The Museum of Monsters & Madmen”, they learn the local legend of Dr. Satan. As they take off in search of the tree from which Dr. Satan was hanged, they pick up a young hitchhiker named Baby, who claims to live only a few miles away. Shortly after, the vehicle’s tire bursts in what is later seen to be a trap and Baby takes Bill to her family’s house. Moments later, Baby’s half-brother, Rufus, picks up the stranded passengers and takes them to the family home.
There they meet Baby’s family: Mother Firefly, Otis Driftwood, her adopted brother, Grampa Hugo and Baby’s deformed giant half-brother, Tiny. While being treated to dinner, Mother Firefly explains that her ex-husband, Earl, had previously tried to burn Tiny alive, along with the Firefly house. After dinner, the family puts on a Halloween show for their guests and Baby offends Mary by flirting with Bill. After Mary threatens Baby, Rufus tells them their car is repaired. As they leave, Otis and Tiny, disguised as scarecrows, attack the couples in the drive way and take them prisoner. The next day, Otis kills Bill and mutilates his body for art. Mary is tied up in a barn, Denise is tied to a bed while dressed up for Halloween, and Jerry is partially scalped for failing to guess Baby’s favorite movie star.
When Denise doesn’t come home, her father Don calls the police to report her missing. Two deputies, George Wydell and Steve Naish, find the couples’ abandoned car in a field with a tortured victim in the trunk. Don, who was once a cop, is called to the scene to help the deputies search. They arrive at the Firefly house and Wydell questions Mother Firefly about the missing teens. Mother Firefly shoots Wydell in the neck and kills him, and Don and Steve are then killed by Otis upon finding other bodies in the barn. Later that night, the three remaining teenagers are dressed as rabbits, and taken out to an abandoned well. Mary attempts to run away, but is stabbed to death by Baby moments later.
Meanwhile, Jerry and Denise are lowered into the well, where a group of undead men pull Jerry away, leaving Denise to find her way through an underground lair. As she wanders through the tunnels, she encounters Dr. Satan and a number of mental patients; Jerry is on Dr. Satan’s operating table being vivisected. Dr. Satan tells his mutated assistant, who turns out to be Earl, Mother Firefly’s ex-husband, to capture Denise, but Denise outwits him and escapes the chambers by crawling to the surface. She makes her way to the main road, where she encounters Captain Spaulding, who gives her a ride in his car. She passes out from exhaustion in the front seat, and Otis suddenly appears in the backseat with a knife. Denise later wakes up to find herself strapped to Dr. Satan’s operating table, with Dr. Satan standing there.
(Internal links removed.)
Apocalypse Hack 333
Underlinings (#50)
On the evanescence of Cyberpunk prophecy:
One notable departure from previous blockbuster dystopias like Logan’s Run (1976) was the fact that this [Blade Runner] future had a very visible past and had not been built from scratch. Existing buildings of Los Angeles were incorporated; the police headquarters is Union Station, the eerie stairwell courtyard is inside the Bradbury Building, Deckard’s apartment is in Frank Lloyd Wright’s neo-Mayan Ennis Brown House. It was all contained in a city that Ridley Scott revealed was indebted to contemporary Hong Kong. The colossal, recurring geisha girl on the electronic billboard is significant not for what she is advertising (the pill, as it happens) or even the echo of the decadent “Floating World” of Tokyo legend but for the implication that the future is both otherworldly and compromised. We can speculate on whether an orientalized U.S. West Coast represents the subconscious fear of the end of American exceptionalism, latent memories of having once been a colony, or fears that the Greater Japanese Empire was not entirely buried in 1945. In fact, the dread of being usurped by the Eastern nations was well-placed — a prescient indication that the world’s axis was shifting from mid-Atlantic to mid-Pacific. Asia was the future, and this is what it would look like. For a while, perhaps even still, it held true. The question is: which Asia? South Korean Smart City futurism? Colossal Chinese ghost cities? Drowning the sorrows of a 20-year deflationary recession in Tokyo’s Shinjuku? …
Time Spiral Press 