dick on the brain

Admittedly, I have a type.  Whatever.  I'm human.  That said, feel free to skip this post because I cannot be trusted when it comes to Brain Damage.

Horror nerds love Frank Henenlotter's Basket Case, but Brain Damage is better.  It's better because the male lead in this film is, to quote Claire Danes, so beautiful it hurts to look at him.  That's enough for me.

Brain Damage is a movie about a gorgeous man named Brian who thinks with his penis who he's named Elmer.  I think that's relatable.  The movie starts innocuously enough, Brian wants a night off from his girlfriend and his roommate so he pretends to be sick.   The girlfriend and roommate wind up falling in love with each other and Brian wakes up with blood all over his sheets.  A blackout moment!  One minute, Brian's throwing his sheets in the laundry and, next thing you know,  he's in an alley behind the whole foods, throwing his soiled panties in the trash.  Dick will make you do crazy things - we've all been there, sis!

Getting older, you start to know yourself.  For example, I know that I can't have chips in my house or apps on my phone because three weeks will go by and I'll be seven hundred pounds, still clicking on the same torso picture from someone 2378 feet away who I wouldn't have looked at twice in real life.  It's better (for me) not to go down that road.  A little self-awareness could have helped Brian, but instead he went down the dick hole and never came out again.

Sex addicts are a slippery lot.  They're like phallic sponges, they'll fill you up, but they also take all they can get and then leave you alone with a nasty smell on your fingers.  Gay, straight, they don't care.  They'll do anything.  I've seen Shame, I know.  When Brian has dick on the brain, it's all consuming - colors seem brighter, people seem interesting - he winds up in places with no clue how he got there.  Like an after-school special, Brain Damage shows us Brian's descent into addiction through the lens of 1980s grind house horror cinema.  If you're like me and have a fetish for  hot brunette tall men who look like vampires and who carry around anthropomorphic brain-sucking penises, pop a PrEP and go watch it on Shudder.  You'll be glad you did.

crossing party lines

My biological family is dead, so the closest thing I have to the experience y'all have of being simultaneously mortified by a loved one's behavior, but still desperately craving their love and attention, comes from watching Joe Bob Briggs.

After Elvira went full Hollywood and Rhonda Shear got tired of maintaining her upper register, Joe Bob owned horror movie nights on cable.  First on The Movie Channel in the 80s and then over at TNT where Monster-Vision reigned supreme through the mid-late 90s.  While I worshiped at the altar of Up and Night and wore out my VHS copy of Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, Joe-Bob had something they didn't - specifically, he was hot as fuck.

I'm not one to lust after straight men, but Joe Bob wasn't just hot, he was smart too - he wrote books!  He knew everything about the films he was showing, the making-of the films and the context in which we received the films.  His graphics packages were all day-glo and he had icons like Linnea Quigley come to visit his DIY trailer park set to chat.  I'm starting to sweat just thinking about it.


When a little birdie told me that Shudder was bringing back Joe Bob to work his magic on some titles in their streaming library, I was skeptical - more than skeptical, I didn't want it.  He's a straight white guy from Texas - proudly.  More complicated than being a straight white guy from Texas, he's a boomer.  With that, comes a lot of messy opinions and a general lack of desire to "read the room."  He doesn't really care about the hideous underpinning of the supreme court case on gay cakes, he casually mocks the controversy around Colin Kaepernick and he still loves to objectify ladies in bikinis.  This isn't a person I would be friends with any more than he'd want to come over my place to talk about Light in the Piazza and how quickly Antoni from Queer Eye sold out his entire online footprint to sponsored content (good angle for a Phantom of the Paradise reboot - you're welcome).

So, this last Friday the 13th, me and my bestie Mark sat down to watch The Last Drive-In on Shudder.  We had beer and pizza and we were prepared for anything.  Apparently we weren't the only ones, the feed crashed before the show even started.  Joe Bob broke the internet.

Three minutes in and he makes a reference to "Indians" and he's dropped a casual rape joke, but you know what?  We're doing this.  It's fine.  We're fine.  Like a couple of Patty Hearsts, we sat there transfixed by Joe Bob's dulcet tones.  If we closed our eyes, it was 1996 and we were safe in the comfort of something tied to our adolescence playing out as though no time passed.   It also didn't hurt that the first movie was Tourist Trap - a gay mid-summer classic!

"They're not perverts" - Joe Bob, re: the Trans community.

Next up is Sleepaway Camp and I want to die.  Joe Bob goes on for about twenty minutes about trans bathroom bills and "gender confusion," but is he woke?  Maybe.  He's mocking the notion that someone would carry a birth certificate with them to go to the bathroom and all the wasted resources that went into bigotry and, you know what, I'll take it.  In addition to being the gayest summer camp movie, I forgot how spectacularly vulgar Sleepaway Camp is - there's something truly magic about underage children swearing like they're in a Scorsese film!  

Then grown-up Felissa Rose shows up on the Joe Bob set wearing the most horrible pair of patent pleather, baby pink, bargain-basement stripper shoes with black tights and a thick black glitter dress (in the middle of summer).  I think it's safe to say Felissa isn't doing a lot to advance trans representation - if she had a queer friend, she'd know that you can't clash lipstick with your shoes, but what do I know.  Maybe this wasn't the place to have that conversation.  Maybe I'm part of the problem. 

Then came Rabid, a Cronenberg movie I'd never seen that Mark referred to as "gnarly" before heading out to a midnight screening of Jason Lives.  I have a strong aversion to vaginal body horror, so I had my first nap while Joe Bob talked in my dreams.

I woke up the next morning like Christmas day - racing to the TV with my Eggo waffles to catch up.  Joe Bob was still at it - maybe it was my coffee, but he was making good points about our over-dependence on cell phones and late-stage capitalism.   I love him.  Is this how the gays felt at Jonestown?

So much of my identity is has been tied to rejecting straight culture, avoiding the water cooler at work, rebuking sports, defying buffet lines and refusing to be a member of a club that not only doesn't want me as a member, but a club that's proven itself completely illegitimate.   The one thing Trump culture has done is expose that "traditional marriage" and "the rule of law" were all a gag.  These were systems put in place to give people power over other people.  We were lied to - straight, gay, all of us.  But here I am, watching b-movies and momentarily forgetting all that self-righteous indignation - allowing myself to enjoy a television program, homophobic warts and all.

So, yeah - we contain multitudes.  Joe Bob talked about AIDS, the FLQ,  he mocked Streisand and the first amendment and there was gay-panic humor and I still had the time of my life watching this entire marathon.  I want this on every Friday until I finally die. 

Long live Shudder - Long live the new flesh!

the TV set

"They look just like you and I, but inside - inside they're...different."

In the early 90s, nothing was better than hunkering down for Friday nights with Rhonda Shear (and sometimes Saturdays with Gilbert Gottfried).  Heaven is a double feature comprised of Can't Buy Me Love and The Howling: Part 4.  I remember the palpable thrill that can only be derived from being twelve years old and desperately trying to stay awake throughout both USA Up All Night movies.  Coming out of the MTV years, I think we all took for granted that TV wouldn't always be rock'n roll.

As long as there's been television, there's been cheap and easy late-night horror programming - the two go together like Kristin Chenoweth and twitter.  Whether staying Up All Night with Rhonda or hiking across town to the local video store and being lured by the siren song of a VHS box cover, one of the best elements of Pre-Blockbuster video culture was the element of discovery.

I miss being able to put my faith in late-night horror hosts and video store hipsters - the intimacy and trust implicit in that experience. Ticking through Netflix isn't the same.  Times have changed.  Even when Elvira came back to syndication a couple years ago, something was off.  Elvira still looks exactly the same as she did in 1987, but the revival of her late night shtick (using the same exact formula as it did in its original run) only demonstrated that we can't go back, we can only move forward.  

Here in LA, we're fortunate enough to have repertory theatres like Cinefamily and the New Beverly that drag out the classics week after week to expose a whole new generation to the joy of cinephilia. Nostalgia and kitsch are back in the hipster zeitgeist where they belong.  The good folks over at Shout Factory (the good people who brought us the Jem and Thirtysomething DVDs) were paying attention to this rash of sold-out horror screenings (each more obscure than the last) and Scream Factory was born.   A lot has been made of Scream Factory's recent slew of blu-ray restorations and the hype is well earned.   They're rapidly becoming the Criterion Collection of horror.  Now we can all can host our very own curated late-night movie marathons!

It’s thanks to Scream Factory that I discovered my favorite film of the summer, The Video Dead.

I know I can be a hard bitch, but once in a while a movie comes along that sweeps me off my feet and makes me feel like a giddy eleven year old sneaking downstairs late at night to watch scrambled pay-per-view in the living room with the volume turned all the way down. The Video Dead is such a film. 

With an electric synth score and prominently featuring many "actors" who wear high-waisted denim and appear to struggle with the English language, this movie has it all.  The Video Dead is about a brother and sister named Jeff and Susy who inherit an indestructible television that zombies come out of unless it’s covered in mirrors - aka: it's the stuff that pre-adolescent dreams are made of.

Last month, I was heading out to a party in Laguna and I couldn't decide which shoes to wear.  I've developed a weird habit of leaving yesterday’s shoes outside the front door – so I was trying on a couple pairs of dress shoes on my front porch when a platinum blonde barefoot girl charges at me.  Apparently I have a new neighbor.  Within three minutes, I was informed that she loves gay people and that I shouldn't get upset if I hear her yelling “Faggot” because she’s family and that her Facebook wall is full of rainbow flags.  Then she asked if I was a bottom and invited me to a party hosted by one of the Real Housewives of Miami.

Miami?  Really?  Anyone with a lick of common sense would know that I like The Real Housewives of New York.  Pay attention, please!  Stone-faced, I told her I liked her pedicure and pad-locked my door.  

This is basically what happens to my namesake protagonist in The Video Dead. 

Jeff doesn't like to wash or change his clothes.  He lives with his sister, Susy, who is a college freshman majoring in aerobics with a sensible minor in "Music Videos".  She just bought her first house.  An obnoxious blonde girl ingratiates herself to her new neighbors and the next thing you know, zombies are pouring out of the television.

This is why we must avoid talking to strangers (especially manic girls who think they're sexy)!

When the zombies start doing what zombies are wont to do, Jeff takes to the woods with a creepy old man and a chainsaw.

You know I love a movie where the boy takes on a Final Girl role and this is a good one - Jeff runs and falls and yelps and even gets tied up.  Watch out, Amy Steele, somebody's coming for your spot!

Shot on 16mm, The Video Dead was a movie made for the booming '80s home entertainment market – produced fast, cheap and locally and then gussied up with fantastic box art to spark a thousand adolescent imaginations for thirty years to come.  This is the pulp nonsense movie that those V/H/S movies wish they could be.

We're older than we ever intended to be, but thanks to Scream Factory, we can relive the majesty of Up All Night horror movie marathons in the comfort of our own living rooms without having to stay up all night or having the face the indignity of waiting in a line outside a sold-out screening with 100 fanboys in black t-shirts loudly talking at each other.  The future has its perks.

Mannequin 3: Samantha's Revenge

If you're not hot I don't value your opinion. Stop trying to force me to listen if I show no interest.

— Amanda Bynes (@AmandaBynes) June 19, 2013

Hi.  It’s sharing time…  I don't like the original Maniac because the killer is ugly.  There.  I said it.  So when it was announced that Elijah Wood would be taking on the lady-killing, title role in the remake, I was intrigued.  Stunt casting!  Be it in The Good Son of those Hobbit movies, no one plays damsel in distress better than Elijah.  

"Look what you made me do!"

The Good:

 Having now seen this film a couple times, I’ll say one thing: the Maniac remake is better than the original.  Most obviously, its soundtrack is great.  I'm serious; the music alone is worth the price of admission.  Buy it twice.  Set here in Los Angeles, Maniac captures the spookiness of downtown quite well (just ask Nick Stahl).  Maniac 2.0 is nothing if not stylish.  The color palate and overall look of the movie is fantastic, with lots of hot pink and blood reds and electric blues contrasting against an otherwise harsh DIY student film digital aesthetic.  Gorgeous.  

The Bad:

It's clear that the creative team watched American Psycho a whole lot but, beyond style, one can’t help but to question why we’re watching Elijah Wood attack a bunch of innocent women.  What is Maniac about?  Elijah goes on dates and remembers that his mom used to love having indiscriminate sex with strangers.  So...

The entire film is shot from his first-person perspective -which is a fun gimmick that often works well until the very second you start thinking about how silly it is - or you remember Student Bodies, and it quickly becomes a parody of itself.  Elijah Wood yelling at mannequins is funny.  Also, Elijah making sex face makes me uncomfortable.  This is my issue, not the films.  Contrary to urban legend, Mr. Wood is not gay.  I know this is very confusing.  If this movie projects nothing else, it pronounces his heterosexuality with absolute clarity.

The inherent flaws of the source material are still present.  The sensitive serial killer with Mommy issues angle doesn't work in 2013.   Are we supposed to sympathize with him?  I don't understand.  This movie would play a lot better if they just took the time to write in a part for Hollywood Montrose. Easy fix.

Maniac opens exclusively in Manhattan this weekend, thus proving that gay people should move to New York or LA.  Sorry, I don't make the rules.

the most wonderful time of the year

Happy Gay Pride, dolls! 
Remember to wear sunblock, stay hydrated, respect your elders and don't be racist.

xoxo

eat, pray, die

"I don't know about you girls, but Mother Nicky here is going to get herself watered."

Do y'all remember when Jill Clayburgh was a movie star?  Back in the ‘70s, movies could be green-lit on the elegant premise of a seasoned, educated woman coming to terms with her own mortality in the Upper West Side. 

It was heaven.

Imagine one of these Jill Clayburgh classics, sans Jill Clayburgh - a woman going through a painful divorce left with no choice but to flee the hustle of Manhattan to find herself (with the help of her best gay) in the country.  Now throw in a dash of rural paranoia shaken gently with some pornstaches and a few rogue chainsaws and you have Savage Weekend (1979).

As a single mother stuck in a passionless relationship with an aging investment banker named Robert, Marie needed a new lease on life.   Robert is a boat enthusiast, so Marie and her best gay tag along for a weekend in the country where he's restoring a boat he bought for next to nothing from some hillbilly who speaks like a Toni Morrison character.  Why not? Marie is prone to reveries of sexual awakening. And judging by the way she looks at the local groundsmen, she apparently has a penchant for rough trade.

Nicky, her best gay, is an old-school sissy and sissies are nothing if not dependable.  The ladies can always count on Nicky to make them laugh, to bolster their fragile egos, he even cleans bat carcasses out of the time-share for them!  ‘70s sissies are a trip. They're simultaneously empowering and morbidly offensive; one minute Nicky's beating up homophobic hicks in a small town dive-bar, the next minute he's putting on a full drag beat and screaming like a woman with hatpins shoved through his frontal lobe.  And you ask why I love horror movies!

On the surface Savage Weekend is just another pulpy Grindhouse thriller, but if you look below the surface you can see a premonition of things to come.  We can mock the Sarah Palins of the world for their fourth grade educations and limited world-views but, at the end of the day, they're the ones with the guns and chainsaws!  No one gets rich in this country without someone else getting poor and one day the poor are bound to fight back. For Richard to have his yacht, he had to take it from the country bumpkin rubes. Marie, with her fancy apartment and educated friends, fetishizes the working class but once they reciprocate her advances, she retreats.  Eventually, the poor are bound to retaliate.  

Besides, the climax features a wrestling match culminating in machete versus chainsaw showdown between the two objects of Marie's burgeoning desires (both direct from their star turns in William Higgins' films) while she looks on helplessly in a cotton nightie and smeared mascara.  You really can't lose with this one.

(Faggotyass Drinking Game.  Anytime you see the boom mic in the shot: SHOOTERS!  You may want to have an ambulance on call.)