The Friday Night Horror Movie: Evil Dead Trap (1988)

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I’ve talked about the J-Horror craze of the 2000s in these pages a few times. Generally speaking, Japanese horror from this time period relied more on mood than gore. Their stories often involved elements of folklore, and the villains were often ghosts or other supernatural elements. 

But there is another side to the J-Horror phenomenon that is part of the larger Asian Extreme horror movement. Folks like Takashi Miike were making films filled with heavy violence and gruesome depravity.

Evil Dead Trap falls into the latter category. 

It is the kind of film I would have loved back in the late 2000s, when I was first discovering horror films outside the slashers I loved as a teenager and the classic Universal stories I loved in college. Back then I loved extreme horror. I thought it was cool to discover these weird little films that took gore to the max.

These days I prefer my horror a bit more gothic and subdued.

This film starts out promising. Nami Tsuchiya (Miyuki Ono) hosts a late-night TV show. It is the sort of thing that likes showing off the wild and the weird. She often asks folks to send her videotapes of their crazy stuff. One day she gets a tape showing a woman (that looks remarkably like her) having her eyeballs sliced open and her stomach stabbed. It looks real. She is intriged.  She takes her fellow showmakers to an abaonded military base where she thinks the film was shot.

Naturally, things go bad.  A killer starts picking them off in some pretty gruesome ways. It feels a lot more like those slashers from the 1980s than a typical Japanese horror movie.  This is especially true in the buildup. Our heroes consist of five girls and one guy. Of course they split into groups to explore the grounds.  Nami goes at it alone. The guy and the girls have sex. Then he hides and jumps out to scare everyone.

Nami runs into a creepy guy, Daisuke Muraki (Yuji Honma) who says he’s there looking for his brother. He warns Nami to stay away from the place, then goes off on his own. There is a touch of Saw in one scene with a complicated trap set, forcing one of the girls to kill the other.  The score is reminiscent of something Goblin would do for Dario Argento, with a main theme repeating every time the killer comes near.

It is unnerving, and it pushes hard into the extreme horror ideas with lots of gore and a pretty horrific rape scene.  The last act gets really goofy, weird, and gross. 

It really is the kind of film I would have loved twenty years ago. It is one of those things I’d love to ask other people if they’d seen it, feeling cool because they hadn’t.  And then going into some of the wilder details.

These days I can admire what it’s doing and appreciate the weirdness, but I can’t say I really liked it.

Listen To Bob Dyan Perform “Slow Train Coming” on this Day in 1980

I love the idea of regularly doing a shows in history post. It seems super fun to listen to a show that happened on this day sometime in the past. I do have to train myself to remember to actually listen to a show from this day in history.

Also, the last couple of times I did this, I got a lot of questions concerning where you could download the show.  I need to make sure everyone knows I am no longer uploading shows. If I do a show in history, it is just for fun. It is just to talk about the show, but I won’t be putting download links on this site.

I have been having fun uploading one song from a show to YouTube. I’m still learning how to do it properly, but it seems like a fun way to share a snippet of the shows I’m talking about.

In this case I haven’t had time to actually listen to any show from today. I did listen to a bit of this show from Bob Dylan in Montreal, 1980. The audience recording isn’t great. And to be honest, I wasn’t really in the mood for Christian Bob, but this version of “Slow Train Coming” is a good one and I thought you all might enjoy.

I’ll try to do some more actual Shows in History posts soon.

Broadchurch: The Complete Season Two

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I’ve been a fan of David Tennant since I watched him in Doctor Who. I try to watch him in just about everything he does (but he does a lot of things, so I’m always way behind.) I caught him in the first season of Broadchurch right as it was airing.  I think that was the first time I ever saw Olivia Colman in anything, but I immediately became a fan.

That first season was excellent. It was one of those murders in a small, picturesque British village type things that they’ve done a million times, but the writing was good and the acting was excellent. 

I was worried that season two would do what a lot of these types of stories do when they get a second season and add yet another murder to solve in this same sleepy little village, but it circumvents that problem in interesting ways. 

I never did get around to watching Season Three, but reading this old review makes me want to go through the entire thing again.  You can read my review of Season Two here.

Batman: House of Gotham

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I’ve been a comics reader for about fifteen years now. I’m not hardcore about it. I’m not one of those people who reads single issues as they come out each month. I read the stories packaged into graphic novels or omnibuses. I’m fairly random at that too, just picking up one book here and there without paying much attention to where it falls within the greater continuity of the character.

My favorites are Batman and X-Men (although I also really love Saga, Chew, and Sandman, among others.) Those two favorites have been around for decades. They have a long list of writers. They have all sorts of spin-off characters (X-Factor, New Mutants, Nightwing, Catwoman, etc.) that get their own runs. And then there are all kinds of one-off stories and side stories, and to be honest, I don’t really understand it. I get lost in all the titles.

Shadows of the Bat ran from 1992-2000 and its focus was on side characters. Or at least that’s what the Wikis say. But while the cover of this graphic novel has “Shadows of the Bat” on it, the single issues were apparently released as part of the Batman Detective Comics line.  Like I said, I don’t understand all this stuff.

House of Gotham focuses on a boy whose family was killed by the Joker.  Batman tries to help him by putting him in a Wayne-funded orphanage and various other things, but he’s an awfully busy superhero, so the kid winds up slipping through the cracks.

He finds help in the strangest of places – some of Gotham’s most notorious villains take the boy under their wing. Clayface befriends him inside Arkham Asylum. Penguin gives him a job. It is true that these villains help the boy with ulterior motives, but at least they are truly present. Unlike Batman.

The story takes place over the course of about a decade. Some of Batman’s most notorious cases – Knightfall, where Bane breaks his back, and No Man’s Land, where an earthquake seals off Gotham from the world – serve as a backdrop to this story. We understand why Batman is so busy he can’t pay much attention to the boy, but also that this is still a failure of our hero.

The art by Fernando Blanco (Artist), Jordie Bellaire (Colorist) is excellent, and the writing by Matthew Rosenberg is good.  I love these kinds of stories where we get to know more about characters who would normally be in the background, who might normally get just a page or two, or a few lines to move the larger plot along.  I’m also a huge fan of stories that allow the more famous stories to be seen just in passing. 

I’ve been trying to read every Batman story ever written (a monumental task, I know).  I bought this one randomly because it was on sale for cheap. I’m glad I did because I really liked it.

Murder in the First: The Complete First Season

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I used to write a lot more TV reviews. For a while, back when this blog was still young, I’d actually do what they now call recaps of different shows (running down the plots of single episodes and discussing their good and bad points.) Sometimes I wish I’d stuck with that, as it later became something you could actually make a living at. But it was a lot of work, and I stopped.  But even after that, I did a lot of seasonal reviews when the DVDs came out.

I don’t do that anymore, but I keep thinking about it. In my continuing effort to write about all the arts I consume (and I really hate that word – consume – but it is hard to find a better one that fits all the arts), I may try and do more TV talking.

I hate to sound like a broken record as I’m posting all these old reviews, but I don’t remember this show at all. It sounds like it had a lot of potential but wound up being just another dumb cop show.  You can read my review of it here.

The Running Man by Stephen King

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For a time in the late 1970s and 1980s, Stephen King published several books under the pen name Richard Bachman. His publishers didn’t think it was a good idea for King to release more than one book a year, and he is a prolific writer, so he came up with Bachman as a way to release more books.

The Bachman books tend to be grittier, more intense, and grim. Such is the case with The Running Man.  Set in the near future (2025!) America’s economy is in shambles and has become a totalitarian hellscape (!).  The gulf between the rich and the poor has never been wider (!!). To keep the poor from rioting, the government has created a Games Network that features a variety of violent game shows in which people can win loads of cash (if they don’t die in the process, which they usually do.)

The biggest game and the one you can win the biggest loot from is The Running Man, where a few folks are set loose into the world, given a small head start, and then hunted like animals. The longer they survive, the more money their surviving family will receive. 

Ben Richards is poor; his wife has turned to prostitution to make ends meet, and his young daughter is very sick. He becomes a Running Man. He learns he will do anything to survive – lie, cheat and even kill.  He also learns there is a whole underground movement trying to get the people to rise up against the government.

This is King at his most cynical and his grimiest. He breaks his story into tiny chapters (each one with a heading counting down to presumably Richard’s end). There is none of that usual King excess. As such, we barely get to know Richards or this world he’s living in. Still, it is a cool concept, and King is always good at keeping me turning the page.

It is nothing like the Arnold Schwarzenegger film from the 1980s. The more recent adaptation is much more faithful, but it loses a lot of the stories bleakness.

Now Watching: Cherry 2000 (1987)

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Cherry 2000 (1987)

Directed by Steve De Jarnatt

Starring Melanie Griffith, David Andrews, Pamela Gidley, Ben Johnson, Marshall Bell, and Harry Carey, Jr.

Synopsis: When successful businessman Sam Treadwell finds that his android wife, Cherry model 2000, has blown a fuse, he hires sexy renegade tracker E. Johnson to find her exact duplicate. But as their journey to replace his perfect mate leads them into the treacherous and lawless region of ‘The Zone,’ Treadwell learns the hard way that the perfect woman is made not of computer chips and diodes.

Rating: 3/10

The other day a friend of mine posted on Facebook saying that he had created a Substack, and he linked to his first post.  It was a bunch of nothing. Just a list of some recent movies he’d watched and a couple of words (not even full sentences) on what he thought. That was it.

I was shocked. I’m shy about promoting my official reviews or well-thought-out essays on social media, and here he was proudly posting this nonsense.  I was kind of jealous, actually. 

I have always had this idea that I should post about everything I’m reading, watching, and listening to. I like the idea that this blog could be just a collection of little things, mad thoughts, pictures of my cats, etc. But I’m bad at it. I’m bad at social media. I just don’t have the personality to post regularly everyday.

This is especially true with thoughts about films and the like. I always feel like I should write full reviews. But I just don’t have the time or mental energy for that. This is also complicated by the fact that I do write full reviews for Cinema Sentries and this little blog. When I hope to write full reviews, then I don’t write little bitty ones. But then sometimes I don’t write full reviews. 

Even for things I know I’m not going to write full reviews on, I sometimes write things for Five Cool Things. It seems silly to write some little something here and then have to repeat myself for those articles.

And yet.  And yet, here I am. I’m gonna try and do better. I’m gonna try and write at least a tiny thought on the various things I’m enjoying (or not enjoying, as the case may be.) If I then write full reviews, or include it in Five Cool Things, then that’s just the way it is.

Or, knowing me, I’ll write this one post and then never do this again.

And here are a couple of thoughts about Cherry 2000.  For a movie about a dude hiring a sexy bounty hunter to find his sexbot in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, this movie is really rather dull. 

There is a version of this film that is wild, sexy, and fun. One that leans into the ridiculous nature of that story. But this movie just limps along. Melanie Griffith is dressed with absolute drab, and her performance isn’t much better.

Rio Bravo (1959)

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Sometimes when I’m reading these old reviews, I wonder what I was thinking. In this review of Rio Bravo that I wrote in 2015, I compare it to High Noon (famously, Howard Hawks made Rio Bravo because he thought High Noon was stupid). I note that both movies are great, but I’d give High Noon the higher rating. I can’t believe I wrote that.  I still think both films are great, but in terms of sheer entertainment, Rio Bravo is one of the greatest movies ever made. 

I think about it often. I pull it out to watch pretty regularly. I rarely think about High Noon.  But whatever, you can still read my review even if I don’t even agree with it myself.

Inside Out (2015)

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Every now and again my connections to Cinema Sentries will give me access to something fun beyond just getting Blu-rays to review. I’ll get tickets to a con or to some special event. Just before Inside Out was released, I got to go to an event with my family where they gave you a commemorative poster (I still have it; it hangs on my wall right behind me), and there was some fun behind the scenes stuff on the screen. We had a lot of fun, and the movie was great. You can read all about it here.

Ripper Street: Season Three

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There is just too much TV to watch these days. I can’t keep up. I can’t even remember what I’m keeping up with. Ripper Street periodically pops up as a recommendation to me in my streaming feeds. Sometimes I think I ought to watch it. Apparently, I already have. At least the third season. Reading my review, I have the vaguest recollection of watching it. At least some of those plot points sound familiar. I don’t know if that means I should go back and watch the entire thing, or if I should just give up on it entirely. but I did like that third season, so that’s something.