House Sitting, Day 7

Day Seven of the House Sitting.

Last day. Doing the laundry one last time, getting things packed away. Spending one last night here, then headed to work tomorrow mourning, all of my things tucked into the NEKRON 7. Headed back to the Haunted Victorian afterwards.

Tonight, though, I plan on watching the newest Preacher on the AMC channel on the Dish Network setup (as opposed to waiting until Monday evening to watch it on the Amazon streaming). Only three more episodes left to this season. I hope they actually get to the point of all this. Judging by last season, though, probably not.

The existential realization of heading back to the reality tomorrow looms just above and behind me, like the realization of my own mortality. It’s more of an intangible black cloud, reminding me that, like life itself, the holiday is fleeting, a mere blip in the grand overall scope of time and space. I exist, and that existence has meaning; and yet, when compared to the vastness that is time, and the fact that time itself is speeding along faster and faster, so that to give the illusion of blinking and seeing much of my life and experience go by, a blip in the history of Everything…makes me want to just order a pizza and chill out a bit.

Mmmmm…taco pizza from Casey’s…make this a reality, when the laundry’s done and I have socks again…

::END TRANSMISSION::

House Sitting, Day 6

Day Six of the House Sitting. Saturday. I didn’t go into Omaha for the standard Lunch + Writing. I was planning on doing so, as I had the Lappy and a couple of notebooks packed up in the bag, but decided when I got inside the NEKRON 7 to just go into Blair and pick some things up at the Family Fair, and just do the writing at the homestead.

Discovered that Blair’s Family Fare is the only one I’ve been to that doesn’t carry the A&W Diet Cream Soda in 2 liter bottles. Minor setback. Just picked up a 12-pack instead, as well as a 4-pack of the IBC brand diet root beer. That stuff is more on the wintergreen side of the taste, instead of the creamy side.

Steve the Hamster keeps getting his hamster ball of DOOOOOOOM stuck. Extension cords, between a yarn basket and the wall…it’s almost like he’s now doing this on purpose, just to get the thrill of me unsticking him out of his predicament. I’m on to you, Hamster Steve.

Watching the 1991 sci-fi-ish action flick Firehead. Why do I do this to myself?

House Sitting Day 5

Day Five. Got a bit of the ol’ cabin fever, so I opted to go have a shorter Lunch + Writing session at Sean O’Casey’s. Had the Breakfast Bacon Cheeseburger, with peanut butter. Onion rings with 1000 Island for the dippin’. Not bad, but didn’t set my world ablaze with flavor.

Kicked things old-school with the writing, meaning I didn’t bring any of the two laptops (I’m typing this on the Linux Lappy, in case anyone was morbidly curious), only a couple of notebooks and my pen. Made sure it had plenty of ink this time. Mostly listened to some albums and taking notes for future reviews. One Disciple EP and a couple of Dead Artist Syndrome albums.

Steve the Hamster rolling around in his Death Ball. Duchess off brooding somewhere. Had some fun running around while I watered the flowers. Back to watching the movies on my Windows Lappy by way of the Prim streaming…horrible, horrible movies riffed gleefully by the guys who brought us the original Mystery Science Theater 3000…even then, sometimes that barely helps…

Movie Review: BEFORE I DIE

Parade Deck Films
2016
NR

Dammit.

Dammit dammit dammit dammit.

Look, I’m not going to mince words, here. It’s been a long time since I’ve been angry for having watched a movie. Indifference? Yes. Irritation? Yepper. Insulted? Plenty of times. Been reduced to madness-induced laughter? I call those “Thursdays”. But a movie that was so badly made that, once the end credits ran, all I can think of is to do violent things to the movie for having teased me with promises it never intended to keep. Or, at least write a very terse review of it for my blog.

I believe the last movie to do that was 2000’s Lost Souls. Well, that has been dethroned and replaced with this movie we’re discussing right now: Before I Die.

Before I Die happens to be one of those movies that are free streaming with my Prime account. You better believe I’m gonna get as much mileage out of that as I can. But, sometimes that means being duped into watching a movie like this because the movie poster art and descript blurb made it sound interesting. Here, let me reproduce the descript from Amazon, and tell me if this doesn’t sound the least bit tantalizing:

“Strange spiritual obsessions begin to unearth age-old secrets in a small Northwest town, leading a pastor to suspect that all might not be as idyllic as he first imagined and personal threats await anyone who dares confront them.

I mean, sure, it’s kind of a generic sounding horror premise, one that has been done since Hawthorne and Poe’s time, but at least it wasn’t another “teenagers trapped in a haunted asylum” or what have you movie these low-budget straight-to-video movie makers seem to favor.

What I got instead, was something that was ineptly made on all levels. The movie starts at a potluck gathering in a Congregational style church basement, and for 110 minutes of the movie’s nearly 2-hour run time, it maintains that level of excitement throughout. The movie just drags on and on and on, with a story that has less to do with horror, and more to do with a PBS drama, with some lame attempts at “oooh, spooky shenanigans afoot!” thrown in to remind us that we are, in fact, watching a horror movie. The acting is amateurish at best, and is so wooden you’ll be picking splinters out of your brain for days after. The effects are…well, there are no effects, really. The plot is so meandering and at times confusing that the big “twist” reveal seems more of an afterthought tacked on.

Watching Before I Die did the impossible: it made m want to watch the television show 7th Heaven for some excitement. To say that I was disappointed with this movie is a gross understatement. Avoid this movie like the festering blob of undigested guacamole dip that it is.

House Sitting, Day 4

Day Four of watching the Rinas household while my sister’s family visit our father down in Nevada. I have finally acclimated to sleeping on the couch, as last night I was able to sleep through, instead of tossing and turning most of the time.

Went into Freakmont to pick up a bit more grocieries; the trip reminded me why I don’t go into Fremont too often anymore. I couldn’t get back to the homestead and away from interacting with society fast enough.

Continuing on with the steady stream of writing, napping, and watching really bad movies on the Amazon Stream; as I metioned to my nephew earlier today, the 80s was a magical time for bad movies, as we watched the over-the-top fight scene in Deadly Prey…someone gets his arm chopped off and is beaten up with his own arm. That’s going to factor in somewhere in my dreams.

Up in the air with going into Omaha tomorrow for the standard Holiday Lunch + Writing at Sean O’Casey’s. The dog seems to get along fine with being alone for a few hours; Annie wasn’t kidding that she seems to be a bit clingy, though. She is eating, though, which is one of the things to keep an eye out for. Steve the Hamster rushes around inside his Death Star.

Mesa Of Lost Women plays as I pound out my brain droppings. The cheese level is very high on this one.

::END TRANSMISSION::

 

Movie Review: LADY BIRD

A24
2017
R

“I hate California, I want to go to the east coast. I want to go where culture is like, New York, or Connecticut, or New Hampshire.”

When it comes to pop culture, I’ve always said it’s okay to have a preference. It doesn’t mean that you can’t branch out and try new things; it just means that, in the whole scheme of things, you know what you like, and you’re comfortable with that. For instance, it’s no big secret that I’m a fan of horror movies. But, I do have close friends that like normal movies. Or, as some of them like to put it, “good movies”. That’s debatable. The point is, if the buzz is good surrounding a movie that normally wouldn’t be within my particular demographic, let’s just say, I’m not averse to check it out to see what the noise is all about.

Such was the situation with the movie Lady Bird. This was a movie that you couldn’t get away from the buzz it was making. It was praised left and right, being touted as thee movie to see in 2017. I don’t know if it won any kind of award, as I don’t keep abreast with those thing. But, the praise for Lady Bird was strong enough that, despite it being described as a kind of coming-of-age movie, I decided to check out the moment it became available for free streaming with my Prime membership. Hey, I was interested, but I still didn’t want to pay much for something I’m probably going to watch once, bang out a review of, and then probably forget about later in the week. Or month. Or, whatever.

So, after watching it, I have to come out and say it: Lady Bird is vastly overrated. Keep in mind, I went into this kinda wanting to like it. I have no problem with coming of age movies, and this one seemed interesting, with its premise of a Catholic high school girl’s senior year and all the stuff that goes with these kind of things in movies. We come in with the titular character and her mother driving back from a college visit, then beginning her senior year, where, in the course of the entire school year, she worries about trying to get into a college that’s not in California — preferably a romanticized New York college that her favorite authors went to — while her family struggles to make ends meet; she joins a school musical production, falls in love with her first boyfriend who turns out to be gay and kind of using her as a coverup, she hooks up with another boy who is in a band and ditches her best friend for one of the rich girls as her totes BFF, loses her virginity and breaks up with the current BF in one fell swoop, makes up with her original BFF and talks about cheese and other stuff with her instead of going to prom, discovers that she has, indeed, been accepted into one of the New York colleges against her mother’s wishes, then flies out to said college, only to promptly get alcohol poisoning at a party, then calling and leaving a message on her parents’ answering machine that she loves her mom. Then the movie ends abruptly. Throughout this movie, it’s interspersed with her arguing and fighting with her mother over various things, and shopping at thrift stores. Oh, and she starts going by her real name at the end. Because that signifies maturity, I guess.

Lady Bird, for me at least, was kind of the movie watching equivalent to driving west-bound on I-80 through Nebraska; there are some interesting things to look at, and once in a while you find yourself enjoying a bit or two, but when it comes down to it, the beats are recognizable and over half-way through you begin wondering how much longer until you finally reach the end destination. With, of course, the occasional pause to hit a rest stop on the way.

There was a lot to like about this movie, though: the acting was great, especially the dynamic between Saoirse Ronan as Lady Bird and Laurie Metcalf as her mother. And yes, because of Laurie Metcalf, I began to pretend that this was a spin-off of the original run of Rosanne, which made things a bit more fun.

But anyway, no, I concede that Lady Bird isn’t a bad movie. It is rather good, yes…but it’s not my cup of black-as-my-heart coffee. I’m really more of a Wes Anderson type when it comes to “normal” movies. And that is really all I have to say about that.

Movie Review: The SWORD AND THE SORCERER

Group 1
1982
R

“I will allow you to live as long as you serve me. Betray me, and I will joyfully send you back to rot in hell.”

Ah, the big fantasy genre ‘splosion of the early 80s. There seemed to be so many of these kind of movie back then. Conan The Barbarian, Beastmaster…um, other ones, I guess. Look, even as a young lad, I wasn’t really into the whole fantasy dragons and swords thing. The Dungeons & Dragons cartoon was about as far as I got with any interest in this. Even now, if there’s no other choice to go with, maybe I’ll take in a fantasy tale or whatnot. So you can probably imagine what was going on when I picked The Sword And The Sorcerer to watch.

So, back in the days of yore, a malevolent jerk who wants to be king summons a demonic Richard Moll and proceeded to kill the current king and queen, leaving the son of the king — named Talon — to flee as an orphan with a spring-loaded tri-bladed sword. I wish I was making that up, but no, you read that right. Years pass, and Talon has grown into a mighty rogue warrior with pecks of melons and knees of fringe, adventuring with his horde of equally rogue-like warriors, womanizing and drinking and eating and getting into the odd skirmish and all. He happens to run across the princess — who is betrothed to the guy who killed his royal parents — as she and her brother have been organizing a rebellion against the despot, but haven’t worked on keeping things on the down-low, as it seems everyone and their squire knew about it. So, her brother is imprisoned, and she’s on the run from being captured by the king’s men. After some…negotiating, Talon agrees to lend his tri-bladed Sword of Overcompensation in taking down the king. Things go smashingly…until Talon and his crew are captured and imprisoned in the castle dungeon. It’s then that we learn the king’s eeee-vil plot: Marry the princess, crucify Talon on a giant “X”, and assassinate all of the royalty attending the event, all in one swoop. But then, Talon’s Scoobie Gang are set free by the royal concubines, Talon himself gets himself off of the giant “X”, and there’s a massive swashbuckling battle, wherein the princess battles a giant amorous anaconda (don’t want none) and the king is slain. Talon decides he doesn’t want to claim his rightful place as king, and rides off to more adventure in a sequel that was promised but never happened. Thank goodness for that.

While I’m not exactly the demographic for these type of genre movies, there are certain ones that came out in the 1980s that you have to watch just to experience the magic of Bad Movie Watching. Movies like this one have a special something to them that you can only get from this particular era.

The Sword And The Sorcerer has it all: cheesy acting, low-budget effects, plot beats that will never go over in this day and age, and a story that will bury your WTF Meter in the red more times than you can keep count. Meaning, The Sword And The Sorcerer is prime Bad Movie Nite watching material.

Book Review: MY LIFE WITH DETH

David Ellefson / Joel McIver
Howard Books
2013

I really shouldn’t need to point this out, but in the interest of this blog post’s subject matter, I am a big Megadeth fan. Ever since getting my face sand-blasted off after purchasing Rust In Peace at the tender age of 17 — my first proper taste of the band, and it was a doozy — they’ve been very consistent with continually doing so, even during their low periods, more so than the Venom that spawned Megadeth’s Carnage, Metallica, ever did.

I think I popped something reaching for that mixed metaphor. Yeah, I’ll be feeling that for a few days.

Anyway, of the two Daves associated with the band, I’ve already read the biography for main man Dave Mustaine, and reviewed it quite a few years ago on my previous blog (it’s been moved here on this one, in case you were morbidly curious). A few months ago, while perusing the ebook selection on my Google Plus account, I came across the autobiography of the other Dave in the group, bassist and co-founder David Ellefson. I was rather jazzed to read this one; finally, we get the viewpoint of someone who had been with Megadeth and all the wackiness involved since the very beginning, save for a stretch where he wasn’t part of the band for…reasons.

Right at the start, Dave Ellefson writes in My Life With Deth that this was a book he really didn’t want to write. As he points out early on, these kind of biographies are a dime a dozen, and all contain the same tragic story. You read one, you’ve read them all. It’s the same kind of pattern you get with the VH1 Behind The Music series, really. Fine, understood. But, this book itself is only 256 pages long; 188 if you discount the final pages being a discography, an index (?) and the obligatory thanks section. That’s not a lot of pages to go into detail on a career that spanned three decades not only founding and playing in one of the legendary Big Four of thrash metal bands, inspiring generations to pick up the bass, but also the in-between times where he was broke and had to get a 9-5 type job just to get by. Mind you, this was with Peavey, so he didn’t exactly go back to slinging fries at a burger joint after he was first booted out of Megadeth. But, I’m getting ahead of myself, here…

In My Life With Deth, Ellefson takes us through his upbringing in rural Minnesota, first getting interested in music, and working up to playing gigs in and around the surrounding Midwest area; moving to LA and befriending some guy named Dave Mustaine, forming Megadeth, getting into drugs and the struggle to break free from his addictions, his career with Megadeth to his leaving the band, his post-Megadeth ventures and careers, his resulting fued with Mustaine and eventual patching up of the relationship. Oh, he also touches on his Christian faith.

Oh, yeah. Dave Ellefson’s a professing Christian. As such, not only does he talk about this, but each chapter ends with a brief “what I’ve learned from all this” takeaway. It’s definitely not something yo see in your standard rock n’ roll biography, here.

Overall, My Life With ‘Deth is rather brief, and quite frankly seems to be missing a bit of meat. This may be Ellefson’s design, as he tells his tale less as an excuse to dish dirt and cause controversy, and as more of a “these were the mistakes I’ve made, let’s learn from this” kind of story. If you’re looking for something like Motley Crue’s biography The Dirt, you’re going to be sorely disappointed, I’m afraid. If you’re looking for a rather detailed, point-by-point analysis of one of the greatest metal bands to ever have existed…well, again, you may be less than satisfied with this. But, if you’re looking for some light reading and have some time to kill, My Life With ‘Deth is a good way to fill the time.

Movie Review: ICEBREAKER

Edgewood Entertainment
2000
PG-13

“They were all huddled together, but you know I could tell they had just enough piss and vinegar left in them that, uh, give them an inch, they’d scream for miles.”

Wow. Just…wow. I never thought I’d see the day where a movie featuring Bruce Campbell would fail to entertain me on any kind of level. But, here we are, at that day. And not surprising, it’s a movie that’s put out by the same studio that brought us Radical Jack and Time Chasers. Yeah, I seem to be stumbling on these left and right nowadays.

Icebreaker not only stars Bruce Campbell, but also Stacy Keech and Sean Astin. Yes, that Sean Astin. This was the movie he was in before starring in the Lord Of The Rings movies. My guess is that Peter Jackson didn’t see Icebreaker before casting him. But, that’s neither here nor there.

In Icebreaker, a group of terrorists lead by a shaven-headed Bruce Campbell, have stolen a nuclear warhead and have it on a mountain nearby a ski resort. At said ski resort works an earnest Radar O’Riley type of rescue team member (Astin), who is already nervous enough due to being scheduled to have lunch with his fiance’s father (he doesn’t approve of him as his daughter’s betrothed, surprise surprise), but then finds himself in the position of an ultra-low-rent John McClane in a second-rate Die Hard At A Ski Resort when the resort is taken hostage by the terrorists, and he seems to be the only one able to try and save the day. It doesn’t go as well as planned, let’s just say.

You know, I never thought I’d see the day where I’d get bored watching a movie featuring Bruce Campbell. But, here we are. Icebreakers is the movie that has proved to me that, despite the pairing of both Campbell and Keech, the movie couldn’t be saved from utter mind-numbing mediocrity. Campbell seemed to be phoning it in, whereas he normally gives a memorable scene-chewing to anything I’ve seen him in, including those bad-on-a-different-level Sci-Fi Channel movies from the early Aughts. Sean Astin, bless his heart, comes close to elevating Icebreakers to an almost watchable level with his patented cherub-like demeanor, but this still falls very short in the process.

Overall, there’s not enough cheese in Icebreakers to make someone like me, a man who famously revels in cheesy bad movies, keep my interest. The Rifftrax edition does make this a bit more palatable, but as a movie in and of itself, give it a hard pass.

Movie Review: ANTISOCIAL 2

Breakthrough Entertainment
2015
NR

Hey, look. It’s a sequel to one of the more mediocre Millennial horror movies I’ve had the displeasure of watching. What were the changes of there being one? I’m not certain why, but we have a sequel. And by some twisted masochistic logic that only I can understand, I was compelled to watch Antisocial 2: Antisocial Harder.

Gads, I’m already using bad humor as a coping mechanism. This is not a good sign.

So, anyway, after a voice-over recap of the first Antisocial, we find the final girl from the first movie — Sam — emerge from the trunk of a beat up car, having spent the night there to be safe from any attacks from those feral humans that were fully zombified from the Red Room virus referred to as “users”. It’s evident that, sometime between the end of the first movie and now, she managed to get preggers, as Sam is clearly in the third trimester. She then drives off in the car, which is when we realize that Antisocial 2 is going to be a Post-Apocalyptic Road Trip movie. She gives birth to her baby in an abandoned building, where the kid is immediately taken by a crazy (but uninfected) lady spouting off religious end times gobblety-gook and Sam is left to die, but of course she survives and takes off to find her kid and drive around some more. Somehow, three years go by, and while trying to score some munitions Sam runs afoul of users, who are turned away by a precarious preteen who has figured out how to hack the Users to do her dark bidding get them safely out of the way. Seems the Read Room social media chat room is still alive and well, making more and more infected Users, causing them to become kind of a hive-mind collective. It’s convoluted, yes, but let’s just go with it. Seems the preteen kid is the daughter of a crazy military scientist who ran away due to…well, he’s a crazy military scientist. Seems he’s doing experiments on not only the Users, but also the ones that are normal because they had the DIY tumor removal that was done in the previous movie, of which Sam is one of them. Of course, the two are captured by the military that the kid’s dad works for, and is brought back to the base, where it appears that Sam’s three-year-old is at. This kid, because he was in-utero during the infection, has some wicked psychic abilities, because of course he does. The military science guy does a bunch of SCIENCE! things, Sam discovers her son is alive and well an in the facility, yadda-yadda, they escape only to have things end on one of those frustrating sequel baits.

Well, I’ll give Antisocial 2 this — at least it didn’t insult my intelligence by just rehashing the same story beats and tropes as the original movie. No, instead Antisocial 2 insulted my intelligence by copying and pasting ideas and tropes from far better horror and sci-fi movies. You know the ones: Day Of The Dead (the original, as no other versions exist in my reality), I Am Legend, Zombieland (without the humor), Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, and Children Of The Damned, to name a few. I did find the concept of the Red Room virus turning the infected into a kind of hive-mind organism intriguing, and wished they explored that a bit more than what they did with the story. Overall, though, I found Antisocial 2 to be mediocre for the most part, while picking up a bit at the very end. I don’t hate myself for watching this unnecessary sequel, but I’m not clamoring for another one. I wasn’t clamoring for this one after watching the first one, but here we are.