In Praise of Terrible Things
July 25, 2012 § 4 Comments
Earlier a friend linked me to this article, a review of the art film Nazis at the Center of the Earth. Near the end of the review, thefoodjunk gives what –from my perspective at least– is the highest possible endorsement of any film:
I loved this movie! It’s everything a low-budget B-movie should be. The plot is straightforward, it’s bad, it’s huge amounts of fun, and it made me want to share it with everyone I know.
I was particularly happy to see “it’s bad” used positively. Really, there are few things more wonderful than a terrible, horrible, no good very bad movie. See Jack Frost; see The Room; see Troll 2. I’d take any of those movies over what typically qualifies as a “good” movie, i.e. movies people actually like or merely tell people they like, because of cool-traps. Suffice it to say that I love and in fact prefer strange and terrible things, deep down at the bottom of my heart, and not even ironically.
For me, the internet equivalent of an awesomely bad film is my all-time favorite website, Blingee.com. I fucking love Blingees. I would make Blingees all day if I could. This is good, because later today I’ll be making some Santorum-related Blingees to be used in this week’s slashfic. To see just how seriously I take my ART, behold the vomiting unicorn that is a portion of my Blingee portfolio. Let the sparkle sink in, my friends. LET IT SINK IN.
For a very special birthday boy
Blingee request: “Make this half-naked woman on a cross less offensive”
I know what you did last summer!
Ah, memory lane. And now it’s off the Blingee mines I go!
That’s The Spirit
December 26, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Fear and Loathing
I’ve always thought Christmas was weirdly sinister, like Norman Rockwell personified, and when I was younger would frequently conflate Christ’s joyous birth with Christmas’ slutty step-sister, Halloween. This might be due to my childhood obsession with Nightmare Before Christmas, or the fact that God is a creepy dick and is much better suited to scaring the shit out of children than rousing goodwill towards men, or whatever it is that’s supposed to happen while you’re doling out the overpriced plastic crap you had to wrassle all those bitches at the Big Lots to get and mindlessly gorging yourself on Safeway brand sugar cookies, just to drown out the bickering of your ungrateful children who neither need nor want anything you gave them yet still end up fighting over who got what. So this year Chris and I decided to embrace the TRUE meaning of Christmas and watch a bunch of horror movies.
We started the weekend strong, with an American Horror Story marathon (see above video for comical Valencia reference). Which was great, really some of the most twisted footage I’ve seen on a network television show (sewn up baby-corpse, anyone?), until the last few episodes when Ryan Murphy aka the show’s producer aka the guy who also does Glee got all traditional family values on us and turned the whole bloodbath into a Hallmark card. This was very disappointing, especially after such a strong start, since he completely eviscerated the narrative stakes — as we come to find out, and contrary to everything we’d seen thus far, all death means is that you get to tenderly reunite with your family (even though they hated you in life), rekindle with your wife for literally no good reason because you’re an asshole, and happily decorate Christmas trees like some sort of unironic Thomas Kincaid painting for all eternity.
We then moved on to We Need to Talk About Kevin, a movie about a school shooting that made me cry, and World’s Greatest Dad, in which Robin Williams discovers his pervert douchebag of a son dead of autoerotic asphyxiation and then makes up a bunch of touching shit to maximize town sympathy. This was depressing, so the next day we got back to our roots and watched all the Child’s Play movies, plus Jack Frost, the mutant killer snowman version (there’s another movie titled “Jack Frost” starring Michael Keaton, but that’s entirely the wrong film). We also decided that one special day –maybe next Christmas!– we’ll have to get our friends together and watch The Room, Troll II and Jack Frost, verily three of the best-worst films every to grace the silver screen for like a weekend.
In conclusion, there’s only 364 shopping days till Christmas! You better hurry up, people are already lining up outside the Big Lots.
