Theater Owners Feel Betrayed By MPAA

MPAA Betrays Theaters: Asks FCC To Let Studios Join Modern Age

In a filing today with the Federal Communications Commission, the Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. (MPAA) reinforced the benefits of allowing studios the option of sending movies fresh from the box office to tens of millions of American households.

“Many of us love movies, but we just can’t make it to the theater as often as we’d like.  That is especially true for parents of young children, rural Americans who live far from the multiplex and people with disabilities that keep them close to home,”  MPAA Chairman and CEO Dan Glickman said.  “Having the added option to enjoy movies in a more timely fashion at home would be a liberating new choice.”

So the MPAA wants to bypass theaters to sell directly to consumers? Pardon me while I pick up this trombone… wah-wah.

I can appreciate the traditional film-going experience. Really, I can. But I could not be happier about this. I don’t see movies anymore. Mainly because of the reasons cited by MPAA Chairman Dan Glickman. I’m too fucking busy. I’m married, I live a good thirty minutes from a cinema (w/traffic), and I work fifty hours a week. Finding time when my wife and I are both off work, both aren’t ready to pass out, and have something we can agree on has become too impractical in a world filled with the convenience of Red Box, Netflix, Hulu, and other services which cater to the customer’s needs. And that’s what this boils down to.

Purists cry foul, but let’s really look at what theaters have become. There was a time when a ticket to a matinee cost close to four dollars. The cinema was located in a strip mall. And you had easy access to roll up, hand over some cash, and see a movie before some other activity. Theaters today are stadium-sized behemoths situated in malls that are so large they require parking structures. Tickets today can cost as much as $15 dollars and chains still do nothing to ensure your experience is free of noise, cell phones, chatty teenagers, screaming children, or any of the other annoyances that make home viewing more attractive. And they cater to younger audiences which means that not only do I have to park, take an elevator down, and walk two city blocks through the Mega Mall, but I also have to wade through droves of 14-year-olds who may or may not use the film as background noise while they text message each other about their plans later that night.

For theaters, the cost of their service has gone up, the quality of that service has gone down. Their only innovation over these past 25 years is the addition of commercials before previews and a slide that says “Please turn off your cell phones”. They have done nothing up until this point to stay ahead of the curve, instead acting like all companies do when their customers have no other options which is maintain the status quo by performing the bare minimum to get by. This filing ensures that consumers may now have a choice, which means innovation and competitive pricing with regards to snacks and other price-gouged garbage. For purists, this is actually a good thing. The bad elements of the cinema experience will have been rooted out by direct purchase leaving the enthusiasts to enjoy the films in the way in which they see fit. Which the theaters will now have to cater to because they won’t have a choice.

I have little patience for industries with captive markets these days. Airlines, cable providers, telecommunications, you name it. Being put “out of business” is always the excuse, forgetting entirely the others who were put out of business when they began. It’s 2009 and the entire world has to stifle progress because a bunch of lazy baboons want to maintain their death-grip on a meal ticket that should have expired long ago. Here’s to ya…

Maybe now they can use one of their 48 screens to show something independent so people don’t have to drive 50 miles to the Nuart. Just sayin.

Bad Query Letters – “T-REX VS. A FUCKING NINJA ARMY”

The Wayback Dial!

1975…

JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF MY MOUTH

Dentists are such cunts. I had an appointment three weeks ago for a cleaning and a follow-up on the very costly crown work I had done on my cracked molar, and when the hoe-bag from the office called to confirm the appointment she started listing off all these additional services they had simply gone ahead and added to the appointment. Tooth whitening? Oral treatment something-or-other?

“No, no, no…” I said, shaking my head in GREAT DISAGREEMENT. “I have a cleaning and a follow-up. I never scheduled five fillings and a whitening.” Mind you, they called to confirm just two hours prior to the appointment. “I’m only coming in for a cleaning. How much would all that stuff cost anyways?”

My out of pocket would have been six hundred dollars, which is insane. “Six hundred dollars,” I said, “That’s insane.”

Conference of Dental Professionals '09

I explained to her that while the fillings might be important, and something to look at down the road, money is tight and I don’t have cash sitting around waiting to be pissed away on sparkling white teeth because I don’t host a game show. She hit me back with maybe the rudest thing anybody has ever said to me. Ever. EVER. EVAR!!!

“We’ll just cancel today’s visit then. I tell you what, why don’t you give us a call and schedule when you can figure out how to save up a little money.” I was floored. A medical office cancelled on me, which has never happened before, and then scolded me for falling on hard times. Only in Orange County, folks. Surprisingly, the dentist herself called me three days later to personally apologize, and offered to do every service I could possibly need at cost for less than a hundred dollars. Desperate to save money, I accepted her apology.

Apparently somewhere in the filling process yesterday I got stuck with the Novocaine needle one too many times and when it was inserted into my gums it struck one of the nerves in my jaw. I woke up at four this morning with half my face swollen in searing pain with my cheek turning numb in little spurts that left me looking like a stroke victim.

Having waited four hours until their office opened, I called and spoke to the very same box o’ assorted creams who told me to “save money”. I explained that I’ve had multiple surgeries on my sinuses, and that the places where they had cut during each of those operations are now inflamed to the point where I can feel my own pulse in them. She, being of Satan’s personal yeast infection, told me to call back in three days if that didn’t improve. And when I decided to just walk right in a little while later, the dentist offered me this consolation. “Yeah. It’ll probably hurt like that for a couple days or a few weeks. Take some Motrin.” Thank you. I hadn’t thought of that. Motrin, you said? Is that new?

This is why I hate dentists. Not just because they’re sadists who operate like sleazy car salesmen, but because they operate on a system in which opportunity cost is greater than gain. Had I not gone to the dentist I may at some point in the future suffer painfully while needing expensive work, so the best way to avoid that scenario is to put myself in pain and pay for expensive work. If that makes sense, I have a war in Iraq you might be interested in. I don’t ask for much. But my bare minimum expectation is that if you screwed something up in my body, please fix it.

The Forefathers of Modern Dentistry

I decided to make a short list of things I hate about the dentist because as I’m sitting here holding an ice pack to the side of my face with half my eye swollen over there is little else I can think about than how much I wish dentistry was considered witchcraft punishable by stake burnings.

LIST OF REASONS WHY I HATE DENTISTS

1. They’re cunts.

All of them. Every dentist you meet is a total cunt.

2. They lack accountability.

If your doctor’s treatment resulted in you being in more pain AFTER than before you would never see that doctor again.  In dentistry this is routine, comes without apology, without warning, and without any consideration. They’re so like retarded monkey children, these dentists. Retarded monkey children with drills.

3. Their beady little eyes.

Every time I see a dentist shift his rat-like eyes back and forth I know he’s up to something and I just want to start strangling him until he confesses.

4. Some of them wear Crocs.

Think about it.

5. They have no soul

Dentists, much like robots, dogs, and North Koreans, were born vacant of any spirit through which they can channel divinity or basic knowledge of good and evil. They’re like globules of human meat who, while able to move and talk like you or I, provide only an illusion of humanity. A replication. As children squeal under the pain of their whizzing drills they do not understand this emotion we humans call “empathy”, only ponder the sounds we make the way a botanist might stare passively at leaves wilting on a tree.

Dentistry

As I sit here, now going through the strange twitching phase wherein my cheek muscles tighten and my eye starts fluttering, I examine my feelings for dentists with more abstract means. What stream of consciousness flows from my emotional state? I’ve decided to just blurt out random words that come to mind when i think about dentists:

holocaust-torture-piss-velociraptor-gitmo-kanye west-vivisection-jackyls-hellmouth-rape-mouth rape-hostel-the Tieneman Square Massacre times one thousand-cavity-judas-scraping-dying chicken fetus-sadism-nails-arthouse movies-death

Imagine a great artist. A man who is old, weathered, and has spent years dedicating his life to his sculpting. He is slow and methodical. Patient. He looks inside a slab of marble and sees a masterpiece but does not rush. He knows to rush is to deny himself his love of the process and the essence of being a creator. Great work takes time, he thinks to himself as he strokes his grey beard. He spends a moment examining this block of material the way a chess player might look upon a board determining his next move. And then, as if suddenly possessed by inspiration, he places his calloused hands around his tools. He holds the chisel in one hand, and a hammer in the other, and positions them upon the slab. Now instead of a block of marble, imagine my cheekbone as this old guy smacks the tip of the chisel right fucking square in the center. And instead of an old guy, a man in his mid-thirties just laughing maniacally as he does it. He’s like that Gremlin with the googly eyes in Gremlins 2, just chiseling the fuck out of the side of my face. WHACK! WHACK! WHACK!

"Don't forget to floss!"

I’m starting a group if anybody wants to join. It’s going to be a secret order of knights sworn to uphold God’s will in destroying dentists. We’ll have matching tattoos and carry swords and be locked in an infinite battle against evil. And if they so much as come near me with a drill again or that low-humming device that feels like somebody’s thumping your teeth with a spinning die, I swear I will strike them down with fists of steel and a sock filled with heavy lug nuts.

Seriously you guys, this is total fail.

Of Research and Knowing Things

November brings winter’s rust, and as the last of the sunshine-filled evenings dwindles down to cold repose, so too does manic turn toward depressive and posts become more infrequent. This blog is going to have less activity going forward. I spent most of this past year writing and rewriting a script and after polishing my latest draft decided to take two months off in jack-ass mode. Typically this involves 4chan or some other distraction but the blog is so much like a goddamn Sims game that I couldn’t leave it alone. Aside from the random crap I’ve posted on here I did the writing dance where you take on a number of creative false-starts; I have five or so stories I started writing that I quickly lost interest in after the tenth page. But after this last ‘go’ I think I may have found a keeper. Or at the very least a vague sense of visuals that I can’t shake from my head — and a premise that I’m damn sure nobody has thought of in the ultra-minimal, ultra-cheap, “Paranormal Activity” realm. So expect to see less of me. If you don’t, please feel free to smack me upside the head and remind me to get back to work.

The portion of writing I think is the most fun, and call me a geek for saying this, is the research phase. I love it. And this latest endeavor is going to be research-intensive to get it right so I’m checking all my links and bookmarks to make sure I have everything at my disposal. I’ve worked for a number of years in a research capacity, both in journalism but also in my square job doing data mining and investigative services. I pride myself in finding it if it exists out there.

I’ve posted about this before, but there really is no limit to what you can find with the level of information available online. And while it scares most people to think about how much of our information is readily available to the public, I find it comforting that it exists in such abundance. What prevented you from snooping on your neighbor fifty years ago were physical boundaries, i.e. walls, doors, safety deposit boxes, etc. What we’ve done in placing so much information online, I’ve found, is replace these physical hurdles with digital ones whose complications are compounded by time, accuracy, and volume. Fifty years ago I may have had to dig through my neighbor’s trash to find his bank statements, but today I would need to dig through multiple trash bins, each existing as some fragmented snapshot of him in some arbitrary point in time. Multiply his information by the 300 million Americans whose information might be readily available and now you’re searching for a needle in a haystack. To put this into a more personal perspective, I’ve been searching for a long-lost relative for over three years now and after dozens of phone calls and registry searches have found so many names and phone numbers and leads that the difficulty is in narrowing those down to a manageable group to follow up on. If 1984 were real Big Brother would need half the country working in a data center to be watching you, if he could even find you or know it was you he was watching.

The Holy Grail for public information is The Black Book. Here you can find any number of valuable resources, both in public records and in national registries. Writing a script about a death row inmate? Check the archive of last meals requested prior to execution in the state of Texas. Wondering about the proper abbreviation or an acronym? There’s an archive of that as well. Con artists? Hundreds of files on scams, hustles, pyramid schemes, etc. There’s even an ongoing list of active cults in the United States, complete with news aggregates regarding their leaders.

If you’re looking for visual references, check out Getty Images. Not only do they have millions of searchable photos, including thousands of photo journalist pictures, but they now offer public domain video as well as pay-per-use video. And there’s some weird random stuff on there, by the way, so dig in. Archive.org offers a multitude of audio and visual catalogs as well. Along with their “wayback machine” which keeps a record of web pages throughout the years. Want to see what CNN.com looked like in March of 1998? Just enter the url.

If you can afford the subscription or have access to a university server, LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters offer databases of information that are quite possibly without end. I know the tendency these days is to search Wikipedia which is a useful tool, but it does have large limitations. Namely, the content provided by users tends to be pulled from other ambiguous internet resources. While that may be fine for researching subject matter from the last 10 years, it does provide issues when looking for anything pre-internet that hasn’t been uploaded or linked. Often I’ll find information provided on a Wiki article that references material found on a YouTube video. While not misinformation by any means, I do find these instances where what sparse bits of content made it onto the web are now suddenly comprehensive when they may be incomplete or out of context.

And I would watch Obama’s Data.gov site in the coming year as this looks like it may become a powerhouse of information — essentially everything the government has ever documented (minus National Security matters) is being uploaded to this site. Think of the millions of pork projects over the years, from pilot psychological evaluations to why prisoners try to escape prison, and it’s all going to be readily available for companies like Google to index and organize.

Lastly, I preach the value of podcasts constantly as a means of character research. Writing a character who works with disabled children? Chances are there’s a podcast. Need to know how a survivalist actually lives and how he talks? There’s a podcast for that as well. I like podcasts because they give you a better sense of people’s general demeanor. The American Veteran does a series in which veterans recall their own war stories both before, during, and after combat. The attention given to little things, the details given to mannerisms and things spoken in off-handed remarks, that is priceless story gold right there. And there are thousands of podcasts out there like this of people relaying their lives candidly.

I read a script not too long ago in which the writer chose to set his story in World War II. As impractical as this was, and for as much of the script just didn’t work, the guy’s research was stellar. The real point of intrigue was just knowing half of this stuff actually existed or took place. I found myself mesmerized by how this research came through in the dialogue and in the story. It was like being given eyes to see something in a way I had never seen it before, with flesh and blood as opposed to the same highlight reel we’ve seen over and over again of troops landing on Normandy and couples kissing in Times Square. At the very least, research this stuff so as not be ignorant. Nothing irks me more than a writer who knows dick about the material he’s chosen. Or worse, gets his information via composite from other movies he’s seen.

“Detectives? I know they argue a lot, right? And one has always gotta go call his wife or something?”

Speaking of research, anybody get a chance to check out Mr. Scoggins’ new endeavor? Holy shit, man. That thing looks awesome. Now to convince wifey I absolutely must have a subscription…

Dollar Days

Strapped for cash? Recession got you down? No worries — I’m ready to fight for you! Just be sure your name is listed beside the millions and millions of Americans on Zabasearch and you might be randomly selected to receive an envelope with no return address containing a dollar! Spend it wisely…

 

 

 

Overlooked Horror Films – “The Gate”

When I was six years old my mother decided to throw a fancy dinner party. My father was given the duty of finding some place to put me that night, be it babysitter or otherwise. Not wanting to trouble himself with finding a babysitter he did what any reasonable male figure would; set up a television and vcr in my room, put on a movie and simply locked the door. Oh, where’s little Kevin? Meh. I rented something for him to watch, he should be fine.

The movie he chose was called “The Gate”. This, in my opinion, may be the most terrifying movie ever made if you’re six years old. It may also be one of his worst parental decisions, and like H.G.’s post earlier this week, resulted in a furious mother and a father who threw up his hands and said, “Hey, how was I supposed to know it’d give the boy nightmares?”

The premise of The Gate is simple: while left home alone for the weekend, a young boy and his friend inadvertently open the door to hell resulting in their once-cozy home becoming the gateway through which violent creatures murder his big sister, his best friend, his dog, and leave him alone to wear the mark in a world of darkness and eternal suffering. In fairness to my dad, what six-year-old would get scared by that?

For a child, this movie really does touch on every one of your basic fears. And what’s more, like all great cult movies it goes from A to B, B to C, and then C to &#?!!!  By the third act, if the creative minds behind this film could think of it they filmed it. While looking for a gun to defend himself, the young boy reaches into the closet and has his hand bitten by the severed head of his best friend. Screaming in pain, he breaks free only to find his hand has now grown a wandering eye which he must cut out using a shard of broken glass. While cowering in the corner with his big sister, a construction worker breaks from inside the wall of their home and lumbers over to the pair, grabbing the sister by the ankle and dragging her into hell while she screams in terror. Ding-dong! Is somebody at the door? Hey kid, your parents came home. And just in time. They’ll know what to AWWW FUCK MY DAD IS STRANGLING ME!! (This is followed by the mother laughing with delight at her son’s torment while the father’s face sloughs from his skull, hits the ground and becomes infested with crawling maggots.

Although marketed as strictly “kiddie horror”, it’s difficult to justify considering the content. The hell back story revolves around the underground thrash movement of the 80’s. Brought in are the old “play this record backwards” myths as well as some of the Norwegian black metal legends regarding human sacrifice and dismemberment. My guess is that this was intended for an older audience, cast a little too young, and when they realized that no teenager would want to see a movie about a couple of 12-year-olds they simply skewed the advertisements as some farcical ghost story and rented it to my dad.

I slept in their room for three months after. The film stars a young Stephen Dorff and was followed by a sequel which had little or nothing to do with the original. Supposedly Alex Winter has been chosen to direct a third film shot in 3-D. Now a whole new generation can have something to talk about years later when they’re in rehab.

10 Best Directed Horror Scenes…

…that aren’t the shower scene from Psycho.

EXORCIST III: Nurse Station Scene

SUSPIRIA: A Colorful Death

JEEPERS CREEPERS: The First Six Minutes

MULHOLLAND DRIVE: Winkie’s Dream

THE OMEN (1976): It’s All For You!

THE SHINING: Danny’s Big Wheel

THE STRANGERS: Is Tamara Home?

[Unfortunately I wasn't able to find the entire scene up until to the "looping song", so here's just the first minute]

EVIL DEAD II: LOL

AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON: Werewolves of London

THE EXECUTION OF MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS

Overlooked Horror Films – “Deathwatch”

I know, I sing the praises of Michael Bassett constantly. I was a huge fan of his last film “Wilderness” and I’m looking forward to when  Solomon Kane reaches our shores. But his first film “Deathwatch” was what kicked off my fanboy geekdom. It’s an eerie film, and a film that squeezed every last penny out of its modest budget to produce something that seems so much bigger than it actually is. Incredibly imaginative, this film takes the atmospheric elements of a haunted house story and smashes them against the ‘Jonny Got His Gun’ terrors of war.

Set on the western front during World War I, a group of British soldiers become detached from their group during a gas attack.  Disoriented, they wander aimlessly through the fog and stumble upon a series of abandoned German trenches. Believing they can secure the area, they set about searching the complex network of trenches only to discover bodies (cocooned in barbed wire) and a lone German survivor. While its clear that the Germans who had occupied this trench have gone mad and killed each other, why and how still remain a mystery. Are they alone, or is something else with them?

I think that Bassett’s strength in storytelling is his ability to illustrate male characters, typically young, devolving into brutish behavior when faced with any type of confrontation. The violence in this film is stiff — that is to say you can expect to see things like a club stuck with nails being swung into another man’s flesh. But as a “nuts-and-bolts” kind of guy there were little things I enjoyed that worked to his second strength as a director, which is setting a gritty tone and building on it without committing suicide in the third act. The abundance of rats, mud, razor wire, and dead bodies set inside this very claustrophobic trench plays wonderfully in creating an atmosphere that becomes more and more horrifying as all these little elements come to life. And did I mention the were barbed wire cocoon bodies?

The film has been playing on On Demand off and on for a while, but I would definetely check it out if you get a chance to buy or rent. Its an easy view – quick pace and a lot of visual eye candy for those of you with short attention spans. It’ll rip your face off.

Overlooked Horror – “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark”

Your friend, my friend, Herschel Gordon Rabinowitz…

+++

Perhaps it ain’t exactly overlooked cause it’s currently being remade by Miramax and Guillermo del Toro. But, I bet most of you young whippersnappers overlooked the original cause you were just born too late, or the DVD cover art looked too cheesy or the lead actress didn’t have big enough tits. Me, I was born at exactly the right time to have soiled my bed for weeks after watching it on TV.

Not wet dream kinda soil. Quite the opposite — so scared the muscle controlling both my rectum and bladder kept twitching, leaving the chute too often in the opened-up position. Ever wonder why you usually have to pee while taking a dump? That’s the muscle I’m talking about. Gee, you just learnt something. Send the webmaster a dollar.

Yes, one of the scariest horror flicks I’ve ever seen as a tween was a TV movie!!! It was a time that Hollywood cranked out lemons like The Car, The Hearse and The Devil Dog, The Hound Of Hell. TV movies ruled the roost at that time. Well, those without Valerie Bertonelli did anyway. Not that I have anything against Valerie Bertonelli. Val, if your reading this, the Hershmeister would still do you. I’d still do you even if we had to do it with the entire Van Halen catalogue piped into our bedroom. That’s how bad I still want to do you. That’s how bad I want to do just about anybody. The Hersch is a very lonely movie critic.

Oh, yeah, the movie.

Basically, a young couple inherit a creepy mansion and while their gay best friend redecorates, they unleash a fireplace full of creature features. Seems that fireplace was bricked up for good reason cause it held a portal straight down to Hell. Or Amityville. Or Staten Island. Somewhere nasty.

The prunce-faced demons they set free kind of remind me of a dwarfed Glenn Beck after he just sucked on a lemon. Yup, they’re that ugly. But, unlike Beck, they just have to whisper to get your attention. They whisper alot. Whispers can be downright horrifying.

These monster munchkins pretty much hide and whisper and drive True Grit’s Kim Darby totally insane. Her husband, Timothy Hutton’s dad, screams at her a lot, saying “There’s nothing there!!!!” No one else seems to see these fucking evil troll dolls. Is she losing it? Are they real? She has tiny tits, so we know she’s a serious actress.

Like my other childhood favorites, Planet of The Apes, Soylent Green and The Omega man, the film probably won’t stand up to my now snobby grown up standards. (Crap, I just realized that Charlton Heston starred in the top three flicks of my youth.) So, if you rent it and don’t find it truly scary, please forgive me. I don’t have some fucking Marcel Proust memory. The Hersch can’t even remember what he ate for dinner yesterday.

But, I’m led to believe by these crumbs that it was corned beef.

Herschel Gordon Rabinowitz

Things The ‘Paranormal Activity’ Couple Could Have Done to Improve Their Situation

1. Got Real Jobs

A day trader and an English student living in a large house in  San Diego in 2006 would be living back at their folk’s place in 2009. These people did less with themselves than the old-school cast of The Real World. People who go to work all day don’t worry about creaks and cracks; they’re too tired from having jobs. Ever wonder why you don’t hear about haunted houses in the ghetto? It’s because poor folk don’t concern themselves with lights suddenly going on. It’s the lights suddenly being turned off they worry about.

2. Left The House

Even if the demon can follow her outside the house there are certain places where his powers would find little to work with. Like a church or a Dave & Buster’s. Or hey, why not sleep in the fucking attic? What’s he going to do? Throw insulation foam at you? He’d have to leave the attic just to have a way to cause a commotion coming back in. And then what? You’d sit in awkward silence until he got bored and went back to Utah.

3. Got A Bazooka

I was lucky enough to be seated next to a group of cholo’s during a showing of Blair Witch Project years ago. As these philosophers pondered the existential qualities of the narrative, one  considered the plight of the characters entering the handprint house. He turned to the others and said “Fuck that stupid witch, eh. If that were me homes, I would just get a bazooka!” Brilliant. When in danger, just get a bazooka.

4. Left the Lights On

The demon in this scenario seemed only able to function when the lights were off and things were in spooky night vision green. Leaving the lights on, or possibly changing the interior decoration to reflect something more silly would have made the task of vexing much more difficult. Try haunting a house filled with crap picked up at Spencer’s.

5. Packed a Dummy w/Dynamite and Dressed it Up as a Hot Lady Demon

After its feet stop fluttering and it goes through the motions of feeling dizzy while miniature hearts bubble from the top of its head KABOOM!

6. Throw’d That Hoodoo Bitch Out The Door And Found Somebody Else

I love my wife but if I ever wake up to find her staring menacingly at me while I’m asleep I will be throwing wild haymakers toward her facial area and calling up old ex-girlfriends. What’s creepy is I think she already does this now sans the poltergeist. I don’t like being watched when I’m asleep. You go look at the wall.

7. Given It A Couple Bucks

The demons in my apartment complex sneak around our hallways at night causing mischief and mumbling in strange tongues, usually clutching some kind of malted beverage. Normally if you give them a couple dollars or just let them root through the dumpster undisturbed they go away. I tend to place dog shit on top of our recyclables so they never come back.

8. Masturbated

The only thing more awkward than being walked in on while rubbing one out is walking in on somebody else. Find me a being, living or otherwise, that would purposefully walk in on somebody jacking off and I’ll show you a sicko who was trying to get caught. Plus it’s a great stress reliever. I was a little shocked that during all of their time-lapsed videos at night the boyfriend never woke up with his hand at his crotch. And neither of them had to use the bathroom either.

9. Hired A Prostitute

Whores are to demons what birthday cake is to a fat kid. They can’t resist. Using a Tijuana prostitute as a kind of demon bait they could have easily channeled the demon’s spirit from his hell dimension into the whore woman’s body, using it as a proxy vessel for him to take form in the flesh. Trapped, the demon would then have been possessing a prostitute and not the lovely girlfriend. After that it’s just a matter of dumping it back at the border which is like, five minutes from there.

10. Did What It Wanted

This was mentioned a few times throughout the film but never acted upon. Why fight it? Just go with it, man. Nine times out of ten in these situations it has a script or something it just wants you to read.

Overlooked Horror – “Below”

In 2002 this little gem went largely unappreciated. Despite boasting a writing credit by Darren Aronofsky and starring Olivia Williams and a wonderful supporting role played by Zach Galifianakis it was a bit too thriller for horror fans a smidge too horror for mainstream thriller audiences (terrible marketing doesn’t help either). Essentially the premise is “haunted submarine” set in World War 2. But what makes this flick standout is how well written and wonderfully executed it is. It doesn’t strive to be anything mind-shattering; it’s just a very good, very fun to watch horror thriller set in a submarine.

The film centers around three British workers rescued from their sunken hospital boat; two sailors and a nurse (played by Williams). Questions surround the circumstances of their rescue: Are they spies? Was their ship really sunk? How did they stray so far out into Nazi waters? As the sub is suddenly hunted by a mysterious German warship it’s discovered that one of the rescued sailors is a Nazi POW, and the issue of trust splits the crew of the ship in half. The presence of the inexplicably eerie German ship becomes a conflict between the two factions in how it has found them and how best they should survive while being pounded with depth charges and matched in naval moves tit-for-tat. It’s slowly revealed the the circumstances of the rescue sub itself is now questionable. And meanwhile, the bearded, philosophical Galifianakis is given the opportunity to spin wild theories about the circumstances as he reads from issues of Horror Magazines.

Submarines are scary. It doesn’t matter what film you’re watching; you root for any person trapped in a submarine. They’re dank, claustrophobic dwellings where there’s no escape and our characters are forced to whisper lest they be spotted on a radar. “Das Boot” was about Nazis. And it didn’t matter. You wanted those Nazis to survive. Because they were in a submarine. The tension of waiting for depth charges, clanking sounds in the hull, or even a sneeze resulting in our characters being discovered (and subsequently drowned) makes the submarine setting terrifying by itself; but add horror elements gracefully woven into the story and you have one hell of a nail-biter.

[If anybody has a horror flick they think deserves a second look write it up and throw it my way and I'll post it. I'm going to be running with this theme until Halloween because it's easy and I have shit to do]