Here's My Video Review of Frogs (1972)

Artists that never made a bad Album

Someone made a thread or post about this I think here before?
If so direct me and I'll delete this

The Velvet Underground
Nirvana
The Stooges (not the reformation)
Jimi Hendrix
The Beatles
Genesis (Gabriel years)

others?

Have you ever wanted to work in the horror genre?

We all love a wide variety of horror culture. From movies made during the dawn of film and up to the present, it obviously tickles your fancy enough to make you watch this stuff regularly, sometimes even craving it. I don't have enough horror movies in my diet, and that's what keeping me off my rocker.

People do all sorts of things to keep their mind off of the perils of reality, but horror is an escape that can consume your life if apt enough for it. It becomes a quest to seek out more, hoping to break boundaries of your emotional state and trying to find that next movie that makes you feel alive. Then, once you embrace the genre for what it is, it really can be quite a ride.

Have you ever wanted to be a horror host, or run a haunted hayride on a farm, or design your own horror art or clothes or toys or any such thing related to the horror genre, as a hobby or even as a career?

You know what I hate? Pop Figures!

Every time any movie or tv show or comic is ever released, so comes another slew of these stupid things. They make it an effort to cover almost any character in pop culture, but after a few hundred of them, you ought to realize there isn't anything worthwhile in collecting these stupid looking monstrosities.
This company is feeding off of the obsessions of collectors by giving them big-headed kiddie versions of even the lamest of characters. This company is brilliant, and that's why I hate them.

A confession

Today I was tired and a little distraught. I did something. A man came to my door. What happened next was a flurry and a blurr, but I was so hungry. It was hot and steemy. I felt so guilty as I bit in. The red stuff still warm as it gushed out, most making it into my mouth and some ending up in my beard. I was careful to wash away the evidence. The meat tasted so good. Maybe the best meat I had ever had. I was frustrated with how much I had to cut it, but maybe if it were cooked more I wouldn't have had to. It just felt right as it slipped down my throat. I even made my kids eat some. They were relucatant at first, but children will do almost anything they see their father doing. Man I love pizza.

Fire Walk With Me (1992)

After watching the first two seasons of Twin Peaks again, I revisited the (at the time) book ending to the series, which also serves as a prequel to the series. Therefore, you absolutely should NOT watch the movie before watching the series, because it spoils EVERYTHING.

When I first watched the movie, I hated it. I was desperate for resolution after the way season 2 ended. There were so many questions left unanswered, yet it was all leading somewhere so wonderful. However, David Lynch is a hard act to follow/understand, and anyone casually tuning into this television program would surely be absolutely confused by this Lynchian (yes, that's now a word) style of filmmaking.

Twin Peaks was quirky, but David Lynch would often get carried away with his bizarre symbolism and even I find it a bit hard to follow sometimes. Yet, in most every other way, the series is quite endearing. So much so that it brings a tear to my eye, in more ways than one.

So after season 2 got axed, Lynch was attempting to make about 4 feature films https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105665/trivia?item=tr0725249 . FWWM didn't fare too well in the box office, so the others were scrapped. Goddamn, would I have loved to see the movie about David Bowie's character Philip Jeffries, because Bowie with a southern accent is priceless. Also, there would have been resolution to Cooper, Desmond, and Major Briggs. Surely, anyone invested in the series would have loved to get their hands on any of this material, because any TP mythology is gold in our eyes.

So how about this movie, Fire Walk with Me? Well, it's all a prequel about Laura Palmer and her inevitable demise. After all, the series begins with Laura Palmer's dead body being found, so that's not a spoiler. Therefore, I originally felt that the story was redundant tripe, but in restrospect, this movie is emotional as fuck, and it hits me really hard every time I see it.

Sheryl Lee does a fantastic job as the doomed protagonist, and it's strange how much of this film is foretold in premonitions by Cooper. The series and the movie tie in together in such a fascinating way, and even when the characters in the film who have died in the series, it just feels so good to see them again.

Not much can be said in the case that ignorant audiences are reading this post, but this is a damn fine movie. I'd give it a 5 out of 5 rating, because I fucking LOVE anything relating to Twin Peaks. My man @ballz recently informed me of the Missing Pieces deleted scenes movies, and I'm anxious for that shit. Then, I'll revisit season 3, which was such a damn fine season, it makes me weep even moreso.

Season 3 was a phenomenal effort by Lynch. Not only does it tie up loose ends that were 27 years in the making, but they even have some brilliant tie-ins to Fire Walk with Me. I really love the episodes that feature Harry Dean Stanton, even though he only had a bit part in the movie, but he had some great scenes in season 3. Hard-hitting stuff, by a legendary actor.

On a side note, that movie "Lucky" was also pretty good, featuring David Lynch as a tortoise-loving bizarro, because Harry Dean and David Lynch should have collaborated in all of their efforts. They go together like Lynch and MacLachlan, which is to say... damn fine(ly)!

I drank a LOT of alchohol tonight, so I could rant about how great this movie is all night, but I'll stow it for the night. Once I rewatch season 3, I'll rant on that a bit more, because it's one of the greatest television events of all time. Damn fine coffee!

Trash Epics updates coming soon

Between work and the commute to work, I usually only have a couple hours a day to myself, so bear with me if I seem like I've been lazy on here. Trust me, I haven't. I've been working on a slew of updates for TE that I'm so very close to completing. The only problem is my limited window in each day to work on these things, which is quite frustrating considering how little work I actually have left.

After some of our regulars decided to bail on us for no good reason, I've been promising that I'd do my best to improve the TE experience with new, more robust functionality, and I'm in the mood to ramble on about these things.


One thing I've been doing these past few days is restructuring the board system. Originally, a post could only be on one board, like most forums do. However, posts get lost in the sea of under-utilized boards, so after a while, I changed it up so a post could be on two boards. It seemed okay for a while, but the same lack of exposure befell posts again, and so I'm changing it up again. You'll soon be able to tag a post under as many boards as you want, and it'll automatically categorize them appropriately.

Say for example, you post a topic on the "Halloween" 1978 board. Your post will also be filed under the boards for Movies, Horror, and Thrillers/Suspense automatically. Posts will also be able to be moved to multiple boards just as easily. Therefore, the board index will function much more accurately, too.

Of course, with this added functionality, I have to manually go through about 2000 posts, but I'm halfway there! 😦 That's the hard part. Once that's done, I'll update the main forum, the post pages, TEDb, and that shitty FreeForums skin in no time.


Another big update that's taken me a bit longer to wrap my head around is a new dynamic markup editor that wont redirect you off the page, and you'll get live preview results. They call this a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. So if you click the reply button, a box will pop up right under the post and you wont have to worry about [ b ] and [ url=blah blah ] tags, because you'll see the bold text text and the link as you make your post.

Of course, if you're old fashioned, the current way will still be available because I have to make this backwards compatible with all of our existing posts. The same thing goes for when you add or edit posts. You wont be redirected, and you'll see the formatting as you type. I have to do a lot of debugging to make sure I don't screw this up though, but it'll be pretty damn sleek once it's finished.


The home page will also probably be revamped, too. I don't think I'll include the post feed on there, but probably just a Board Index. This means I'll be removing subdomains, but nobody ever uses them anyway. I'll figure out a better use for those later.

Even with my efforts to make things easier for newbies to understand, I know that people will still have trouble with them, so I'm going to make the other skins more accessible, too, and that includes that stupid Facebook skin I've been designing on and off again these past few month. I figure a lot of our reliable users migrated to that shithole, so I might as well cater to them with something they'll recognize visually.

There will be a few more tweaks here and there, such as how you search and sort stuff, but the big changes revolve around the markup editor, the new board system, and the facebook skin. Hopefully, this stuff can be ready in time for the October Challenge, because that's always a big deal.

I really can't wait until I have this stuff all sorted out. Then, I can finally start working on CONTENT! Maybe, if we're lucky, we can lure back a few of our old regulars to this place with these epic redesigns, minimal drama, and high-end low-class trash!

Horror movies in sewers and subways

I'm watching Mimic right now. Somehow it isn't 100% successful, but it's hard to say why not. It does a lot of things right, I think.

Anyway, what are some other horror movies (or books!) that have a lot of scenes, or at least one really important scene, somewhere underground like a sewer or a subway? I'll start.

It
Relic
Reliquary (book)
CHUD
Mimic
Return of the Living Dead 2 (just a couple quick scenes in that huge sewer pipe, but they are important scenes for the movie)
Midnight Meat Train
This horror short film:
Resident Evil (arguably)
Demons (1985) (the beginning)
American Werewolf in London
Cloverfield

and I see some more when I start Googling, but nothing I've seen personally. Anyone got any good ones to mention?

HBO Mini-challenge

I will put this one out there as a mini-challenge for at some point during this month. Basically you will have 10-12 days to watch as many episodes from any HBO series (minimum 40 minutes per episode) as you can. You will get 1 point per episode. If you manage to complete a whole season (minimum 8 episodes), you will get a bonus 10 points. So for example managing to watch 2 seasons of Deadwood would get you 44 points. If anyone would prefer it to be based on the traditional running time though, that is also ok.

If anyone is up for this, grab your spot and if there are 5 participants minimum, I will stick a date on it to begin.

Cheap Trick, Bad Company, and ZZ Top Concert

This was a convenient concert that sprung up on der's radar, so I went to Dallas with him to catch the 50th anniversary of ZZ Top's career. FIFTY years, dude! The other two bands are only a few years from their 50th as well, but rock and roll has kept these fuckers young.

This was the same place we'd seen Alice Cooper and Deep Purple a couple years ago, but we were waaay in the back of the lawn this time. Not a problem though, because a lot of weed was passed around back there, but damn were those beers expensive. Good thing der was banking at work recently, because I would never spend $17 for two fucking beers.


So first up was Cheap Trick as the "special guest". They played loud, so their sound had a lot of gain and you couldn't make out many intricacies in the guitar playing, but I love Cheap Trick, so it was worthwhile. Why are they touring with ZZ Top? I don't know, but I'll take it. Set list was:

Hello There
Hot Love
California Man
If You Want My Love
Never Had a Lot to Lose
Ain't That a Shame
Voices
I Want You to Want Me
Dream Police
Surrender
Goodnight



Next up was Bad Company. I only really know their hits, but they played them, and they played them well:

Can't Get Enough of Your Love
Rock and Roll Fantasy
Movin' On
Feel Like Makin' Love
All Because of You
Ready for Love
All Along the Watchtower
Ride on a Pony
Shooting Star
Bad Company
All Right Now

I started getting jazzed up by the time they got to "Shooting Star". I didn't think they'd outperform Cheap Trick, but they did it.



Finally... ZZ Top comes along, and they killed it. These guys are almost 70, but being a trio, their sound was loud and clear, and pretty damn perfect. Billie and Dusty had their beards, they moved in sync a lot, and they were shredding. Frank Beard (drummer) was kicking that drum's ass, too.

I knew some of these songs more when I was younger, and had to look up some of them when I got home. Around halfway through the set, there were a few songs I couldn't make out ANY words too, but it all cleared up toward the end, where they rocked our socks off:

Under Pressure
I Thank You
Gimme All Your Loving
Pearl Necklace
I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide
I Gotsta Get Paid
My Head's in Mississippi
Sixteen Tons
Beer Drinkers and Hellraisers
Just Got Paid
Sharp Dressed Man
Legs
La Grange/Tush



The whole night was pretty fun. Nice weather, beer, weed, more beer, and a lot of rock and roll. Also, being a TX concert for a TX band, there were a lot of rednecks too, but also a lot of titties and sexy women.

We tried to bail a touch early during their final medley so we could beat traffic, but we definitely did not beat it. We were stuck in that damn parking lot for 70 minutes!

Everyone got along fine during the concert because of all that rock and roll peace and love vibes, but as soon as the concert was over, people turned into assholes, trying to inch ahead and cut in front of us, and shout double middle-fingered obscenities at us when they couldn't, but fortunately, der wasn't having any of it, or we'd have probably been there another 30 something minutes.

Finally got home at 1am, had to wake up for work at 3am, and that sucked, but the rest was great. We'll return to that venue in September to see... Iron Maiden! Can't wait for that shit.