Things: A Canuxploitation Abomination



Bad movies, especially of the Horror genre, have always been subjective. What's so bad it's good, and what's worthless is usually a matter of opinion. But what's the difference? What separates "good bad" from "bad bad"? It doesn't matter how terrible a movie is. If it's boring, then, it's boring. And boring is boring. I think we can all agree on that. But what, above all, has made certain bad movies stand out over the years and gain a following? What is it that people like about Blood Freak, Manos, and Troll 2? The only thing I can think of that these movies have in common is weirdness. WTF moments, intentional or not, that makes you question the director's sanity, and even your own, at times. It's true, and always has been. Bad + weird = gold.

Today, we're going to talk about one of the weird ones. In fact, we're going to talk about THE weird one, as far as I'm concerned. A movie I've had a hell of a time thinking up words for. It's called Things, and it was made in Canada in the late 80's by Andrew Jordan and Barry J. Gillis. Although, it strangely has a bit of a 90's feel to it. I watched Things for the first of many times about four years ago, not long after the dvd release. And now that I've thought it over, I think I'm finally ready to talk about this.

I guess some films are so weird, they just got to show the title twice. Already giving the viewer a sense of deja vu. Yeah. They just showed the title three minutes ago, and now, they're showing it again. This time, with fire. I guess some movies are so weird, they just need to show the title twice. The main character is Don Drake, played by Barry J. Gillis. What makes him the main character is a mystery, As well as why he just took the tape recorder out of the freezer and replaced it with his jacket. Don's brother, Doug, has been trying to get his wife pregnant, but with no luck. Doug might be insane, but that's neither here nor there. With seemingly no plan whatsoever, Don and Fred hang out at Doug's house while he tends to the sick wife. Doug's been letting some mad doctor do experiments on her, which was supposed to result in a pregnancy. We then witness a somewhat unsettling scene involving said doctor. A scene that looks like it belongs in another movie. As they sit around and kill time, Don, Doug and Fred kid around, drink beer, and say things no one in their right mind would understand. Ya know what I think? I think they're fucking with us!

Don claims his beer tastes like cowshit from a well in West Africa, and waters it down with pure American water like any Canadian beer drinker with a good head on his shoulders. After Groundhogs Day Massacre goes off, Doug makes some sandwiches, which I'm pretty sure contains nothing. The second his brother's back is turned, he sticks a moth in his, because "it'll be crunchy in his tummy". One of many practical jokes, seemingly meant to fuck with our heads. As Don goes to take a bite, he clutches his arm in pain. "OH, FUCK! I HATE MOSQUITO BITES!!!", he yells, seemingly in the form of a question. I didn't see, nor did I hear any mosquitoes. And even if I missed it, Don was wearing a long sleeve sweatshirt. So, I'm not sure what else to say about that.

All hell breaks loose as Doug's wife dies and gives birth to a bunch of things. The fellas don't seem quite as affected by this as they should be. Doug isn't exactly thrilled his wife is dead, but doesn't show the emotion one should in this situation. He tries to explain why this has happened, but Don randomly goes off about some story he recently read in a Science Fiction novel. I'm not sure what was weirder. Don's seemingly pointless story, or the fact that Doug actually waited for him to finish before calling him a damn bastard and a dick. Don says he's sorry. He meant well and was only trying to eeease the tension. Or so he says.

Soon, Fred is sucked into the third, fourth and fifth dimension, complicating things further. Don and Doug don't seem all that concerned that their friend is gone, but they are now short a man, and forced to do something about the things problem themselves. Don and Doug then sit around for a while longer, drinking whiskey, making confusing jokes, and putting very little thought into whatever it is they should be doing, as porn star, Amber Lynn, tries in vain to make sense out of things.



That's probably all I should say about the story, for lack of a better word. As the movie goes on, things only gets more and more confusing. And I'd rather this be a good review than go on trying in vain to make you understand something that you're just not going to understand. But I would like to point out how great the dvd is, which is packed with extras, including two audio commentaries. The one featuring Gillis and Jordan, however, is probably the least informative, clusterfuck of a commentary I've ever heard. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

In all seriousness. If you see Things as JUST a bad movie, then, you're probably an asshole. Things is nothing short of a masterpiece of schlock. Truly a one of a kind experience. What amazes me is that somehow, the 90's and 2000's came and went without me even noticing this movie. I'll never understand why I hadn't heard of it until its most recent release. Oh, to be a B-movie loving teenager in the 90's, and to discover this shit! But I suppose I should be grateful to now own this movie and to have the option to watch it any time I want, with only a double digit number of viewings behind me. But I got to point out that this is one difficult film to consistently pay attention to. I'm not even sure why. Well, there's the fact that very little happens to further the almost non existent plot. Then, there's the intentionally bad dubbing, the Super-8 film which makes this look a bit older than it is, that "Talespin" song playing during that 15 minute scene where the guys are basically doing nothing. It's so easy to get lost in the weirdness, which varies from random to trippy to dreamy to nightmarish. All of this complimented by a score that makes everything seem far more surreal than I could ever put into words.

The highlight for me was of course Barry J. Gillis' portrayal of the mustached little weirdo, Don Drake, who's sly demeanor tells me he knows something the audience doesn't. Something we're never clued in on, as if we're supposed to figure it all out for ourselves. His disconnected performance makes this disconnected movie one of a kind as much as any of the other weird shit that goes on. The so bad it's good qualities takes a backseat to the complete and utter confusion, which is all clearly intentional, although, the intentions aside from that still remain unclear, even after my dozen plus viewings. Not to be understood, only accepted. Ultimately,Things is just everything you shouldn't do when attempting to make a film, rolled into one big, Incoherent joke without a punchline. A joke probably only meant to be funny to a select few, but is slowly winning over the world, one bad movie lover at a time. 10/10



#Review

Is anyone else getting excited for October?

Is anyone else getting stoked for October yet? Does anyone have an idea of what they what to watch? Do you have anything saved for it?

I know there is still three weeks to be exact to the kick-off of The October Challenge, and I know that there is a challenge underway, but I am starting to look forward to this years challenge. Time flies and it waits for no man. However, it is not just the challenge - I like this time of year, when the evenings are shorter. Leaves are falling and Autumn is calling. It is good for TrashEpics too, a sharp increase in activity is inevitable - hopefully activity will be prolonged.

Anyway, I usually put movies aside especially for it. Movies that I haven't had a chance to watch, or movies that I keep putting off, for one reason or another. I already know what I will be watching this year as it saves from rushed choices and ultimate disappointment. I have a nice mixture of old and new movies, from foreign, to obscure and hyped horror lined up. It allows gives me the opportunity to explore some directors filmography that I may have not seen to others in which I am concluding their filmography, to watching some Asian horror movies I have not seen before. I usually don't bother with re-watches - I usually just watch first-time-views instead. Anyway here is my list for anyone interested:

Fermat's Room 2007
Hell's Ground 2007
Homebodies 1974
The Haunting of M. 1979
Ringu 1995
To Sleep with a Vampire 1993
Arcana 1972
Jack Be Nimble 1993
La nuit de la mort! 1980
Sommarens tolv månader 1988
Retribution 1987
What the Peeper Saw 1972
The Night Child 1975
The Sender 1982
The Ugly 1997
The Baby's Room 2006
Two Orphan Vampires 1997
The Night of the Hunted 1980
Fascination 1979
Lips of Blood 1975
Requiem for a vampire 1971
The Living Dead Girl 1982
Salem Witch Trials 2002
Opera 1987
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage 1970
The Cat o' Nine Tails 1971
The Stendhal Syndrome 1996
Madman 1981
Graveyard Shift 1987
The New York Ripper 1982
Manhattan Baby 1982
The Black Cat 1981
Touch of Death 1988
Voices from Beyond 1991
The Sweet House of Horrors 1989
Blood Feast 1963
The Wizard of Gore 1970
The Eye 2002
The Eye 2 2004
Shutter 2004
Pulse 2001
Reincarnation 2005
Martyrs 2008
Bubba Ho-Tep 2002
Taxidermia 2006
Inside 2007
Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon 2006
Dark Water 2002
Tesis 1996
Versus 2000
Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom 1975
A Serbian Film 2010
Dabbe: Bir Cin Vakasi 2012
Atrocious 2010
D@bbe 2 2009
Dabbe: Cin Çarpmasi 2013
Man Bites Dog 1992
Angst 1983
Frankenstein 2015
Jessabelle 2014
Jigsaw 2017
From Beyond the Grave 1974
House of Usher 1960
Pit and the Pendulum 1961
Madhouse 1974
Diary of a Madman 1963
Devil Fetus 1983
Demons 5: The Devil's Veil 1990
The Haunted Palace 1963
The Skin I Live In 2011
Taste of Fear 1961
The Mephisto Waltz 1971
5 Dolls for an August Moon 1970
Mystics in Bali 1981
Paranoiac 1963
Dracula 1979
The Shuttered Room 1967
Anatomy 2000

"The" Predator (2018) - good stuff

Anybody watch this yet? I've liked the Predator series since I was a kid. The first is a fuckin' Schwarzenegger movie where he fights a goddamn alien in the jungle. How cool is that? Part 2 is a decent take where the location moves to the city, then we have those shitty AVP movies...

When I first saw AVP, I was really disappointed with it. They didn't put any effort into the story for that one. They had nothing new to say, and were mostly trying to cash-in on the crossover aspects of Freddy vs Jason, which came out a year earlier. Suffice to say, they failed miserably, and those two movies are generally not considered canon, because the timelines contradict themselves. Most notably because of Prometheus, setting the creation of the Aliens in the future, whereas the AVP movies had them around for hundreds of years before our time. Not that this would matter to a true fan, who can force the pieces to fit with imaginative and other media lore, but I digress...

My point is that the AVP movies are kinda shit. In retrospect, they're at least somewhat entertaining, and I'll give them that. AVP2 is arguably better, but it suffers from the unfortunate bad lighting, as everything in that movie is literally too dark to see.

Then, in 2010, Robert Rodriguez produced Nimrod Antal's "Predators", which is a "reboot" that focuses on a lot of the aspects of the original Predator film, in which a group of mercenaries have to fight predator(s). It's a cool sequel, featuring one of the coolest actors of all time... Walton Goggins. But again, I digress... now, it's time to talk about... THE Predator!


Shane Black, who co-wrote the original and played "Hawkins" in it, writes and directs this sequel, and he was firm on making this an R-rated romp. He gets it. Fortunatley, the infamous sex offender's cut scene didn't hinder the plot, because the movie was easy enough to understand. If anything, it adds a good amount to the Predator mythology.

Shane didn't want to do a remake/reboot. He wanted this to be a sequel, and he even got Jake Busey to play Gary Busey's character (from part 2)'s son. They reference the events of the first movie (filmed/set in 1987) and the second movie (set in 1997), and understandably, they aren't quite aware of the events of "Predators". 🙄

So again, we have military-trained outcasts, who are pitted up against a big fucking predator. They're all pretty decent characters, because Shane Black is a bad-ass and knows how to make cool movies. We got Tom Jane as a guy with tourrettes, and he's got a love/hate relationship with Keegan Michael Keyes, who's a pretty fuckin' funny guy if you didn't know. All the side characters are alright, as well as the main dude Boyd Holbrook (from "Logan"), who's got to steer the premise with his autistic son, who inadvertantly activates this whole mess by understanding the patterns and shit from the predator tech's interface.

A lot of reviews say this movie is kind of a mess. I can kind of agree, but I thought it was a fun ride, and the chaotic nature of it didn't bother me at all. I think it flowed well enough.

Like most Predator sequels, they wanted Arnold to cameo in some capacity, but Arnold wont do it unless he's got a big role. He doesn't want to be a side character or a cameo, but he admits that he'd do more predator if it was a worthwhile part. Why the hell has he never done another Predator movie?!

I liked it. Talk about Predator. Or don't.

Was anyone else a fan of 'Six Feet Under'?

Six Feet Under was phenomenal, One of the finest TV series ever imo. I have yet to come across another show that has effected me as much as this one had. I own the box set and recently had the pleasure of re-watching it again, and it was as though I hadn't seen it before. The whole range of emotions in this show. Poignant and at the same time very funny. The incredibly insensitive adverts were hilarious and the finale is the best ending to a TV show I have ever seen.

Was anyone here ever a fan of it too?

Olivia Munn can go fuck herself

I'm sure most of you are aware of the Predator controversy, and while this stuff shouldn't bother me as it was only a "small" scene that was removed, it really grinds my gears. Here we have Shane Black, a cool fuckin' guy, returning to his roots to direct "The Predator". It's got a decent cast of mostly males, because Predator is a fucking man's movie. It's always been about machisimo, but they've always had to throw in at least one prominent female character. In this case, Olivia Munn plays a scientist who was likely shoe-horned into the movie to fill the quota. Okay. Fair enough.

So with only a couple weeks until the release date, she finds out that Shane casted an old friend of his, who happened to be a registered sex offender. That's not even the bad part. The bad part is how she handled it. She went over the director's head and complained directly to the studio, demanding that the dude's scenes be cut. And they were.

Now, there are a few things wrong with this, and none of them have to do with the pedophile. This bitch not only compromised the integrity of the film by fucking with the story, but she also acted like a victim about it. She claimed her castmates "ostracized" her after this, because they didn't have any immediate remarks about it. What was she expecting? For everybody to coddle her because she did "the right thing"? Most of them probably didn't want to say anything because they didn't want to get involved in this shit, but then she guilted them into it by calling them out on it.

So what do the other castmates do, following her claim? They all start jumping on the bandwagon in her defense, offering their "apologies" and "appreciation" of what she did, because if they didn't end up saying something at this point, they'd get the story flipped on them as if they were in defense of the guy who was cut from the film. This doesn't make them look strong. It makes them look like a bunch of chumps. Hollywood is so pussy-whipped by political correctness these days, it's disgusting.

So now that we have one less scene of exposition, the movie will probably make a little bit less sense now, and why? Because the sole female cast member of the movie wanted to be part of the latest Hollywood craze of exposing sexual misconduct? Doesn't she know that the #MeToo movement has hit a brick wall, what with the likes of Asia Argento's "sex crime"?

What you really have to consider is the precedent this will set. If a cast member can go above the director's head to demand changes to a film, then what good is a director if he doesn't have final cut? That would only contribute to the loss of auteurism, whereas the director doesn't mean a damn thing if he can be replaced or stepped on. Next thing you know, more and more actors will demand that changes be made, despite the director's intent. For all we know, Shane Black could have cast the guy because he wanted the character to have an authentic creepy sex offender vibe to him. Who is Olivia Munn to demand changes to a film that was already complete? What difference did it make if the guy's history was shady? It's just a fucking acting part. I'm sure the guy felt bad enough for whatever he did, but now she's trying to make a martyr out of herself because of it. She can go fuck herself.

#MeToo

Red state movies versus Blue state movies

Well, this is something that sucks. This way of making movies, this way of targeting specific demographic groups for an audience. It wasn't always like this. There must have been a few threads about this here before, right? Anyway, here's another one.

I was watching the 2010-ish Straw Dogs yesterday, and, JESUS that was slanted. Holy shlamotherfuckingmoly. It's like something that might have been directed by the "liberal kook" maniac that Troma talks about. Everything about it. EVERYTHING. Doesn't anyone even try to look for common ground anymore?

There are shitloads of movies that are made from a liberal, or mega-liberal, perspective. That is the stereotype of Hollywood, and there is a lot of truth to the stereotype, I think. From more of a red state perspective, we have... the Red Dawn remake... Shooter (2007)... shit, I have to go to the bathroom and then go somewhere, but anyone who has any thoughts on this please just post them.

A Conundrum I've Often Wondered

70s vs 80s horror. A long discussed topic, though maybe losing its relevance the further in time we continue and the more distant those decades become. The way pre-70s horror really has no influence on me or my tastes, 70s-80s horror is an ancient relic to the current generation.

But anyway, that isn't really what this topic's about. I'm aging and out of touch and fine with that.

I'm team 80s horror all the way. The conundrum that I'm in is, for folks that prefer 70s horror, why? Yes, there's plenty to love from that decade. But dang. Aren't there more horror films from 1981 alone than the years 1970-1974 combined that are just....well, better? Yeah, I get that it's all subjective. And quality over quantity and all that. I dunno. What're your thoughts? How can you honestly prefer 70s horror as a whole, over 80s, when there's just not nearly as much to like? For collectors, wouldn't you agree your collection is made up of more 80s horror films than 70s?

I mean, I suppose if you own 100 films from the 80s but only 15 of them you rate, say, an 8/10, and own 20 films from the 70s and 15 of them you rate an 8/10....I suppose I can see one's point.

•partially inspired by Troma's 70s horror thread.

Door-to-door religion salesmen.



I just bought this sign for my door because I am so sick of these assholes invading my life every other week, often while I am napping. I really hope they take heed. How is this considered okay, to come banging on someone's door, unexpected, not even considering what kind of hours the occupants might keep? I don't even understand it, does this method ever actually work? I mean, people know churches exist, right? Are there really such weak minded individuals out there who just take up any religion that happens to come knocking at their door?

Human servants of vampires

30 Days of Night is on, and it got me thinking about the Ben Foster character. A lot of vampire movies have a human or two who serve as some kind of accomplice or servant to a vampire master. They are almost like a witch's "familiar," in some ways... almost a pet.

Dracula had Renfield. In Salem's Lot, Barlow had Straker. In Fright Night, Jerry had Billy Cole. In The Forsaken (2001) (forgive me for even knowing what The Forsaken is, but I happened to watch it fairly recently, God help me) the Johnathan Schaech character had Pen, the Simon Rex character. In 30 Days of Night, the vamps had the Ben Foster character.

Googling around, I see people seem to use different terms to describe these human servants. They get called drudges, thralls... I thought I was being original in associating them with witch familiars, but Maybe I read that somewhere before, because I see other people saying the same thing online...

Anyone have anything to say about this type of thing?? Any movies I am forgetting, with a character like Renfield, Straker, Billy Cole, etc? Or, any names for them that I haven't come across?

Castle Rock, season 1

The 10-episode Hulu season has come to its end, so was it worth it?


It starts off kinda slow, because it's all setup, but around halfway through the season, you start to get an idea of where you're going with it. It's rather bizarre at times, and the later half of the season is back and forth in its continuity (but continuity itself plays a big part of this season). I started to like all these characters though, and the whole show was weird and moody enough. It does seem like something Stephen King would have written, even though I'm pretty sure he only had a limited producer role, if any involvement.

You got to wonder what King himself thinks of this show. He's gone on record saying he doesn't like certain adaptions of his work (like The Shining 1980), but I don't know...

I'm not all that familiar with King's works, but the biggest connections I can name are the city of Castle Rock itself, former sheriff Alan Pangborn (The Dark Half, Needful Things), and Shawshank prison.

Some characters like Jane Levy's Jackie Torrence seem rather shoe-horned, but it looks like they may be saving that for another season. I hear that each season will revolve around another weird happening in the town, which is probably the best way to go about it. This story is wrapped rather concisely, I feel. Not sure I understand the whole thing, but I liked most of it.