Twilight Zone 2002

You don't hear about this one much. The original is a classic of its era and sets a high standard. Apparently, the 80s version was good enough to last 3 seasons. Then we have a 2002 version hosted by Forest Whitaker. This only lasted 1 season, 22 episodes, 2 segments (20ish minutes each) per episode. They canceled it.

Honestly, this was such a pleasant surprise, though. Most anthology shows have plenty of dud episodes, but I really enjoyed most all of these episodes. And so many guest stars, too!

Scroll down that page to view a list of guest stars:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twilight_Zone_(2002_TV_series)



A few noteworthy episodes:

Katherine Heigl goes back in time to kill Hitler as a baby! She poses as a nanny, working for Hitler's father (James Remar), and he hates the dirty Jews!

A woman is stalked by a bus! Well, some bus nobody ever knows about keeps stopping where she's at, waiting for her to get on. She keeps telling it to fuck off, but it keeps coming back. Will she get on?

Jeremy Piven gets struck by lightning! From that point on, he can hear people's thoughts. A full episode in length, but interesting enough to justify it.

Frank Whaley, the guy who says "what" one too many times in front of Sam Jackson, lives a mundane and tedious suburban life. He gets an offer to trade his life for someone else's. He's got a lot of questions, but then he wonders who he can trade lives with. Maybe a rich person with a perfect life and a hot wife? It's some food for thought on how much is too much and what has real value.

A sequel to "It's a Good Life", the original episode of the boy who could think anything to happen. He has a daughter now. This ep has Stephen King vibes.

Eriq La Salle has 6 months to live! Then he gets hit by a car! When he wakes, he's in the year 1968. Stephen King definitely ripped off this episode for 11.22.63 (written in 2011).

A hypochondriac with an over-active imagination manifests a fictional disease... and that neurotic character is played by Jeffrey Combs! That should be enough to sell it.

Shawn Hatosy is a magician trying to learn the best trick ever from a retired magician (Xander Berkeley). I got really sucked into this one. How is the trick really done, though?

Jessica Simpson is stalked by dolls! A more horror-oriented episode about a babysitter and a sad little girl who has a collection of dolls that she has an anxiety and trust issues with. A tad creepy at times, even.

Jeremy Sisto is on death row! He pleads to the end that he's innocent, but what do you know? The execution machine is botched and they have to try again later. Stay tuned to find out what happens next! Great fuckin' episode. I'll call it my favorite of the lot.

Some archeologists dig up an Aztec chest with a gauntlet of blood in it. They accidentally spill the blood, and just like that... the sun is gone. Huh. It doesn't take long for the earth to start freezing, so they hide in their cave and consider if it was their doing, and if so... how do they fix it? A great disturbing ending.

So yeah, I had a lot of fun with this series. If it went on for more seasons, it probably would have turned shitty, so 1 season was good. Recommended to anthology fanatics.

#Review

Betelgeuse Part Deuce!

Who thought this was ever going to happen? They were talking about it for years and years, I wrote it off as a pipe dream. But here we are, 36 years later, and they finally did it. They made Tim Burton great again.

The first movie is great. Weird as hell, original, and a promising start for Tim Burton. He channeled his filmmaking process at that time to make a very practical effects oriented movie. Finally, a Tim Burton movie with very little CGI. The story is a lot of fun, too.

Beetlejuice himself only has so many minutes of screentime, in which most of his scenes are set in the afterlife as a service worker. Michael Keaton rules. You can tell he loves every minute of being such a douchy character.

Most of the movie is set in the real world, and we're given a grander scope of the town. It's a great setting. Autumnal and set primarily on Halloween. Winona is some solid glue to entry, as is her annoying mother Catherine O'Hara. Jeffrey Jones couldn't be in it for reasons we'll not get into here, but they did include his character in a pretty hilarious way. Jenna Ortega is obviously great. She's a wonderful scream queen as of late, and this movie is slightly closer to the horror genre than the original. More life and death stakes. And afterlife stakes.

The Day-O song is only briefly homaged, thank God, but there happens to be an equally hilarious musical number in there. I got plenty of laughs throughout. Willem Dafoe is an actor in the afterlife, acting like a police officer for some reason, and he cracks me up. Danny DeVito is only in one scene, but he's welcome in every goddamn movie ever made. Justin Theroux is the equivalent of Glenn Shadix's character in the original. A phony psychic foil.

I wont say much about Monica Belluci's character, but Monica Belluci is fucking Tim Burton now. That's probably important to the story for some reason. It's strange how a weirdo-looking creep like him attracts women like Belluci and Lisa Marie. And Helena, if you're into zombies.

Basically, everything about BJ2 comes together really well. I think everyone involved had fun making it, and it's a return to form for Tim Burton. This movie didn't even have Helena Bonham Carter or Johnny Depp in it!

#Review

Mindwarp (1991)

Starring Bruce Campbell and Angus Scrimm! With KNB effects! When I saw that cast and crew, I didn't even read the synopsis. I simply turned it on, thinking I would be in for a good time, but...

This movie was so unengaging. It didn't get me invested at all. There are a few good effects moments, but otherwise, this movie was a big letdown. At least Bruce Campbell screams a lot. It's always fun hearing him in pain.

#Review

Yonkers Joe (2008)

I was getting desperate for a 'Y' movie, so I settled on the first one I could find. I've been on a Chazz Palminteri kick, and this one places him as a gambler trying to scam the casinos for a big win with the help from his wife.

Now things take a more personal/domestic turn when Chazz's son drops by, having been kicked out of his group home because he's a down syndrome guy with violent/inappropriate tendencies. So the movie is Chazz trying to reconcile things with this son of his, who can range from tolerable to asshole.

Now, I've dealt with special-needs before, and I don't have much patience with them. But with that said, this guy doesn't seem totally unbearable, though he does have a potty-mouth and some rapist tendencies. 😦

So I started wondering if this guy was actually retarded or not. It appears as though he is not retarded, so I guess that means he did a great job. This movie would be canceled if it were made today. Some snowflake would bitch that this movie is taking acting jobs away from the real 'tards who want to work ^{don't know the difference either way}.

There's not a whole hell of a lot to say about this movie otherwise, but I liked it.

#Review

UHF (1989)

Weird Al gets his own TV station, which he fills with ridiculous programming.

This movie is pure trash. This shit had me crying.



#Review

Stranger in Our House (1978)

Does anyone know if there is a way to tell when the second showing of Stranger in Our House was? This was the made for TV witch movie with Linda Blair and directed by Wes Craven. It premiered on October 31, 1978 (same night as Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell on a different network). I didn't see it then, but it was rerun some time later, I think probably in the summer or fall of '79. That's when I saw it. I'm trying to determine the exact date because it was the same day as soemthing else that happened to me that I'm including in a written work.

A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (2006)

This is a good mid-80s NYC period piece following a bunch of juvenile delinquents. It switches between 1986 and the present, as recollected by Robert Downey Jr.

The setting is wonderful. The whole thing is beautifully made and the cast nails it. The crude teens harrassing everybody in town is a lot of fun to me. It's like Kids, where the teens are getting drunk and suffering adolescent melodrama. Shia LeBeauf is among the teens, mostly a spectator rather than instigator to the gang violence that Channing Tatum's bad attitude keeps egging on. The girls are eye candy, everybody's got issues, and people get fucked up. These teens are trash, and I love it.

What's funny to me is that Shia LeBeauf becomes Robert Downey Jr., and Channing Tatum becomes Eric Roberts. This movie needed levity, after all.

It could have been a trash epic if it added some nudity and shown more of the suggested violence. Instead, it's just a really good movie, which is good enough, made better by its level of trash. Like the scene where they beat a small child with a trash can. Fun times for the whole family.

#Review

Alien Romulus

When I heard this was to be set between the first two movies, I wondered how the hell that was going to work. So here's the setup: The company sends a ship to gather some space junk from the Nostromo wreckage. Guess what kind of space junk they find?

But we're not dealing with them. We're dealing with a group of young people on a mining colony planet, and like most young people, they don't want to work. They form a plan to steal some cryo tubes from the wreckage of the ship that went out to get the wreckage from the Nostromo, and... are you still following me?

With the help of a special-ed android, they infiltrate the ship, and then it all goes to shit for them. It's not a bad setup, but it took me a moment to wrap my head around what was going on. Then I got even more confused when I saw a damaged android that looked and dressed like Ash from the original film. Eventually, we confirm that it's a different synthetic that merely looks like him.

This movie relies a lot on nostalgia and doing the same thing over and over again. The atmosphere is good, though, and it has some cool scenes. They do some cool stuff with the facehuggers and the acid, and I liked that ringed planet setting. The movie acknowledges Prometheus pretty readily, and it also homages Alien: Resurrection with a weird hybrid type, who's really stupid and gross.

One part I thought was stupid is how they try to guilt trip the android for not opening the door to save what's-her-face, even though doing so would have guaranteed all of their deaths. I hate that morality shit. It's like that train-track thing where you decide whether to kill the one guy on the tracks or the 5 guys on the tracks, which apparently is a huge moral conundrum for some people.

You'll get a lot of fan service. I read some review say it works best when it's not trying to copy the original so much, and I'd agree. The new ideas were cool, the old ideas are just franchise tropes at this point. Not a great movie, but I don't really hate any of the movies in this series. It's at least better than Covenant.

#Review

50 years of Texas Chainsaw

Released 50 years ago in October.

I first saw the '74 original when it was around 30 years old. It always seemed so old back then, almost like it was part of Texas culture. Before I moved to TX, I'd often imagine that any farmland or field probably had a hidden chainsaw psycho in there, like ol' Bubba. The film's title alone is enough to tell you that this movie is going to be different than anything you've seen before. And none of the sequels since can even top it.

I actually like all the movies in this series. Even the shitty ones. They know which ones they are. The series has awful continuity, but it somehow earns its place among the other iconic horror franchises.



Since the F13 video game looked pretty clunky, I never bothered playing the TCM game. I've only played that shitty old Atari one, and what a great fucking idea that game was. You actually play as the villain and your goal is to gas up and kill people. Sure, the new one looks fine, but I'm just not into gaming so much.

And of course, you have a new movie allegedly in the works, rumored to be the "Texas Chainsaw Legacy", which will probably be a direct sequel to part 1. They should have made a sequel to the 2013 movie and had Alexandria Daddario get naked in it.



Share some thoughts on anything TCM related.

Dee Snider's Strangeland (1998)

I haven't seen this film in nearly 20 years, so it was time to re-evaluate.

Dee Snider plays Carlton Hendricks, who goes by the username "CaptHowdy". He's a sadist and online predator luring teen girls to his lair where he sews their mouths shut and puts them in weird sex/trap devices.

What sets him apart from others is that his aim isn't to kill people. He just loves to torture them. What a fucking asshole, but Dee makes it work.

Captain Howdy lures detective Gage's daughter Genevieve (Linda Cardellini) into one of his weird fetish torture traps, and this act gives him a hard-on for Howdy to get his due justice.

About halfway through, the movie takes a different direction. There's a whole subplot about reforming this evil bastard (damn that insanity plea), and it's a great way to introduce Robert Englund into the movie. He plays Jack, part of a lynch mob out to end Howdy, whether he's reformed or not. It's a fun parallel to Freddy getting killed by an angry mob, and Robert got to be on both ends now.

On a side note, when they reform Carlton, he looks like such a lame ugly fucking square. I know Dee was probably trying to make him look as uncool as possible, even admitting that it was one of the hardest parts to film in the movie because of how much he hated his lame aesthetic so much.

And did I mention how ugly he looks? I find him more frightening than when he's pierced & tatted!

The movie then resumes its original course and has a pretty decent ending. This includes a house of bodily horrors, and a theme that's always disturbed me. It's when someone goes through something traumatic, but gets out of that situation... only to find themselves back in an even worse situation.


The movie isn't great. I hated it when I first saw it, but it does have a good cast and a decent story, albeit so-so execution. What I'll never understand is how Dee Snider kept the rumors alive for a sequel for like 15 years, given that ending.

And since we're talking about flesh here, I remember Bill Hinzman kept rumors going for a sequel to FleshEater for about 20 years. I'd buy that for a dollar!

#Review