New Feature: Reporting Users

I've been thinking a lot about Vince's comments and decided to buy a few eggplants. The only way I know how to eat them is cooked & cheesed over pasta, but that's good enough. Does it make me racist to only eat them in Italian foods?


Users may now report other users over stupid little things. There is a button available on a user's info page labeled "⚠️ Report User", working similar to how IMDb's system works:

1.) You select a reason, 2.) You submit the report, and 3.) Moderators ignore the report.

Remember those red warnings about compliance you would get? Those were cool. (And remember posting quotas?!)


It is advised that you use this feature sparingly^frivolously because we don't want to demean the integrity of the system^{it'll be funnier that way}.

T-shirts with Gifs

I was just thinking, I bet these aren't too far off in the future, technologically. Like, a t-shirt that has a moving gif on front, in some way, so it appears to be woven into the fabric of the shirt. They already have flexible phone screens, obviously.

I was thinking that I would totally wear a t-shirt that a gif on the front of Kenny from South Park, in the Major Boobage episode. They had several scenes showing him having a psychedelic experience, floating away to Heavy Metal Land. I would walk around wearing that, it would be awesome. Maybe they will even be able to have t-shirt gifs that have the option of playing sound. I would not walk around with that song from that episode playing all the time, but it would be nice to be able to turn the volume on and off, and up and down.

Here, this is what I'm thinking of. Watch from about :21 to :26, or possibly even from :21 until the end of the clip.

Unhuman 2022

Blumhouse likes to shit out these meta high school horror movies, and this one is a doozy. A group of high schoolers get on the bus for a field trip and find themselves fighting off zombies.

Sounds pretty cool, right? Well, it isn't. It's a pretty generic experience with some pretty lame high school drama interwoven into the plot. We have some BFF girls, some misfits, some jock douchebags, the basic high school starter pack. Maybe it would be better if it was a straight-up zombie flick (likely not), but it isn't quite that.

Halfway through, there's a twist. Things actually get a little more interesting now once we realize it's all an elaborate ruse by the kids that are bullied. However, just as easily as things begin to pick, it all falls apart again really quick. One beef is the inclusion of Drew Scheid, Cameron's annoying friend in Halloween '18 who tried to make it with Allison. This guy just looks weird to me, and I hate him.


So if you want to be surprised, quit reading from here on. SPOILERS...


Okay... so the whole twist is bullshit. Our victimized male protagonist Randall is trying to get revenge against his bullies because they're fucking horrible. His plan is some elaborate date-rape/zombie-survival ploy to win the girls over, but it eventually backfires when the rest of the gang finds out, but you know what? Randall and his stupid fucking friend Drew Sheid are the real heroes. I mean, the first time we see Randall, the girls hit him with their fucking car and send him flying into a pile of garbage. Then the asshole jocks throw a slushy at him. And this guy is in the wrong for trying to punk these bitches? I really wanted him to win against these unlikeable cunts, but of course... everyone kicks his ass and parades around in some stupid girl-power cliche straight out of Death Proof.


This ending sucks so much ass. It's some heavy-handed anti-bullying propaganda that basically condones bullying so long as the person you're bullying tries to get you back. Everyone in this movie is a dick. The "villains" should have won. It's shit like this that gives Blumhouse a bad name. Everything about this movie is a sham. Think April Fools Day. There isn't even a bodycount.

#Review

October Challenge 2023 - RESULTS

That's another October Challenge done and dusted, so let's see who managed to cross the finish line and then some...



Went the extra mile!

Soph - 66 (58)
Ballz - 63 (38)
Box - 62 (47)
ebossert - 60 (17)
jimb - 57 (49)
Trigger - 55 (49)
Troma - 53 (34)
Conditioned - 48 (19)
deferenz 45 (34)

Did what had to be done...

zed - 40 (40)
shroud - 38 (25)
Nicko - 34 (18)
Brett - 31 (17)
markus - 31 (16)

Fell short or simply gave up?

zombie - 22 (16)
Onyx - 7 (3)

Where the •BEEP• were you?

Vincent

It's not about the winning. It's about the taking part but still, a big congratulations to first time (?) winner Sophie, for both the amount of movies watched and FTVs.



Feel free to share your favourite FTV, or your least favourite...

Until next year then...

Amityville Karen 2022

A brief recap of Amityville movies... there were a few movies about a haunted house, then in the 3rd movie, the house blew up. At part 4 and just about every movie after that, it was about some random cursed items from the house winding up in cities all over the country. It didn't really matter after a certain point, and then the b-movie companies went hog-wild with it, just like they did with shark movies. There are infinity Amityville movies now, and this is one of them.

I was actually wondering wtf this movie had to do with Amityville, but they clear that up for you: it's haunted wine from the Amityville house. And now it ends up in the hands of a Karen in California.

Honestly, who cares about the Amityville part. The first half of this movie is straight-up about a horrible Karen being a horrible person, and that works all on its own. The whole idea of our Karen is reminiscent of how a Mink Stole would react in Desperate Living. I think Mink might be the OG Karen actually.

Our Karen is played by Lauren Francesca, who is actually pretty hot and therefore easy to watch, no matter how much of a cunt she is being. Besides, you don't ever actually hate her, because her depiction is too funny to take seriously. "Oh, I forgot to harass the gardener today!"

Eventually, she drinks enough of that tainted wine to get possessed and/or go insane, and she starts killing her stupid friends over trivial matters. It's basically a perfect plot, though the execution is still only mildly amusing. Shit rating on imdb makes for some good points though.

#Review

My 2023 Halloween

I haven't done anything on Halloween for years, but this year was different. My neighborhood sucks, so I went to my sister's rich-people neighborhood and guess what? People were actually trick or treating! And they had decorations up! I haven't seen any of that festive behavior in a while, so it was a great place to be a creep. I dressed up as Michael Myers and simply walked around a few blocks, but it felt great. The anonymity is one thing, but the fact that it was perfectly acceptable and expected of me to be an asshole was great. I scared children, I hid in the bushes to watch people, and I breathed heavily. Basically, it was like any other day, except I was wearing a costume.

Marianne Hagan's character's age in H6: Curse of MM

This has always bugged me, but I guess I have never paid close enough attention to really figure it out. Tonight I.... um...well, it still doesn't quite seem right to me, but I got a little closer to being able to live with it.

Marianne Hagan played Kara Strode. She is supposed to be a college student with a little boy, but the little boy isn't really THAT little. He looks like he's about nine, to me, although they say he's supposed to be six.

So, this has always just seemed vaguely OFF, and wrong, to me. I don't know if I've ever sat down and googled my way through my questions, it just seemed messed up for a college student to have a son whom I thought was nine-ish. What is this, Yemen?!? Actually, in Yemen, I'm pretty sure young women don't go to college. But I digress.

Anyway. OK. So. The son Danny is supposed to be six, not nine. I disagree with their casting of a kid who looks as old as this kid does, but, whatever, I can live with it.

Tonight, watching this, and actually trying to pay close attention, I noticed that the asshole father in the Strode family clearly says that Kara had been away from home for FIVE YEARS before returning to live there again, with her son. Five years. OK, now we're getting somewhere. So, if she had just finished high school when she moved away, then she would be twenty-two. Of course, it is certainly very possible that she ran away from home when she was younger than seventeen. Happens all the time. But, let's just imagine that she was seventeen when she left home, and twenty-two when she returned. Maybe she is even a little older in the movie... suppose she has been home for a few months, long enough to turn twenty-three, and her father is just still being an asshole to her because he's an asshole, and that's what assholes do.

Anyway.... what the hell am I talking about... oh yeah, I wanted to mention Kara's friends at college. I guess that was never very clear to me. For one thing, Tim is supposed to be Kara's BROTHER. Younger brother, probably. And, the character Beth is supposed to be Tim's girlfriend. They are probably supposed to be regular, college-age people, in their late teens or early twenties. I can live with that. Sometimes when they are shown walking together with Kara, I'm like, wait, what? Kara, just seems too mature to be hanging out with these wild kids. But, whatever, OK.

I guess they are are all students at Haddonfield University. I guess it is supposed to be some kind of local community college, where people can get an associate's degree. Something like that. OK, I'm fine with that.

Anyway, I guess I am just venting here. There are just a few scenes where I just can't wrap my mind around the characters. I just don't buy it. I guess I must have a crush on Marianne Hagan..... She just seems way too poised, composed, thoughtful, mature, calm, maternal to her son, intelligent, etc to play a character with what must have been a pretty wild past, and to have such wild friends. She (Marianne Hagan) was about twenty-eight or twenty-nine when she played the character, which isn't THAT old, of course. But, she seems to have depth and maturity to her personality... it just feels wrong, to me, to see her calling Kim Darby "Mom," and living at home, and hanging out with the characters Tim and Beth, and so on.

Probably this will not make any sense at all, to some of you, but I can't be the only one who has had these thoughts. I just wanted to try to sort them out a little.

So. Yah. Had to share.

October Challenge 2023



It's that time of the year again. You all know the drill but for any newbies, here are the rules:

> At least 31 horror films must be watched during the month of October. 16 of these must be FTVs (first time viewings).
> You get 1 "point" per movie watched.
> Runtime is 45 minutes minimum.
> Kiddy-friendly "Halloween themed" movies will be permitted as long as there is some element of horror or spooky fun, i.e. A Nightmare Before Christmas, Goosebumps, The Addams Family, etc.
> If unsure on whether a movie is "horror" or not, please refer to the usual suspects: IMDb, Wiki, Letterboxd, etc.
> Documentaries and TV shows will not be accepted, however mockumentaries will be.
> The challenge will begin at 00:00 hours on October 1st in your time zone.

If there is anything I have missed, let me know over in the shoutbox. Use it for discussions too.

Previous year threads:

https://trashepics.com/post/9/160/
https://trashepics.com/post/9/218/
https://trashepics.com/post/142/130/
https://trashepics.com/post/30/34/
https://trashepics.com/post/30/38/
https://trashepics.com/post/30/53/

So make your spot and have fun!

Rev. Jackson Sayer, in Halloween 4

I'm talking about the.... um... let's say three-quarters crazy old guy, who gives Dr. Loomis a ride, and a drink, helping him out on his way to Haddonfield in Halloween 4.

I wish they had done something more with that character, either in H4 or in a later sequel. We just get that little glimpse of him in H4, but it's so tantalizing. I wonder what his backstory was.

That could make a pretty decent graphic novel, probably, now that I'm thinking about this. Something about Rev. Sayer in his younger days, going up against some kind of Ancient Evil. He could be portrayed as a little crazy, or possiby just totally normal, in a pre-crazy period of his life.

I guess he could even potentially be a main protagonist in a franchise of his own, like Ash in ED, or Tommy Jarvis in the F13 franchise, with his own adventures battling evil. They could be set in the 1940s or 50s, when he was a younger man than he was in H4.

Well... just a thought. I dunno. Had to share.

There's Something Wrong with the Children (2023)

SPOILERS (here and there, I'm too tired to find them and black them all out, it's very late where I live).

I saw this the other day. It's not terrific, but I think they were probably attempting to do some interesting things with it. I am still trying to figure it out.

It's about two couples, one of which has kids, renting "cabins" at some kind of camping ground. The cabins are pretty freaking nice, by the way. At first I thought they were just in a home that belonged to one of the couples. Anyway, the couple with kids has a girl who is around ten, and a boy who is... eight or nine, I guess. The boy looks like another girl, soooo that's confusing.

The couples hang out and talk for the first part of the movie, and they drink a LOT. I am pretty sure there is some kind of commentary on society going on there, because they are just drinking CONSTANTLY. They would have been absolutely plastered if they really drank as much alcohol as they are shown drinking. They also toke up a little, if I recall correctly, and the man in one of the couples takes lithium for a manic-depressive disorder. Sooooooo, yah. Good times.

The conversations that they have seem to be written in order to make some kind of points about having children, and whether it is necessarily the best thing to do. They talk about various adventures that they could have without children, and so on.

At some point they go for a little hike in the woods. They find the remains of some kind of old building... not a REALLY old building, like a Mayan ruin, but something from... I don't know, maybe a hundred years ago. They explore the foundations of the building, and they find a deep, wide hole in the ground. The kids seem to be drawn to the hole, and they almost fall in. The call the hole "the shining place," or "the place that shines." It has kind of a greenish glow, off and on.

I am pretty sure the shining hole is supposed to be some kind of trap to attract unwary humans. The glow reminds me of the glow from a bug zapper they show at the campsite, which, of course, is meant to draw bugs to their death. That can't be a coincidence, they even do a slow zoom-in on the bug zapper. There is definitely something related to bugs going on, although I can't quite figure out what it is. When the children (very predictably) turn evil, as they eventually do, sometimes one of the main characters sees their shadows and the shadows are not the shadows of children. They are the shadows of some kind of humongous praying mantises. They didn't spend money on CGI to show actual giant praying mantises, they just show their shadows. Sooooooo, whatever that means.

I am really struggling to figure out what the hell this movie was shooting for. Either I am just being very dense, or they just completely blew it. Possibly both.

They seem to have borrowed ideas from Pet Sematary, just in the sense that the aerial view of the ruined old building in the woods evokes my memory of the aerial shots of the old Micmac burial ground in Pet Sematary. But, the way the children act when they get possessed by praying mantises, or whatever the hell possesses them, is not exactly the same as the way Gage acts in PS. They seem to get far more intelligent than normal children, and more dextrous and probably stronger.

What was the old building supposed to be, or supposed to have been, decades or centuries before the movie took place? I feel like that is probably the key, here. If I could figure that out, the whole movie might make more sense. It must have been either some kind of super-science outpost, communicating with bug-like aliens, or maybe some kind of structure related to magic of some kind, summoning up the ancient spirits of some kind of insect gods worshipped by early Native Americans. I don't know. Argh.

One thing that I thought the movie did pretty well was to show the confusion of one of the men, when he first witnesses the children falling to their deaths in the hole, and then very shortly afterwards sees them running around and playing back at the campsite. He is clearly as confused as I was by the entire movie, and he shows that confusion convincingly.

I was reminded a little of The Tommyknockers, now and then. Possibly just because of the green glow. Also, of course, because somehow the people in the movie unearth some kind of ancient, advanced Evil in the woods, and get possessed by it. As I said, I'm not sure if it is supposed to be aliens or malevolent intelligent insects, but whatever it is, it is definitely evil.

So, um... two thumbs sideways, maybe a little up, maybe a little down...? I don't know.