What's the deal with shark movies?

Oh no! There's this horrible man eating monster that's killing everybody! How will we ever stop it? How will we ever avoid it? How do you know you won't be the next one to be eaten?!

Oh, I don't know. Maybe just STAY OUT OF THE FUCKING OCEAN? You know, that big wet salty place that you have absolutely no reason to ever go into, ever? Maybe just don't go in there?

I can't thing of any type of attack that is easier to avoid than a shark attack.

FUCKING POINTLESS!

Day of the Triffids (1981 BBC miniseries)

This is available for free on Pluto TV right now. It appears to have six episodes. So far I have watched the first two.

It's pretty scary! It's from 1981, and was filmed in and around London. Anyway, they did a pretty respectable job on it. I think most of us have seen the 1962 film by the same title, at some point in our lives, but just in case not: the idea is that a meteor storm affiliated with a comet has put on a light show that blinded everyone who watched it, which was over 99% of the population. That's bad enough, but then a second problem is that there are these giant venus-flytrap-like plants called Triffids, that have the ability to sort of crawl around, and which have these whip-like appendages that they can snap out at people and poison/kill them with. There is some discussion implying that they even have a sort of crude, rudimentary intelligence, too... there might be more about that in the episodes I have not seen yet. Anyway, there are millions of these Triffids, and they are crawling all over London killing all the helpless blind people. It's pretty scary!

In this miniseries, the Triffids are supposed to be a previously rare species, native to Earth (Ecuador specifically). At some point prior to the action of the miniseries, investors started cultivating Triffids in huge numbers, on "Triffid farms," because they secrete some kind of oil that the investors plan to market as a biofuel. It sounds like a perfectly reasonable, maybe even profitable idea. But, of course, when everybody gets blinded by the meteors, the Triffids start to escape, and just generally run amok, killing everybody they can.

I think there is another version of this story, either in the book, the 1962 film or maybe just some fanfiction I read once, in which the Triffids are supposed to be an alien species that came to Earth as spores, during the meteor shower. Does this sound familiar to anyone? I might be thinking of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, obviously, but I don't think I am.

Anyway, if you watch this, you will be reminded of various scenes from 28 Days Later, Night of the Comet, and maybe even the very first episode of The Walking Dead. And Invasion of the Body Snatchers, of course. It also makes me think of the 1984 BBC TV movie Threads, which I have talked about here before. Threads was directed by Barry Hines, and is about a cataclysmic nuclear war... I am just reminded of it because it is from roughly the same time period, and is also a British production.

Back to DotT.... I just find it creepy and eerie, to see all the blind people staggering around, calling out for help. That alone is scary. At the pont I'm at, the Triffids are just starting to become a problem, and they are scary, but so far they haven't completely taken over the city yet.

Anyway, as far as I can tell, it's a pretty respectable miniseries, and worth a watch. Had to share.

Reading Tommix's post...

Concerning Stephen King, I was thinking about King's films I saw at the cinemas. I remember seeing The Dead Zone, Maximum Overdrive, The Running Man, Pet Semetary, Sleepwalkers and 1408 in theatres. Seeing a film at the cinemas was always a different experience than watching at home imo which made a piece of shit like Sleepwalkers seem alright. Which films adapted from King's writings did you see in theatres?

Does Stephen King do positive military characters?

I was just thinking about this. Can anyone think of any Stephen King book, or movie, where he makes a character in the military who is positive or sympathetic?

He might do it in some of his books from the middle period of his writing. I have read most of his early stuff, and a fair amount of his recent stuff, but I am having a hard time thinking of any of his books showing people in the military as the good guys. Maybe he did this in some of his books from the 90s or early 2000s.

Anyway, I guess I just find this interesting. In The Stand, the military guys are just about always very unsympathetic, because they were responsible for the virus. There might have been a few very low-ranking, sort of everyman, regular dude characters in the military that you feel bad for, but overall they are pretty awful people. In The Long Walk, the army guys are just soulless killers, pure and simple. In the novella The Mist, the army is clearly responsible for whatever the hell happened to the world... some kind of portal to another dimension, or something like that.

Can anyone think of any of his books or movies where he presents military people in a sympathetic way?

I might have started thinking about this just in the context of 80s horror movies. The 80s had Predator, Lifeforce, Day of the Dead... probably others. They all had a major military element, whether it was for good or for evil. But, Stephen King just doesn't seem to like to write about military people, except as part of a soulless machine... it is just difficult to imagine Stephen King writing a fun Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, or a Rambo, Steven Seagal, or Jean Claude Van Damme movie, with the main character saying lots of deadpan one liners before vengefully machine gunning dozens of his enemies into tiny little bits and pieces.

I'm repeating myself a lot, here... well, whatever. Anyone have any thoughts?

DC Stuff

What are your thoughts on DC movies and shows? Marvel is imploding upon itself, so I'm trying to get more acquainted with the company that makes content for adults. I don't care for most properties outside of the Batman/Gotham variety, but I do believe DC has something decent every now and then that isn't just Batman. DC is also brave enough to do standalone movies outside of the convoluted and cluttered continuities of the "cinemative universe" trend.


I got HBO Max to catch up on some comic junk, and Harley Quinn season 3 is out now. It's a fun show with a lot of dirty gags, and Christopher Meloni as Jim Gordon is the best. Also, Harley and Poison Ivy are in a relationship. She's sooo over Joker.

I also watched Peacemaker, which is a spin-off of THE Suicide Squad, which is a sequel to Suicide Squad, which is a spin-off from the Justice League movies, but apparently, none of that matters. DC plays fast and loose with the continuity, because fuck it. Most of their stuff sucks anyway, but that attitude right there has been the reason the whole thing has been getting better. But Peacemaker as a show was okay at best. John Cena did keep it afloat though.

I wanted to watch Swamp Thing, which is supposed to be James Wan's body horror contribution to the DCEU, but HBO took it off. Bastards! Swamp Thing has always been a favorite of mine, due to the 1982 & 1989 movies and a slew of action figures.

And last of all... the DC animated movies are better than the live-action movies. "Flashpoint Paradox" and "Doomsday" are pretty awesome.



And if you hate DC, then you should watch The Boys, which makes the Justice League knockoffs into evil attention whores, which makes things infinitely more interesting. It's one of the few current shows get excited for.

The Incredible Melting Man (1977)

Just how incredible is this man, you ask? Monstrously incredible.

The premise is that of a classic monster movie. Some group tries to stop a bad accident from getting worse, and our hero/villain/victim is the gimmick. A man melts. The concept of the film is terrifying. The execution is not. It's cheesy and poorly shot at times, but it is gory. It has to be, right?

The dude is fucked either way, and we take a trip through his decomposition and it is pretty gnarly. Throw in a slasher/monster angle for good measure. He needs to feed on people to slow his decay rate. None of the characters matter, and for a movie that wants to showcase its gore effects, it skips out on a lot of opportunities for it.

It's all about the special effects on the main guy though. His character is just as shallow as everyone else, but it's better that way. The audience can be left to ponder their own wonders of this melting man's melting biology, and maybe even try to put themselves in his shoes. The melting man's shoes.

He wears a hospital type of outfit, so you'll only ever see his melting head, hands, and feet. All he does is stumble around the land and kill people every so often, until a confrontation with his past ends it for everyone. Not that it matters, because every character in this movie is bland. You'll have zero attachment to any of them as you root for the Melting Man to kill people and, well... melt some more.

It's a bleak ending, but damnit, I loved it. And I loved that bit where the guy has to clean up the muck. His fate is inevitable. Melted things can't unmelt. I'm surprised it took me so long to see this. This movie is trash, and that's exactly where they put him.

#Review

The Horde (2016 or 2017?)

I just wanted to mention this one, in case anybody's interested. It's not exactly a gem, but it has its attractions, and it certainly qualifies as a trash epic.

I'm talking about the movie by this name starring Bill Moseley, Paul Logan, Sydney Sweeney, Vernon Wells, Nestor Serrano, Don "The Dragon" Wilson, etc. Not the French movie also called The Horde, from 2009. Here, this is the one I'm talking about:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3924782/

Anyway, to just get a very quick sense of roughly what to expect, I would agree with the IMDB reviewer who described it as essentially a hybrid of Commando (1985) and Wrong Turn (2003). In fact, I bet they got Vernon Wells to be in it because they were basically trying to copy Commando... That is the most important expectation to have, to just expect a combination of Commando and Wrong Turn. It also has important elements from Rambo movies, The Hills Have Eyes, and from a few random old Jean-Claude Van Damme movies. It would have made a pretty fun USA Up All Night movie.

It's a story about a cute young female college professor, who takes some typical horny kids from her nature photography class out in the woods. They are supposed to be on a little camping trip, taking pictures of nature (which apparently includes somebody's escaped pet guinea pig... soooo that was pretty funny to see). She (the college professor) looks sort of like a cross between Vanessa Curry and a youngish Katie Holmes. But, her much-much-much-much-much older (it's a bit gross) boyfriend, played by Paul Logan, is the real star of the show. He is supposed to be some kind of ex-Special Forces or Navy SEALs dude, who has retired but gets sucked back into a life of action, mayhem, and carnage, by the events of the film.

The villains of the film are a bunch of... I don't know, maybe 15 or 20 mutants, led by Costas Mandylor, who live in the woods and kill people. One of the mutants appears to have that disease that makes you look like an Ent, the disease that that Indonesian guy, Dede Koswara, had. That disease is called epidermodysplasia verruciformis, and I thought it was pretty creative to have a character with that disease.... anyway, that was just one of the mutants, there are a whole bunch of them and they appear to have lots of different things wrong with them. Actually a few of them are just assholes who want to kill people, they aren't really mutated in any obvious physical way. If they ever explained why all the mutants and assholes found each other and decided to form a colony in the woods, I missed it.

Several of the mutants and assholes can talk, (although not all of them can), and they basically say typical evil character sorts of things.

You can guess every single thing that happens in this movie, and you would be exactly, exactly, exactly right. No surpises in this movie.

It's not a masterpiece of a film, but it can be kind of fun if you aren't expecting too much from it. Paul Logan wrote it, and I can just feel that he was trying to emulate some of the great action movies and B movies of the 80s and early 90s, and give them a bit of a horror twist. I think he did a perfectly decent job of doing that. He is in amazing shape, and he just generally beats the living daylights out of every mutant he meets. I would have seriously loved it if this was on TV when I was a kid. Seeing it as an adult, I can pretty much respect it, and say that they did what they wanted to do with it.

Bill Moseley plays the local small business owner who is in league with the mutants, and helps get them victims, and covers up for them... there are characters like him in Children of the Corn, Wrong Turn, Cabin in the Woods, etc etc etc.

It also has Matthew Willig, as a sort of an inbred backwoods Richard Marcinko type of dude, which of course is a pretty scary thing to think about.

So anyway, yeah... if you're up for watching a throwback movie to 80s or early 90s action insanity, with a semi-horror vibe, you could do worse than this. They didn't have the budget for real effects, and that's part of its charm... it really does feel like something from 30-ish years ago.

Had to share! It's on Tubi right now.

The Thing (2011)

Anybody have any strong feelings about this one? The 1982 movie will never be surpassed, of course, but in some ways the 2011 prequel takes respectable risks, I think.

I have seen most of it before, just channel surfing, but I watched the whole thing this weekend. I tried to pay attention, and not just zone out like I often/usually do.

One interesting element of the prequel: I am not absolutely certain of this, but I had the strong impression that at least some of the Thing-ified humans believed that they were still regular humans, right up until the end. If you look carefully at their facial expressions as their bodies are Thing-ing out, they appear to be as horrified and suprised as any normal human would be, if that suddenly happened to them.

My personal theory to explain that, is that maybe the Thing-ified humans had two separate consciousnesses in the same body, a Thing consciousness and a "human" consciousness. My interpretation is that maybe when the Thing makes a perfect duplication of whichever human it is duplicating, maybe the duplication just generates its own consciousness on its own, in its brain, without even knowing what it really is. If every single cell was perfectly imitated, maybe the imitation would end up with identical memories and personality to the original human. It wouldn't necessarily know what had happened to it. Of course, somewhere in the body there would be a second intelligence, which can control what the body does, and even the form of the body. Maybe that second intelligence would choose to lie dormant for long periods of time, just so the imitation human intelligence would fit in more perfectly with its old friends, and with the patterns of life that it was expected by other humans to follow.

In the original story, Who Goes There?, by John W. Campbell Jr., a character named Kinner actually asks that question, of whether he would even know if he had been Thing-ified. In the story, McReady immediately shuts down that line of thinking, he just says "you'd know," and that's the end of that conversation. But, maybe they decided to toy with the idea a little in the 2011 The Thing, and just... just sort of suggest, at least, that the humans who had been Thing-ified didn't even realize it. It makes for a more horrifying movie, if you think about it.

Anyway, I enjoyed that, about the 2011 The Thing. I also liked the little homages and nods to the 1982 movie, like the dog gnawing at the wire mesh of his caged off area. Also, the alien spaceship looked pretty cool, so, that's a plus.

Well, I mostly just wanted to share my theory about possible multiple consciousnesses inhabiting Thing-ified human bodies. If anybody has any thoughts on that, or on anything else about the movie, pls share!

Would You Rather (not the movie)

Would you rather be locked in a room for an hour with a wild grizzly bear or locked in a room for an hour with one million black widow spiders?

TV Challenge 2022

So the rules are simple as fuck. Watch as much TV as you possibly can throughout the entirety of July and get 1 point for every minute you watch of the stuff.

Can be TV shows or documentaries but we already have a doc challenge so try to stick to TV shows, eh.

Some bonus point possibilities:

If you watch an entire season of a show, in which each episode lasts over 40 minutes, you can claim 50 bonus points per episode. So if you watch a season of a show that has 10 episodes, all lasting around the hour mark, you can give yourself a whopping 500 extra points.

For shorter episodes, i.e. sitcoms or anything lasting 39 minutes or under, you will get 25 bonus points per episode. So, 250 points for a 10 episode season.

Any questions, please shout. In the shout box.

Starts this Friday 1st July at 00:00 and ends on 31st July at 23:59 hours.

Grab a spot below!