The Midsommar madness of Ari Aster

About a year after creeping me right the fuck out with Hereditary, Ari Aster went in another similar direction with this bizarre trip to a Swedish cult festival in "Midsommar". The artistic direction is pretty wonderful, much in the same vein as the last movie, and the weirdness is way up there. Both movies share a lot of similar themes, and it only gets more obvious toward the end of the movie.

The movie is quite long at almost 2.5 hours, but throughout the film, you'll get a few shocking moments. In typical Aster fashion, the film has some fucked up imagery, and an unsettling vibe throughout. We start the movie with a traumatic experience, and while the comedy lingers about in the first half, the horror drowns it out in a strangely fascinating and uncomfortable viewing experience.

Our characters are pretty decent, with our lead actress putting on a range of sad emotions throughout. She's drawn into this festival after her uncommitted leech of a boyfriend ((not) played by Chris Pratt) is set to travel with his friends there to write a thesis on their rituals. What could go wrong?

This one is another slow-burner that culminates to a Wicker-Man/Hereditary event where all these friendly commune types prove to have a more sinister Children of the Corn style of living.

One thing I really liked about the movie was its use of hallucinogenic drugs. They take a few of them throughout, and the trippy look of things is quite awesome. You see the trees moving and breathing, the grass swaying and blending in, and the world has waves to it. Perhaps the best drug trippery I've ever seen in a movie.


Overall, it was a pretty good movie. My initial viewing still places Hereditary on a higher pedestal, but fans of that movie should have no trouble in getting into this deranged picture. Again, this movie almost seems to retread some of the same ideas as the last movie, with cultists, weird mythologies, reincarnation, and directorial quirks. I'm always happy to see classy horror like this make it into cinemas.

I done it again!

I just went on another splurge and brought in a big haul. I need to stop as I am running out of room! 😲

How did I do?..

One Missed Call 2003
Gia 1998
Hair Extensions 2007
Perfect Sense 2011
Slaughterhouse-Five 1972
Snowtown 2011
The Zero Theorem 2013
Mandy 2018
Adaptation. 2002
Lucy 2014
Powder 1995
Premonition 2004
I Am Legend 2007
He Was a Quiet Man 2007
Maléfique 2002
Tattoo 2002
The Ninth Configuration 1980
Project X 2012
247°F 2011
Tony 2009
All Good Things 2010
Dead & Breakfast 2004
The Nameless 1999
Interstellar 2014
mother! 2017
Devil's Knot 2013
Bonnie and Clyde 1967
Brazil 1985
Silent Running 1972
The Reaping 2007
Equals 2015
Attack the Block 2011
Summer of Sam 1999
Here Comes the Devil 2012
Let Me In 2010
The Possession 2012
The Midnight Meat Train 2008
Willow Creek 2013
The Awakening 2011
Roseville 2013
Rigor Mortis 2013
Under the Shadow 2016
The Signal 2014
Sleep Tight 2011
The Experiment 2001
Kalifornia 1993
Undead 2003
Eat 2014
The Boston Strangler 1968
Chained 2012
Pyewacket 2017
Project Almanac 2015
The Woman in Black 2012
Walkabout 1971

Random thoughts

David said that there are days when not a single post is posted.
That won't be a problem for me, especially since I have 2 year's worth of catching up to do.

It's not just that.
When IMDb shut down 2 years ago, we all had a high-level of expectation, as far as activity goes.
But by now, that expectation has severely diminished.

Kudos to David for having a bug-free site (or seemingly).
So many sites are down from time to time, due to bugs.
Also, in the words of the late-great Ray Bradbury, "I'll never starve here".

Hank HillRaiser

Had to share. For those of us from outside the US, this is a character from a cartoon called King of the Hill.
https://twitter.com/1AshleyLaurence/status/1146417879643901954

Where have all those regulars gone?

We used to have some more regular contributers here who posted some good shit, then vanished off the face of the earth. People like BarkingBaphomet, Shadow-345, iceflamez, Atomichotwings, klownz, RedHawk10, sethyeah, slasherfan85, AlcoholicNinja, Moffat, and all those others who rarely/never posted, but at least lurked. Anybody know what hole they all crawled into?

I'd think that some of the political talk scared 'em off, but even after the government calmed down and there was no talk of this shit, that didn't seem to make a difference anymore. People stayed gone, and things got a bit stagnant.

So where did they all migrate to? Internet addicts like that don't simply "get a life" and move on, or move to facebook. Most of the aforementioned users don't even frequent the other imdb knockoff sites, so wtf happened to the age of internet forums? How do we get that back? How do we bring the old blood back here, and how do we get new blood?

I think of this stuff sometimes, and it makes me sad. I miss the days when there was too much activity for me to keep up with, and people were excited to see what an alternative website could offer them. I guess they didn't find it here.

Facebook had driven me INSANE

Prepare for another long-winded rant here... because FaceBook has driven me to the brink of my sanity!

Ever since the most unfortunate departure of our proiminent users, I've been racking my brain trying to come up with ways to make this place more appealing to potential new users.

I'm not going to lie to you. I've been in a bad place for the past few months. People I'm friends with tend to hate the living shit out of each other, and it's caused a major divide in my life, as well as this site. Coupled with the stress of going broke and juggling two jobs for adequate hours to make ends meet, I am still holding out hope that TE will survive the fuckery of my detrimental existence.

What do people want? Well, as a web developer, I try to figure out what it is exactly that causes people to gravitate toward certain websites and platforms, and everybody seems to go on facebook, for some damn reason...

So with that said, my best effort has been to emulate that stupid piece of social media they all call "Facebook", and as much as I want to, I can't seem to crack it.


As most of you loyal bastards have seen, I do what I can to give people the proper outlet to express themselves here, and one of those aspects is alternate skins. When the Internet Movie Database shut down its boards, I snagged the source code of those boards immediately and plugged in our TE content to make the TEDb https://trashepics.com/tedb/, a near identical visual representation of our long-lost IMDb message boards. Sure, I got a few cheers, but people still quit TE left and right in favor of lesser, non-compliant representatives of the boards. Fuck my life.

On a whim, I tried to capitalize on the random nostalgia of the mid-2000s by creating the MyWaste https://trashepics.com/mywaste/ rip-off. Truth be told, I thought MySpace was waaay better than Facebook. It allowed customization of one's profile page to create a unique page for users, but seeing as how most people didn't understand how HTML and CSS worked, that caved in on itself because MySpace couldn't fathom those contigencies. That's when you'd see people's profile pages that had WAY too many pictures and conflicting elements that caused pages to load forever, as well as scroll sideways for miles. (Ironically, MySpace thought it would be good to make page layouts automatically scroll sideways, and they fell off the face of the earth after that stupid idea).

So yeah... Nobody took to the idea of MyWaste either. Oh boy... So when we lost a cluster of our best users... to goddamn FREEFORUMS, no less... Holy fucking hell, did that piss me off! We ain't living in the 2000s anymore! TE has more capabilities than that, but they left nonetheless, so in a spiteful effort, I ripped off the look of their shitty FreeForums site for FleaForums https://trashepics.com/app/ff/. Clearly, our userbase was already too fargone for that to matter, so I began to sink into a further depression...

Shortly after this clusterfuck, I figured... why not try my hand at Facebook? Oh, what a grueling task it has been...

I tried dissecting the sourcecode of Facebook to make one great big farce of it, but it's proven to be an arduous effort that has nearly cost me my sanity.

Jesus Christ, does facebook overcomplicate the ever-loving HELL out of their code! I looked at their code and thought I'd be able to emulate it in a couple of days. Boy, was I wrong. It's taken me MONTHS to wrap my head around it, and I'm not even halfway there. I tried to make a TE skin for Facebook, as a means of potential new users having that familiarity to make the transition here as easy as can be, but I still haven't worked out all the kinks. Sure, I've been so busy with work, relationships, and simply trying to eat enough that I don't starve, but GOD DAMN! Why is facebook so complicated?!!!

If anyone is curious, I haven't gotten very far in it, but here's my effort for the Farcebook https://trashepics.com/app/fb/ skin on TE. There are a LOT of holes I have yet to fill in, but there's a vague desktop AND mobile presence to it. Learning how fb operates has taught me a few things, and is why we have the notification system. I'm trying to fathom how the comment system works, and that's also given me a few ideas on how to streamline the TE experience, as well as a boatload of headaches.

Looking at their source code, it's a goddamn miracle that Facebook can even load, because those dumb bastards call hundreds of scriptsets and stylesheets when you view their page. If this was the 90s, it would take a fucking YEAR for these pages to load, because as I've said, facebook is an overcomplicated mess, and I've been trying for MONTHS to get this skin working, and it's barely halfway there.

My God... how stressful this has been, and I don't even have much to show for it. I've been struggling for weeks trying to wrap my head around the comment system, as well as the seemingly infinite amount of conflicting stylesheets it presents that end up making each page visit use about a megabyte of data, which is GODAWFUL. I'm seriously surprised FB loads as fast as it does, because the code for it makes me sick to my stomach just looking at it. It's just bad, bad, BAD!


And what stresses me out even more is that this skin isn't even the only thing I'm working on. I'm still trying to restore Johan's old posts, while trying to update our markup system to be dynamic, among about a dozen other things.

So stressful this has been, and I haven't even gotten to user profiles yet. Sometimes, I wonder why I bother, but sometimes... when I'm drunk and high enough... I can look beyond my own self-pity to remember all the great ideas I have yet to tackle... Ideas for content, media, literature, and so much else that my brain just begins to melt when I think of how little time I have to do any of it.

I love horror, and I love trash. One of these years, I might be able to express myself in a way that people might actually see the filth that I've been dreaming about all my life. Some day, I hope...

2019 Documentary Challenge



In the mood for some learning? Then you should make your SPOT below for this challenge.

1 point for any documentary.

2 points for a documentary about dark subject matter.

3 points for a documentary about the horror genre.

1 bonus point for an FTV.

DVD and Blu-ray commentaries are allowed and fall under the same rules, but no FTV point.

This year, we're going to try one small change. If you want to watch a documentary that's less than 40 minutes, you can, but you only receive half the points.

Mockumentaries are also allowed, but they must be feature length.

The Documentary Challenge will begin with June and end with June.

If you need some ideas for what to watch, here's last year's progress thread https://trashepics.com/post/9/197/.

Movies you know you've seen, but remember nothing about

Kind of a weird topic, I know. But what do you make of this "phenomenon?" What do you do about it? I mean, you know you've seen the movie, but remember very little or maybe even nothing at all about it. Do you ever have the urge to revisit it? Should we even be bothering in the first place, since there's an infinite supply of movies to see? (as I type this, 15 new movies just came out.)

For me, the majority of my rabid movie watching was in the '90s up until about 2004 or 2005, and then I kinda got burnt out, got a life (yeah, right), and found other interests. So I find that so many movies that get discussed, like around here for instance, I sometimes remember practically nothing about because it was so long ago. Can my opinion even be taken seriously??

And the older I get, the worse my short term memory is becoming. Even a movie I saw maybe 6 months ago can be a downright blur when I try to recall it.

Are there any particular movies you can think of that you know you've seen, but remember nothing about?

Hey, Trash Epics-ians! I Got a Good One For Ya!



It's only a half hour long and there's some gnarly gore in it. That's all ya need to know.

Assorted Horrors: Stephen King's "Night Shift" (1978)

Last month's Stephen King Challenge put me in the mood to read some Stephen King. Because I don't always enjoy his novels, I decided to go with one of his short story collections, his first of several released over the last forty-one years, "Night Shift".

The book kicks off with "Jerusalem's Lot", a prequel to "'Salem's Lot". It's told through letters and journal entries from 1850, a time when (Jeru)salem's Lot was a deserted village the people of neighboring towns avoided. Near the end of the book is a second related story, "One for the Road". It's set two years after the events of "'Salem's Lot", involving a family of three who take a wrong turn while traveling during a blizzard.

There are a few stories anyone more familiar with the feature film adaptations rather than the writing of Stephen King might recognize based on the titles alone: "Graveyard Shift", "The Mangler", "Sometimes They Come Back", and "Children of the Corn".

I can't speak for "The Mangler" or "Sometimes They Come Back", but the other two are moderately faithful adaptations. Being short stories, the movies had to expand their plots some, but "Graveyard Shift" is still about workers clearing out the basement of a rat-infested textile mill and "Children of the Corn" is still about a couple discovering a town surrounded by corn and full of demented children.

Then there's "Trucks", which served as the basis for "Maximum Overdrive". The main thing "Trucks" and "Maximum Overdrive" share is the basic plot of people trapped in a truck stop while the trucks drive themselves, mercilessly running down any humans who dare to step out into the open. None of the characters are the same, although some of the characters in "Trucks" share certain traits with the characters in "Maximum Overdrive", most notably the (Bible) Salesman. A few lines of dialogue from "Trucks" are also spoken word for word in "Maximum Overdrive".

I would include "The Lawnmower Man" with the above titles, but the controversy surrounding the 1992 adaptation is well-known. And if you don't know, the producers put Stephen King's name on the movie, but it turned out to have nothing to do with his story other than a man mowing lawns. King didn't appreciate that and sued them into removing his name. I'm one of those weird people who think the movie's good and in fact, I prefer it over the story, but who can blame him for suing?

"Night Surf" is worth mentioning, if for nothing more than that King recycled the idea for his other 1978 book, "The Stand". The two stories are only alike in that they're about a virus nicknamed Captain Trips killing off most of humanity. The characters are different and the problems they face in the aftermath of the virus's devastation are different. Still, it's interesting to see where one of King's most renowned novels got its start.

Possibly my number one favorite story is "Battleground", the tale of a hitman versus a box of toys sent to him by the mother of his most recent victim, a toy-maker. Toy soldiers to be exact, which are somehow alive, and their miniature guns are just as real. It might sound like a silly concept, but the story is as brutal as you can expect from Stephen King.

Other favorites include: "I Am the Doorway" (an astronaut returns to Earth with some thing), "Gray Matter" (a bad beer leads to bad things), and "Quitters, Inc." (a man endures unusual treatment to help him stop smoking). There's also "The Ledge", where a man caught having an affair with another man's wife is forced into circumnavigating the thin ledge of a high-rise's penthouse if he wishes to continue leading a happy life.

While I enjoyed "The Ledge" despite it being more of a thriller than horror, it reminded me of the "Creepshow" segment "Something to Tide You Over". Specifically, the husband getting revenge on the man banging his wife by putting him in a situation he likely won't survive. The endings are slightly similar as well. Since "Something to Tide You Over" isn't based on any of Stephen King's stories, I'm thinking "The Ledge" crossed his mind once or twice while writing the screenplay. A few years after "Creepshow", "The Ledge" along with "Quitters, Inc." appeared in the movie "Cat's Eye", another screenplay written by King.

Many of the stories in "Night Shift", including some I didn't mention, have been made into short films, sometimes more than once. This is thanks to King's Dollar Baby arrangement, where he allows students and aspiring filmmakers to adapt his short stories into short films for just $1. As cluttered as all those short film credits have made his IMDb page, it's impossible to criticize that level of generosity.

As a whole, I really liked "Night Shift". There were only a few stories I didn't care much about and none I outright disliked. The great thing about a short story collection is, like any other form of anthology, if you aren't enjoying one story, it'll be over soon enough and there's a chance the next one will be better.