About "Prince of Darkness"

I saw this, for the seventeen bajillionth time, last night at a midnight showing. I guess there really is something special about seeing it on a big screen, because I had an idea that I don't know if I've ever had before, despite having seen the movie, as I said, seventeen bajillion times already.

There are several ideas in the movie that Carpenter probably borrowed from The Quatermass Experiment. There must be a lot of websites, Youtube videos, etc where people talk about this connection. But, I think the short story Beep, by James Blish, or its expanded version The Quincunx of Time, may also have been an influence/inspiration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quincunx_of_Time

This occurred to me because, as I mentioned last night in the shoutbox, I realized that the Professor Birack character is probably inspired by the real theoretical physicist Paul Dirac. Somewhere in my $%&•$#@!ing cluttered apartment I have an anthology of science fiction stories that includes the short story Beep, which I mentioned above. They talk a lot about Paul Dirac in that story.

By the way, I'm pretty sure that another book by the author of Beep, James Blish, was a big inspiration for Mortal Engines, the book that was adapted into the movie of the same title last year. Whoops, I lost control of that sentence, I meant to mention that the James Blish book that probably helped inspire Mortal Engines was called Cities in Flight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cities_in_Flight

Other inspirations for Prince of Darkness MIGHT have included Chariots of the Gods, by Erich von Daniken, and a few books that try to connect quantum mechancs and theoretical physics to religion, like The Tao of Physics, The Dancing Wu Li Masters, and... there's another one like those books... I'll come back to this thread when I think of it.

Trailer for Terminator: Dark Fate

What do you think of this? I'd been waiting my whole life for the real Terminator 3, and it's finally coming. The trailer is a big tease though, and it doesn't show enough of what I'm looking for.



So as you can see, we have an endoskeleton with a liquid metal skin. The last few movies always made the new machines ridiculously over-the-top and it kind of pissed me off. This time, they just merged the first two villains into one, and there's nothing wrong with that.

I wish they wouldn't try to make things look "cool" and sleek, though. The machines started out as clunky robots that weren't trying to impress anybody with strong acrobatics. They were just armored killing machines.

Judging by this trailer, I'm still not sure what the story is. There's some girl who's basically the new Sarah Connor, while the old Sarah Connor is trying to protect her, along with some other overly-advanced hybrid type.

I sure hope the R-rating is pushed to the max, and that Arnold has a somewhat prominent role. As you can see, he's only in the trailer for 2 seconds, but every terminator fan knows that the movies don't work well without him.

Very vague, but I'm optimistic.

OT: Recently developed forms of personal transport

Do people ever say OT here?!? As I was typing it, I thought "whoa, major IMDB flashback, here."

Anyway, in the last few minutes I saw one guy riding a onewheel, and someone else on a Lime electric scooter. There are so many funky things like those, these days. There are hovershoes, hoverboards, Segway minipros... I had to fool around on Google to even find the names of these things. Where the hell did all these gadgets come from? Does anybody have any personal favorite modes of personal transportation that have only come into existence in the last few years? I also like stand up paddleboards, by the way, but right now I'm thinking of newfangled modes of transportation for short range travel on land, like around your local town or city center. What comes to mind for you??

Just to make this a little less OT... it might be fun to create a horror movie that employed as many things like that as possible... just have every character riding around on electric scooters, hovershoes, onewheels, etc. Maybe they could also be operating drones, and/or remote controlled miniature submarines, etc. You could have a modern young person armed with as many of those devices as posisble, going up against some kind of monster from old movies... not sure exactly how that would work, but maybe it could be a fairly funny secondary plotline in a horror comedy.

But back to my earlier question: can you think of any other funky, very modern, gadgety sorts of personal transport that I might not even know about?? I think these things look so cutting edge... I'm sure they'll be incredibly obsolete and ridiculous-looking in five years, but, whatever.

The Mule (2018)

Damn good movie. Based on a true story of a 90 year old flower guy who gets in deep with the cartel after running drugs for them. He uses his money to help out his family and friends, but things escalate, as they always do.

Clint Eastwood is so old, but he's still got it. He even manages to score with a few young ladies. "I'm a high-end gigolo", he says.

The fact that he's still acting and directing is amazing. You'd think he'd have made his best movies years ago. I thought Gran Torino would be his swan song, but this one here is yet another 5 star movie.

Great cast, great performances, and great drama. If you like Clint Eastwood, give it a watch. If you don't, well... go fuck yourself.

Rest in Peace, Chewie! Peter Mayhew (1944-2019)

Everybody likes that wookie, right? Even if you're not a big fan of Star Wars, you'll still appreciate a giant hairy beast that hangs out with Harrison Ford, and Chewbacca was a great sidekick. One of the best.

Peter was a tall fucker, though. It lead to health problems with his back and knees, so he couldn't be as adventurous as his days in the sci-fi 70s and 80s, but he was always good to his fans. He was supposed to do a big convention soon, and that's got to be awful for everyone.

I always like to brag that I met him, and am even vaguely related to him. He's my step-uncle, if that's the proper term for it. I wont say I actually knew him or hung out with him, but I have seen him a few times at family events, many years ago.

I've been to two different houses of his before, and the one time I remember most is when he lived on some patch of land off some random country road, and he had this great big trailer in his yard full of all kinds of Star Wars shit. It had a bunch of vintage toys, signed pictures, props, and other things. Too bad Star Wars merchandise is abundant as hell these days, but the original stuff will always be worth something.

I know Peter didn't do much beyond Star Wars, but he must have appreciated being part of something as epic as the franchise has become. Sure, they have "A" Chewbacca in the new movies, but Peter was the O.G.

RIP

Twilight, Taintlight, and Robert Pattinson

Twilight was all the rage back in the late 2000s... among pre-pubescent girls. Quite frankly, it's a stupid movie. Everyone knows they sparkle, but why? They look really stupid when they run super fast. Why are vampires playing baseball? The world may never know.

Taintlight is a far superior knockoff. It's made by Chris Seaver, so you know it's at least entertaining. Stella and Edgar are queefloads better than Bella and Edward. Plus, the movie is on youtube:



I'm not against recent news of Robert Pattinson as Batman, though. He was supposed to be in a Harmony Korine movie "The Trap", announced well before Beach Bum came out, but there still hasn't been any word on that.

Batman or Harmony Korine? Tough choice.

Movies for the Blind

I spend a lot of time half watching shows and movies with out hardly looking at the screen. So, I'm just intersted in what people would considered the 1 movie they would take with them to a desert island, if they were blinded before having to make the choice.

Pet Sematary 2 and references to the original

Watched this one again today for some quasi-King points. I've always liked the movie, and I love that it has the same vibe/setting/director as the first. What I noticed this time is how often it references the original.

First off, it's set in the same city. There's a few times throughout where they mention the Creed family, and what happened to them. There's also a doctor that was familiar with the strange case of Church the cat, and that guy was a kook who could have probably had his own spin-off as a crazed taxidermist who reminisces of that Indian burial ground.

Furlong and company are in the pet sematary to relay the story of Louis Creed. The bully claims that Elle Creed went nuts and dug up corpses and licked their faces and whatnot, but for the director's sake, I think he elaborated. The bully said that Gage had maggots in his eyes when Louis dug him up, but he clearly didn't. I'm pretty sure Mary Lambert (director) said that if she did a part 3, it would be Elle Creed's story. Too bad that shitty remake came out and laid that idea to rest, because whatever she came up with would have been better than the remake.



But PS2 is a pretty fun movie. Clearly a step down from the original, a bit cheesy at times, but it has some good gore, and Clancy Brown steals the whole show as the asshole sheriff Gus. This is easily my favorite of his performances, and the dude was Mister Krabs. "I like money!"

This was back at the height of Eddie Furlong's career. Straight off of T2, he makes this one. Kind of a horror fan in iit, as his mother was a horror actress, and he dressed as Jason for Halloween during that one scene. He'd later go on to play a more hardcore horror fan in "Brainscan", which I was also kind of obsessed with as a kid, becaused I loved all three of these movies as a youth.

We're gonna need Two Turnips in Heat

Horror movies in ancient Greece?!?

I was just thinking about the first Omen movie, from 1976. It is excellent in soooo many different ways, of course: music, cast, abrupt beheadings (always an important consideration), and, perhaps mportantly... settings.

I think one big reason The Omen gets under all our skin is because it is largely set in places that had a lot of significance in Western culture. Rome, London, and... well, Israel, if not necessarily Jerusalem... I can't remember if there's a brief shot of Jerusalem somewhere in there, like right when Gregory Peck flies in, maybe... whatever. My point is that so many of our traditions and cultural history is rooted in those places. My hair almost starts standing on end when I just hear the names of those places, even without thinking of them in the context of a horror movie. You just think of London, Rome, and Israel, and you can just feel the weight of centuries and millennia of important human history. The movie draws upon that feeling, I think. You just feel like "oh wow, so many hugely important things that affected the destinies of millions of people, and BILLIONS of their descendants, happened in these locations. Now, in this movie... um... something ELSE is happening that may affect the fate of the world..." I get goosebumps just thinking about it.

So, here's where ancient Greece comes in. Why are there so few, if any, horror movies that exploit similar feelinds that we should have about ancient Greece? Athens, especially? I mean, Athens was a pretty damned important place in the development of democracy and philosophy, right? But I can't even think of any horror movies that plug into that, and try to give us a horror movie type of reaction to things that went down there. I mean, there are some SyFy channel type movies about minotaurs, chimeras, harpies, and various Greek mythological creatures. And Greek gods and heroes have their share of movies. But there's hardly anything that tries to create a horror movie type of shivery frisson feeling about trhe birth of democracy or philosophy. It feels funny even thinking about this, like it's a silly thing to think about. But why is that?

Maybe it's because democracy and philosophy at least try, or sometimes maybe just pretend to try, to be about being RATIONAL, whereas horror movies are all about the IRRATIONAL side of humanity. But, just in the sense of the weight of many, many centuries of human history, it seems like Athens could potentially elicit the same kind of reaction that we get from hearing about Rome, London, and Israel in The Omen.

I guess this could work in a time travel type of movie. Like, time travellers go back to ancient Athens and affect the developmen of democratic ideas... that would hugely affect all of western history, for as far back as written records go. That idea kind of gives me that shivery feeling, just from imagining the sheer scale of the significance of things that happened in that location. But it's different from the Omen feeling I get. I guess it's just because the things that happened in Athens don't give us a feeling of religious awe or majesty, like a lot of things that went down in the cathedrals and public places of Rome and London.

I don't know if I'm saying this very well, but I feel like I'm on to something here. Anyone have any thoughts about any of this???