TV Show Challenge 2025

I'm veering away from the runtime method this time. Hopefully this will be easier to tally.

From February 1st to 28th
Watch as many TV episodes as you can

Score points by episodes watched:

• Less than 30 minutes = 1 pt (2 if FTV)
• Greater than 30 minutes = 2 pts (4 if FTV)

• Full season watched = +0.5 pt per episode
• Full series watched = +10

Mark your SPOT.

Anti-Turkey Challenge 2025 - RESULTS

Despite a slow start, congrats to Ballz for running away with the first Anti-Turkey challenge. Also, fair play to Troma for coming second by watching a bunch of movies he would never otherwise have watched - The Dark Knight? Deadpool?!. Zed probably got more points than me because I am sure he hasn't included any FTVs in his total but hey, I did keep reminding him... Hope you all (well most of you) enjoyed participating - Any favourite FTVs or a particular movie you enjoyed rewatching? Any movies you watched that you considered to be overrated? (STFU zed about Tokyo Story!).

Here are the final scores:

Ballz - 186
Troma - 153
Markus - 130
zed - 123
Ninja - 91
Box - 77
Nicko - 48
Zombie - 9

Anti-Turkey Challenge 2025

So a brand new challenge and a slight revision of the rules. Using IMDb, the idea is is to watch as many movies as you can rated 7.0+. Well, ideally 8.0+ but see below as to how I will try to encourage this...

1. Scoring:
8.9+ = 6 points
8.6-8.8 = 5 points
8.3-8.5 = 4 points
8.0-8.2 = 3 points
7.5-7.9 = 2 points
7.0-7.4 = 1 point

2. FTV = 1 point

3. Can be any genre.

4. Trifectas: franchises and directors only however they only apply to movies rated 7.5+
A movie can only count towards one trifecta. For example, the "Dark Knight" trilogy can be either director or franchise but not both. If you decide to count "Dark Knight" as a franchise trifecta and then watch another Nolan movie like Inception, you will need to watch another two of his movies 8.0+ to count as a director trifecta.
Trilogies such as The Godfather can be counted in the "franchise" rule but not something like Leone's "Dollars" trilogy because they are too loosely connected.

Single trifecta: 5 points
Double trifecta: +7 points
Triple trifecta: +9 points
Etc.

5. Movies with a rating of 6.9 or under do not count.

6. Running time must be at least 60 minutes.

7. Starts 00:00 1st January and ends 23:59 31st January in your respective time zones

So come on people, grab a spot and get watching some of those classics or to some, overrated movies!

Also, please use the discussion thread or the shoutbox for questions.

Eruption (book) by Michael Crichton and James Patterson

You guys, I am about a third of the way through this book right now. I'm mentioning it here because I am wondering if it might have been partly inspired by Return of the Living Dead.

I won't wreck it, but one of the things going on in the book involves old, semi-forgotten canisters of dangerous chemicals, which were caught up in a complicated bureaucratic screw-up by the army over a period of many years. The canisters ended up being stored in a dangerous location, overseen by people who at first only have a hazy idea of what the canisters hold, or how they (the canisters) got there.

Also, the chemical is called Agent Black, but they specifically say that it came out of the same research that created dioxin, and also they call... not the chemical itself, but a molecule that it can create as it is broken down in certain contexts, 2,4-D. All of this makes me think of 2-4-5 Trioxin, from RotLD. Maybe 2,4-whatever or 2-4-whatever are extremely common starting elements in the names of chemicals. I have no idea. But, I can't help but think of RotLD, given the various parallels.

If the canisters leak, things in the book will get pretty apocalyptic. I don't think that will happen, as far as I can tell from my sense of what is going on in the story. But it certainly could happen. We shall see. The apocalypse that would happen if the canisters broke would have nothing to do with zombies, brains, or paramedics, but it would be pretty damned bad.

Anyway. Yah. Had to share. I'm about a third of the way through the book, and so far I would recommend reading it! I think it will stay interesting and suspenseful. The authors, of course, know/knew what they are/were doing.

Tokyo Story : The greatest film ever made

ranked #1 on Metacritic's Filtered "Best Movies of All Time"
Tokyo Story at the top of his published list of the best 1000 films ever made
#1 2012 Sight & Sound Directors' Top Ten Best Films Ever
#215 on IMDB top 250



With stats like this, Surely worth a watch
You're in luck its on youtube

A fucking brutal nightmare

No, that's not the name of a movie I saw, I just had a really brutal nightmare.

My nightmare was set in my apartment, in my bathroom, until right at the end.

Basically, I was in the shower, shampooing, and suddenly I just knew (like you just KNOW things in dreams) that an ex-girlfriend had just let herself in. That wouldn't have been so bad, but in my dream this ex-girlfriend had become a vampire. She could get into my apartment because I had invited her in lots of times.

Soooo this presented problems for me.

Suddenly, very suddenly, she stared pounding on my flimsy bathroom door, and then started stabbing a hole through it with some kind of heavy duty huge btcher knife or machete.

I stumbled out of the shower as fast as I could, naked, of course, with tons of shampoo foam from my hair getting in my eyes and all over the tile floor, together with lots of water from the shower, which was still running full blast. I did not have my glasses on, of course. So, not only was I basically blind from not having my glasses on, but I could barely open my eyes anyway because the shampoo foam kept getting in my eyes, and it REALLY stung. Also, the tile floor was basically a completely frictionless surface, because there was like half an inch of hot shower water on it, which was full of very sudsy slippery foam from the shampoo.

In the real world, if vampires really existed, she would have got me. I wouldn't have had a prayer.

But in the dream, somehow I slipped and slid toward the door, got my back up against the front of my toilet, and pressed my feet against the bottom of the door to keep it shut. My vampire ex-girlfriend was still stabbing a hole in the middle of the door, but she couldn't get it open.

I started trying to talk her out of killing me, or turning me into a vampire, but she didn't want to hear it. She just kept stabbing through the door. I kept trying, but it wasn't working.

My back was killing me, because I had it pressed really hard against the front of the toilet. But, all I could do was press it against the toilet even harder, so my feet could keep as much pressure as possible against the door.

This mostly happened in the space of just three of four seconds, with the problem of being on a wet, frictionless surface with no weapons while totally naked was a massive part of the ordeal. I guess it took a little longer than that when I was trying to talk her out of killing or envampening me, but everything else happened very quickly.

Then I saw that she had made the hole in the door large enough to look through. She did that, she looked through it, and she had spooky light vampire eyes like in lots of movies.

Then she stepped aside and let some other girl look through the hole in the door, and it was some totally new girl that I didn't even know was with her.

That was the last straw. I knew I didn't have a prayer, and that I would probably be either dead or vamped out in the next few seconds.

Time for drastic measures.

So I jumped to my feet, pushed off against the wall, and skedaddled across the floor back into the shower. I pounded on the wall on the far side of the shower as hard as I possibly could, and managed not only to pound a hole through the wall, but to avoid any electrical wires that may have been in there. I clambered through the hole out into the public hallway on the other side, that all the apartments on my floor share.

Luckily, in my dream there was a window at the end of the hallway, and it was pouring (poring??) sunlight into the hallway. Soooo...

I was safe.

In real life of course, I never could have pounded a hole through the wall. Maybe when I was 18 or 19, I guess. There was a year or two around that age when I was trying to be like Herschel Walker, and I did so many push-ups over a period of many months that I became capable of walking all the way around our house on my hands. That included going uphill!!!! Try doing that sometime, it was really hard. Anyway, at that time in my life maybe I could have just beaten my way through a wall, but not anymore. Except in dreams, apparently.

Anyway. Yah. Had to share. Somehow, I bet that was inspired by The Substance, just because it was in a bathroom, and being naked on the floor was a big part of it.

That could actually make a decent scene in a horror movie I imagine.

OK! Had to share. I now return you to your regular lives. Kirk out.

The Legacy (1978)

We must have talked about this before, on here. I can't find any threads though. Any fans? I am not going to be able to compose a very intelligible post right now, because I'm trying to sleep. But, I was just thinking about this movie, so here's a link to watch it if you want, and I'll come back tomorrow and say stuff about it. Just briefly: it has a pretty great cast, with Katharine Ross, Sam Elliott, Roger Daltrey (!?! yes, seriously), and some less famous people. It's 70s as HELL, ha ha, no really it is. It's mostly set in England... it's probably not a coincidence that it came out not many years after The Omen and The Sentinel. Just imagine various plot elements from those two movies stewing for a few months in some writer's unconscious, and you could imagine the overall setting, music, and rough plot of this movie. Here, you can watch it for free here, or use whatever means you prefer that you might have at your disposal.

The Substance

I'm just gonna start a thread about this one, if anybody has thoughts, pls share 'em here.

OK, to start out, this felt like a cautionary sci-fi film modeled on The Portrait of Dorian Gray, co-directed by David Cronenberg, Brian Yuzna, and possibly Lucky McKee??? You'll know what I mean by that, if you've seen it.

Demi Moore looks QUITE respectable for her age, in this. She would have been 60 or 61 during filming, and she's plausibly playing a woman just turning 50. But, as good as she looks, she doesn't look young enough for the retro exercise TV show she is the star of. (Sorry about that sentence. That was pretty bad).

She is approached, during an unexpected visit to the hospital, by a young male nurse who says she is a suitable "candidate." (We gradually learn what that means). He gives her... I was distracted, but it must have been a flash drive, floppy disc, or CD-ROM... this movie is right up there with It Follows, when it comes to lack of clarity about what decade it is set in.

She goes home and sticks the little data storage unit thingie into whatever computer she has, and is shown a little video that is sort of a mysterious little commercial for something called The Substance. It promises to "release a new her," or something to that effect.

Not to wreck it too too too much, but eventually her soul comes to more or less inhabit a much younger and hotter body, that of Margaret Qualley. I am still trying to recall who MQ reminds me of, it is driving me up a wall. Facially, Kathryn Newton, overall physically, Jennifer Connelly, but there was some other famous girl 20-25 years ago that she looks like, whose name is eluding me. It doesn't make any difference anyway, unless MQ was deliberately chosen and made up to resemble this girl whose name I can't remember, to connote something important abot her character. Anyway, whatever, who cares.

Basically, the bulk of the movie is about how this poor woman's entire identity is impossible for her to disconnect from her own ideal of beauty. She comes to despise her true self, and starts to believe all the hype around the TV show she remains that star of (in her new body, in her new identity).

The ending made me think of Society, bigtime. So, yah, that's why I thought of Brian Yuzna. Well, maybe the last quarter of the movie. Nothing wrong with that.

There is quite a bit of nudity, soooo that's always nice. But, the way that it is sexual is really aimed at a hetero female audience, I would say, if that means anything to you. It's sort of about the seductiveness of a sexy identity to women, I would say. It's certainly not unpleasant viewing, as a guy, but I don't think we are really the audience the director had in mind.

Also, it reminded me a lot of the 1995 Jennifer Rubin film Wasp Woman. Had to mention that. WW actually might have been a movie for the SyFy channel, or whatever it was called in the mid-90s. Or... maybe for Skinemax. Either one.

Anyway. It's pretty interesting, it shows thought and work, aaaaaand I'm gonna give it two thumbs up. Kirk out.

#ShakespearesShitstorm

Funny, I recently mentioned this movie in a shout. It came out in 2020 to some small theatrical showings, but has been MIA on physical media and streaming, until now. Not sure exactly when it showed up, but has to have been very recently. It's on Troma Now for a subscription fee, but is playing on Fawesome for free with some ads.

The term "shitstorm" is appropriate, as plotwise, this movie is a fucking mess. Honestly, I'm not really sure what it was about. It's supposedly based on Shakespeare's The Tempest, which I have never read. But hell, this was just all over the place.

Most of the humor was just making fun of woke culture, and triggered social justice warriors, and their safespaces. I mean, that's all fine, but in 2025, it does feel a little dated. It probably felt refreshing 5 years ago when it should have come out, but who's even paying attention to those people anymore?

On the plus side, it does feature Troma's usual brand of lots and lots of boobies, bodily fluids, and not-so-subtle over the top gross-out offensiveness. So yeah, I guess I'd give it a mild recommendation. It's definitely better than the stuff they were doing in the late 80s-early 90s (Toxie 2+3/Kabukiman).

Folk Horror is my fav sub genre of horror

Not sure why, Atmosphere obviously plays a large role.
esp eastern europe stuff, the babes the clothes the folklore, the BS.
Gonna see if I can see some more over this coming year

btw I'm in love - Linda Rybová man what a babe, pity she didn't make more horror