Words Seem Out Of Place

As much as the anticipation leading up to October 31st brings me great joy every year , the impending arrival of Halloween also brings on some sadness, too. That's because it marks the last day of the greatest month of the year, and the elbowing aside of the great things that make it the greatest. Sure, we horror nerds will continue watching and reveling in all things creepy, year around, but the mainstream's focus will shift to the nauseating displays of treacly holiday claptrap surrounding Thanksgiving and Christmas. For some of us, that's almost too much to bear. That's okay, at least we have movies like Planes, Trains, and Automobiles to help us through Thanksgiving, or like  Black Christmas  or New Year's Evil to provide some yuletide cheer. At this point, 2019 has started to wear me out. I'm not sure how much new content you'll see around here these next few months.  I go through this annually, where I question why I'm writing this bl...

This series looks back at the 1990s and its influence on the generation of people who came of age during the decade. [This post may not be safe for work, thanks to a gif below.] More than two decades since its release, the sci-fi comic book movie  Barb Wire remains one of the essential documents of the 1990s for a few reasons. As written by Chuck Pfarrer and Ilene Chaiken, the film feels like both a time capsule of the American decade in which it was made, and uncanny foreshadowing of where we've ended up in America today, in 2019. I'm serious. Hear me out before you sneer. Maybe you had to be there in order to fully appreciate the absolute lunacy of peak Pamela Anderson media hype. When that infamous sex tape of her and then-hubby Tommy Lee was stolen in 1995, it was uploaded to the still-nascent and damn-near lawless internet for all the world to see—well, okay, for people who had the patience to sit through dial-up's excruciating wait times. Then in 1996 t...

Looking back at the pop culture mainstays of this Gen Xer's gloriously misspent youth. I first laid eyes on screen and stage actress Kate Nelligan watching John Badham's Dracula (1979) a few years after its release. Even at that time, at a very young age of seven or eight, I was captivated by her. I understood nothing about romance or attraction yet, but I could still see why Frank Langella's Dracula wanted to sink his teeth into that neck. There was something in her eyes—an attractive melancholy that I'd be increasingly drawn to as I got older and became more melancholy myself. She had a pensive, thoughtful look. Something about her face felt safe and comforting to little me: "This," some omniscient narrator declared in my head, "is what quiet beauty looks like, kid." Nelligan was heartbreakingly good as Lucy in Dracula . That must've been the early 1980s, probably during the brief halcyon period when my parents subscribed to...

Last Halloween, Netflix gifted the world with a short, six-episode series unlike any other, The Curious Creations of Christine McConnell . Part DIY baking show, part Muppet monster show, and 100% dark comedy, the show transfixed me immediately. This is just the right combination of freaky weird macabre stuff I live for every Halloween. And while I long ago stopped caring about food porn, there's no denying this show makes it fun again. She holds that butcher knife like she knows how to use it, no? In the world of the show, Christine lives in a big, spooky Gothic house, where she bakes extravagant horror-themed desserts, engages in witty and often innuendo-laden banter with her monster and ghost roommates, and generally tries to keep her ghoulish pals from killing the neighbors. The "beauty and the beasts" premise helps make everything feel like an old-school sitcom on acid. Beyond food porn level baking bliss, the show also offers advice for dealing with na...

My blogging pfriend and pfellow Michelle Pfeiffer pfanatic Paul S. recently shared one of my Pfeiffer posts and added his own commentary to it, over at his pfabulous site  Pfeiffer Pfilms and Meg Movies . Speaking of "pfabulous," in honor of the thirtieth anniversary of The Fabulous Baker Boys falling on October 13 this year, I'm going to do the same. Here's a dual commentary on the movie from two of the biggest Pfeiffer pfans in all the world (I'm confident this is true). I'm presenting Paul's original commentary (and his selected images), unedited. The Fabulous Pfeiffer Girl Paul: I’ve slept, I’ve woken and I still have Michelle on my mind. It’s not surprising, I need Pfeiffer in the way that some people need to eat, sleep and breathe.  Pfeiffer the face has launched a million pfixations. The film that made me an obsessed fanatic was  The Fabulous Baker Boys . Michael:  You and me, Paul, we're the same.  Baker Boys played a hu...

Celebrating Scream Queens that make the Halloween season the most wonderful time of year. In many ways, Linnea Quigley is the ultimate Scream Queen. A pint-sized bundle of pure punk rock spirit, Quigley has starred in countless horror and exploitation classics: The Return of the Living Dead: Silent Night, Deadly Night; Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama: Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers: Night of the Demons; Creepozoids; Nightmare Sisters ...get the point? Many of these cult classics are from the 1980s and early 1990s, when Quigley first shot to fame within the B-movie world. She was everywhere back then, at least if you were a horror-loving kid like myself. She seemed to pop up in every other splatter flick I watched on USA Up All Night or rented from the video store during those days. Whenever she joined host Rhonda Shear on set, it was like the horror gods had answered our heathen prayers. Explosive sex appeal, hilariously deadpan Valley Girl-esque charm, and a wil...