Four seasons of Breaking Bad rendered as an old-school console game. (Spoiler alert.)
“Robot” (by Jim Henson)
There’s a definite proto-muppet (not to mention HAL 9000) quality to the robot in this vintage short introducing business owners to the cutting-edge concept of “data communications.”
Dear Mr. Scorsese
This video was purportedly shot near the end of a screening of Hugo at the Regal Union Square multiplex in downtown Manhattan. Farewell to scratched prints, melted film, and brain wraps. Still, CHAOS REIGNS.
Pingu’s The Thing
Deep Focus Audio Commentary: Flash Gordon
A look at art direction, performance, and sci-fi sensuousness in the 1980 version of Flash Gordon directed by Mike Hodges.
Vampire Circus
Updated 01/13/11: Blu-ray review
Originally reviewed 05/16/08
As this Hammer horror melodrama from 1972 opens, schoolteacher Albert Mueller (Laurence Payne) catches his wife (Domini Blythe) and one of the young village girls making their way through the countryside in what’s apparently a quite unwholesome direction. He follows, but is unable to prevent their entry to the castle of Count Mitterhaus, a notoriously sexy vampire who holds the whole village under his sway. As the cuckold tries to marshal the shiftless men of the village for a rescue mission — experience with the Count seems to have whipped everybody here into a sense of meek helplessness — his wife offers up the young blond virgin to the vampire, who rips the girl’s throat out. The woman tears her own clothes off and Mitterhaus makes love to her. When the villagers are finally coerced to make their way to the castle with torches and grim looks, they carry away the dead girl and do battle with Mitterhaus himself, who ends up impaled through the chest on a pointed wooden stick while cursing the village in a stage whisper. Albert’s wife is brought outside and whipped as punishment for her betrayal, but finally runs back into the castle, which is set afire and burns into ruins. And then the opening credits roll.
Audio Commentary: They Live (John Carpenter, 1988)
A look at scenes from John Carpenter’s satirical alien-invasion movie They Live, released four days before the 1988 presidential elections and relevant to this day.
Halloween Horror Montage
Every year, I see those Chuck Workman clip compilations on the Oscars broadcast and I think, “Gee, that looks like a fun job.” Also every year, I wish I had started thinking about Halloween early enough to do something special for my Web site. Here’s the result of those twin impulses: a short montage of clips culled from my collection of horror movies from 1960 and later, cued up and intertwined in a sequence dictated by my memories of watching them over the decades — and some ascertainment of their meanings in relation to one another — and set to a fairly arbitrary choice of music. Accordingly, and as HBO and/or the MPAA might note, it contains graphic violence, brief nudity, strong language, strong sexual content, and some disturbing images. It also may contain sidelong SPOILERS for a number of terrific horror movies (they’re listed at the bottom of this entry), so proceed at your own risk.