Gremlins (1984)

It was Christmas Eve. I was 9 years old. Me and Mom were decorating the tree, waiting for Dad to come home from work. A couple hours went by. Dad wasn't home. So Mom called the office. No answer. Christmas Day came and went, and still nothing. So the police began a search. Four or five days went by. Neither one of us could eat or sleep. Everything was falling apart. It was snowing outside. The house was freezing, so I went to try to light up the fire...and that's when I noticed the smell. The firemen came and broke through the chimney top, and me and Mom were expecting them to pull out a dead cat or a bird...and instead they pulled out my father. He was dressed in a Santa Claus suit. He'd been climbing down the chimney on Christmas Eve, his arms loaded with presents. He was gonna surprise us. He slipped and broke his neck, died instantly. And that's how I found out there was no Santa Claus.
--Kate Beringer

Ahh, it's Christmastime again. The most wonderful time of the year. The season of joy and giving, of warm feelings and happy memories, of holly and mistletoe and eggnog and presents and figgy pudding.

Let's do a horror movie.

Written by the director of the first two Harry Potter films as well as the only two Home Alone movies that anyone really remembers, Gremlins is one of several movies from the early 1980s, along with Poltergeist, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and a few others, which drew fire from critics and patrons for some particular scenes of violence and horror that many felt pushed the boundaries of a PG-rated film at the time. The complaints eventually got so loud it led filmmaker Steven Spielberg, who produced and/or directed many of those movies, including this one, to petition the MPAA for a new rating for films that were not PG, not quite an R. They agreed, and two months later Red Dawn became the first film ever to be released with the brand new PG-13 rating.

Thank you, Santa Spielberg.

In the nondescript Midwestern town of Kingston Falls, USA, a town that is so straight out of the past it may as well be Bedford Falls or the set from Back to the Future, lives an aspiring cartoonist named Billy, played by Zach Galligan, the son of an inventor with high aspirations whose inventions never work quite right and should probably just stick to acting and country singing since, well, he's Hoyt Axton. Every day he gets up and goes to work at the savings and loan and has to put up with the daily threats and rantings of the richest cat lady in town, Mrs. Deagle (played by Polly Holliday a.k.a. Flo from Alice), the resident grumpy old bat who enjoys metaphorically whizzing on poor people, drenching carolers and stringing up people's pets on their front porches every time they poop on her lawn. Then he goes to a bar to drink away work stress and listen to his suck-up coworker lord over his new house and how he'll usurp the bank once the boss dies and how superior he thinks he is in every way.

I wouldn't sell this kid short, though. I mean, not only is he a talented artist, but look who he's getting drawing tips from:

"Yeah, I know how you feel, Billy. I've dealt with Grinches before."

The things that keep him going every day are his art (more power to him), a coworker at his bank by the name of Kate Beringer (Phoebe Cates out of Fast Times at Ridgemont High) whom he is trying to work up the nerve to ask out on a date, and quite recently a new addition to his household: a small, furry, pointy-eared new pet his father has given him as an early Christmas present. Purchased at a curio shop within the Chinatown district of the nearest major city to Kingston Falls via the grandson of its more hesitant curator, the creature is a "mogwai" (the Cantonese word for "demon") and is just the cutest-wootest widdle ball of fwuff you could ever lay eyes on.

He also comes with three very important rules for his proper care which I'm assuming every 80's movie nut knows by heart but I'm repeating here anyway: don't expose him to bright lights as sunlight in particular will kill him, don't get him wet, and absolutely under no circumstances feed him after midnight.

"For every piece of poop I find on my lawn...I BOIL A KITTEN."

Seems easy enough. The adorable little nummy-muffin is given the name Gizmo, and he and Billy become fast friends. He sits around on Billy's bed a lot watching old movies on TV and being pwecious.

Of course the thing is, with movies that revolve around rules that absolutely positively must not be broken under any circumstance, one or more of them will at some point in its running time, be broken, for if not, the plot would not naturally progress. And I'm afraid that this film is no exception. The trouble starts around the time when Corey Feldman stops by to deliver a Christmas tree and accidentally knocks a paintbrush jar full of water on the poor creature.

All together now...AWWWWWWWWWWWW.

As it happens, pouring water on these creatures causes them to reproduce, which raises a lot of questions as to what kind of mammals bore offspring via skin growths which drop off the body and sprout brand new creatures whenever they get wet. Then questions are further raised when Billy accidentally feeds these newborns past midnight, discovering too late that his alarm clock's wires have been eaten through. This has the result of the gremlin babies forming chrysaliseseses...chrysalees...chrysalii?...that hatch before too long and form larger, scaly-skinned creatures that have somehow lost all their fur. And these new creatures are less like the docile, harmless little fuzzball voiced by Skeeter from Muppet Babies and more like monstrous, foul-tempered, mischievous little trolls voiced by Optimus Prime, Megatron and that one guy from the Police Academy movies. One in particular has a mohawk and is named Stripe for ease of convenience.

That poor gingerbread man. Have they no scruples?

Before long, the entire town is waist-deep in an army of these voracious affronts to God and nature raising untold amounts of hell upon the population. Billy's mother finds three in the kitchen and minces one in the food processor, stabs a second and explodes a third in the microwave in true PG-13 fashion before a fourth attacks her from inside the Christmas tree. A snowplow is driven into the living room of snowplow driver Mr. Futterman (Dick Miller), a character who ironically announced his detest of imported goods as he believed they weren't made as properly. ("They put gremlins in everything!") A group of them pose as Christmas carolers to scare the crap out of Mrs. Deagle while one gives her a speedy ride on a stair lift chair. Even poor Kate has her hands full during her night job as a waitress at Dorry's Tavern, where many of these blighted little hellbeasts are in for a night of drinking, dancing, card playing and quick sight gags. She has only just made her escape with the help of a flash bulb off a Polaroid camera when Billy and cutie-wootie Gizmo arrive to pull her out of there.

And of course, during all this, Billy's father is out of town at an inventor's convention and it's no use going to the police because, frankly, a story about how his grandmother got run down by Santa's sleigh would have been more plausible to them. They don't realize he's telling the truth until a ghastly bit of proof that Mother Nature has a sick sense of humor fiddles with his brakes.

Damn American-made snowplows!

Right about here, we get the movie's most famous piece of dialogue, after those three rules, of course. Holed up in the bank with Billy and Gizmo, Kate picks this moment to talk about a traumatic event in her childhood that explains why she doesn't celebrate Christmas. I need not go into too much detail here, as I have recreated her monologue at the top of this page. I'm not exactly sure what it has to do with the rest of the film, apart from a need of the filmmakers to inject a bit of dark comedy into what is already a darkly comedic film.

I have holiday depression now.

During Kate's tale of woe, we find that the beastly little mutants have retreated from the bright lights of downtown Kingston Falls (though as Billy and Kate were running away from the bar, it seemed that they were running around attacking people just fine without fear of injury) and have retreated into the only movie theater in town. Some of them have even defied their own evolutionary process to rig up the projector to play a reel of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and being too savage to grasp the corporate culture of the Walt Disney Company, they all seem to be enjoying themselves.

At the very least, it provides the perfect distraction for Billy, Kate and Gizmo to rig the theater to explode with a flaming rag and a gas leak in the boiler room and incinerate the little buggers.

Unfortunately, the one named Stripe has escaped his deserved burnination by escaping ahead of time into the town's neighborhood Montgomery Ward (remember that place?) setting up a final showdown in, appropriately enough, a department store, the most modern-looking (circa 1984) building in town. Thus begins what turns out to be a race to the working water fixture in the gardening section that would start this whole movie all over again. Billy battles Sprite, Kate gets the lights working, and Gizmo eventually wins the day for good guy cuteness by opening up the blinds to the bright lights of a convenient winter's morning to send the unholy abomination back to Hell where it belongs.

Finally, at the end of the film, on Christmas Day, I assume, the Peltzers and Kate are watching TV news coverage of the aftermath when the Chinatown curio shop owner suddenly appears to take Gizmo back and to deliver the message of this film, saying that man with his modern technology has a tendency to abuse nature's gifts, and they are not ready for the responsibilities of something as delicate as a mogwai. But noticing Gizmo's attachment to Billy, he says that one day HE may be ready.

Maybe around the time Gremlins 2: The New Batch comes out.

These new Muppets look DREADFUL.

The thing that sticks out the most to me about Gremlins, more than the puppetry or the horror-comedy aspect, is its message.

Part of that has to do with its setting - nearly every building in town could easily come straight out of It's a Wonderful Life or A Christmas Story, Billy's car looks more vintage than anything, and I swear the only channel they get on cable out there is Turner Classic Movies. If not for the odd 1980s technological advancement, or the department store in the film's climax, or Billy's father's malfuntioning inventions all over his house, I could have sworn this movie took place in the fifties. It sets up a general theme of the introduction of new technology in an old environment.

And then there are the gremlins themselves, obviously named for a term used for a failure in something mechanical like a "bug" or a "kink" as Mr. Futterman is nice to point out for us. Most of the time they are terrorizing people it's something technological, like tinkering with wiring or screwing with traffic lights or hotwiring snowplows. I'm surprised they managed to start up a movie projector.

And of course it takes place on Christmas. The most commercialized holiday on the Gregorian calendar.

Take away the animatronic creatures and the microwave explosions and the chimney story and that's what Gremlins is - a message film about technology and nature. Or you could, you know, leave all that stuff in and get an entertaining movie regardless.

Hmmm...not everyone can successfully lose weight for their New Year's resolution. Maybe they're not so bad after all.

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

THEY'RE COMING TO GET YOU, BARBARA...

If you're looking for a monster who makes the perfect killing machine, who feasts on the living indiscriminately without heart, conscience or soul--you can't go wrong with Nazis.

Oh, wait. That's video games.

In the movie world, you can't go wrong with ZOMBIES. The living dead. The reanimated bodies of the deceased, ravenous, bloodthirsty, unthinking, unnatural BEASTS risen from the grave to seek the flesh and/or brains of the living! Lock your doors, board up your windows, and for Pete's sake pretend you don't have flesh!

Zombies are right up there with summer camp serial killers, William Shatner impersonators, janitors who kill you in your dreams, and guys with pins sticking out of their faces - they make the perfect Halloween monsters. Besides, Frankenstein's monster has the capacity for human emotion, werewolves only come out one night a month, and Stephanie Meyer has pretty much single-handedly ruined vampires forever.

Now we all know from a scientific viewpoint (or by Cracked.com, anyway) that an army of zombies bringing human civilization to its knees would be a physical implausibility. Rotting flesh is a magnet for worms, weevils, maggots, and even wild animals, the lack of brain function would deny them the ability to identify mountains, cliffs or even stairs, and of course, being dead and all, they wouldn't have a functioning immune system, central nervous system or even bones that could mend themselves. Generally, the wisest thing to do during a zombie invasion would be to hide out in a tall building or a less densely populated area and wait for their food supply to run out.

Of course, that hasn't stopped some zombie movie makers from working around such complications. Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, for example, created ravenous ghouls from a highly contagious disease spread from an infected monkey. Peter Jackson's Braindead (or Dead Alive, if you prefer) also used a monkey, but was also spread by New Zealander Howard Sprague's mother.

Meanwhile, nobody has even bothered to tell horror movie icon George A. Romero, as he's been making movies ending with "of the (Living) Dead" for years.

And as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is considered by many to be slasher movie elite, so is George Romero's 1968 film Night of the Living Dead considered by many to be the ultimate zombie movie. Even though the word "zombie" is never used throughout the entire film, there's plenty of them in there.

What? It's just Bela Lugosi's chiropractor.

It began in a cemetery somewhere in western Pennsylvania...

Two siblings, Barbara and her groaning, moaning, less-than-enthusiastic brother John have traveled three hours to this cemetery at their mother's request to place some flowers on their father's grave. Or, rather, she places the flowers on his grave while her brother keeps pissing and moaning about having to drive three hours to arrive at 8:00 in the evening which looks more like the middle of the day to mourn a dead guy, and then starts freaking her out by chasing her around the tombstones teasing her about how something is coming to get her.

Well...then...something comes to get her. A strange, voiceless man comes out of nowhere, bashes Johnny's head on a headstone and chases Barbara all the way to an isolated farmhouse further in the middle of nowhere, where she in a near-catatonic state and an African-American gentleman named Ben barricade themselves inside as some of her pursuer's friends show up and begin to stand around the house waiting the two of them out.

"Wait! Can I get a ride to the Carnival of Souls set?"

The rest of the film pretty much takes place in or around the house and focuses on disaster movie principles of a group of survivors trying to escape this calamity, while radio and television give us expository reports of a people being killed and eaten by otherwise normal-looking dead people who have developed a taste for human flesh. As to the cause of this zombie infestation, TV newscasters say experts are reportedly at a loss, though one hypothesis claims extraterrestrial radiation found on an exploratory satellite that was blown up on its way back from Venus. Frankly, in my opinion, a virus would have been more plausible.

"After the break, we'll discuss the recent zombie epidemic and how it's all because of Obamacare!"

Meanwhile their little circle grows to include a boyfriend/girlfriend pairing and a bickering married couple whose daughter was bitten, all of whom come out from down in the basement about forty-five minutes into the film and then start arguing with each other, because what's a survival story without members of their main cast constantly at each other's throats, acting all "every-man-for-himself"?

Our heroes finally start arguing long enough to formulate a plan to escape the house by hurling Molotov cocktails out of the second story window to distract the ghouls while the boyfriend and girlfriend attempt to frive the blak guy's truck to a nearby fuel pump to fill up the tank, only to accidentally set the truck on fire and blow the young couple up in a fiery explosion. Which gives us the most iconic and infamous scene of zombies disassembling their flaming corpses and eating the delicious candy inside.

Even with zombies banging down your door, you can't miss Laugh-In.

Relations between the remaining survivors break down after that, particularly after the electricity goes off and the zombies start breaking in. The loudmouthed father turns on Ben and in the scuffle gets himself shot and falls down the basement stairs; by the time the mother retreats down there, her daughter has started feasting on his flesh and pauses for a moment to stab her to death with a garden trowel.

In this zombie universe, their brains haven't rotted enough to know that garden trowels are sharp and that rocks break car windows, apparently. I'm also willing to guess that they know how to cut off the electricity.

Barbara doesn't fare any better - she gets carried off by the swarm, one of whom looks like her brother while Ben is forced to fight the rest of them off alone and spends the night down in the basement.

The next morning, local law enforcement and the neighborhood rifle-wielding mob have the zombie epidemic pretty much under control, as they wander the field nearby capping off the last few walkers. Ben wakes up, comes out of the basement and peeks out the window only to be shot between the eyes and burned with the rest of the bodies, providing possibly the most eyebrow-raising conclusion to a movie that came out about six months after the assassination of Martin Luther King.

I like this new direction The Family Circus is taking. "NOT ME!"

Apart from some scenes of entrail consumption and gratuitous garden utensil violence, the original Night of the Living Dead would be considered moderate by today's horror movie standard. It doesn't entirely subscribe to the "less is more" philosophy demonstrated by The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but not unlike that film, it does sacrifice some outright shock value for an atmosphere of suspense, desperation and survival. Some filmmakers rely on atmosphere when big-budget special effects are a luxury they can't afford, and Romero does a good job establishing atmosphere here. No jump scares, no on-camera dismemberment, no buckets of blood pouring out of some guy's arm-stump, just good old fashioned feelings of entrapment and claustrophobia.

Something also should be said for the film's progressiveness. As I emphasized earlier, this movie came out at a time of heavy racial tension in America, so it was pretty unheard of for someone to cast an African-American actor as the male lead, let alone as the most competent character in the entire cast. Compare that to most horror movies these days, where the black guy is a token character who gets killed off first.

Night of the Living Dead isn't recommended for anyone who enjoys horror movies with more blood spatter, but is definitely required viewing for classic horror buffs and zombie fans in particular.

Is that gluten-free?

Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

Greetings, my friends. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friends--future events such as these will affect you in the future.

There are bad movies, and then there are bad movies.

Some movies are made with the sole intent to cause physical and mental pain to its audience. Some movies are made by directors and film crews with very dim outlooks on life and very low opinions of humanity. Some movies are torturous to sit through in ways that violate the Geneva Conventions. Some movies exist only to insult your intelligence, diminish your sanity, and suck your very will to live.

Then there is that special kind of bad movie, the "so bad it's good" type of turkey. It's the unnatural phenomenon where a film is just so inept, so terrible, so incompetent on every imaginable level that it somehow transcends all logic and criticism and actually becomes quite entertaining. They're been called guilty pleasures, unintentional comedies, and have sometimes been considered art films. People not only love them, but make them cult classics and recommend them to friends.

You know which ones I'm talking about. Snakes on a Plane. The Room. Reefer Madness. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Every movie Troma Films has ever made.

And this week, we're looking at the granddaddy of them all...

Who better to school us all in how not to make a movie than the grand cheese master himself, Edward D. Wood, Jr., writer, producer, director, known transvestite, lover of angora sweaters, and the self-proclaimed master of "suspension of disbelief"? A man who loved movies and loved making movies, even though he wasn't very good at it. An icon of overzealous half-assery who combined the acting talents (or lack thereof) of horror legends Vampira, Tor Johnson, even the great Bela Lugosi (sort of), put together shoddy reusable sets complete with identical shower curtains, banged out a script in no less than five minutes tops, dressed half the cast in shiny bathrobes, and then blindly chucked the footage in the editor's face with the words "go nuts", and STILL came up with a film that is less than the sum of its parts.

Crackpot psychic The Amazing Criswell opens the film by talking (or reading off cue cards) about the future, where you and I will spend the rest of our lives, and where future events such as these will affect us. He then goes on to talk about "what happened on that fateful day" and then confuses us further about punishing the guilty and rewarding the innocent before finally settling on "GRAVE ROBBERS FROM OUTER SPACE!"

Up in the skies, two men pretending to be airline pilots while sitting in a mostly empty room on boxes are freaked out by a shot of a hubcap hanging from a string.

Meanwhile, following a funeral service for the wife of an elderly gentleman, two gravediggers are burying the coffin when they are suddenly attacked by the very woman they were just burying.

Grief-stricken and despondent, the widower sadly leaves the house they had shared for so many years and walks a lonely, lonely path...into oncoming traffic.

And at HIS funeral, little do his mourners know that as they walk out of the world's smallest mausoleum wondering why his wife isn't entombed in there with him, HER CORPSE IS WATCHING THEM.

And it just gets better from here.

"The incidents, the places, the future...where the hell am I going with this?"

That evening, one of the pilots, a man named Jeff Trent, tells his wife Paula about the flying saucer he saw, saying it looked like a giant cigar (a giant hubcap-shaped cigar, I'm sure) and after he radioed it in, the topmost army personnel were upon him as soon as they landed and made him and the co-pilot swear to secrecy. He can't even admit he saw the thing (even though he just did). Suddenly a bright flash and a huge gust of wind knocks them both backward as a spacecraft has just landed in a cemetery conveniently next to the house, and just as conveniently where those two gravediggers were killed.

As the wind knocks the police around flimsy grave markers, one Inspector Clay (Johnson), who had gone off on his own with a flashlight, encounters Lugosi (or was it the director's wife's chiropractor? I can't be sure) and Vampira and is promptly murdered. ("And somebody's responsible!")

Soon after, Hollywood and Washington, DC are visited by similar sightings of hubcaps wobbling about on strings ("Visits? That would indicate visitors!") and the army's only solution is to shoot off pop caps at them. (How hard is it to hit them? They're just dangling up there.) As the army men ponder just what it is they're shooting at and what it is they're covering up, the aliens return to their space station and set about implementing "Plan 9", which is the regeneration of the newly deceased through stimulation of the pineal and pituitary glands in hopes of gaining the people of Earth's attention.

Plan 8 involved the saucers flying low over major cities with the aliens leaning out the windows waving and yelling "Hey! Look over here!"

Well, as Trent leaves to play pretend airplane pilot again, Paula is left all alone to touch his pillows in her sleep (make of that what you will) when Lugosi/Chiropractor Vampire Guy comes into her bedroom for some reason and chases her out of the house and into the cemetery, where he, Vampira and now the newly resurrected Inspector Clay wander around aimlessly while the girl runs around screaming. Shots alternate between soundstage and outdoor film, actors run across the same part of the cemetery several times over and the time of day changes completely at random until Paula is finally carried off the movie by a passing motorist. The dead reconvene at a waiting space vessel which takes off just as the cops arrive.

Wait, the detective and the dead wife come back as zombies, but the old man comes back as a vampire? How does that work?

Yeah, if I had to wear that, I'd want to choke myself, too.

Meanwhile, at the Pentagon, Colonel Thomas Edwards, Chief of Saucer Operations (as if there were such a position in in the Army, at least to my knowledge) is briefed by a chain-smoking general about the radio signals the aliens have been sending them all this time, and then plays him one which they have translated via their new "language computer." The speaker identifies himself as Eros, a soldier from some unnamed planet within the galaxy who describes his race as advanced eons beyond humans, calls they "stupid" for thinking they were alone in the universe, states that they have come to save their planet from their "ancient, juvenile minds" who keep devising new ways to blow themselves up, and states that the Earth's big guns scare them and that humankind will be destroyed if they refuse to acknowledge their existence.

Not one for diplomacy, are we?

When did Ann Coulter get a dye job? And when did Glenn Beck shave his head?

Edwards is sent to California to speak with the Trents when the aliens come back, send their vampire to attack them and then promptly vaporize him with their Decomposing Ray.

You know, I'm beginning to think these cries for attention are signs of a deeper psychological problem.

A trip back into the cemetery to see where this ray came from sees Monster Clay kidnap Trent's wife and Eros invite them inside their spaceship so they can show them that they're holding Trent's wife captive. He then goes on to reiterate that they are on a mission of peace by admonishing them for their primitive wars, calling them "idiots" with "stupid minds" who will just keep killing each other, and states that mankind must be obliterated before they stumble upon a new type of explosive--a "Solaranite" bomb which would harness molecules of sunlight or whatever as an explosive that would set off a chain reaction and destroy the universe.

Oh, nice use of tact, Eros. The aliens from Independence Day have better people skills.

"You're all big jerks who are stupid and your big ugly faces are as dumb as a butt!"

Anyway, police reinforcements arrive to incapacitate Clay with a stick to the back of his head and save Trent's wife, a fight breaks out on the spacecraft between Trent and Eros that destroys Eros' ham radio equipment and sets off a fire, Trent and the army guys escape just as the flaming ship takes off and explodes in midair, and the remaining zombie creatures instantly decompose where they stand.

Then Criswell comes back daring us to prove that what we just saw didn't happen (we can) and warns us that people whom we don't even know have passed us by in the street may be from outer space, and mentions something about laughing at vitamins and television and outer space before ending with "God help us in the future," not telling us what any of this even has to do with the future.

"YOUR mind's stupider!"
"Nuh-uh, YOUR mind's stupider!"
"YOUR mind's stupider times ten!"
"YOUR mind's stupider times a hundred!"
"YOURS time a thousand!"
"YOURS times INFINITY!!"

Plan 9 from Outer Space is a quandary among bad movies. Is it a bad movie? Undoubtedly. Did it look like they only had a special effects budget of twenty dollars (adjusted for inflation)? Absolutely. Does the plot make as much sense as a 27-dollar bill? Of course. Could a hyperactive six-year-old have written better dialogue? Again, the answer is yes.

Is it the worst movie ever made, however? Surprisingly no.

There ARE bad movies out there. Movies that make you cringe, movies that make you hurt, movies that make you want to find the nearest bridge and jump off it. I've done a few on this blog already--Supergirl, Volcano, The Giant Spider Invasion, and maybe some others I can't name off the top of my head. To list Plan 9 from Outer Space among those titles just seems...wrong.

Don't get me wrong; it is NOT a good movie. It tries hard to tell a suspenseful science fiction story and fails spectacularly in every category. But I'm certain there isn't a director alive who goes into any movie project with the sole intent of making an absolute stinkburger. Sometimes watching these cinematic failures are like staring at a train wreck. You can't look away. And over the years people continue to not look away at epic fails like these. And they keep telling other movie buffs to not look away. And eventually they gain legions of fans, attract new generations of film lovers and develop a cult following, and nobody ever looks away.

I guess my point is...the worst movie ever made is NOT the worst movie ever made.

"A MOVIE THAT IS SO GOOD I WAS HAPPY TO DIE FOR IT!" --Bela Lugosi

Carnival of Souls (1962)

Oldfather Studios, former home of the Centron Corporation.

In 1947, University of Kansas alumni Russell Mosser and Arthur Wolf founded the Centron Corporation, a small Midwestern movie studio which specialized in making hygiene films that they used to show in classrooms to get kids to brush their teeth, keep clean and neat and avoid the dangers of communism. Based in my hometown of Lawrence, Kansas, Centron shot their films at various locations around town, particularly Lawrence High School, and employed local scriptwriters, technical crews and over 3,000 residents, many of whom were children, as actors. Throughout its history, Centron produced these kitschy, conformist educational shorts as well as some industrial safety films for John Deere, Caterpillar and General Electric.

It's been more than twenty years since Centron closed its doors for good. Their old building, constructed in 1955 and pictured above, is now the main facility of the KU film and media department, while their legacy is forever preserved in the Prelinger Archives and old episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

As well as one of the best-known public domain horror films of all time.

Herk Harvey, another KU graduate, was hired by Centron and directed over 400 of their instructional films. While coming home from a location shoot in California, he came across an abandoned amusement park near Salt Lake City, and the desolation and spooky atmosphere was so enchanting that it inspired him to make a movie about it. And so he brought in Centron scriptwriter John Clifford to come up with a movie script, hired an unknown actress named Candace Hilligoss, and used various locations in and around Lawrence (as well as a few in Salt Lake City) with Lawrence-based actors and a Lawrence-based crew, shooting it all in five weeks' time and on a $30,000 budget.

And so we have Carnival of Souls, a horror classic that barely made a whisper in theaters on its first release, but thanks to a successful run on the late-night TV circuit gained a tremendous cult following and inspired the likes of David Lynch and fellow public domain movie icon George A. Romero.

Nowadays the students throw the GOALPOSTS in Potter Lake after winning football games.
Of course, we've also stopped winning football games.

So the film starts out with something you usually see in movies from this era: a hot rod drag race. Two guys randomly pull up next to three women in a car and challenge them, and the women quickly accept. The two vehicles race out of town, through some country roads and finally to a bridge, where for some reason the car with the three women in it suddenly swerves over the side and falls into the river beneath.

That's the Kaw Bridge in north Lawrence they've driven off, incidentally. Though since then it's been replaced by one made of concrete.

As local law enforcement try and fish the car out of the river for three hours with no luck, a survivor named Mary Henry (Hilligoss) emerges out of the water with no memory of how she escaped or what happened to the other two women.

Some time later, Mary decides to move on with her life and take a job as a church organist in Utah, after stopping off at Lawrence's downtown pipe organ factory (since relocated to the northeast part of town) to try one out. She settles in at a boarding house run by a nice old lady and meets her lecherous next door neighbor, and then introduces herself to the minister of her new church (the Trinity Episcopal Church in Lawrence, in fact, at least in the exterior shot).

If he starts saying "giggity-giggity", I'm leaving.

Along the way, strange things starts happening. On her way out of town Mary starts picking up strange organ music on every station on the radio, and then starts seeing a ghostly white-faced man (producer/director Harvey in makeup and a suit) in her windows which causes her to run her car off the road. This man starts appearing in front of her in random places at various times of the day--in mirrors, in windows, at the foot of the stairs of her boarding house, you name it.

Meanwhile, she takes a peculiar interest in an abandoned pavilion out in the middle of nowhere. The minister explains that the building used to be a bathhouse, then a dance hall, and was finally used as carnival grounds before it closed down.

"HEY! YOUR RIGHT FRONT TIRE'S A LITTLE LOW!"

Then one morning during a shopping trip (probably at Weaver's, the department store in downtown Lawrence), a ripple effect in the dressing room renders her invisible to the rest of the world for a few minutes, coupled by an unbearable silence and yet another sighting of the mysterious ghost-faced man. By sheer coincidence she becomes visible again at just the right moment to run panicking into the arms of one Dr. Samuels, a professor of sorts who offers to help her with her strange condition.

Even though he mentions to her that he's not a psychiatrist.

Frankly I'd have gone to see someone who actually IS a psychiatrist. This guy could be any type of doctor.

"Well, I can't just call you 'Not-a-Psychiatrist' Samuels, or 'Dr. Samuels who is not a psychiatrist'!"

At this point you need to know something about Mary - in less polite conversation she would be thought of as a "wet blanket" or a "party pooper". She's very strong-willed, but doesn't always feel comfortable around other people, doesn't want a boyfriend, and isn't keen to join in on activities with others. She admits that she only took the organist job because it was just a job and has no interest in joining the church that is hiring her. She's also not interested in having a relationship with her lascivious neighbor, though that may be his fault more than hers.

The next day, while practicing the organ at the church, Mary goes into a trance and starts playing something particularly eerie while hallucinating about the old pavilion and the white-faced man standing in a dance hall surrounded by other white-faced people dancing. The minister overhears it, calls it "profane" and "sacrilegious", and asks her to resign, all the while worrying about her mortal soul and asking her to join his church.

Okay, THIS part was DEFINITELY filmed in Kansas. Maybe not Lawrence, but still...

Then she goes out with her neighbor to drink and dance...or NOT drink and NOT dance as she's just not into those kind of things. He eventually leaves, fed up with her when he tries to put the moves on her and she sees the white-faced man in the mirror and freaks out, despite her constant pleas for companionship.

On the plus side, there's no lines.

Driven to her wits' end and convinced she does not belong in this world, Mary finally decides to leave town, but not before stopping at a service station across the street from the masonic temple in downtown Lawrence (the masons have since moved and there's a contemporary-style church there now). When the white-faced man reappears as a shadow in a doorway she flees to a bus depot desperate to leave town, where another screen ripple makes her invisible again, and the only bus she gets on is full of eerie white-faced people who all get up out of their seats and move in her direction. Finally she returns to Dr. Samuels' office for help only to learn she's been speaking to the original white-faced man in the chair.

She turns out to have dreamed this.

No, the movie doesn't end there. Heaven forbid.

It ends when she drives out to the empty pavilion, where everything she saw during her freak-out at the church is waiting for her, including the white-face man dancing with a white-faced version of herself. Then they all start chasing her outside laughing and finally catch up to her when she inevitably trips and falls in that special way that movie heroines do...

The next day, the minister, doctor and the police observe her footprints outside the pavilion which end abruptly with no explanation.

Back in Lawrence, the police have finally pulled the car from the start of the film out of the water, with Mary's body inside.

"GRUUHUGHGHUGHH...EEEEEEVERYYYYYY MAAAAAAAN A WIIIIIIIILDCAAAAAAT..."

I'll agree with Herk Harvey on one thing - if there's anything that creeps me out more than Lawrence Welk reruns, it's wandering around in an empty amusement park. Nobody in the booths or running the registers at the gift shops, the roller-coasters and bumper cars totally motionless, no music, no babies crying, no guys earning minimum wage and college credit by walking around in hot, sweaty cartoon animal costumes...I could see why he chose one as the backdrop for a horror movie, particularly one as isolated and remote as Mary is from human society. I could easily tell there was a message in there about social withdrawal and lack of human interaction, though hopefully the creepy-looking monsters in the makeup will give her someone to finally talk to.

Atmosphere is one thing that Carnival of Souls does well, from the empty pavilion scenes to Mary's momentary lapses of existence. No special effects, no CGI, just an abandoned fairground, some makeup and a creepy organ soundtrack. If you enjoy a move that makes good use of atmosphere, you will most assuredly enjoy Carnival of Souls. It's one of those movies that proves that less is in fact more. My only gripe with it was that it drops us into the opening drag race too abruptly, and we don't get a lot of background on Mary apart from she doesn't always get on well with others.

It's a real shame this film is in the public domain, because had it done well in theaters, it might have put my town on the map. That is, if being a progressive college town in an infamously red state with a great arts and music scene and home to one of the best college basketball programs in the country wasn't enough. To be honest, I think the only other film that Lawrence is famous for is The Day After, which implies that there's actually a worthwhile reason to drop a nuclear bomb on Kansas.

Remember kids: brush your teeth, keep clean and neat, and communism is bad!

Carrie (1976)

Everybody's guessed
That baby can't be blessed
'Til she finally sees that she's like all the rest.
--one of Carrie's poems from the book

Does just walking through it make you want to kill yourself? Then it's a high school!
--Crow T. Robot

Wow, Halloween again already? Guess I should do another scary movie.

But which one? There's so many to choose from!

And those are just the ones in the based-on-the-novel-by-Stephen-King aisle!

Throughout his writing career, Stephen King has had his books turned into movies and TV specials more times than Alexandre Dumas, Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare COMBINED. The more you watch them, and the more of them you watch, the more you notice that many of them have certain things in common--most of them take place somewhere in Maine, there's a parental character who slowly goes insane if he hasn't already gone insane, sometimes there's a religious icon who is self-righteous to the point of having a possible serious mental condition, and usually there's a monster that is something out of a deep-seeded childhood trauma which shakes the protagonist even today, like Tim Curry's Pennywise the Clown from the It miniseries or the primitive-CG'ed Milk Duds of Doom from the TV adaptation of The Langoliers.

But Carrie was a little something extra special. It wasn't just King's first published novel to be turned into a movie--in 1976 by director and co-producer Brian de Palma, and the first of a great many, I'm sure--it was also his first published novel period, first printed in 1974. And while most of the other films you can take or leave, Carrie has since become a horror classic and a staple of pop culture and also spawned a sequel, a musical and almost a TV series. King himself has even said that it was one of the best adaptations of one of his novels ever made, and even prefers it to his original book.

I kinda wish he'd felt the same way about The Shining...

This is what you call "No Child Left Behind"?

Sissy Spacek stars as Carrie White, an ostracized high school student whom nobody understands. You know the type--the slow, mixed-up kids who fall off the beaten path and, well, just don't fit in. As shown in the opening scene where Carrie is showering after gym class and notices a bit of blood coming out of her you-know-where. Confused and horrified, she goes to the other girls for help and they respond by mocking her and throwing tampons and sanitary napkins at her while shouting "Plug it up! Plug it up! Plug it up!" Only after the gym teacher Miss Collins (Betty Buckley) breaks things up does she calm her down, but not before a light bulb breaks over the shower stall.

And then while at the principal's office where he dismisses her for the rest of the day, an ashtray flips off his desk and spills onto the floor when he gets her name wrong for the fourth or fifth time.

And then a kid on his bicycle crashes into nothing and falls over while riding past her and calling her names.

Of course, it's not Carrie's fault in the least. A good portion of the blame lies with Carrie's mother Margaret (Piper Laurie), known throughout the neighborhood as a religious fanatic who believes that the transformation of a young girl into an adult is not so much natural as just God punishing you for something really naughty you did. She responds to the news of Carrie's first period ("the curse of blood", as she calls it) by throwing her in a small closet full of grotesque Catholic imagery kicking and screaming. I shudder to think what she'd have done if she'd heard Carrie was a lesbian.

"Did you know that those hairs growing on your daughter's armpit is God's way of saying she will burn in Hell forever for her lustful ways?"

The next day, while Carrie is in the library looking up telekinesis, Miss Collins gives her students detention for yesterday's incident. One of her girls, an especially nasty feather-haired little...word I choose not to use named Chris Hargensen (Nancy Allen) storms off in a fit of rage, and in the midst of a night of teenage hanky panky with her boyfriend Billy Nolan (John Travolta in the Vinnie Barbarino, pre-Saturday Night Fever phase of his career), she is too upset with Carrie to think.

Another of Carrie's tormentors at the scene, a plain looking girl named Sue Snell (Amy Irving) has a change of heart about the whole thing and decides to make it up to Carrie by asking her intended prom date, the VERY permed Tommy Ross (William Katt) to take the poor girl out instead--

Hold on there. What do you think you're doing? Who do you think you are? Where were you the other day when everyone else was throwing tampons at her? Is kindness and thoughtfulness something you can make retroactive? Don't you think she has any feelings? You and your friends are the most thoughtless bunch I've ever known! You don't care anything about Carrie White! You just hate to feel guilty! And now you have the nerve to come around two days later and offer her a used prom date just to ease your conscience! Well, let me tell you something...Carrie White doesn't need your--

Hmph. Well at least Miss Collins agrees with me.

Her heart a-flutter with the thought of normalcy and against her mother's wishes (even after closing every window in the house with her telekinesis in protest), Carrie is off to the prom with Tommy. She's sewn her own prom dress ("I can see your dirty pillows", says her mother), she's had her hair done, she's got makeup and lipstick on, and her new-found self-confidence is firing on all cylinders. She's the proverbial ugly duckling transformed into the proverbial beautiful swan. And everybody loves it.

And as if the night couldn't get any better, her and Tommy's names are on the ballots for prom king and queen. Score.

Look at them with their hats and their sunglasses and their notebooks...SINNERS, THE LOT OF THEM!!
I bet they do it every night like rabbits with terminal diseases!

The votes are in--Tommy and Carrie are the king and queen of the prom! Feeling on top of the world, she escorts Tommy to the stage and recieves her tiara and roses, smiling and waving as everyone applauds. Truly it is the happiest moment of her young life.

And then a bucket of pig's blood is dropped upon her head while Tommy is knocked unconscious by the bucket.

It turns out this whole prom queen thing was a prank by Chris and Billy, who snuck into a swine farm, bludgeoned a pig, bled it into a bucket and snuck into the prom and rigged it above the stage, and they rigged the votes as well to get her up there just to epically humiliate her at her crowning moment of glory. Now whether or not the subsequent pointing and laughing is all in Carrie's head is up for debate (the ambiguity there is well established) but only one thought is running through her head: IT'S GOING DOWN.

Using her telekinetic powers, Carrie closes every door in the gymnasium never to open again, and then--

I really don't think it's necessary to tell you what happens next. I mean, if you were a high school outcast with telekinetic powers and someone had dumped a bucket of pig's blood on you at the apex of your short-lived popularity, what do you think you'd do? Besides, I'm guessing many of you have already seen this movie, or at least this part of the movie in some form or another, so you really don't need me going too much into detail about it.

I will say this though: NO SURVIVORS. Well, except for Sue, who sneaks in to check on Carrie and notices the bucket over the stage but is thrown out by Miss Collins before she can warn anybody about it.

And don't worry about Norma Watson (P.J. Soles), she only got a ruptured eardrum from the fire hose. She'll be back alongside Jamie Lee Curtis in John Carpenter's Halloween in a couple of years. Of course, she dies in that movie, too, but what do you want from me?

I really have nothing to say here, it's just that every review of this movie includes a picture like this.

Chris and Billy? Don't worry, they get theirs. After fleeing from the gym, they see Carrie in her blood-stained prom dress and in a momentary fit of homicidal glee try to run her down (oh yeah, another Stephen King movie staple, the irredeemable school bully who stoops as low as committing murder in the first degree), but she casually glances backwards and diverts their car, flipping it over several times before it explodes as cars normally do.

Carrie returns home to clean herself up when her mother comes in to comfort her...and then stabs her, now fully convinced that her daughter's new powers make her a witch. After a brief chase downstairs, Carrie fends her off by flinging kitchen utensils at her with her mind, literally crucifying her on her own kitchen doorway, and then while crying over her body, ducks into the closet while inadvertently bringing her entire house crashing down on top of her.

The final scene is of Sue Snell waking up screaming from a nightmare in which she walks in slow motion to put flowers on a makeshift grave for Carrie where her house once stood and is grabbed by a hand popping up from the ground.

Pretty sure they don't cover this in the Bible.

Stephen King based his novel Carrie on two girls he went to school with who were both in the same boat as its title character, and had written it as sort of "a reverse Cinderella story". The theme of teenage alienation translates well into the movie, aided by the performances of Spacek as Carrie, Laurie as Margaret, and...well, almost everyone else, I suppose. It's sort of a "who's the real monster" message type of film, but it isn't played like an after-school special--it feels real, and it has you pitying Carrie and her hard-knock life, and pays you off with the "prom night" climax that the film will have had you counting down to by the time it happens.

But...DAMN, IS IT 70'S! I don't think I've seen anything as 70's as this outside of Sid and Marty Krofft. The perms, the feathered hair, the tuxedo jackets, the music in the background during the gym class scene, that one kid with the Elton John hat during the getting-ready-for-the-prom montage...the story is timeless, but I can't think of anything else about this movie that is as well. However, this can only be attributed to the passage of time and is just a minor complaint towards otherwise prerequisite viewing for anyone who loves horror.

Or anyone who loves stories about bullied schoolkids getting revenge. Those are always good.

And to think she was almost Princess Leia...

Braindead (a.k.a. Dead Alive) (1992)

Story goes, these great big rats come scuttling off the slave ships and raped all the little tree monkeys. The natives use them in black magic rituals. Don't ask me how, probably suck the blood of virgins, eh, eh?

Peter Jackson. You know him as the director of the Lord of the Rings movies (plus the upcoming prequel), as well as the 2005 remake of King Kong with Jack Black, all of which won him (or probably will win him) a ridiculous amount of Oscars.
This week, however, we look at something from very early in his career, back when he was in his New Zealand homeland making movies about zombies, fast-food franchising aliens and perverted puppets.

...we'll just be focusing on the zombies.

Namely his 1992 feature Braindead (retitled Dead Alive in the States after a Bill Pullman movie with the title Braindead came out two years earlier). Many have called this the grossest movie ever made, and for good reason--300 liters of movie blood were used to film its climax, or about seventy-nine gallons if you prefer, at one particular point squirting out at five gallons per second, earning it the title of bloodiest zombie movie in motion picture history. It is so grotesque that video rental stores in Sweden and possibly other countries sold it with complementary barf bags. For the squeamish, I will describe this movie as best to within the standards I maintain for this blog as possible, so just try to keep your dinner in the right place and this will go smoothly.

Our story begins in a potential tourist destination named Skull Island (a location which fans of his King Kong remake might recognize) just west of Sumatra in the year 1957. An explorer and his guide are carrying a rare breed of monkey in a cage whilst being chased by angry natives with spears who would very much like it back. They manage to make it to their jeep and get away, but not before the explorer gets his hand bitten by the monkey in question. One of his men mentions in horror that he has "the bite" and they pull over so they can chop off his hand before a supposed infection spreads through his systems. When bite marks start showing up all over his body, they start amputating some more and they've only just gotten to his head when the movie gives us its title card to stop this going on too long.

Next we meet our two protagonists: Paquita (Diana Peñalver), a romantically-minded Latin American immigrant girl who helps runs her family's convenience store and has a grandmother who is obsessed with the occult, and Lionel (Timothy Balme), a mild-mannered, somewhat clumsy mama's boy who lost his father at a very young age and lives in what I swear is the house from Psycho with his bossy matriarch Vera (Elizabeth Moody). Right away the movie tells us that Paquita and Lionel will end up together thanks to a sign denoted by Paquita's grandmother spelled out for the young girl when Lionel drops by the store and spills some stuff on the counter.

Lionel inadvertently talks himself into going out to the zoo with her, and the two of them have a lovely time until we get to the monkey cages. You see, the monkey we saw the explorer and his men run off with in the start of the film is the rare stop-motion animated Sumatran rat monkey (Simian raticus), a raging beast which the residents of Skull Island used for black magic rituals and sacrifices and other things that people dressed like the African kids from Santa's workshop are believed to do. Regrettably, nobody told Vera, who right off the bat does not approve of the new woman in her son's life and had been following them all over the zoo when she slips backwards onto the rat monkey's cage and gets bitten. After literally and quite graphically squashing the little devil's brains out with the high heel of her shoe in front of disgusted onlookers, she orders Lionel to take her home post haste.

The Sumatran rat monkey has been known to inhabit mountainous jungles as well as Coraline's sickest nightmares.

The next morning, representatives from the Wellington Ladies' Welfare League come by to visit, and despite the fact that her bite wound has started oozing pus and the skin on her face has started to peel off, Vera is insistent to get out of bed and impress them. The four of them sit down to a meal which immediately turns south when she starts decomposing in the after-dinner custard. After they leave none the wiser, Paquita stops by with her dog Fernando, who wanders around upstairs until Vera devours him. Shortly after Paquita calls a nurse, Vera finally dies in her son's arms...and then attacks and kills the nurse. Then they both attack Lionel, who finally locks the two of them in the basement. While Lionel sees Paquita's grandmother about the "dark forces" which surrounds him and receives a moon-star charm necklace for his protection, Vera makes a garish spectacle of herself by breaking out of the basement, getting hit by a trolley and smashing through Paquita's store window.

After an attempt to calm his mother's corpse down with some sedatives he bought from a shady veterinarian brings a very awkward close to the funeral scene, Lionel tries to dig up his mother's grave for another precautionary injection when some thugs arrive to beat the crap out of him and urinate on her grave site. Just then, Vera bursts out of the ground and mutilates the lot of them. The priest at Vera's funeral who suddenly turns out to be very proficient in kung fu ("I kick arse for the Lord!") comes to Lionel's aid, but sadly his action scene doesn't last very long as he too is bitten and then impaled onto a tombstone.

By the way, during the funeral we meet Lionel's uncle Les (Ian Watson) who immediately sets himself up as a slimeball by dressing in a gaudy flannel shirt and hairpiece, lasciviously chatting up Paquita and grinning devilishly when someone mentions an inheritance Vera left for her son.

So nice having everyone over for dinner.

Lionel winds up as unwilling caretaker for his new zombie family, which brands him as a weirdo all over town and has put a major strain on his and Paquita's new relationship. At one point the zombie priest and zombie nurse fall in love and bring a bouncing baby zombie into the world, which Lionel takes to the park in a darkly funny scene which has him beating the undead child senseless in broad daylight to calm its homicidal urges. As if he didn't have enough to deal with, Uncle Les has uncovered his little secret while he was gone and greedily uses it to blackmail Lionel out of Vera's house and inheritance.

That evening, Les throws a housewarming party with several dozens of his drunken friends to celebrate his new ill-gotten gains. Paquita just happens to walk by with her talkative soccer-playing boyfriend when she ditches him to see what's going on, and after kicking a horny Les in his tender area she retreats to the basement and discovers Lionel's zombie problem. Rather than running out of the house and moving to another hemisphere, she takes pity on poor overburdened Lionel (death, as her grandmother said, quite literally surrounding him) and even helps him properly bury his undead house guests. I'd say she's a keeper.

"It's not the fact that you obviously have people who have been turned into zombies tied to chairs in your basement.
It's the fact that you LIED about it."

No sooner do they make it back upstairs when Les reappears, locks Lionel back in the basement for the crime of standing up for his girl and carries Paquita off to be raped. Luckily Les doesn't get very far with his new-found sex toy because after it is revealed that the sedative Lionel had been using turned out to be an animal stimulant which only makes them more ravenous, the zombies break out of the basement and in an epic climax to end all epic climaxes turn the party into an all-you-can-eat buffet. Paquita and several survivors hole up in the kitchen as Les tries to run away and is chased back inside. Lionel ends up in the attic, where his moon-star charm thingie starts moving on its own and points to a old trunk where he finds some old photographs. Oh yeah, and a skeletonized corpse.

Give this movie credit, it comes up with a lot of imaginative, over-the-top ways for the characters to fight off this zombie incursion, each with very gory effects. A zombie is impaled on a light fixture and her head lights up like a jack-o'-lantern. Uncle Les chops up the walking dead with cooking knives like a chef at a Japanese steakhouse. Paquita purees the ghouls piece by piece with a blender, and then starts fending them off with another zombie's legs. And let's not forget the film's most iconic moment where Lionel slices up zombies left and right with a rotary blade lawnmower, blood spraying and limbs flying all over the place in cartoon fashion.

At the end, everybody in the house has stopped moving except for Lionel, Paquita and Vera, who has now grown into this giant bulbous monster. She chases them up to the roof, where Lionel confronts the she-demon (now by appearance as well as personality) and reveals that it was she who killed his father and a blond mistress he was having an affair with at the time before she ingests him into her belly. She is just about to take out Paquita as well when in some strange Freudian analogy he bursts back out again and rescues his lady friend as Vera falls through the roof into his now flaming house and the fire brigade arrive. Lionel and Paquita share a kiss and walk off together in that oh-so-lovely happily ever after fashion.

Groovy.

Remember back in my Texas Chain Saw Massacre review when I said you didn't need excessive blood and guts to generate shock value? I didn't necessarily say that there shouldn't be exceptions to this rule. The gory make-up effects fit well into what is essentially two parts horror movie and one part comedy, reinforced by its over-the-top cast of characters and kinetic cinematography with shaky camera shots and extreme closeups. Lionel's plight makes for an interesting deviation from the standard zombie plot as well, trying to keep his zombies under wraps in his basement while every other zombie movie character normally wants to keep them out.

Plus I kinda had redneck axe murderers and suspense movie serial killers more in mind when I said all that stuff.

I can recommended Braindead (or Dead Alive, wherever you are) to zombie film buffs who have a strong constitution. As far as movies about the undead go, this one is a milestone--record-smashing special effects, an original plot for its genre, and particularly the zombie massacre in a finale that would make Bruce Campbell proud. If you have a spare 85 to 104 minutes, depending on which country you live in, you love a good splatterfest and you can look at things like partially digested dogs without feeling sick, dig up a copy of this movie and make a night of it.

The rest of you might want to watch something more easy on your stomach. I recommend Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.

A boy's best friend is his mother.