drfreex.com

B: Blood of Ghastly Horror (1973)

I think we all know there is a movie called Blood of Ghastly Horror. We saw the video cases, the ad mats in genre magazines. And somehow I had passed it up all these years. Let me emphasize that: I used to run a movie review site called The Bad Movie Report and I had spent my entire life not watching something called Blood of Ghastly Horror.

Well, I’ve taken care of that. Go me.

Ahem.

Blood of Ghastly Horror opens with the murder spree of a disfigured green-faced guy who goes around crushing people, racking up five kills in a few minutes, and two of them are cops. (Budget-minded viewers will note that the cops all drive the same car, and they all park in the same alley for the entire movie) Homicide detective Cross (Tommy Kirk!) is on the job, especially after he is delivered a box containing the head of one of the dead cops. A note enclosed with the head leads him to opening an old case file about a killer named Corey (Roy Morton), and so begins our first flashback to another movie entirely.

Let’s see if we can manage better detective work than Cross in untangling this Gordian Knot of a movie. This flashback is excerpted from Adamson’s first movie, Echo of Terror, which is actually a pretty decent low-budget suspense flick about a failed jewel heist. An unwitting everyman (Kirk Duncan) gets involved when a doctor’s bag (did I mention the robbers are dressed as surgeons in full gear? Walking around an office building?) containing the jewels is hurriedly dropped in the back of his pickup truck when the heist goes sour. His daughter finds the bag and hides the jewels in her doll, which would charitably be called a Golliwog by our British readers. Thus supplied with a MacGuffin, she leaves for a tour with her nightclub star mother, supplying us with the basis for the rest of that movie.

In order to make this movie more commercial, Director Al Adamson and Producer Sam Sherman added go-go dancing and more murder for a version called Psycho A-Go-Go. Corey was already a sadist in Echo, but here blossoms into full-bore psychopathy. Now, one of the jewel robbers (played by Adamson himself) got killed in the heist (by Corey), and the cops find his fingerprints all over Adamson’s apartment – but Corey was declared dead two years before! The investigation leads to Dr. Howard Vanard (John Carradine!), who signed the death certificate. Vanard will eventually confess that Corey was one of the first casualties of Vietnam, so brain-damaged he was doomed to life as a vegetable – until Vanard installed a device in his brain that would take over from the damaged parts. The result: Corey was functional again, but was also a psycho.

*My father wore this helmet to work for years.*

We are, incidentally, into yet another movie, The Fiend with the Synthetic Brain, an effort to turn Psycho A-Go-Go into a science fiction movie, as the go-go dancing fad was over by the time that version was finished. It also means that Vanard engages in a flashback-within-a-flashback, which I believe is illegal by international law.

Meanwhile, back in Blood of Ghastly Horror Vanard’s estranged daughter Nancy (Regina Carroll!) shows up because she’s been receiving bizarre psychic messages to come to the city. This because Corey’s father Dr. Elton Corey (Kent Taylor!) who spent many years in Jamaica studying voodoo, is the one using the green-faced zombie (Richard Smedley) to kill everyone involved in his son’s decline and eventual death. Dr. Corey will then take us through the remainder of Psycho A-Go-Go (with a brief sidetrip to The Fiend with the Synthetic Brain for Corey the Younger to kill Carradine). Then damn near everybody dies and Tommy Kirk arrives too late, as usual. The end.

The major reason to watch/survive a movie like Blood of Ghastly Horror (besides the fact that it’s named Blood of Ghastly Horror) is to pick out the various sources, which is how I’ve survived a number of Godfrey Ho ninja stitch jobs. This is made infinitely easier here due to the fact that Psycho A-Go-Go was shot by the recently-immigrated Vilmos Zsigmond and looks gorgeous, especially those final chase scenes in mountainous wilderness. You can’t really say those sequences stand out like a sore thumb, it’s more like they stick out like a healthy thumb on a diseased hand.

I’d say that Blood of Ghastly Horror‘s value – if it truly has any – is educational as concerns the actual movie business. Unable to find distribution for a low-budget crime film with no bankable stars, it was turned into a more violent, sexy film, then a science fiction movie, then a bare-bones horror flick. It’s a fascinating process to watch, but ugly.

October 7, 2021
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: al adamson, hubrisween, john carradine . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

A: Assignment Terror (1970)

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: aliens from a dying world plan to invade the Earth, and decide to start raising the dead to conquer our supposedly inferior race. Except this time the dead being raised are classic monsters, and the aliens are once again represented by Michael Rennie, in his last film role as “Doctor Warnoff”.

To aid him, Warnoff has two more of his alien pals inhabiting recently dead Earthers who have skills he requires: Maleva (Karin Dor), a biochemist, and Kerian (Angel del Pozzo), a soldier. It took me two viewings to figure out that particular part of the plot, thinking during the first runthrough that his two henchmen were simply raised from the dead. And, eventually that Warnoff himself is seemingly an alien in a Earth suit. I think.

This is not the least confusing part of the plot, either.

Warnoff starts off by pulling the wooden stake out of the skeleton of Count Janos (Manuel de Blas), a nod to the classic Universal monster mashes of the 40s, specifically House of Frankenstein. There will be enough of these nods to wear out your neck gimbal as the movie progresses. Warnoff’s plan is to infect humanity with vampire blood, which, like a lot of Warnoff’s plans, will not come to anything. Count Janos will occasionally wander around unsupervised and cause problems.

Next up, and the real reason we are all here, is the infamous lycanthrope Waldemar Daninsky (Paul Naschy), whom they revivify by surgically removing the silver bullets from his still-beating heart (real open heart surgery footage – the 70s, everybody!), while Warnoff explains that the idiots back in Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror did it wrong, and helpfully informing the aide who will eventually betray him the proper way to go about killing a werewolf.

Oh yeah, that’s right: Warnoff is kidnapping local women and brainwashing them with his Super Annoying Sound Machine^TM. This sort of thing brings the attention of the police in the person of Inspector Toberman (Craig Hill), who seems to be the sole person in the employ of the Commissioner… no, wait, there’s a guy who brings in a file folder. So Toberman is the other cop in whatever strange land this takes place. As is traditional in these flicks, the Police are a hapless lot.

While Toberman meanders through his investigation, Warnoff also racks up a living mummy (George Reyes) and the Monster of um, Farancksalan. Naturally, all these personages will gather at the local creepy castle owned by Warnoff, so there will be more unrealized plans and more importantly, inter-monster carnage, while the Commissioner shows up with the Army just in time to see the castle blow up.

This is actually Paul Naschy’s second outing as Daninsky (it was supposed to be his third, but a French co-production never happened). Assignment Terror exists mainly because his first, Las Noches del Hombre Loco, was an enormous hit. Promised a healthy budget, Naschy (under his given name of Jacinto Molina) wrote a script that drew heavily on his love of the Classic Universal monsters (Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man being a particular favorite of his). Then the budget did not materialize, a whole lot of plot got dropped (including the Golem of Prague and some flying saucers), production stopped several times, and there were at least three directors involved over time.

Naschy himself was not very kind to the flick, being especially disappointed in the makeup effects by Francisco Ferrer. Given that Assignment Terror bends over backwards to avoid any possible legal problems with Universal (Farancksalan? Really?), I was surprised to see that the makeup for the Farancksalan Monster is a direct quote of Universal’s, kind of like a comic book simplification. Though I also note that it looks like the Monster is blind, only directed by Warnoff’s psychic guidance, which continues a thread from Ghost of Frankenstein on through Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.

I mean, you remember that, right? Ygor had his brain put in the Monster’s body, but the blood types didn’t match, so he went blind? And the Monster was still blind in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man? Naschy sure did. How the hell Naschy managed to become such a serious Monster Kid in Franco’s repressive Spain is probably a fascinating story.

This really is a confusing jumble of a movie (small wonder). The timeline is twisted, unknowable, and extremely elastic. Although we see the beginning of his plan, Warnoff will later take credit for actually creating the monsters over thousands of years. Which is a really long time to figure out that human emotions will eventually resurface in the aliens occupying Earthly bodies, causing Plan 10 from Outer Space to ultimately fail. Warnoff’s terrible management skills must also take some of the blame.

Assignment Terror is surprisingly restrained for a Naschy script – this could have easily been shown as part of a monster double or triple feature where all the movies were rated PG at most – I could really imagine it on a bill with The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant and Twilight People. There is little blood, no sex (Count Janos will paw Maleva’s boob, in a bit that could have been easily cut)… it’s all pretty mild stuff. And yet, because of the heavy nostalgia riffs, I found myself quite enjoying it. There are several instances of lovely, moody cinematography, particularly when a tomb is involved, which is at least three times.

Despite its shortcomings – and there are many – it’s just so darned eager to please. I can see Naschy cackling because Universal never got the Mummy into their monster mash movies, and he was going to rectify that matter! And he got to do his Farancksalan vs the Wolf Man fight. That’s not nothing.

October 6, 2021
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: hubrisween, paul naschy . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Happy Semi-Hubrisween to You

Oh. Hello. Yes, I’m still alive. Caught COVID from a vaccine-hesitant co-worker, but that’s over and, yes, I still live. Thank you vaccines. (I was amused that one of the reactions to my positive test was “Think of all the movies you can watch while you’re down!” This from a person who didn’t realize how exactly down the virus puts you)

I’ve got at least four drafts still loitering around about my absence from this page and why. Suffice to say that anxiety and depression, the usual culprits, are to blame, and the continuous dumpster fire of Current Events did nothing to alleviate that. Days were spent working, evenings were spent playing the newly-resurrected City of Heroes with friends, which offered escapism, stress relief and companionship during lockdown.

Most of my friends are still actors, even though I counted myself out of that game long ago. My main CoH buddy opened a show a couple of weeks ago, and that, along with the rehearsal period, put me at liberty most evenings, so I eased back into the Old Ways, the watching of movies, that had narrowed down to once a week – my usual Friday night brain-cleaning binge.

You know, I thought, this would be a good time to get back into the blogging game. Hey, Hubrisween is next month! Never mind that this was in September, and when I did Hubrisween in previous years, I started banking the reviews in July. Hell, I reasoned, if I can get halfway through the alphabet – to the letter M – by the end of September, this was doable.

And right there is the Hubris part of Hubrisween.

The real world intruded, as it is wont to do. I’m facing the busiest two week span I’ve had in a long time, and am stealing time to rap out this apology/reintroduction piece (In fact, as this goes live, I’m working on a live remote). I got through the letter H and stalled out, because once more, in my usual lump-headed fashion, I had found a way to make watching movies a job, a chore. That shouldn’t be work, that should be a joy.

So I realized a full return to the event was not in the cards.

But those first eight reviews are already scheduled, so enjoy. Maybe more will come. Hope springs eternal, yes?

October 5, 2021
Categories: Mindless Blather . Tags: hubrisween . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment

I Did Actually Watch Some Stuff…

Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

As expected, a movie about a relentless killing machine punched right through my can’t-focus-on-anything anxieties. This is another franchise flick that decided to ignore every movie made since the second iteration (the other being 2018’s Halloween, which I should get to one of these days), an approach which pays off nicely. Being directed by Tim Miller, who helmed Deadpool, is also a very definite plus.

It turns out that the events of Terminator 2 did actually prevent the genocidal rise of Skynet, but now a different machine overlord from a different future is still sending back new terminators (in this case, Gabriel Luna) for a new target (Natalia Reyes). The good guys have sent back an enhanced human (Mackenzie Davis) to protect the target, but she’s still somewhat overmatched, so it’s up to Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton, making one hell of an entrance) to lend a hand and lots of bullets.

The new Terminator has an interesting double form that builds on former versions in the franchise. And speaking of former versions, Arnold Schwarzenegger is on hand as a former T-800 abandoned by a future that no longer exists; he’s had to build a life as a human, and even learned to experience an emulation of love. He’s also got some of the best lines.

I was “eh” on the other sequels, but Dark Fate serves as a nice trilogy endpiece with the first two, even if every other line seems to be “He’s coming!” or “We can’t stay here.” I would really like this to be the last Terminator movie, but we know how rarely the Suits of Hollywood listen to my wishes.

Coma (2019)

It seems like a million years ago that I first saw a trailer for the Russian Coma and thought “Wow, that looks really interesting” and then spent the next thousand or so years wondering whatever became of it. Well, Dark Sky Films bought the rights and now I finally get to scratch that particular itch.

Visually the movie is amazing, and the first twenty minutes or so are trippy as hell, as a man (Rinal Mukhametov) wakes up in a strange world that seems to be building itself as he walks through it He is attacked by a large creature that seems to be made of billowing black liquid, and rescued by the usual ragtag bunch of post-apocalyptic soldier types.

What he (and we) will eventually find out is that he is in a coma, and this strange world is a level of reality where everyone in a coma finds themselves. The world is made up of loose memories made concrete (everyone arrives with convenient amnesia), and the black creatures, called “reapers” are manifested by brain-dead patients on life support. It also seems that certain of the people in this “Comaspace” can manifest some super power; our hero was apparently an architect in real life, and can create structures out of nothing simply by concentrating.

So what we have here is a sort of sideways Matrix crossed with Dawn of the Dead, as if you are wounded by a Reaper, you will eventually turn into one. As I mentioned, the visuals are stunning, and though I still have a few questions about the mechanics of Comaspace, I can still heartily recommend this.

Bacurau (2019)

It’s always nice when a universally-praised movie actually deserves that praise. Bacurau is one of those movies that needs to be experienced tabula rasa, so I won’t be going into much detail here.

The title is the name of a remote village in Brazil, the time is the very near future. Teresa (Barbera Colen) is an expatriate returning to the village with much-needed medicine. Her main reason, though, is the death of her aunt, who was the matriarch of the village. Bacurau has other problems, too – some megacorporation has shut off their water supply, and one day their village simply disappears from satellite maps. Then, there’s that flying saucer floating around…

Though Teresa is a continuing presence through the movie, this is a wonderful ensemble piece, as Bacurau tries to figure out what is happening, and each new revelation leads to something dark and violent. By the time Udo Kier shows up and you can say, ah, there’s the problem, several people are dead and there promises to be many, many more.

Good stuff.

August 7, 2020
Categories: Movies That Do Not Suck . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 3 Comments

Love in the Time of Everything Sucking

Yeah, I woke up this morning thinking of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Who doesn’t?

It’s been pointed out that I’ve been gone a while. That’s happened before, of course. I have great admiration for bloggers who keep on pumping out the posts, week after week or day after day. Once upon a time, I tried blogging every day and the results weren’t so hot. There are just days when you don’t got nothing to say, and it’s better not to say it.

Of course, the problem this time around hasn’t been a lack of things to talk about, it has purely and simply been a lack of motivation. You’ve probably noticed that there’s a bit of a pandemic going on and the country’s gradual slide into fascism has picked up significant speed. This has given rise to a new term for a new neurosis, doomscrolling. Relentlessly scrolling through Facebook and Twitter to find the most recent horrible news, the newest outrage, until you reach the end of your cache, then refreshing and starting all over again from the top.

I’ve been doing this. I’m trying to break myself of this pernicious habit. Maybe coming here and bugging you will help.

I’m in a halfway decent spot – so far, my main job allows me to work from home. My two side hustles dried up, but at least I can still manage to get bills paid. Mostly. Even that’s in a bit of a perilous state now, for reasons a bit too complex to go into here, so add that into the Doom Pile.

Stress has done its expected damage to my mental health. I’m still medicated, which helps, but my ability to focus was thrown into a wood chipper. My reaction to a Stay Home order should have been “Great! More time to watch movies!” but for several weeks I was unable to watch anything longer than 30 minutes. So thank God for Castlevania and the new Harley Quinn cartoon. And, more recently, the return of Doom Patrol.

Oh, Charlize, I have failed you.

This has abated somewhat but still crops up. For instance, I tried to watch The Old Guard a couple of weeks ago, and still had to tap out after a half hour. That movie had Charlize Theron wielding a battleaxe. That is two big red check marks on the Dr. Freex list and it still couldn’t engage me.

Then the next day I watched the new blu-rays for Horror of Dracula and Mystery of the Wax Museum back to back. Go figure.

Then again, Old Guard was showing me a bunch of familiar tropes. I was already familiar with the other two movies, but I went into them mainly for the restoration and gorgeous transfers. There’s no secret that the best way I found to survive the last four years with my fragile sanity intact was re-watching Marvel movies (I needed to see good triumph over bad as violently as possible), so The Old Guard‘s setup was all too familiar, even though it’s not strictly a superhero movie. The familiarity of gothic horror was quite welcoming, in retrospect.

My New Precioussssssss

I have quite the backlog of things to view and pontificate upon, if the world would just stop ending for a few minutes. I went into hock to buy that Al Adamson box set because of course I did. I would expect no less of myself. That’s a lot to get through. You know, if.

I should go get some work done now. I’m hoping to produce some capsule reviews in the next day or so. If certain dumbasses would refrain from saying something stupid.

I should probably just close those two tabs, shouldn’t I?

July 30, 2020
Categories: Mindless Blather . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 6 Comments

Those Missing Crapfests Pt. 1

Okay, I have a few of these to get through, so forgive me if I resort to my notes/bullet points form of communication. You know our cast of characters, so let’s just charge into No-Man’s Land.

I like to weaponize my fellow attendants’ penchant for movies featuring nudity, so for our first Crapfest we’re catching up on I brought Ken Russell’s Lizstomania, the Master of Wretched Excess’ film biography of Franz Lizst. I reviewed this one some time ago, so I’ll just plagiarize myself:

Lisztomania is concerned with the composer’s adult life, starting with his affair with the Countess Marie d’Agoult (Fiona Lewis), then into a concert where the audience is populated by screaming young girls (causing me to flash back to the final concert scenes of A Hard Day’s Night), then onward through his years of fruitful creativity under Princess Carolyn zu Sayn-Wittgenstein (Sara Kestelman), finally ending with his exorcism of the Nazi vampire Richard Wagner, using a flame-throwing piano made of steel and glass. Then Liszt returns from the afterlife in a pipe organ spaceship powered by the women he loved in life, to defeat Wagner, resurrected as a Frankenstein Monster/Adolf Hitler with an electric guitar that doubles as a machine gun.

What I’m saying is, some liberties may have been taken with Liszt’s biography.

This is Russell’s follow-up to Tommy, which you are much more likely to have seen, and that might prepare you for the absolute lunacy that is Lizstomania, but don’t count on it. I love it for its madness, but my fellow Crapfesters did not, even though it has more exposed breasts than a Hartz Chicken Buffet. The big loser, here, though, is poor Paul. He had, numerous times, almost rented the movie at Blockbuster, only to bypass it for more user-friendly fare, and he was really looking forward to seeing it that night. Alas, he found out his younger self was looking out for him much better than I did.

I was dismayed that the group did not recognize the opening scene of Das Rheingold, but then the Russell version does involve more Rhinemaidens, nudity and implied rape than Wagner’s, and less of his music. Haven’t even mentioned the cameos by Ringo Starr (as The Pope), Rick Wakeman and Nell “Columbia” Campbell.

Dave’s reply to this was Caged Women. Now, there are approximately one hundred and eighty-eight movies named Caged Women, so to clarify, this particular one is the 1991 Italian/Portuguese co-production also known as Caged Women in Purgatory. Beautiful American Janet (Pilar Orive) is, for some inexplicable reason, vacationing alone in South America – not someplace touristy like Rio, but what a certain chief exec would refer to as a “shithole country”. When a local corrupt cop hits on her in a cantina, she is recused by another “American”, Frank (Christian Lorenz). R-rated sex between the two Anglos ensues.

But! Said corrupt cop arrests her on fake drug charges and she gets sent to a remote women’s prison. You can apply your standard women’s prison template after this, with some minor alterations. The warden makes no secret of the prison being a bordello, forsaking the usual Philippine-lensed sugar plantations. The prison is an old ruined castle with some sort of huge cage on the roof, where prisoners are thrown for discipline so the crew didn’t have to build a “hot box”. Janet is thrown into it along with a fellow rebellious prisoner, and the only liquid available is the sweat on their own bodies, so we are eventually led into an R-rated lesbian sex scene. Speaking of lesbians, there is also a female guard who likes whipping prisoners on a St. Andrew’s cross.

And speaking of R-rated scenes, Frank was so impressed by his sex scene that he’s been doing detective work on what happened to Janet and even manages to substitute himself for the regular helicopter pilot to the prison. Just in time, too, because the warden has arranged for a Most Dangerous Game scenario with Janet and her rebellious prison mates. It’ll solve come discipline problems and act as an apology to some of his clientele, especially the one Janet kneed in the balls when he tried to rape her.

Frank manages to hide guns in the tiger pits meant for the girls and some satisfying mayhem ensues. The prisoners are freed, and the lesbian guard winds up in the cross, discovering she likes being whipped. Janet and her side action from that cage on the roof fly out with Frank, and decide to show him how grateful they are while he’s still flying the helicopter. Amusing as that may be, it is exceedingly dangerous, and I can only assume the movie ends just before they crash.

I went into this with a little bit of apprehension, as some of the European versions of WiP movies can be deadly nihilistic, but this particular one is not bad. Pilar Orive deserves some plaudits for spending most of the movie naked, or nearly so. Our audience certainly thought so.

We had fallen to reminiscing about the days of weird martial arts movies at Crapfest, and it turned out Erik had never seen Master of the Flying Guillotine, so we fixed that. If you haven’t, you should fix that, too. Especially if you were a Street Fighter 2 fan and ever fought Dhalsim. This was, like, the third time we’ve shown this movie at Crapfest.

We finished up with a tale of kung fu treachery, Chang Cheh’s Masked Avengers, starring the Venoms. The story this time out concerns a band of bandits who always wear garish masks while they rob and murder. My favorite Venom, Kuo Chui/Philip Kwok is one of the bandits who’s split off from the gang – after their usual attack and slaughter of a family on the road, they kept the pretty daughter. Robbing and murder is perfectly alright with Kuo, but rape is just beyond the pale. This puts him a position to aid the rest of the family in tracking down the bandits hideout to rescue the girl (unfortunately useless, the gang’s depredations have driven her mad), and put an end to the bandits reign of terror.

Chang Cheh’s flicks are often distinguished by their cruelty, and Masked Avengers might have the crown in that category, as lots of helpless people are pincushioned by the bandits’ trademark tridents and made to die slowly. The movie is fairly light on the fight scenes, until the final storming of the hideout, which results in an epic fight that lasts an astounding, exhausting nine and a half minutes.

Have you all been nice boys and girls? Well, okay then.

All right! Three more of these to get through!

April 3, 2020
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 5 Comments

Cabin Feverish

Friday Mornin’ Comin’ Down Freex: Yep, this is the post I started a week ago. Let’s see if the wait was worth it. It may seem quaint at this point. Back to a week ago, when we were all so young, and had such hopes:

That’s kind of an all-purpose title, isn’t it? Lots of people have it these days. I’m one of the lucky ones. As a practicing introvert from waaaaaaaaay back, not much has changed for me. This is how I normally live, folks.

I’M WORKIN HEAH!

The previous week was the scheduled Spring Break for the college where I work (what I often bitterly refer to as “unpaid vacation”), but I still put in some hours by going to the college, packing up my editing rig and camera equipment, then transferring it to my home so I can work this week. It’s now taking up the entirety of the dining room table and the only problem I foresee is the fact that dining room chairs are made to be comfortable for exactly how long a meal might last, no longer. My ponderous ass is already protesting.

The Boy’s college and my wife’s private school – for students with learning disabilities – have both gone online learning. Turns out the stuff my son has been studying at college has proven essential for converting wifey’s school for online. So yay us.

This is The Grinch. Its monthly payments WILL stop Christmas from coming.

I find it mordantly funny that the week before everything went to shit I got tired of only having one functioning automobile in the family and bought a used 2018 Kia Soul. I had long wanted a Soul. I just bought it at the most absolutely wrong time in all of recorded history, which also renders that moment quintessentially me.

I do like the car, though. Let’s see if I get to keep it.

But that’s not why we’re here (cathartic as that was for me). Artists have been putting stuff online for folks stuck at home, which is a Good Thing. After all this is over, I’m sure we will all have a deeper appreciation for them and their work. Who am I kidding, they will go back to being despised, spat upon, and told to get a real job.

Oooh, bitter twist there. Sorry. Back to being upbeat and entertaining.

Anyway – I have no art to give away except my words. Everything else I have is somebody else’s, and not mine to give away, except the stuff that’s already public. So.

Slight digression, but there is a reason for it:

One of my oldest friends, Scott, a good guy with religious convictions (unlike your humble narrator), once offered the following metaphor to explain different religions espousing different interpretations of God/Messiah: to him, God was a sort of Celestial Mirror Ball, constantly catching light and throwing it back out. You caught the light flash that mattered most to you, while other people caught different flashes, but they’re all from the same source.

I liked that metaphor. It was inclusive without the whole my-way-or-the-highway bent that turns me off so much religion.

For my part, I believe in God, just not necessarily the God I’m told I should believe in. Too many of those versions are small, entirely absorbed in earthly matters to the point of being judgmental of personal relationships or really wanting His (always his, never Her) mouthpieces to be wealthy. I instantly distrust anyone who claims to know exactly what God wants, because God is vast and unknowable; casting him/her as entirely absorbed in what we advanced monkeys are doing limits him/her.

I also think God is beyond gender.

(Man, I did not expect this to get all religious. It’s my habit not to discuss such things, as I think a person’s relationship – or non-relationship – to God is ultimately a personal thing, or at least should be. Man, all this to get to a really stupid point, and here it is:)

As a recovering hippie, I love kaleidoscopes. There is often a point while looking at one that the image gets so complex, the details so intricate, that you wish to stop them in time, to drink in all that elegance and detail. But you can’t. It moves on, and you cannot possibly comprehend all that is before you. It seems to extend beyond and behind you. And for all you know, the center point of the design is actually miles away.

And that, even more than the Mirror Ball, is what I think God is like. Mind-boggling, beautiful, and finally, incomprehensible. God isn’t limited; my mind is.

So for me, God is a kaleidoscope. At least, I dearly hope God is a kaleidoscope. That would be cool.

Cripes, all that to get to this, the aforementioned art I can give away:

Any of the videos on hdcolor‘s YouTube channel are worth watching. They help me achieve a nice, relaxed alpha state. The music is good, too. But I do prefer to supply my own.

What’s that you say? Am I still doing those psychedelic playlists? Funny you should ask.

There’s more, but why overwhelm you? That’s six hours of music right there. Also, I’m not saying you might want to cue one of those up and then open a kaleidoscope video in another browser tab, but I do rather wish I’d had that technology back in 1979.

Hey, we’re back to writing in the present day again. There are movie posts I want to get to, but I don’t have to tell any of you working from home that this shit is exhausting. Stress and anxiety are doing their usual jobs on me – they may have actually doubled their productivity – and watching movies is actually kind of depressing right now. Oh, look at how we used to move around so freely, get so close to each other without a second thought.

The Real World is messing with my escapism, yo.

Speaking of which, my Kindle just bricked itself. I want to speak to the manager.

On the other hand, I am also about to have the first true weekend I’ve had in some time. I can’t do any of the things that normally steal away those off-hours, except fill my pill organizers. My liquor supply is about to take such a hit.

Maybe I’ll sober up enough to do some writing. Who knows?

We’re all improvising like Second City here. Stay inside, stay safe. Watch a movie for me.

March 27, 2020
Categories: Mindless Blather . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Well, Whaddaya Know

I was actually working on a post last Sunday, when I received a text message from my online gaming buddies that I should hop on right now. I hopped on right then. Every attempt since then has been interrupted by other texts and/or teleconferences as I work from home, so here’s some quick notes to let you know that yes, I am still alive, and I hope you are, too.

I still hope to have that post out this week. It’s slight, but I also went into the subject of God and religion – one of those subjects I try to avoid – and I have to look at it again to see if it’s worth it.
I’m an idiot, I’ll probably decide it is.
Working from home is difficult when your job entails hustling a camera around to cover events and organizations. I’m considered to be in an “essential” field- news gathering – but the arcane structure of my job entails a second, maybe even third, layer of red tape. Contradictory orders have been the flavor of the day.
It’s surprising how disruptive just not bustling about in the morning to make myself presentable enough to haul my body to the workplace without somebody yelling “My God, what is it?” has been. I looked at my pill organizer yesterday and discovered I hadn’t taken my morning meds the previous two days. Being a lot more mindful about that now.
The passing of Stuart Gordon hit me a lot harder than the passing of Terrance McNally. I am a terrible former theater person. Then, Gordon was also a major force in theater, and I had actually met him, once upon a time. Just to echo everyone else, he was as nice a fellow as you could ever hope to meet.

Time to prep for this morning’s teleconference which will likely only involve me tangentially. I’m currently working across three computer systems, and the only one that runs the Cisco Webex software well doesn’t have a webcam, which is good, since I’m starting to get really shaggy and look like a late 70s college English professor.

Which is actually a fairly good look for me.

I need some tweed, though.

March 26, 2020
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Well. Hi there.

I have a veritable mountain of excuses. But let’s climb that mountain, stand on its summit with arms held high in exultation, and give you the most pertinent one: I finally bought a new keyboard.

I like things dim in my office, so I’ve been using backlit keyboards for the past several years. The latest was made by Redimp, and I bought it because it promised I wouldn’t be replacing it for the reason I was five deep into the specie: I couldn’t rub the letters off. I can touch type if I want, but it’s a slow process for me, so I usually do not want.

Nice keyboard. Clicky. I like clicky. But there was a flaw that I only truly discovered when I answered one of those consumer product questions from Amazon.

It was the space bar. It would either not put in a space, or it would provide two, per press. I’m one of those folks who if they see a problem with a line they just wrote, I have to fix it immediately. This had the effect of making me write each sentence twice, as it were. Very slow, very frustrating. No fix was forthcoming from the manufacturer, so I finally replaced it with one from Pictek, which was on sale.

Quick review: It sucks.

The left shift key and the Enter key (for God’s sake) didn’t work on that one. One exchange later, and here I am, making only one space per press and pressing Enter joyfully. Not a clicky keyboard, but the action on the keys is smooth as all get out. And just in time for Christmas! (In summary, and in keeping with the season: Redimp naughty, Pictek nice)

Now I should get back to work on the Crapfest recap I gave up on when I found myself in UnintentionalLongWordLand. Of course, there’s all sort of holly to be decked and fa’s to be la’ed, so it will take a while. I hope to do better in the future, and justify the hosting costs for this site.

That wasn’t an easy decision, either. Chad Plambeck recently shuttered his blog, after 20 years, and is shifting to podcasts. I considered that, but I edit video and audio for a living, so naaaaaahhhhh. But heaven only knows what 2020 will bring, eh?

Anyway.

Have the Happy Holiday of your choice, be safe, hug your loved ones for me. Seeya.

meatball-pan

December 24, 2019
Categories: Mindless Blather . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 4 Comments

Reverse Hibernation

Oh, hi. Are you still here? Man, I would have given up on me ages ago.

We’ll play catch-up in a bit. There’s some community stuff I need to blurt:

Obviously, I’m not doing the Hubrisween roundtable this year. Chad Plambeck at Microbrewed Reviews and The Fiasco Brothers still are. You’re in good hands. Links can be found at the Hubrisween Central supersoaker page.

So. I’ve been off doing this self-care thing I’ve been hearing so much about. Turns out it’s actually pretty nice, but then that old itch starts at the back of my brain, like a rat trying to dig its way out, and suddenly here I am again, staring at a blank page. I’ve been blogging off and on since the 90s, and my God, do I respect the people who manage to turn out stuff on a regular basis for years. There are points in my (admittedly spotty) career when I just have to walk away for a while. Sometimes for years. Do other stuff.

So today we will be talking – probably to a tiresome degree – about “other stuff”. Probably no movies this time around, because I just haven’t watched that many. That’s how complete a break I made from my usual (increasingly and annoyingly regimented) routine. I point you again to the links above if you require ponderings about crap cinema. I have more if you need them.

This is how we used to have to do it. You kids have no idea.

But through all this I am still aggressively me, so we’re going to address How I Spent My Summer Vacation in a sideways manner. First, in my usual oh-look-let’s-try-this-new-thing-that’s-been-around-for-years habit, I finally made use of that Spotify account I’ve had since the dang thing was in beta. I didn’t find the UI as confusing as I did in my younger days, and after some poking around I found myself in lurv. People talk about falling into YouTube rabbit holes – that’s been me with Spotify. My musical tastes tend to the omnivorous, and there are plenty of musical rabbit holes for me to fall down. Discovered many new artists, revisited some old favorites of my youth to see if they still held up. Often they do.

Which brings me to a new version of an old pursuit: The Mixtape lives, we just now call it a Spotify Playlist.

I’m sure I’m not using the Playlist function correctly. I have every bit of 2 followers – one is an old college housemate – and I think the follow function on these are so you can keep up with new additions to the lists. I have one huge playlist – we will get to that shortly – that is constantly being added and subtracted. But the ones I work hardest on I don’t make public until I am satisfied with the flow of song to song. Like I said, mixtapes. Hitting Shuffle Play on those undoes my hard (snerk) work.

Yeah, this is me in my 20s. Recognize me now?

Once again my gloriously misspent youth trespasses on my elder years. In my 20s I played around with LSD quite a bit, and I generally ran the music for such things, solo or in groups. In my amazingly sober teenage years my friends were amazed I didn’t even smoke pot because I listened to music only potheads did, but I just really liked prog rock, and was such a science-fiction nerd that I found the gestating electronic music scene intoxicating. The closest I came was reading Carlos Casteneda, which certainly primed me for my college days, and the addition of physical intoxication in all its forms.

So I started making mixtapes for acid trips. I had a fairly impressive music library in those days, but it was nothing compared to what is available on Spotify. And I found myself engaged in that old pursuit, in my self-care time. Honestly, since I have a fairly nice sound system on my work computer, I can do research while working – just one more reason my job does not suck. If something is good enough to draw my attention from what I’m doing, it gets plugged into a temporary playlist for later appraisal.

The structure for the playlists is fairly simple – at least I think so, but this is the first time I’ve ever tried to actually write it down. I may look at the result, think it the rambling of a madman worthy of becoming President and delete the whole damn thing.

First of all, the playlist is limited to an arbitrary three hours. That is too short for an actual acid trip, which in my experience runs at least 6-10 hours followed by another 6-8 hours of what I called “thinking at right angles”. The Coming Down period is hopefully accompanied by plentiful orange juice and the music of the Grateful Dead and Free, which I found perfect for that time. Traffic is also good, but “John Barleycorn Must Die” still freaks me out.

Three hours just seems like the limit for a casual, non-altered state listen. I also check the flow at night in bed, through headphones plugged into my Chromebook. I have to go to sleep sometime. My first attempt at an acid Spotify list was the aforementioned 6 hours, and that was just ungainly. Psychedelic voyagers could, I guess, just go from playlist to playlist until the sun comes up and you start getting reacquainted with the real world, if need be. Maybe after I get three of these up and running I’ll attempt an integrated version for all your wasted needs.

Alex Gray provides us with an image for #4.

My playlist structure is as follows:

Let’s have fun, and get in a happy, jolly mood. We’re going on an adventure!
Increasingly psychedelic-tinged music as the tide of the drug begins to flow in. One of my great loves, late 60s-early 70s music is perfect for this.
Oh, hey. Something is happening. Ride with it.
HOLY SHIT I’M PEAKING. TURN ON THE BLACK LIGHT. SHOW ME ALIEN WORLDS.
Wow oh wow oh wow that was amazi-HERE WE GO AGAIN HAND ME THAT KALEIDOSCOPE (repeat as necessary)
Calm down those over-stimulated nerves with some slower, mellower, and dare I say it – beautiful music.

Obviously, I can go no further without posting the links, should you care to know what it sounds like in my head. Here they are, under the fairly innocuous title, “Headphones Strongly Recommended”:

After a certain point in my 20s, I had gotten everything I felt I could get from the psychedelic experience, and went my separate way. I’ve been asked if it was something I’d consider revisiting in the present day, and my response is: no, probably not. The most remarkable thing about acid, in my experience, was it gave you the ability to see everything as if you were seeing it for the first time, without preconceptions. That includes yourself, and that can turn into something remarkably ugly if you’re carrying any emotional baggage or trauma. I now have about 40 years of such baggage stored up, which I’ve no desire to face in a state where my coping mechanisms are diminished.

Now, as to why I got so into Spotify and created a huge frickin’ playlist that HAS to be put on Shuffle: City of Heroes is back. Goodbye, free time.

Painful as it is, I have to consider that normal people have no idea what I’m talking about, so here goes: City of Heroes was a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (henceforward MMO) that went live in 2004, in a period where there seemed to be a new one released every month, all chasing the dollars being earned by the most successful MMO of all time, World of Warcraft (equally henceforward WoW). This one, though, wasn’t about orcs and other Tolkein lifts, it was about superheroes. At the time, it was the only one about superheroes. My pal David Harlan turned me on to it, and thus began a monstrous time sink for me.

I’m not a big fan of MMOs, but City did an exceptional job of functioning without what I found to be drawbacks in other games. There was no waiting around for hours for a special hoohah to spawn for lotsa elite lootz, or even to be able to continue in the game. It was impossible to kill other player characters (people, being jerks, still found ways, and steps were taken to counter them). Every mission (or “quest” if you prefer) was in an instanced space, not the overworld map, so it ran pretty smoothly on most rigs. Combat was a fairly simple matter, and could be controlled by almost any device: keyboard and mouse, joystick, programmable gamepad. All that mattered was which of your superpowers you fired off when.

And I love flying. Flying is fun.

And you get to hang out with giant octopodes. How cool is that?

A companion game was spawned, City of Villains, where, of course, you played an up-and-coming super-villain. The two games were quite popular, though never reaching the player population of World of Warcraft. And in 2012, that all came to an end when the game closed down. I’ve heard varying stories about the whys and wherefores of that shutdown, but while it made me sad, it didn’t affect me all that much at the time. My core group had gradually drifted away to other pastimes, and though it’s possible to play solo, it’s just not as much fun. Playing with strangers did not appeal to me. So I had taken my 15 bucks a month elsewhere long before sunset came to Paragon City.

There was quite a bit of nostalgia over the years. People who loved that game really loved it, and they missed it. I confess the occasional pang or sorrow that I could not simply log on and throw fireballs at demon-worshipping street gangs in the name of justice.

Then I started hearing rumors about a rogue server that was still running City. Membership was closed, and there was a possibility of regaining your old characters from Live! Getting into it was a problematic and lengthy process, until it was revealed that the source code had been released into the wild and there were suddenly several servers openly running the game, so secrecy was no longer an option. A friend who had been working to get the old crew admitted to the closed server was finally successful, and goddammit I was in Paragon City again, and falling madly in love once more.

The reclaiming of old characters wasn’t possible anymore, but I didn’t care. It was a gas playing with the guys again. Now everything is open to all players – Heroes and Villains had separate power sets and archetypes, and now those – and all the costume pieces and other stuff formerly locked behind a paywall – are available to everyone. You don’t have to hit level 50 – once the highest possible level – to unlock the Super Special Ultimate Nitro Platinum Character Types anymore. It’s also free to play, so win-win, as we say in the trade.

I had attempted to start Discord once to participate in a No Budget Nightmares event and it mystified me (occasionally life likes to rub my nose in my increasing decrepitude). I had to demystify it so we could have a (once-again free! Yay!) alternative to our old standard, TeamSpeak. Voice communication is an absolute boon to slow typists like myself, so it became essential. In an attempt to bring the top part of this post into sync with this lower part, I should point out that in the halcyon days of the latter half of the aughts, when we were all heavily into the game, Dave and I ran a station on Live365 that purported to be a Paragon City radio station, so we could all listen to the same ass-kicking music at the same time. Dave produced some fun commercials, too. I finally ran out of money to fund that, but again, here we are, ten years later, with better tools. A truly enormous playlist on Spotify (currently 1814 songs, over 115 hours worth, quite a bit carried over from the Live365 days), and a bot to run that playlist on our Discord server. So even though the game is free, I’ve still found a way to pay 15 bucks a month just to play City of Heroes.

Look, in 1980, when I was a stoned student reading Heavy Metal and listening to Hawkwind over my headphones – had you told me then that 40 years later, I would be guiding a flying laser squid through twisting blue and purple caverns, all the while zapping evil magic users while still listening to Hawkwind over headphones… well, I’d ask you what you were on, why you weren’t sharing and where could I buy some.

Squad Goals

I’ve mentioned before that one of the few things that kept me sane during these last three years of garbage government shenanigans was Marvel movies (and thank God DC finally started making entertaining ones). Being able to briefly inhabit a world where good could overcome evil in a matter of a couple of hours – hopefully as violently as possible – got me through the darkest times. I had forgotten, though, how much physical tension could be drawn away through my guidance of an online avatar to do the same thing in a shorter time frame. There are at least two enemy factions in-game that are obvious Nazi analogs (we refer to them as “Illinois Nazis”), and it’s remarkable how easy it is to gravitate toward the missions that involve taking them down. Hard.

There. I think I’ve bored you enough. Just talking about it makes me want to go online and freeze Illinois Nazis in crushing time distortion fields. Maybe we can talk about movies next time. I did watch a few.

FUTURE FREEX BURSTS IN THE DOOR. It was revealed to me this morning that the megalomaniacs downtown have scheduled not one, but two extra City meetings next week, stealing away three evenings of what remains of my life. Y’all will be waiting for a while on that next installment, I’m afraid.

October 9, 2019
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant, Old Men Playing Videogames . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment

drfreex.com

Pages

Syndicate

Meta