How do you properly pay tribute to a man whose work defines your childhood? On top of that, how do you write an interesting article about someone so influential that there is almost nothing left to say? Well, I’m going to mostly let the man’s work do the speaking here. Most of the time when you think of a cinema legend you think of a charismatic actor or a visionary director. Seldom do you think about the man who did the special effects. Well, when it comes to Ray Harryhausen, you never think of the film in terms of who was in it or who directed it. It is all about the amazing creatures he created that set the standard for and helped define science fiction and fantasy film for decades. He worked under stop-motion animation pioneer and King Kong creator Willis O’Brien, and in time his creations overshadowed even that impressive resume.

Ray Harryhausen was an institution, and his passing earlier this month was a blow to many film geeks’ childhoods. But on the other hand, it is causing a lot of us to stand up and give voice to something we always took for granted: that his creations not only stand the test of time, but are still the standard by which many of us hold modern CG effects to. I can only imagine what I must have been like in the 50’s to go into a movie theater having never seen anything like The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms and just be completely blown away by the massive spectacle of a gigantic prehistoric beast leveling buildings. What I don’t have to imagine is seeing modern CG effects and often feeling like I am watching a video game. Stop-motion animation’s usage of live models gave fantastic monsters a level of reality that had previously been unheard of in film, and the process took a lot of care and time that most filmmakers simply use computers to get around these days.

Rather than give you yet another brief, uninspired biography about Harryhausen I think the best possible way for me to express my admiration would be to give some of the finest examples of his work, and go back in time to when I watched these creatures come to life on my television as a kid on Saturday afternoon airings or from tapes from the local video rental store. These are some of the monsters that rocked my imagination as a child and helped fuel an obsession with the fantastic that has lasted a lifetime. Continue Reading »

Do you know most of the reason Ted Bundy got away with so many of his atrocious crimes initially was because he was considered a very good looking man for his time period (the ugly 80′s, as I so affectionately call them)? You see, we are a visual society, and we want everything laid out for us in as simple a manner as possible. Think about someone like Ozymandias from Watchmen. No doubt that his dashing good looks were a key element used in disarming us to just how evil (?) he really was. But in some cases of fiction, there is no mistaking the bad guys from the good guys, because the bad guys look so, well, BAD.

When evil looks like what we are taught evil is supposed to look like, it makes it that much easier for us to avoid it. But if a character is completely vile, without a single redeeming quality, and he looks absolutely horrifying, that only adds to our fear and apprehension about that person, making the performance resonate even more with the viewer. Here are five examples from film where it wasn’t exactly hard to tell the bad guys from good guys, and it wasn’t exactly easy to shake those bad guys from your mind’s eye after having seen them.

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I can respect that people need to pay bills. Hell, we have all done some things we aren’t proud of to make money (I sold bootleg pancakes out of the back of a van once), and that is just a part of life. But nowhere can that be more evident than when a seemingly great actors take ungodly awful roles in a movie that you KNOW they knew better than to take. I almost always imagine the actor, sitting behind closed doors, laughing about it to his closest friends. Hell, there are even examples where the actors or actresses openly admitted they did it for the money and knew the movie sucked.

David Cronenberg calls his cameo in Jason X the role that bought him a new car. But there are certain examples of actors who are heavily respected in the industry taking roles even I would be too ashamed to take, and I have no shame, so what does that say about them? Here are five great actors who fell far from grace during the ninety minute run of most of the movies mentioned here. I am aware it will seem like I am picking on a few kid’s movies, and that may seem unfair or an easy target, but rationalize why an actor like Walken or De Niro EVER needs to pander to an audience of children? That is the real question here. A bad script is a bad script, and all of these alumni should have known better then to allow their faces to be seen in these steaming piles of feces, eagerly passed off as film.

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Here’s the thing about Hugo Weaving. He’s number one on the list. Yeah, that list. You know the one. Anyone who knows me will attest to the fickleness of my celebrity crushes, so depending on what time period of my life we’re dealing with, there are certain groups who will swear by my unimpeachable love of some actor or other, and none of them will be incorrect. But for all the number ones, only Hugo Weaving has come back around, time and time again, into the topmost of my good graces.

I’ve often been described as a girl who has “weird taste” when it comes to the physical attractiveness of men—”weird” mostly being used to qualify my complete lack of any rules of facial or body structure. There aren’t many who can predict a Sara Clemens crush. Here’s the rub, as Hamlet would say: it’s not about some quantifiable hair/eye/rugged-good-looking-ness that groups my man-crushes together—it’s mostly about talent.

A talented man is the man for me. That’s why Peter Dinklage exists on the same plane as Alan Rickman, why Damian Lewis (Homeland) is just as doable as Robert Webb (Peep Show). Continue Reading »

Adult Swim seems to cater to a very specific demographic. People on drugs. I don’t think is necessarily a bad thing (everyone gets a channel now a days), but if you are not one of their target demographic, and you sit down to watch one of their shows, it can be a very odd and surreal experience. The humor often fires off with a liberal mix of the politically incorrect and the mildly uncomfortable, sometimes sprinkling in surreal pop culture references to keep their viewers awake. Without having to say anything outright and condemn or encourage certain actions from people, I can only safely tell you that I am a huge Adult Swim fan, and that, in itself, should tell you all you need to know.

Having said that, I have years of unofficial research under my belt regarding the channel, and have decided to compile a list of the Adult Swim shows (some still on, some no longer with us) that can make even the most normal, sane, sober person feel like they just ate a handful of drugs in a creepy van behind 7/11. Also a quick disclaimer, if you hate Adult Swim and think all of this shit is stupid, refrain from coming to the comments and condemning those of us enjoy this stuff. In other words, don’t be a buzzkill, man. Just go read a different article. This site is chock full of great pieces, so if this one isn’t for you, don’t stay in the water just to pee in our pool. Also, kids, don’t do drugs. They’re bad for you and stuff. Except the ones the doctors prescribe. Those are EXTRA bad for you. Okay, on to the good stuff.

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Sequels are a fact of life these days. If a movie does well, there’ll be another one to follow it up. Or fill us in on what came before it. Or maybe they’ll just reboot it and pretend it’s a sequel. There’s a lot of options, and some days it seems a full half (or more) of the movies these days have titles ending in a number.

And yet, I notice that they can’t even make sequels to the right things! Sure, there’s successes like Iron Man 3 and interesting projects like Oz: The Great and Powerful, but they’re also making sequels to things like Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and Journey to the Center of the Earth.

Me, I’d much rather have another go at flicks like…

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When I was a kid, I could ask my parents to buy any video game that I wanted. While my mother was extremely conservative and strict, she never really cared about the content of video games and she thought that games were still as simple as Pacman. On the other hand, my father gave me the freedom to try different things out whenever I was with him. He also had his own video game console in addition to mine, so sometimes we would swap games from our respective libraries to try something new. I was able to play all sorts of games, and it wasn’t always all sunshine and rainbows. I started playing games where I had to inflict morbid fatalities, hear curse words I don’t even understand, to seeing women prancing in around in bikinis that are practically non-existent. I can truly say that my brain has lost its purity at a ripe young age, but I have never regretted being exposed to explicit matters so early in life. My dad never censored anything about life. He trusted that I knew the difference between right and wrong. We would also talk about it if I was confused. It personally helped me become self-aware instead of being shielded by naiveté.

Before this turns into a topic about video games and violence, I compiled a list of ‘inappropriate’ video games I was guilty of playing when I was a child. Guilty not in a sense that I regret doing it, but more of like a ‘yeah, I admit I did’ kind of definition. Some of these games are actually great, and others are just so ridiculous… it’s a lot of fun. What ‘inappropriate’ games did YOU play when you were young? Was it simply fun or did it teach you anything? Let US know in the comments. Continue Reading »

by Indy Zoeller

“Oh, and for the record, there was an episode of Happy Days where a guy literally jumped over a shark.  And it was THE BEST one!” – Troy Barnes, Community

Jumping the shark is a phrase that has a bit of a nebulous meaning.  Generally, it’s the moment in which a beloved television show “goes bad.”  More specifically, it’s when the premise itself becomes stale.  It’s the event horizon of television: the moment when you realize, as a viewer, that a show has passed the point of no return and it’s never going to return to its former glory.

It’s a sad moment, especially when a show was particularly good at one time.  To see your favorite characters lose a vital piece of themselves, saying same things but missing the soul, appearing as some sort of hollowed-out Stepford Wives version of themselves – well, it’s a little heartbreaking.

Any show of sufficient length will generate a wide range of opinions on this subject.  Exactly when a show is “RUINED FOREVER” can be an intensely personal thing.  Take a popular show like Friends, poll 100 people, and you’ll get 50 different moments when it jumped the shark, 25 people denying it ever did, and 25 denying it was any good to begin with.

So the caveat here is that this is in no way a complete or objective list.  It’s a starting point for discussion – what are your own personal moments of realization that your favorite show has passed the “event horizon of suck”? Continue Reading »

by Nick Verboon

So you’ve got your heavy hitter Justice Leagues and Avengers, your fan favorite X-Men and Fantastic Fours, and your Young Justices and Teen Titans (what’s the difference between those two again?) on the second string.  You’ve got Green Lantern Corps and Marvel is even uncorking a Guardians of the Galaxy film to open up the comic cosmos to mainstream audiences.  Superteams are and have always been a great concept.  You can either take a diverse group of misfits whose individual talents and personalities fit together to form a force to be reckoned with, or you can take a group of established heroes, throw them all together in the mix and let the awesomeness commence.  Either approach is almost inevitably met with success.

But then there are the superteams who never really take off.  Maybe the comics are popular with critics, but readership doesn’t follow, maybe the title gets canceled,  maybe DC reboots the entire universe, or a bad writer takes over and tanks the whole franchise; maybe all of the above.  A television show or Hollywood film may even get made, but they screw up the concept and/or the mainstream just isn’t interested.  These things happen.   But some of these teams in their best incarnations are always going to be in the hearts and minds of comic book fans even if they never get their proper due.  This is for them. Continue Reading »

It has often be said through time that when the world finally ends, it will end with a whimper, and not a bang, but you ask us who were in Boston over the last month, and we would tell you the opposite. Some of us would tell you it already feels like the world is ending. Like we are, as a whole, circling the drain. The good news gets drown out by the screams of the bad news, which always resonates louder and with a larger audience.

So how would you live your life differently if you knew that this was all for nothing and that all of us as a people were going to be wiped out? Would you embrace the day and be brave enough to do all the things you wanted, or would you just let anarchy reign and do whatever it is you felt like doing, no matter the consequence? I ask because the reality is none of us truly know what will happen, or if something will happen, but thanks to the wonderful (and widely under appreciated)  movies on this list, I feel like we can prepare most efficiently if such a scenario should unfold anytime soon. Just kidding.

These are just movies, and in the REAL end times, all of us shall be freed of our flesh prisons and made as equals, or so the great God of the underEarth, Sassgroth, has been promising me. Either way, these are the films I watch when preparing for the second coming of THE OLD ONES. Note, movies like The Road and Madd Maxx will obviously be off this list, for I am trying to bring some attention to the end of the world films that clearly have not gotten the attention they deserve. Take to the comments and let me know if I missed any of your lesser-known favorites.

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There is an undeniably cathartic element to acoustic music. It just tends to soothe the soul, no matter the state you are in. And classic MTV knew this and (brilliantly) cashed in on it with the Unplugged series, which would run on Sunday nights. It was evident fairly early on in the history of the series that they had tapped a very smart corner of the market. To be honest, whether or not a band is good live pretty much dictates the talent that band has, so if you sucked as a band or were talentless hacks, most likely you were not getting your own episode of Unplugged.

For this reason alone, there are very few bad MTV Unplugged episodes. Don’t get me wrong, there are some bands and acts you just don’t really need to see acoustic (Um, LL Cool J?), but even the bands or artists you didn’t like would still often shift how you felt about them if they delivered a good Unplugged set. While it is quite clear MTV is not the network they once were, I thought it would be a good time to reflect on some of the better performances from the Unplugged series. Remember, you don’t have to come from the 90′s or adore these bands to know some of these sets are remarkable. And to anyone under 30, sorry if this post seems foreign, but I will include some video performances so you can see I am talking about. Alright, before we go any further, a quick moment of silence for the 90′s. What a glorious time it was to be alive, huh? Speaking of Alive…

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