Mr. Skin unveils the 11th Annual Anatomy Awards for the finest skin-chievements in celebrity nudity. (Mr. Skin)

*

Porn scribe Gram Ponante interviews the director of retro-slasher Sprit Camp (2009). (Gram Ponante)

*

Josh Alan Friedman’s ultra-rare 1984 interview with Godfather creator Mario Puzo. (Black Cracker)

*

Deep inside The Eerie Midnight Horror Show. (Movies About Girls)

*

11 Horror Movie Plants With Whom You Should Not F. (Evil on Two Legs)

*

I have always joked that no one person has ever seen both Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring and Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left, and therefore we’ll never know how much the former influenced the latter. Tenebrous Kate says I’m wrong. (Love Train for the Tenebrous Empire)

*

Panic in New York, Menagerie Breaks Loose. (Monty on Movies)

*
Download The Apple soundtrack. Rock your Granny Smith off. (Vinnie Rattolle)

*

Los Angelenos, see the ONLY Evil Dead that matters this Friday (March 5th) at the Nuart. (Grindhouse Releasing)

Pardon the skinterruption…

Big things are a-brew behind the scenes in McBeardoland, particularly on the career track.

More will be revealed in time, but this blog has to take a backseat for the next little while.

While U Wait…

• Grindhouse Releasing is an inferno of smashingness of late. Catch their midnight screenings of the original Evil Dead (1982)—the ONLY Evil Dead, as far as I’m concerned—as it splatters all over a groovy theater near you during the next few months.

Also keep your eyes open and your mind in the upright about-to-be-blown position for Grindhouse’s restoration and revelation of Duke Mitchell’s Gone With the Pope (1976).

• After several years of miserable midnight schedules dominated by The Princess Bride (1987) and the christfuckingawful Goonies (1985), Chicago’s Music Box Theatre is back on track with a spring line that brings grindhouse/arthouse outrage to nearly every weekend.

Among the gems are Forbidden Zone (1980)—which is McBeardo’s one and only favorite movie of all time—along with Don’t Go in the House! (1980), The Warriors (1979), Human Centipede (2009), UHF (1989), Risky Business (1983), and Night of the Comet (1984).

The Music Box Sci-Fi Spectacular in April also boasts Q: The Winged Serpent (1982) with writer-director Larry Cohen in attendance. Along with me.

For decades, it seemed, you could roll your eyes in disgust anytime some simp bellyached: “Thank fuckin’ God for punk for coming along and saving us all from pompous prog-rock like Yes and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer and ….”

And that’s usually where the list ended because that’s as much of the prefabricated pontification the speaker had bothered to mentally rehearse.

First, it’s a ludicrous notion both musically and factually and, second, for at least the past 20 years, that endlessly recited fallacy has served as an immediate indicator that the speaker is out of touch, out of step, and really … old.

Now it’s: “MTV – fuck! What does the ‘M’ stand for? Do they even SHOW music videos anymore?”

The short answer is: “No, MTV does not show music videos anymore.”

The more precise answer is: “No, MTV does not show music videos anymore. And welcome to the Year of Our Lord 1996. You desperate fossil.”

Watching music videos, of course, is essential to the vitality of any organism, healthy or otherwise.

So how does a being obtain its necessary music video intake now, nearly a decade-and-a-half past the point that MTV got into the business of all evidence-that-teenagers-should-be-annihilated, all the time?

Go to the gym.

In my current effort to keep Rotten Cotton and November Fire profitable by necessitating that I have to replace my General Ursus and Dr. Butcher, M.D. (Medical Deviate) t-shirts in sizes minus an X (or two), I am presently elliptical-machining like a maniac.

What makes this Herculean effort possible is the endless loop of music videos spooling out on each device’s TV monitors.

The channels include one general Hit Mix, followed by Top 40 Hits, Dance, 80s Pop, Rock, Classic Rock, Modern Alternative, and Adult Alternative.

There are also options for Rap, Urban Hits, Latin Musica, and Country, and but those exist to me as blips that speed by while I hit the channel changer and think, “Ew! Ew! Ew! Ew!”

Indeed, like John Mayer’s now famous dick, my taste in tunes generally runs toward the Caucasoid, but not so deep as to allow for performers dressed up like the summertime staff of Wild West City in scenic Netcong, New Jersey.

More telling than anything racist (or, blah, “classist”) such a lifelong preference might imply is my inherent sexism when it comes to music. I will watch a woman sing and play anything. And I do mean anything. At the same time, I automatically am suspect of, and even reflexively contemptuous, of any dude attempting the same feat.

This explains how I have, in my life, owned a Liz Phair cassette but never any recorded offenses by, say, Pavement or Uncle Tupelo (I’m trying to keep a consistent timeline/douche-horror context by invoking those particular offenders).

I offer the following examples of the abominations that are rendered, quite literally, sweet music to my ears (and, more importantly I suppose, my eyes) simply by the milk-and-egg-making abilities of the individual performers.

**********************************

‘“WHAT’S UP?” by DJ Kicken featuring Joyce.

The original version, by lesbian separatist front 4 Non-Blondes, is a fairly mighty atrocity in and of itself, but it’s also a genuine curio and a legitimate timepiece, with lyrics whose profound dumbness is surpassed in overkill only by the hyper-histrionics of the bull-dagger vocalist who invented wearing a top hat with goggles on it.

This techno redo is just worthless. Except to me. Because I am mo(i)t smitten by the  sexily semi-flabulent flame-mane doing the wailing, the anti-rhythmic rumbling, and the relentless eye-sliding, as though she’s directing us to look at those two indeterminate-race goofs behind her and not notice how out of sync her shoulders are as they pump to some beat other than the one that’s playing.

And her name: Joyce. Is there a more sexless sound in any language?

Still, this mama is foxy. The shots of her on all fours in an inch of water with her bare, sumptuously sizable mid-section dangling downward, free from her two-piece pleather bodysuit, would have been freeze-frame fodder to the point of injury back when I used to masturbate.

Which I don’t do anymore.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t do it.

For me.

***********************************

THE BRIDGES — “Pieces”

If this piece of music was performed by men, it would justify a slow, excruciating, all-encompassing human holocaust.

But because it emerges from a front-femme who resembles a cross between Linda Blair and Pamelyn Ferdin (of Space Academy and The Toolbox Murders), plus her similarly weirdish looking harmonizing sisters (in particular the bleachy blondey guitar and bass playere who are all, like, “necky”), I watch.

And now you know: Trust none of my judgements. Doubt all of my opinions.

More to come…

And, very much in the spirit of  the storied haunts of 42nd Street and Chicago’s Loop and Downtown L.A. and The Block in Baltimore and hundreds of drive-in screens across the landscape in the glory days of grindhouse cinema, The Red Box is open all night and charges only a buck to get in on the action.

And, thus, as I did in days of yore while hopping from the Selwyn across the street to the Harris and then downtown to the Variety and then back up to Cine 42 (and so on), I’m running through my Red Box options two at a time, devising double features of the freshest fodder from our various trash film factories.

And, as is always the case, most of these movies will be overwhelmingly lame and largely worthless. But you’ve got to learn to love the sleaze-movie spelunk, not just the maniacs, bloodsucking freaks, holocausting cannibals, and medical deviates you luck into once every 10,000 trips downward.

The first-one two punch is a pretty much a blow right where it stings, but does not swell. But onward we go.

***************************************************************

BLOOD CREEK (2009)
DIRECTOR: Joel Schumacher
CAST: Dominic Purcell, Henry Cavill, Michael Fassbender, Emma Booth, Rainer Winkelvoss

My cousin is an esteemed boxing trainer who once believed—correctly—that the height of hilarity was getting you into the ring, turning his back to you, touching his shoulder with one hand, and asking: “Did I ever show you wear the horse bit me?”

When you inevitably leaned in to see, he’d swat you in the schnuts with his free fist.

And now Blood Creek (2009) arrives after a microscopic theatrical run somewhere, and it could be titled: Did I Ever Show You Wear the Horse Bit Me: The Movie.

At least as far as I’m concerned.

After an engaging opening that’s set in 1936 in which a Nazi sorcerer conjures up some black SS magic on a rural American farm, Blood Creek leaps to modern times.

We go back to that same farm, see that the same occupants that lived there 75 years ago have not aged and the movie cooks up a decent mystery as to what kind of brutality has been going on and then … and then these un-fucking-believably shitty CGI horses show up.

They gallop around, all loco-possessed by The Evil Magic Gestapo-Thing in the Celler and one of these see-through Seabiscuits bites a buy on the shoulder and pulls him out a window, and all I could think about was my cousin prankishly popping an endless succession of suckers smack in the package.

The other moment that comes to mind is The Attack of the Killer Forest Deer in The Ring 2 (2005). To be surrounded by a battalion of berserk Bambis that continually head-butt your car on an isolated road would be, in real life, entirely terrifying.

In fact, it would be seats-soakingly scary if one deer did it even. But in a movie, it looks ridiculous. There’s no way to make deer look scary on-screen, short of busting out the rubber suit from the end of Larry Fessenden’s Wendigo: A Film by Larry Fessenden.

The same proves true of horses. While out here in actuality, horses are enormously imposing beasts whose strength and hugeness stands behind their power as crowd-control tools (plus it would really suck to get trampled under even just one hoof, let along a pack of them).

But in Blood Creek, the horses are all amateurishly CGI’d up and they’re transparent and they get huge, cartoony holes blasted through them, so that these obviously computer-animated animals, so hellbent on inspiring horror, come off momentarily hilarious, then irritating, and then insulting.

And that’s pretty much the course of the movie: it kicks off pretty well, staggers, then sucks.

Curiously, Blood Creek was directed—between the Jim Carrey thriller The Number 23 (2008) and the upcoming Emma Roberts Sundance hit Twelve (2010)—by Joel Schumacher, an A-list name who you have been told to hate and despise and tar and feather and soil your pull-ups over at the mere mention of because he upset grown-men with his treatment of their favorite dress-up super-heroes.

And he did it twice, even!

(The only job I’ve ever had of which I am ashamed was a six-week stint at a “New York arts and fashion quarterly” shit-sheet called Black Book, which once befouled existence with it “101 Suggestions on How to Save Hollywood”, one of which was “Never let Joel Schumacher direct another Batman movie again. Ever!” That came from the Future Screenwriter of the Fucking Will Smith Rom-Com Hitch … and his writing partner. Because quality like that? It takes two, baby).

There are any number of Schumacher transgressions with which to be genuinely outraged and, in fact, he inspired the first truly stand-out use of “brutally” as an overkill adjective that Youngman McBeardo ever came across.

In 1985, New York magazine film critic David Denby ended his review of St. Elmo’s Fire with the line: “Directed by the brutally untalented Joel Schumacher.”

In the all-calling-for-beheadings, all-the-time world of Internet language, that line is coddling gurgle. But at the time, and in such a normally demure context, it was, indeed, brutal. And inspiring. Brutally.

Still, I’ll properly applaud Schumacher for D.C. Cab (1983) and The Lost Boys (1987) and the opening of Falling Down (1993) and that picture with the Muppets, above, and nothing else. Least of all Blood Creek.

********************************************

ASSASSINATION OF A HIGH SCHOOL PRESIDENT (2008)
DIRECTOR: Brett Simon
CAST: Mischa Barton, Reece Daniel Thompson, Bruce Willis, Patrick Taylor, Melonie Diaz

Writer-director Rian Johnson’s debut feature Brick (2005) is a subtly brilliant bending, intersecting, and dissection of two genres that results in a one-of-a-kind experience: stark film noir via high school romance.

And I must say that Brick WAS one-of-a-kind—note the past tense—because now we have Assassination of a High School President and what that means is what we have now is, specifically, Brick for Dummies.

Severe dummies. Severe, loathsome dummies. If I were in charge: dead dummies.

For whereas Brick is quiet and disquieting, understated and all-enveloping, never flinching from the seriousness with which its characters take their situations nor needing to acknowledge the bizarre language they use to communicate with one another, Assasination is all winks, japes, raspberries, text message shorthand brayed out loud (loud! LOUD!!!), and stomach-turning post-Diablo-Cody tongue-twister/panty-buncher-uppers bombarding faster than the speed of every unwelcome Twitter you ever couldn’t figure out how to delete quickly enough.

Neither film consists of dialogue that could ever possibly occur in real life. Brick’s words call to mind Daschiel Hammet and James M. Cain as filtered through Shakespearean rhythms. Assassination’s lead dick describes a situation as being “as crooked as a case of scoliosis” and adds that he’s “on it like pink rubber bands on your little sister’s braces.”

By the time we get to Principal Bruce Willis as the “Psycho Gulf War Vet” (at last, a stereotype I am not eager to embrace) with a “Mission Accomplished” sign and a picture of Eisenhower (fuckin’ Ike?) above his desk, I was waiting for someone to produce a Chinese phone book and mention something about someone having more Chins than could be found inside.

Willis, in fact, delivers not only the worst line in the movie, but the worst line of the … maybe ever. As he gets guff from a bad attitude Hot Topic chick in his office he blurts out:

“I don’t go to the strip club where you work and knock the dicks out of your mouth!”

The correct version of this ancient hack stand-up comic’s heckler comeback line is, of course, “I don’t go where you work and knock the dicks out of your mouth!”

The joke is in NOT stating where the target works. The humor comes from the IMPLICATION – e.g., strip-club, whorehouse, glory-hole, Bruce Willis’s backyard pool cabana, etc.

To have included this mummified turd of a gag as it properly exists would be lethal, but to kill what is already beyond dead by including “THE STRIP CLUB” is … well, that’s Assassination of a High School President in one handy bifurcation.

Except it’s not. Not completely. Because goddamned if halfway through I didn’t find myself getting caught up in the central mystery. And the art direction, costumes, clever set design, and sharp cinematography pulled me in even further.

But it did not pull me far (or hard) enough. Because I had seen Brick and, as Assassination grated along, sometimes successfully (even Willis turns funny by the end), there was just no un-seeing the original, superior-in-every-meaningful-scintilla version of this material.

Alas, there is one area where Assassination swamps Brick, and it’s the one that genuinely qualifies it for the bottom half of an exploitation double feature: gratuitous nudity.

Mischa Barton, whatever your opinion of her, is one of Hollywood’s most famous contemporary starlets and so it’s especially noteworthy that we see her buoyant British B-bags multiple times as she eases back in a bathtub.

First, those dark-tipped nerps bobble into sight as the hero spies on her and provides us with a long, lustful leer, and then we see the same footage twice more in flashback—even longer and more lustfully leering.

Assassination’s closing line is the ultimate groaner that anyone who is not the intended audience for this film had been dreading all along (yes, Chinatown), but the repeated presence of Mischa’s bon-bons make for an interesting paraphrase:

“Remember, you out there watching this … it’s a teen exploitation movie.”

“I was born with seven clits.”

And so, with that clam-dinger of an opening line, Bad Biology kicks off with a metaphorical bang that is followed, in short order, by a more literal one.

After explaining her mutant mons Venus, the speaker, Jennifer—played by Hollywood-worthy pretty Charlee Danielson—picks up an unsuspecting sex partner, mounts him on the floor and puts her poon-of-many-protrusions to work on him.  The guy dies, Jennifer immediately whelps out a monstrous infant and, admonishing us not to judge her, takes off in search of more carnal prey.

The cue-card-caliber acting immediately signals that we’re at least partly in amateur country, but this amusing, grotesque set-up, exactly as it plays out in Bad Biology, might work equally well for an intellectual, Cronenberg-esque venereal nightmare or a way-too-dumb dumb-joke Troma bifurcation.

As it turns out, Bad Biology contains flashes of the former and admirably works to steer clear of the latter but, at this point, the presence of a pulsating, freely ambulatory penis puppet on a naked-stripper-impaling rampage can only invoke comparisons to The House That Repackaged Sgt. Kabukiman DVDs Built.

Bad Biology’s other main protagonist is Batz (Anthony Steed), a lone nut/chronic masturbator who, at birth, suffered an accidental penis extraction and has since spent his life in pursuit of chemically conjuring a replacement appendage. In that, he’s been successful.

So Jennifer has seven clits and Batz has a berserk, hard-flopping phallus that’s three feet long with a literal mind of its own. Destiny turns on the 35mm cameras (shockingly enough) and we watch.

From there, this long-in-gestation collaboration between director Frank Henenlotter (maker of the 1982 splatter meistürwürk Basket Case), and co-screenwriter R.A. the Rugged Man (a hip-hop multi-talent who once penned a consistently interesting film column for Mass Appeal magazine), works pretty good. Enough.

The script is literate and funny, although most dialogue is delivered by performers that might clinically be deemed “non-professional.”

Moments do crop up, here and there, that invite the pondering of larger themes along the line of sex addiction and the lasting effects of pubescent body-change trauma, but we get jumped back to dirty talk and bare boobs before any of that might take hold.

Weird touches like a vagina-face photo shoot and Batz’s lair full of antique Rube Goldberg whack-off machinery laid out before perpetually porn-playing TV monitors are effectively realized.

The nudity is copious and rife with formica-funbagged Garden State pole-dancers, but when it comes to Ms. Danielson’s Crunchberry milk-spouts and volcanically voluptuous Jelena Jensen’s uproariously gratuitous shower scene, Bad Biology’s up-close anatomy lessons attain passing greatness.

And Henenlotter proves, even with resources that were likely as limited as the flimsiest Shock-O-Rama pick-up, that he remains an enormously talented, miserably underutilized director.

The dick- and pussy-P.O.V. shots immediately grab more attention, but just marvel at Henenlotter’s montages of the faces of Jennifer’s bedmates simultaneously experiencing Little and Big Deaths.

Still, Bad Biology never quite caroms into anything greater than a momentarily beguiling direct-to-DVD cheapie.

The final film exists somewhere between the exquisite Teeth (2007) and the execrable Poultrygeist (does the year even matter?), but don’t take that to mean it’s like some combination of the two, or some sort of “perfect” middle ground. Bad Biology is its own unique, fitfully memorable experience. And it’s a good. Enough.

It seems oddly, even sadly fitting that Henenlotter, who made Basket Case with ambitions of having it run on 42nd Street and then had to be satisfied with its success as an arthouse midnight attraction, now seems to be aiming to make a midnight movie, and Bad Biology turns out to be just another eye-catching title at the Red Box machine.

And that’s good. Enough.

Today’s Red Box serves as the 21st century equivalent of a row of Deuce-esque exploitation theater marquees. Frank Henenlotter is, at last, up with the B-movies where he belongs.

By all means, next time you’re at your local DVD dispenser, happily and eagerly give the man and his new movie your single dollar support.

And may there be many more.

Shit is Finished.

That’s all I can stands. I cain’t stands no more. Puked out here is the remainder of my annotated tour of that which was worst, on a communally endured cultural scale, from the previous decade.

As with the preceding five countdowns (100-81, 80-61, 60-51, 50-41, 40-30), my plan was to imbue each entry with its own vituperative condemnation, summing up what was unforgivable about each transgression and irrigating my spleen, simultaneously.

But the second half of January 2010 has placed me in a brighter spot than the first half, and I wish to write tributes to the gorgeous likes of Allen Garfield and “Bag” from the first season of Happy Days.

So here’s the rest of the wretchedness, barfed out in one bombastic bifurcation of gargantuan grievance.

Have at, and then let’s get on with things, shall we?

********************************************************************

30. “PABST! BLUE! RIBBON!”

Granted, beer and I have endured a tempestuous relationship, lo these past handful of decades.

So I do come into this dust-up with all manner of chips on my shoulder, affixed there good and stiff by piles of dried puke.

Plus, the first half of the 1990s, was all about nonstop imbibing of Rolling Rock for me, that quaint hepcat elixir of the grunge era.

But I must protest that I, at least, genuinley did like the taste of Rolling Rock and that I do believe that it is BIOLOGICALLY IMPOSSIBLE for any human throat to choke down Pabst Blue Ribbon unless it’s powered by faux-blue-collar pretensions and ironic non-irony and prescribed cornballism and desperate, ugly floundering desires to be SEEN choking down Pabst Blue Ribbon.

And, on (foamy) top of that, I never, ever heard to Rolling Rock as “RR”.

When was the last time you were able to escape mention of “P.B.R.”?

So to P.B.R. and, more pointedly, suckers down of P.B.R., I say:

“P. - U.!”

*

29. ANCHORMAN (2005).

At first, it was easy to just lob mental feces at Will Ferrell and be done with him.

After all, it was his cheerleader bit that seemed to prompt Saturday Night Live to abandon the idea of recurring characters and simply substitute entire recurring sketches—exact same construction, exact same set-ups, exact same beats, exact same punchlines, exact same everything (with the sole switch being one week’s guest host appearing in the exact same role as the previous week’s guest host).

So instead of “The Coneheads Celebrate Halloween” begetting “The Coneheads Welcome Connie’s Boyfriend to Dinner”, SNL is comprised entirely of “Gilly” pieces (to name just one offender) so identically indistinguishable from one another that they could function as some kind of minimalist art experiment—as long as it was one in which laughter is forbidden.

But back to Ferrell. At some point, he did start to make me laugh on SNL and, by the time he got to the professor character declaring love for his “llluhh-vaahhh”, I was on his side. Then came the movie Elf (2003), and I was a … if not exactly a fan, certainly a booster.

Alas, but then came way, way, way too much Will Ferrell and then he wanted us to really, really, seriously APPRECIATE his socking it to George W. Bush and then I hated him more than the first time.

And no anti-funniness that the public refuses to not fake-laugh-at better crystallizes everything despicable about lazy, stillborn Will Ferrell than the anti-funniness of Anchorman.

Still, as trite, as watery, and as dead-schticky as Anchorman is—and that is ALL Anchorman is—by far, its far most loathsome transgression is creating PEOPLE WHO QUOTE ANCHORMAN.

You hear that, you SMELLY PIRATE HOOKER!?!?

HAW! HAW!! HAWWWWWWWWW!!!!

*

28. MEN’S HATS ON WOMEN.

Hideous.

Although I have to admit the opposite would make for an intriguing fashion trend: women’s hats on men.

*

27. The terms “RED STATE” and “BLUE STATE”.
Pick your side.

Pick your “us.”

Pick your “them.”

Pick who’s going to dictate your “me.”

Pick your ass and eat it. Then die of Hepatitis A. That will serve us all better.

*

26. POKER
’Cuz it’s one way that wasted-penis-stricken pussies who live in vaginal concaves like the Upper West Side of Manhattan and Chicagoland’s Oak Park can play-act at being “GUUUUUUUUUYZ!”

Same goes for cunts of the traditional cuntish gender.

*

25. AXE BODY PRODUCTS.
Why capitalists want to sell you deodorant.

*

24. TRIUMPH OF THE PG-13.
Mr. Skin said it best. And I said it for Mr. Skin.

*

23. BILL MAHER.
Bill Maher looks like he takes snuff. And I’d like it if  Bill Maher got taken for a snuff film. Very much. Maybe even—GUFFAW!—religulously!

*

22. THE ANTI-“TORTURE PORN” POLICE
Especially this parasitic interloper who believes subjecting her child to The fucking goddamned desevered-to-be-razor-sodomized Shins is more beneficial to his development than, say, Scrapbook (2001).

*

21. TEARS FOR THE WORLD FINALLY SHITTING OUT JOE STRUMMER.
Who killed punk?

Who made it palatable for the King Midases of Feces that would eventually turn it into U2?

I will tell you who: this uniformed careerist who brought Crosby, Stills, & Nash political sloganeering to the initial Nihilism Party and used it to poison the punch (in every sense of the term), that’s who.

Weep not for the murderer Joe Strummer.

*

20. THE BIG LIE OF PORNOGRAPHY
Specifically: the enduring, unkillable, decades-old falsehood: “Women now consume porn as enthusiastically and in the same numbers as men! MAYBE EVEN MORESO!!!”

*

19. JOSS WHEDON MENSTRUATING ON THE HORROR GENRE.
Really, just Joss Whedon, period, as in the monthly visit bestowed upon any fella named Joseph who prefers you call him by the common abbreviation for “Jocelyn”.

And also because:

A. The hairdo.

B. ANY externally piss-piped being that majors in Women’s Studies is a desperate, oozing, opportunistic grotesque (for the internally-genitaled, that figure drops to the high 99-percentiles).

C. For all the self-trumpeted feminism of the (PUUUUUUUKKKKE!) “Whedonverse”, Jocelyn’s work proves that he believes in powerful heroines—as long as the source of their power is their MAXIM-ready bikini bodies.

D.  I’ve never made it through 18 consecutive of Buffy the Vampire Slayer without attempting to drive a stake throught my TV screen.

E. This simp who built a capitalist fortune on ghouls, grimness, and gruesomery wants to dictate and limit the “extremes” to which genuine horror filmmakers may dare to go.

F. Again, the hairdo.

*

17. U2.
Still. Why? FOR WHO?!?!

*

16. SHIRTS FOR GUUUUUUUUYZ!
Vomit-graphic men’s apparel with words, stencils, and general ass-wipe visuals splattered all over odd corners of any given article of clothing.

Especially non-Ed-Hardy brands that look exactly like Ed Hardy abominations worn by product-headed abominations who claim they’d never be caught dead wearing Ed Hardy.

*

16. ALT-COUNTRY
Gonad-free fake hayseedism in general, Wilco in particular.

Jeff Tweedy’s unfortunately resilient liver in super-ultra particular.

*

15. ALMOST FAMOUS.
Cameron Crud.

*

14. TEARS FOR THE WORLD FINALLY SHITTING OUT JOHN HUGHES.
I was 15 in 1984 when Sixteen Candles came out and it was followed, in rapid succession, by The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, all before my 1986 high-school graduation.

This gruesomely unamusing onslaught from the creative loins of (the once great) National Lampoon contributor John Hughes hit me, especially at the time, as cascading firebombs of class warfare propaganda.

And the privileged, moneyed, New-Wave-grooving, Mid-West suburban “heroes” of Hughes’  freakishly inappropriate fantasies (which, more freakishly, he was never called out on) certainly did not represent anything resembling any side of suicidal, prog-and-metal-listening, son-of-a-Green-Beret, Brooklynite me.

In fact, Hughes’ characters, clearly and infuriatingly, both embodied The Enemy and taught The Enemy how to be just that … The Enemy.

“I wanted a car,” sniffs Ferris Bueller in non-appreciation of his parents’ generosity, “I got a computer!”

(Consider the context: cars and computers, circa ‘86, were comparable investments.)

Somehow, I couldn’t sympathize with Master Bueller. And somehow I couldn’t swallow that that obscenely entitled skag was supposed to be The Coolest Kid in the School Called the Whole Wide World. Somehow, I only wanted to take up arms.

But I didn’t. I just … did other stuff. And, alas, like the Caucasian Nobility that Hughes only served to further empower, those shitty fucking movies and their even (way) shittier fucking soundtracks never went the fuck away.

Shit.

In fact, Hughes only grew in stature over time, especially as newer generations of dipshitticusses threw themselves into Nostalgia for Other People’s Memories.

So when John Hughes died suddenly last year, I expressed how much I wouldn’t miss him.

Oh, the moans I heard and shaming fingers I felt zinging in my direction.

But I stand unmoved. The war rages on. To quote one of Hughes’ infinitely more gifted Lampoon superiors: “It’s the slobs against the snobs.”

And I’m still breathing.

*

13. THE DIABLO CODY MOMENT
Again, let us goddamn all Nostalgia for Other People’s (Alzheimer’s Glazed) Memories.

As such, Betty Page-ling/Burlesque/Roller Derby/Rockabilly/Dita Von Vomitaciousness: each warrants blunt trauma hysterectomies for all involved.

Especially Michael Cera.

*

12. Grown men punctuating written sentences with smiley faces

*

11. DONNIE DARKO.
Dummo.

*

10. TUCKER MAX.
Tucker Max is Peter Sotos for guys who, in high school, beat up guys like Peter Sotos. And, for that matter, guys like Tucker Max.

Here it is, all you arrested-at-your-first-jerkoff losers aching for looking-glass/beer-bottle illusions/delusions of onanistic impunity: Revenge of the turds.

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9. McSWEENEY’S.
The parents of McSweeney’s midget-mind Dave Eggers famously succumbed to fatal illnesses in the prime of their lives.

His sister, less famously, committed suicide.

Touch anything connected to this twee, oily-tendriled, diabetic anal rot made contemptible flesh, and you’ll understand members of the Family Eggers’ fatal insistence on getting away from their ultimate shame—i.e., being related to the treacle-reeking un-talent who bullet-proofs his every keystroke with juvenile irony and hyper-preening “adowableness”.

Case in point: the very title, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

Case in mortifying mega-point: the Eggers-bankrupted movie version Where the Wild Things Are (2009).

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8. JUDD APATOW.
Mitigating factor: John Hughes died young.

Continue following that dildo’s example, Judd.

All the way. Hard. And fast.

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7. “CELEBRITY!”
Not the Woody Allen bomb (which was from 1998, anyway). Our ENTIRE PRESENT REALITY.

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6. PITCHFORK NATION
The Complete and Utter Goddamnable Castration of Mainstream Rock Music.

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5. SEX AND THE CITY
Oh, wait! It turns out you ARE your fucking shoes!

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4. MAXIM
The how-to manual for perfect male nothingness, for all-encompassing consumerist enslavement, for eruptions of false superiority emanating from volunteer lobomitization.

FUCKIN’-A RIGHTEOUS, DUDE!

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3. Your Gushing Love and Adoration of Authority as long as it comes wrapped in a Good Negro Daddy President package.

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2. THE DAILY SHOW
See the above category. Now see it loathsomely, utterly, toxically embodied in the smug “compassion” and “bemusement” over “what’s Good for America” in Jon Stewart’s Oxblood-Doc-Marten-inviting smirk.

Then go put on your Oxblood Doc Martens. Steel toes first.

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1. GOING OUT TO A MOVIE.
The talking, texting, telephoning, “shush”-resistance and all-around subhumanism of modern-day movie theater audiences begs for wholesale hydrogen-bomb sterilization of this species that laughably deems itself human like no other offense that has ever existed.

The nonstop audience ruckus that once seemed so fun and funny to me on 42^nd Street throughout the ’80s and ’90s now coagulates my blood into pure fury and serves only to remind me that I was constantly drunk, high, and coked-to-the-corneas whenever I was on 42^nd Street throughout the ’80s and ’90s.

It’s not even a lack of etiquette. It’s an evolution of New Etiquette wherein full-voiced conversation, beaming cell-phone lights, and running commentary are part of what people go to the movies now to do. And put up with.

And it’s ALL people. Make no mistake. Prior to the past few years, strategic racism could spare one most interruptions of this nature.

Time was, you could enter the theater, scan the crowd and assess potential noise-and-nonsense-makers thusly:

Black teenagers? Nonstop jibber-jabber. Arguments. Doobie-passing. Will kill you if you ask them to pipe down. Will answer each in an endless series of phone calls by bellowing: “Yo! I’m at the movies! Nah, it’s ai-ight, it’s ai-aight…”

Hispanic families? Infant hysteria. Toddler hysteria. Tween hysteria. Adolescent hysteria as they set about creating more infants, toddlers, and tweens. Mami making cell phone plans for after the movie. Papi offering loud advice to the screen.

NPR-looking Caucasian couples? Might nudge each other and whisper. Will laugh loudly at absolutely nothing to prove they “get” whatever just happened on screen.

… and so on.

But now All God’s Chillen have done gotten in on the rootin’-tootin’, rompin’-stompin’ free-for-all.

Last year, when I spotted two hyper-white fratty dudes at the Last House on the Left remake, I plopped down smack in front of them, thinking … well, you know what I was thinking.

Two minutes in, it became apparent that Biff and Happy behind me intended to narrate the entire movie.

“They’re cops,” one said when the police on-screen powered up the siren in their unmarked car.

“Cops, yeah,” said the other. “Yeah, cops.”

At the Music Box Theatre—my favorite Chicago movie haunt—I can, will, and often do stand up, turn around, point at the sources of the disturbance and erupt: “SHHHHHHHHHUT UPPPPPPP, YOU!!!”

That’s largely due to of the size, weight, and capability for violence of the average Music Box Theatre attendee.

Last House was playing at the local Kerasotes multiplex and these two Jockensteins would not be so instantly intimidated.

So they talked. And I went “Shhhh!” And they kicked the back of my chair. Over and over and over again, throughout the entirety of the movie (which was sold out, meaning no switching seats, no escape).

Beginning at age four, when I stayed awake all the way through Pinocchio, going out to a movie served as the supreme pleasure in my life.

And now it is a supreme nightmare. Always. Every time. Everywhere.

Alas, a glimmer of hope occurred near decade’s end. And with that in mind, let us all now salute James Joseph Cialella who silenced a movie theater gabber the only proper and righteous way: by shooting him with a Kel-Tec .380-caliber handgun.

All hail James Joseph Cialella, the hero—the only true hero—of the decade!

After the past few weeks’ temporary lift in my spirits vis-à-vis a top secret video project (all will be revealed come spring), the reality of my employment status came spiraling down upon me yesterday.

I don’t have a job, and I am aiming to move back to New York before summer.

Fuck. Fart. Gorilla. Suckola. Booo!

Thus, I have been launched into the proper lunatic frame of mind to commence work on finishing my Worst of the 2000s diatribe.

Until #30-21 emerges tomorrow or Friday, indulge here:

Rob Zombie’s HALLOWEEN II vs. Shirley Temple’s THE BLUE BIRD. (Kindertrauma)

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He-Man and The Masters of the Universe art show! (I Have the Power Art via The Devil’s Demons)

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Robin Bougie’s THE CUMMING OF JIZZUS has cum at last. (Cinema Sewer)

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DAHMER VS. GACY? And it got a theatrical release? (B Movie News)

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Loads of love for Larry Love: Killer Kitten on Tiny Tim. (Killer Kittens From Beyond)

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Frankenstein, Italian-Style. (Frankensteina)

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Groovy Brooklyn horror art show. (Monster Brains)

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Swank write-up of THE MANITOU, which I got to see at a midnight Music Box showing, before that beloved auditorium’s collapse into all-GOONIES, every midnight. (Mad Mad Mad Mad Movies)

Right now, all I can do is play Kaptain Kryptic and declare this a day of electrifying victory for me and a noble cabal of collaborators, both past and perhaps future.

Plunge into the grand finale of my favorite movie of all time. As my hyper-homosexualized Spiritual Advisor said of this moment: “It’s delicious! Savor it! SAVOR!”

Only preference: work with money attached. Send me some.

Over the weekend, I’ll be back to working on Worst of the 2000s madness. Reason for delay: the only payment I receive for all my hard-rendered hatred is all your love-love-love.

In the meantime, explore the pooniverse of online amusements that I  strongly admire. Por ejemplo:

I feel profound affection for cheap, dopey, R-rated sketch comedy films of the ’70s and early ’80s, especially slapdash raunch on the order of Video Vixens (1975) and Hey, There’s Naked Bodies on My TV! (1979). The ever-heroic Temple of Shock has just unearthed 69 Minutes (1976), complete with behind-the-scenes info on this Kansas-City-made wonder. (Temple of Schlock)

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Nifty round-up of horror flicks en route throughout 2010. (Monster Land)

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“Is it just me, or did Christopher Lee’s Dracula really dig being evil?” Questions from a Monster Kid. (Vault of Buncheness)

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Josh Alan Friedman on the wild impact of the obscenity-and-nudity-laden 1967 play Scuba Duba by his pop, Bruce Jay Friedman. (Josh Alan Friedman)

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The upcoming Swedish fright flick Mara looks moist skintriguing. (Fangoria)

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Last of the Moe Howard! See the Head Stooge in Charge’s final film role when Scorpion Releasing brings Dr. Death, Seeker of Souls to DVD on January 26, 2010. (Dread Central)

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Puke-A-Palooza: The Best Vomit in Horror. (Day of the Woman)

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Behind the Wall Greatness: The best horror blog coming to you from deep inside the People’s Republic of China. (Necrotic Cinema)

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Is it? Can it be? Why yes, good grief, it’s Poor Pretty Eddie coming to DVD!  (TOS via Hard Feelings)

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Gear up for Piranha 3-D with an ace look back at the Joe Dante original. (Kindertrauma)

January 1, 2000 to January 1, 2010. Ten years that felt like a colonic irrigation in reverse. And in the mouth.

We arrive, now, at the Top 40 of the bottom. Power up your hate-bazookas and train them alongside mine at oblivion-begging targets such as Vespa scooters, Vespa scooter drivers, Green Day, Entourage, the Matrix sequels, “alterna-“anything, and Michael Moore vs. The Passion of the Jesus.

What a dreadful decade. What a dreadful species.

Babs and Barry, youse was wrong: that these fecal abominations merely exist means that we ALL got something to be guilty of….

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40. THE LOVE OF 30 ROCK.
Frankly, anything that is not Tracy Morgan on 30 Rock demands to be buried up to its (no doubt, scarf-adorned) neck and get pelted into puree by 30 sizable, hefty, powerfully projected rocks—a minimum of 30 times each. And then 30 more. With 30 more rocks. And so on.

It’s not that the show itself hasn’t provided me with an occasional odd yuk—again, it does feature the mighty Tracy Morgan—but it is gimmicky, desperate to be adorable, and emptier than any of those ghastly post-Far-Side single-panel newspaper cartoons that, in fact, the show’s writers seem to graft verbatim into each episode as wretchedly unfunny cutaways.

Much is made of Alec Baldwin as the network honcho and, for certain, he can be a very amusing presence. But where Alec Baldwin belongs on TV is opposite Robert Osborne co-hosting Turner Classic Movies‘ “The Essentials”, and he’s already there.

Tina Fey, I suppose, is the core issue, and there’s no quibble as to her talent and even out-of-character likability.

But “Liz Lemon”, per se, is a worthless creation outside of embodying a mongoloid Ideal for middle-age-adjacent cunts (of any gender) who learned their lameness from Sassy and minoring in Women’s Studies and Liz Phair’s phalse claims of wanting “to be your blow job queen” and proudly being too “Lollapalooza” to ever actually go Riot Grrl, all the while en route to marriage, reproduction, and property ownership while being convinced that they are just the most hoo-larious “geek vixens” to ever try to make you think that they, personally, invented saying the words “I HEART”, and most especially when they are followed by “… BACON!”

Specific enough for you?

And, hence, disdain is officially and specifically dispensed for the adoration of this irritant where every awful, cutesy transgression gets excused and bombing clods of anti-humor that elicit natural groans get automatically converted into forced, fake, and—above all—LOUD laughter.

Just think of the dingus who plays the page. The thing where THAT comes from wins the “Best Comedy Series” Emmy every year.

And, yet, none dare call it cunt-spiracy.

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39. The Onion A/V Club’s Annual “Best of the Year” Edition
Area Man Saddened and Revolted to Read Uniform Praise for Arcade Fire, Wes Anderson, McSweeneys. Again. And Again. And Again. And Always.

Each holiday season, it hits: the horrendous moment when one is forced to face the fact that these people who write such funny, inventive things all year long have been doing it to the sights and sounds of the most self-serious self-congratulatory, depressingly pat, and glumly predictable things all the while.

And that’s when this Onion really can make you cry.

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38. AMERICAN IDIOT(S).
Green Day eats shit.

Their fans eat shit.

But there is a special extra-runny feces buffet reserved for True Believing Shit-Eaters in the “reevaluation” of Green Day after they issued an album of the exact same slavishly aped, anciently ineffective “punk” that comprises the totality of what these simps are capable of dumping out.

AH! But with American Idiot, Blowy Joe and the bros made sure to point out in press releases that, on this disc, they, like, really, really, really, seriously call George W. a A-hole.

By gum, even Rolling Stone magazine itself let us know on the cover that Green Day “saved” rock! What a feat!

Especially after Rolling Stone has spent all these decades slaughtering and entombing the goddamn thing.

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37. The MATRIX sequels.
Did you see these torpid ruinations of the original?

Did I?

Does anyone remember?

No?

Well if THE MACHINES are really that merciful, I side with Joey Pants and say, “Fuck the fuck out of you, Neo!”

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36. ALTERNADAD by NEAL POLLACK.
And anything else by Neal Pollack. And anything else preceded by the prefix “Alterna-.” And Chuck Klosterman.

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35. ENTOURAGE.
Douchebag codification so complete that it all but obliterated the potency of the term “douchebag” while, remarkably, spawning more and more and more and more of them. Forever and ever and ever.

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34. FAHRENHEIT 9/11 vs. THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST.
Or Keith Olbermann vs. Bill O’Reilly.

Or Al Franken vs. Rush Limbaugh.

Or Rachel Maddow vs. Glenn Beck.

Or Sarah Silverman vs. Sarah Palin.

Or Daily Kos vs. Newsmax.

Or The Daily Show vs. Fox News.

Or NPR vs. Sean Hannity.

Or Janeane Garofolo vs. Ann Coulter.

Or Whole Foods vs. Wal-Mart.

Or indie rock vs. country pop.

Or hybrids vs. NASCAR.

Or “choice” vs. “life.”

Or The Comedians of Comedy vs. The Blue Collar Comedy Tour.

Or utmost, unquestioning faith in a baffling, unread book by Charles Darwin vs. utmost, unquestioning faith in the baffling, too-closely-read Book of Genesis.

Or Bush = Hitler vs. Obama = Hitler.

Or any other easily-purchased “culture war” short-hand identifier for: “Looky! I picked a side and got on it! Thinking’s over now! Time to just swallow whole and hard and fight-fight-fight! Got to stop THEY! THEM! THOSE PEOPLE!”

However, for personal reasons, I must single out the Michael Moore vs. Mel Gibson moment.

Obviously, my sympathy is automatically inclined toward Mad Max over the lump who hires gun-toting guards to protect his Upper West Side penthouse but who makes the money to pay them by agitating so that we who can’t afford such pricey muscle also won’t be able to enjoy the same firepower.

And the whole “million-dollar working class hero” schtick was retch-inducing when John Lennon attempted it—and he was John Lennon!

Regardless, I never actually made it all the way through The Passion of the Christ because, frankly, it just doesn’t make amusing enough good on the material with which Gibson was so hilariously adept while he was in handcuffs and blowing quintuple Breathalyzer digits.

The cries of anti-Semitism against Passion invariably arose (as they always do) from the sort of Chosen and Gentile alike who bombastically mock the idea of, say, gangsta rap promoting ghetto violence.

Nonetheless, THIS extra-super-ultra-toxic material got them bellowing with righteous rage in assured horror that Gibson’s Snuff-Goes-the-Jesus saga would send goyim hordes storming into synagogues and emerging only after crafting and donning long necklaces of blood-soaked yarmulkes and tefillin.

Those same Defenders of the Allegedly Defamed—who, again, disgustedly guffaw at the theory that Grand Theft Auto might play a part in X-Box-addicted imbeciles baseball-batting real-world prostitutes—simultaneously believed that the power of the mass media could, however, do … “good.”

But they just had to get the message out … if they could only back up the work of the Disney organization in promoting a wide-release motion-picture with a billion-dollar promotional thrust that just could not possibly fail to win hearts and cleanse minds … if they could just get you to pay to see Fahrenheit 9/11.

And by “you”, I mean “me.”

And very specifically, I mean the time I was out grabbing a bite with friends several days before F-9/11 opened.

Every American with at least two functioning senses was, at that point, at least six months into the documentary’s inescapable online “controversy” campaign and at least six weeks into the inescapable TV, radio, billboard, flyers, print, online, and in-front-of your-face-at-public-urinals advertising juggernaut.

So I was sitting down to a burrito next to my pal Don and he asked: “What are you doing Friday?”

I said I had no plans and he continued: “Well … okay, good. Okay.”

Don cleared his throat a little and took on the air of a High Enlightener doing some Extremely Important Education—by speaking Very, Very Slowly and Very, Very Clearly and Very, Very Simply.

“Okay,” Don said (a third time). “There’s a movie coming out Friday called Fahrenheit 9/11 that’s very critical of President Bush.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” I said, tensing my guts for the Morally Imperative Pitch I knew was to follow.

“Well,” Don continued, “naturally the government is trying to quash it. So, uh, this organization I’m involved with, Move On, is asking people to see the movie or at least buy tickets to support it.”

“It’s not my thing, man,” I said, cutting him off.

Kindly.

Because all I wanted was to chow down and not have to Be Right.

And also because I was 35, and not 15 or 25 (or, to be honest, 34), and enjoying Don as a friend was more important to me than drilling my wrath into him by asking just HOW, exactly, the government was trying to “quash” this monstrous source of tax revenue or by pointing out that Don and “the organization” with which he was “involved” were proselytizing (very much religiously) on behalf of corporate coiffeurs and the-above-the-title brand-name’s trusty ol’ war profiteering.

So, instead of that, chow down we did and convivially discuss our favorite sorts of vaginal lips we did, too.

In peace.

Today, I remain nicely chummy with Don, although I’ve often detected an air of what I suppose is “benevolent pity” from him directed toward my savage simpleton benightedness.

For if not Don … and Move On … and Michael Moore … who WILL save my soul? Or, more importantly, THE HEART AND/OR SOUL OF AMERICA?

Who, dammit!? … YOU?

Please try. But only with cash. For I am, most assuredly, for sale.

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33. Any element of ANA MARIE COX that isn’t breast tissue.

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32. VESPA scooters.
Suddenly, this is acceptable big-city commuter transportation?

For … adults?

SAYS FUCKING WHO?!?!

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31. The dreadful lack of fatal VESPA scooter accidents.
For if even one, single, solitary Vespa scooter accident doesn’t kill its driver, that, in and of itself, comprises a dreadful lack of fatality.

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Sheesh! 30 more of these left? Well, they do get more suckadelic. Next go: Bill Maher, crocodile tears for Joe Strummer, the “Red State/Blue State” conceit, and the PABST! BLUE! RIBBON! deceit.

While you wait, commemorate our being in The Top 40 with this ageless jewel: