Linksploitation: October 9, 2009
Jessica Harper blogs! (JessicaHarper.com)
Trash Aesthetics‘ Chick Young lays out his 10 favorite movie characters. Great idea. (Trash Aesthetics)
How did I just, now, learn about Up in Flames (1973)? It’s an unauthorized porno adaptation of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers meeting R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural! (Something Weird)
Spanking new interview with Jess Franco (SoledadMiranda.com via Tomb It May Concern)
I love Neil Marshall’s Dog Soldiers, don’t much care for The Descent, and I admire his ambitions in Doomsday (and not just for the tattoo-face chick). All told, I look forward to his upcoming project, Burst 3-D. Swell title. (Bloody Disgusting)
Dawn of the Mummy (1981). I rented this movie in high-school because the VHS box said it was rated X. I liked it. Sort of. As does this guy. Sort of not. (Mad Mad Mad Mad Movies)
Horror fan on Hitchcock. (Lightning Bug’s Lair)
What is your Holy Grail porno movie? (AV Maniacs)
Get pasty over eye-popping horror, exploitation, and B-movie posters. (Wrong Side of the Art)
I hope they serve piss (and it’s mine) at the memorial service following Tucker Max’s well-earned suicide. Actually, I just hope Tucker Max commits suicide. Let’s all encourage him however we can, eh? (IMDB Message Board)
Year of Our Exploitation 1979, Part 3: MAD MAX
The final year in the greatest of all decades is rife with cult and grindhouse masterworks. Come along for an exploration of these cinematic mayhem milestones as only McBeardo can provide - because it’s all about the crap I was doing when I saw these movies.
MAD MAX (1979)
Mad Max was made and released in Australia in 1979. The subsequent year, it opened at the Oceana Theater in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. I wasn’t allowed to see it.
But I did marvel at the ad in the newspaper, wondering if its helmet-adorned, jack-booted, armed-in-leather “Maximum Force of the Future” was some kind of super-homo.
Year of Our Exploitation 1979, Part 2: Hardcore
“Oh my God! That’s George C. Scott’s daughter! And me! And we’re both naked!”
Last time out, I recounted how 1979 resides in my head as 12 months of preadolescent obesity, round-the-clock suicidal ideation in the sixth grade, and having to endure Imus in the Morning before school each day because Howard Stern was still three years away from landing in New York, and mostly we only had AM radios in the childhood McBeardo home anyway.
Alas, investigation of 1979 from a gloriously insane-o movie point-of-view recasts it as an extraordinary year of one grimily awesome classic after another..
Our spelunk down the 1979 cult film hole continues - today, with just one stop. But, oh, is it deep.
HARDCORE
Kids today and their free porno all the time, any time, anywhere.
It’s a blessing and a curse, I’m sure, and I can’t imagine how I would have coped, circa ‘79, with not just being able to learn about and obsess over and contemplate the possibilities of pornography, but to lift the then-insurmountable veil of smudgy newspaper ads and glaring adults-only bijou marquees and nuclear-neon, gigantic 25-cent-piece-emblazoned peep-show signage to actually lay eyes (and who knows what other organs) upon whatever loomed on the other side of all those XXX-ratings.
Year of Our Exploitation 1979: Part 1
The last 12 months in the greatest of all decades turns out to be greater than I remembered.
In my memory, 1979 reeks of shit, garbage, Jimmy Carter, Ayatollah Khomeini, and “Reunited” by Peaches and Herb.
It was also the year that Belushi and Aykroyd left Saturday Night Live, resulting in the first-ever “Worst. Season. Ever.” (the follow-up year, of producer Jean Doumanian’s Saturday Night Live ‘80, at least remains a legendary curiosity). The quality of SNL was crucial to my young happiness. And, yes, I did suffer severe childhood depression.
Music-wise, I most 
assuredly was not into homo-negro-dago-Latino dance-pop at that moment, either, when WKTU - “Disco 92″ - conquered NYC radio and, by extension, schoolyards and car speakers and the AM Top 40 radio stations.
The truly alternative rock was Zeppelin and Sabbath and I was still a mite too practicing a Catholic for that to go down devoid of guilt and/or terror.
Plus I got fat in 1979. After a spindly early childhood, at age 10 I grew “chunky” then “chubby” and then, by my 11th birthday, I was a full-blown “fat boy” replete with water-balloon bosoms. They jiggled delightfully in my Our Lady Help of Christians Physical Education gym shirt twice a week.
I also had to start wearing eyeglasses. And not for any urban-legendarily fun reasons.
Review: STILETTO (2009)
STILETTO (2009)
Director: Nick Vallelonga
Cast: Stana Katic, Dominique Swain, Tom Berenger, Michael Biehn, William Forsythe, D.B. Sweeney, Tom Sizemore, James Russo, Paul Sloane
It’s about time somebody took on the Greek Mafia, Zeusdammit, and Stiletto proves to be just the rock-’em-sock-’em direct-to-video revenge flick to do it.
Tall drink of Canuck loveliness Stana Katic (alternately purring and wailing i
n a luscious Russian accent) hunts down and slaughters a 21st-century B-movie dream team of grizzled hard-asses (Berenger! Biehn! Bill Forsythe!) as payback for what they did to her kid sister. You know those baklavah-breath types and their famous white-slave trade.
Aside from the great knockout vs. knockabout-guy cast, the violence is splattery good, and the plot barrels along at an agreeable clip. You want Mediterranean mobster blood (and who doesn’t)? You got it.
Stiletto also includes stick-fighting geishas, Nazi skinheads, and that adorable case study in gangly, overgrown gawkiness, Dominique Swain.
Plus there’s Tom Sizemore snorting narcotics, groping prostitutes, and rolling with thugs of color. It’s safe to assume that’s documentary footage.
On top of that, there’s the coincidental casting of R.A. Mihailoff and Andrew Bryniarski, two actors who portayed Leatherface in two different Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies.
It all adds up to a perfect recipe to accompany pizza on a DVD Friday night.
In addition, Stiletto is destined to figure as an absolute godsend to insomniac channel surfers for, let us hope, years of wee-hour cable programming to come.
Strange Things Happen in Public Men’s Rooms: Part One
“Liar! LIAR! I’ve had better sex with GIRLS! And they had bigger DICKS, too!”
Quenchless thirst is my primary lifelong malady. If I am awake, even for half-a-minute, I am ingesting some kind of fluid. Every day. Always.
For a while, mostly in my 20s, that fluid was alcohol, but even before and since that glorious era of black-blood vomit and sleeping on the sidewalk, a constant flow of soda, coffee, water, tea, juice, and you-name-it has run past my lips and perpetually down my gullet.
The inevitable byproduct of all this guzzling, of course, is that it keeps my bladder and urethra in a similar state of near nonstop irrigation.
And, yes, I realize that this entire process may be an unconscious concoction of a reason to excuse myself in polite company so I can grab my wang several dozen times a day.
Linksploitation: September 21, 2009
Bai Ling speaks an epic lesbian mouthful on par with her super-human wonder-nipples. (Mr. Skin)
Vincent Price on a 1972 Dating Game! (Weird Hollow)
Help interview an actual sorority about Sorority Row. (Day of the Woman)
Is “Meg” from the original Sleepaway Camp dropping hints about the END of all Sleepaway Camps? (Lightning Bugs Lair)
Halloween is in the air, when a sensible human’s thoughts turn to Alice Cooper. (BthroughZ)
Synapse Film’s 42nd St. Forever: Alamo Draft House Edition is loose! (DVD Drive-In)
On the trail of SASQUA (which is spelled correctly). (Temple of Schlock)
For all my love of Conan/Mad Max hybrid/rip-offs, I can’t believe I’ve NEVER seen Steel Dawn with the late, great Patrick Swayze. (Scandy Factory)
For lost and obscure monstrous/metallic MP3s, Good Night Whatever You Are is a great companion to Occult Rock. (Goodnight Whatever You Are)
Swank newspaper movie ads from the bangin’ banner year of the Bicenetennial. (Doomed Movieblog)
Cinema Sewer (thanks for the shark pic) enters the discussion of New Atheism. (Cinema Sewer)
15 Film Firsts
A Lifeline of First-Times at the Movies: From Beneath the Planet of the Apes to The Bride
You never forget your first time at the movies. Or doing stuff that you can associate with going to the movies. Or thinking about all the times you’ve gone to the movies.
Well, if you’re normal, you do. And pretty much right away, too.
But if you’re like me, you remember it all; so much so that you can - and, in fact, often must - rattle off a list of such occasions, no matter how obscure or fecactuh (not for nothing does Fiddler on the Roof figure big in what follows), and no matter who cares or who doesn’t.
Stuff like:
First PG-13 Movie I Saw: Red Dawn (which was the first PG-13 movie to hit theaters, period, although 
not the first movie to be rated PG-13. That would be The Zoo Gang, which I never saw. But I’d like to at least try to see it. Still).
So please read my round-up of personal movie firsts, and then leave a list of yours in my comments section.
Patty Duke vs Suspiria
How I long, even now, for such a creation as the Remco Movieland Drive-In Theater, complete with Lil’ Patty Duke as a pre-bipolar playmate.
Watching this warm, lovely TV moment also brought to mind the commercial that most profoundly affected nine-year-old McBeardling: a jarring, snarling, 60-second all-out sensory assault promoting the New York area premiere of Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977).
Linksploitation: September 11, 2009
Portland grindhouse archaeologist hits classic kung fu movie motherlode! (Portland Mercury via Ant Timpson) 
Attention, scum of the earth: Scum of the Earth is coming to DVD! (Hard Feelings)
Horror icons defiled - charmingly! (Evil on Two Legs)
Hey, glamour ghouls, show us your curvy cadaver: become a Rue Morguette! (Rue Morgue)
Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion just turned 40. Dig these old tie-ins. (My Monster Memories)
Ebert super-extra-doubly confirms that Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist super-extra-doubly blew his 
mind. (Roger Ebert)
Sexy nerd broads slaughter spooks in upcoming fright flick, The Graves. (Graves Movie)
Remakes or How Horror Bloggers Became a Marketing Army (Tenebrous Kate)
Southern-fried sexploiter Mike McCarthy smokes anew with Cigarette Girl. (Bloodshot Eye)
Day of the Woman salutes Women of Hammer Horror (Day of the Woman)
Whooooaa, lawdy! Blaxploitation Horror poster bonanza. (Final Girl)
Lucifera! (Blonde Zombies)
Deep Inside ElectroBabe and DynaChick (Movies About Girls)
Always remember that it was McBeardo who granted Milla Jovovich nude the nickname G.N.A.T.s - Greatest Nipples of All Time. (Mr. Skin)
