Minor Life Lessons with Cap'n Howdy

The, uh, vote is in. Major Tom* successfully campaigned for La Haine and won because, well, nobody else bothered voting. This tells the Cap'n two things:

1. I'll be watching La Haine sometime soon.

2. That whole "vote for what the Cap'n watches next" will not be back next week.

That's cool. It's better to know early when an experiment isn't working and course correct than take forever only to suffer months of crushing futility**, so I'll scale back the "reader interaction" for now. Nevertheless, look for a write up of La Haine next week, hopefully better than the Star Trek one from Monday.

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Onto other business: Mr. Cranpire, I checked up and Ghost House Underground is, in fact, part of the craptacular Ghost House productions Sam Raimi is responsible for. This does not help his case, I'm afraid.

Also, every time I think about After Dark Bore-or Fest, I grow slightly frustrated. The After Dark Horrorfest started the same Halloween I launched Horror Fest here, and while I selfishly think my fest is better, more people know about 8 Films to Yawn For.

For that reason (and many others), I won't show any of their films; not even Frontier(s) which never technically played at an After Dark. They also put out The Butterfly Effect 3, Crazy Eights, Dark Ride, Penny Dreadful, Wicked Little Things, and (theatrically anyway) Snoop Dogg's Hood of Horror. If you count Frontier(s), they're still doing better than Ghost House and Ghost House Underground.

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I haven't finished watching anything in the past few days. Honestly, I spend most of my day doing homework and most of the evening at work. When I get home I do more homework (never take summer classes, gang), and write the blogorium. I did manage to watch pieces of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and Star Trek: The Boring Picture all on fancy schmancy discs. They all looked pretty nice, even if the T2 disc is so overcomplicated that it won't actually start the movie when you press "Play _____ Version"***.

Actually, the T2 disc is kind of creepy. It pretends to be linking your "disc" with Skynet, including an on-screen readout of where you live, what kind of internet connection you have, the provider, and a map showing where you're watching the Blu Ray from. Any time you ask it to do things, "Skynet" spends a little time downloading crap to help it "function" better. Sure, most of its just Java-related stuff for the picture-in-picture modes, but dammit that's creepy. Because, you know, I WANT Skynet (and we all know it really exists) to know I'm watching a movie about how it fails to kill John Connor. That's going to earn me brownie points during the inevitable robot invasion.

To be fair, I'd rather be wasted in the Robot Holocaust called Judgment Day than to wake up in The Matrix after it happens. You guys did know that's what happens, right? John Connor fails and the Terminators hook humans up to The Matrix to grow their Skynet Empire. Surely you've heard this already.

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Oh, Star Trek? Well, Wrath of Khan looks very good and The Boring Picture is, as ever, pretty boring. Unless you have a huge boner for long, uninterrupted model shots of Klingon ships and the Enterprise or V'Ger (SPOILER: it's the Voyager 6 space probe. What a twist!). For some reason, HD makes the Klingon makeup look really bad, like something from the BBC Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I'm glad they improved it in time for Christopher Lloyd (SPOILER: He's a Klingon in The Search for Spock! Baron Von Trapp and Evil from Time Bandits are also Klingons but in a later movie. So was Shakespeare. What a twist!).

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Finally, while I could always be very wrong when it comes to Werner Herzog (the trailer for Rescue Dawn looked like the most generic "inspirational prisoner of war" movie, after all), the trailer of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans - and that's actually the title - looked baaaaaaad. Like, Wicker Man crossed with Bangkok Dangerous BAD. I was going to share it with you, but the user who posted it on Youtube wisely removed the clip.

If it helps give you some idea what you missed, here are some things Nicolas Cage uttered in the trailer:

"You don't have a lucky crack pipe?"

"What are these fucking iguanas doing on my coffee table?"

"Shoot him again. His soul is still dancing."

I can't remember whether it's supposed to be a remake or a sequel to Abel Ferrara (The Driller Killer)'s Bad Lieutenant, but I'm suddenly regretting that mandate that (like Harvey Keitel), Nicolas Cage unleash the schlong for his version.

Oh, who am I kidding? The only thing I think when I see this trailer is "well, they made a Basic Instinct 2 and look how well that worked out."

*EDIT* Just kidding. Look what I found



Trailers speak louder than blogs, and this trailer sounds like it's saying "Crap Sandwich."

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Class dismissed.



* Major Tom is, I believe, left his vote the same day during his comment about locating Terrorvision.
** Yes, I'm sorta kinda talking about the Blogorium in general...
*** You have the choice of the theatrical cut (which I prefer), the Director's Cut that James Cameron prefers, or the super-mega-everything back in cut with all of the deleted stuff including the T-1000 killing John Connor's dog and "glitching" after freezing and re-constituting.