Relying on Your Expertise

The announcement of a new film by John Landis (The Blues Brothers, An American Werewolf in London) is generally cause for celebration, even if this one is tinged with curiosity. Landis is casting Burke and Hare, two nineteenth century serial killers / grave robbers. So far, we only know who he tapped to play Hare and Burke, but it's pretty good: Simon Pegg and David Tennant.

Why this is so curious to me is that the timing of this comes awfully hot on the heels of I Sell the Dead, the Dominic Monaghan / Ron Perlman / Angus Scrimm movie I meant to watch on Video on Demand but never got around to. Films tend to do this every now and then; a run of two or more movies about roughly the same thing, like Deep Impact and Armageddon, or The Illusionist and The Prestige. Still, 19th century grave robbing isn't really in the cultural zeitgeist in the same way that asteroids or evil babies or messed up European torture porn are. Maybe turn of the century magicians though.

I guess it isn't a gripe so much as an observation. Teaming up David Tennant with Simon Pegg is a great idea, and John Landis has always had a knack for the funny which he supplements nicely with the scary from time to time.

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Arriving on the old digital versatility disc and Blu-Ray isn't an acronym for anything are four horror movies, two of which I'm keen on and the other two I'm asking for your input on. Believe it or not, I don't have time to watch everything, and I haven't seen everything. In fact, the last day or so I've been not watching movies and playing too much Fallout 3. Seriously, that game is dangerously open-ended...

Where were we? Oh, right! New release Tuesday. Stay frosty.

- After last July's field trip, it was a foregone conclusion that I'd pick up Drag Me to Hell when it came out on Blu Ray. Sam Raimi served me a heaping helpful of "WRONG" for doubting his ability to make a new horror movie, and PG13 at that. For everyone not named Cranpire, DMTH is a clever balance of shrieks and laughs, designed and executed to ratchet the tension all the way up, subvert the "shock" scare, and then hit you when you least expect it. It's also funny in a way Raimi hasn't been since Evil Dead 2. Not that Army of Darkness isn't funny, but it's more jokey than scary. Drag Me to Hell brings them both, and I'll happily eat crow on its behalf.

- I also wasn't going to hesitate picking up ordering The Stepfather online (cheap local stores aren't carrying it). I already ordered, watched, and enjoyed Stepfather 2: Make Room for Daddy last week, and I haven't seen the original Terry O'Quinn as unbalanced-psycho-dad-from-hell since the glory days of Carbonated Video.

For some reason, I never connected him from The Stepfather to The X-Files or Millennium until the first X-Files movie, and even then it was "That guy". Of course most people know him now as "that dead guy impersonating Locke from Dinosaur Island", so it'll be much more fun to watch than when Neil and I watched Saw to see "Ben Linus from Dinosaur Island" as Jigsaw's patsy. True story!

Okay, there are two movies I know very little about. I have been reading an inordinate amount about them online, and at least one of them sounds like a genuine "cult classic" that slipped through the cracks, so I'm reaching out to anybody that's seen them.

- I swear I'd never heard of Hardware until three weeks ago. Ever. No Dylan McDermott / Lemmy Kilmister / Android-Cyborg-Killing Machine whatever movie existed, as far as I knew. I was living in the ignorant bliss of Chopping Mall, but now there's this movie from 1990 by Richard Stanley that reviewers are calling a lost gem or better than you'd think, so my interest is piqued.

Plus, Severin put the dvd and Blu-Ray out, and if you haven't heard of the company, they're responsible for those very nice editions of The Psychic and Nightmare Castle dvds. They also put out The Inglorious Bastards (with an "A") and call themselves "The Criterion of Smut"! How can you go wrong with that? Okay, plenty of ways, but I have good reason to trust them.

My question is, has anyone seen this? It's been around for almost twenty years, so I'm guessing one of you must have seen it. I mean, Major Tom had seen Terrorvision, and I'd never heard of that until last summer. Get back to me.


- Happy Birthday to Me is a title I'm more familiar with, but it's one of those slasher movies I just never got around to seeing. If I understand the premise correctly, the movie is trying to mimic the Italian giallo style, and promises bizarre and memorable kills. The guy with a barbecue skewer in his mouth on the cover is certainly promising, but I've seen my share of slasher movies that promise a lot (like Splatter University's "Get a Higher Degree... In TERROR!") but then rarely deliver.

What I'm really asking is, am I going to get The Burning or Visiting Hours if I rent Happy Birthday to Me? I like the former, but was bored to tears by the latter. On the other hand, if the kills are really good, I will sometimes give a lesser movie a pass (like the original My Bloody Valentine), so what's the word hummingbirds?

Have you heard about Hugo and Kim?

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Tomorrow: a review of Anvil: The Story of Anvil, another excellent documentary that won't be nominated for anything next spring.

Also, Shecky's brother, Yankel Shecklestein, is out of prison and reunited with his brother. Pictures of the reunion to follow.