Click images for desktop size: "Fractal 4" by Clody I was pretty pleased that among the first things Obama has done is to stop as much of the killing of endangered species that George Bush was trying to slip through.
Bush was and is a pratt.
With the abrupt announcing of the end of torture and the closure of the illegal prisons more and more people are starting to bicker about criminal charges. I agree.
One thing that some sociologists and most film critics (real film critics, not opinion dispensers) agree on is that horror movies are a good indication of the general state of mind of the people. I think that's cool. Judging where we are by what scares us most. Understanding our fears gives a clearer image of who we are.

Click images for desktop size: "Unknown Starlet" Yeah. I like that.
I like horror movies almost as much as I like Westerns. Its harder to make a good scary movie than it is to make a great Western. Like Westerns the first filmmakers tried horror. Edison did that weird Oglethorpe version of Frankenstein, Melies flics had plenty of horror elements, pudgy ladies becoming skeletons and the Devil always lurking about with his imps. Cool stuff all.
The scariest thing for me was a book my mother left lying around the house, some stranger than fiction thing that was filled with lavacious stories about something unseen biting the hell out of innocent children; women whose eye spit fountains of blood around Mexican deserts; people spontaneously bursting into flames! Not the sort of thing you should let a 7 year old who was watching his happy world disintegrate only because his mother fell in love and bought this stranger into our home. I was hooked on fear and adrenalin from then out.
The twenties saw Lon Chaney and his monsters that were products of human deformity. In the 30's we had a continuation of the humanoid being the cruelest monster - Browning (who worked a lot
Click images for desktop size: "Gallery of Covers" by Unknown with Chaney in the silent days) giving up Dracula and Freaks. And Whale gave up Frankenstein. Even what made King Kong so memorable was his resemblance to human beings.
The Germans, so heavily involved in great horror movies in the 20's following WWI seemed to stop horror. Maybe they weren't scared of anything.
The forties bought on the real ultimate horror: WWII; and the horror movies moved into a slightly new type of monster; the monster who grieved, the monster who couldn't stop his monstrous devotion to terror.
The fifties exploded with Sci-Fi and horror. Teenagers, the scariest thing adults had ever seen were the monsters now, rock & roll was a monster. And there was the atom bomb and any second we could all be vaporized and the entire planet destroyed in a paroxysm of wild adult fury. The world was such a terrifying place that we also knew that there was even more evil out there in outer space. But the Japanese touched the real horror and showed it came not from the stars but as a natural rebellion to man, it came from nature: Godzilla.
The atomic legacy wasn't just a painful death it was giganticism: Giant ants, grasshoppers, leeches killing all those the bomb sought to spare.
The sixties was the Hammer and AIP era. American International took the fifties themes to even higher layers of hysteria to a thumping beat. The Hammer flics said the world is still a safe and scary place, familiar. The monsters are deviants but we already know them. It didn't go deep enough and justified the deviant fantasies of the Gore movies.
(What's more deviant than paying to see a former Playboy Playmate get her leg cut off with an axe or her tongue pulled out of her mouth with ice tongs.)

Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by KRM PhotosThe 60's ended with a horror so great it opened up the 70's: George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" changed the world for a little while. I mean Roger Ebert wrote a piece for Reader Digest calling this film a socially depraved nightmare! The medium was the new monster!
And the 70's saw "Last House on the Left", "Texas Chainsaw Massacre", "The Hills Have Eyes" and the emergence of David Cronenberg.
Horror became a sensual sexual thing. Pleasure was always punished and the weak were fodder, only the strong survived. The monster was us, just stronger and less inhibited, more willing to survive.
The 80's belonged to Cronenberg. He purified and extolled the 70's. Horror was a by product of our lives, a virus that floated from lover to eunuch and a horror that extolled the perverted. It gave Clive Barker his starting inspiration. The 80's monsters were creatures from Hell. creatures who had human vices and needed love, a deviant love.
It saw the Hellraiser films stand with the Freddie Krueger movies. Splatter moved into the main stream building off of Cronenberg and Paul Schrader's "Taxi Driver".
One oddity were the "Friday the 13th" movies. Created by Steve Miner who worked on "The Last House on the Left" took and exalted the 70's themes by creating an inhuman monster who punished promiscuity with a searing precision.
The 90's spawned little in new horror. Real life was getting too complicated. The old school ruled and shut out the upstarts who might interfere with their mini empires.
Charles Band made his straight to video cheapies. They were sometimes entertaining. Sam Rami did the most destruction by combining a healthy does of bleak humour with the fear, a natural enough reaction. The final decimation cam from Italy. It started in the 80's but blossomed under Argento's hand and guidance.
Horror was reduced to steel and a knife and our own ability to merely watch and remain passive. Great globs of cool icy hatred and death.
And the 00's? Bush's time of remaking the world saw everyone fleeing into a fear of creativity. Brian Yzuna continued onward making original films that were often flaccid but never unimposing (Where is Creaming Mad George). The Asian horror cycle clicked in. Lots of ghosts and possessions of inanimate objects. Diverting
Click images for desktop size: "Green Lantern" by DC Comicsbut not much else.
It began the era of the re-make. The great lost propensity of the damned. Doomed to never create but to simply relive the same old fear over and over again. How dull.
Even the crazed independents, the usual saviors of horror were working harder to look and act like the hits. There were no demons driving them. I mean, they're remaking "My Bloody Valentine" which was a mediocre 80's rip off of Friday the 13th.
I recently saw some horrors that left me pretty cold but seem indicative of the 00's. "Vacancy" was psycho with a profit motive. It was simply fun to kill people and then sell the security tapes for some serious bucks. I guess its scary that people would die for something so trivial.
"The Strangers" was a turgid mess. So slow it was almost expressionistic. Pretty poor and derivative with no payoff at all.
"The Alphabet Killer" was an attempt at something undefinable. It ended up being worthless and shameless. I liked the idea of a serial killer being hunted by an ambulatory schizophrenic except Eliza Dushku is not the actress to pull it off. Her idea of a schizo coping with hallucinations seems to be to twitch a lot and make weird faces. Asia Argento could have made the role real and probably made this a better movie. Oh you do get a glance at Dushku's nude breasts. It wasn't that exciting.
"Hit and Run" was typically dreadful but had some odd quirks. A fat leading lady who is pretty despicable as a character. She gets drunk and runs over some random guy. On getting home she finds his broken body tangled in her Jeep's front bumper so she takes the easy way out and beats him to death with one of her daddy's gold clubs. Then she buries this poor victim out in the woods . . . and she's the heroine.
I mean she has a guilty conscious so I guess that's alright. The guy wasn't really dead and for some reason being hit by a car, bashed in the head and then buried alive doesn't sit well with him. He actually presented as unreasonable and monstrous for wanting justice!
Off course the heroine get away with it and kills this loathsome monster. See he's a monster because he was recently diagnosed as being bipolar. There's little made of the fact that the pudgy girl tried to murder a man with a wife and son. See, provoked by the pudgy girl he murder's his wife . . . see pudgy girl was doing the world a favor
Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Gibberlingbecause bipolar guys are notorious for murdering their spouses . . . well, that's the movies argument anyway.
There's a tacked on ending when pudgy girl gets caught. Someone must have said we can't let her get away with killing the guy even if she does have great tits! So she gets busted in a way that totally ignores the visual evidence we saw maybe two minutes before . . . I guess they figured that my attention span would have drifted away before then.
But it is an interesting trend: The perpetrator as victim: Bush's intended legacy. Nothing that happens to pudgy girl is anyway near as vile as the things she did to her victim. But it was an accident nearly and she even had a nightmare!
I like that movies try to present us with identifiable characters and then strives to find a person who embodies our self image, not the view others have but our self image. Its scary that being fat is becoming that idealized view of ourselves.

The server was down for a few hours. The hosting company says the cooling system broke and they had to shut down the servers to protect them. I can relate to that.
Should be fine now.

No football this weekend. I have a couple of Football movies to watch. I'm a football addict.
The dogs all love me. That's good but a little heart rending at times.
My friend planned to pull an all nighter. I was pleased she ended up coming home and getting some sleep.
There's been no solution to the car issue. Maybe when the job is done at work can sit down and come up with a real plan. Right now a lot of it eels like we're waiting for divine intervention. Not bad as ideas go but seldom workable.
One of her co-workers is facing a similar dilemma, a 10 year old car that costs just slightly less to repair than it would to replace.