I'm not really a Van Halen fan, and as revolutionary as Eddie Van Halen's guitar style was at the time Van Halen's eponymous debut hit the world, he really just played 'Eruption' over and over for the rest of his career. That's not exactly true, but it's not exactly wrong, either. Doesn't matter: first rock album I ever owned was 1984, and I've loved it ever since. The singles are all gold, but the deep cuts are infinitely better, imo. I almost posted Drop Dead Legs here, but instead I went with Top Jimmy just because I think the intro guitar is some of the most under-stated playing EVH ever did, and that makes it even more awesome. If there's a stage in Heaven, Eddie's gonna take a turn.
31 Days of Halloween:
I've been flim-flamming between calling this segment "31 Days of Horror" and "31 Days of Halloween," but I think I'm going to finally settle on the latter, simply because my activities of the last few days have put me in situations where my entries for the day skew outside the realm of Horror. My definition Horror is definitely open to a lot of interpretation, but I feel like I'm really pushing the envelope including Mulholland Drive and Synchronic. So Halloween works a lot better this year.Monday night, my Horror Vision co-host Ray and I hit our final night of Beyondfest 2020 programming at the Mission Tiki Drive-In with the West Coast Premiere of the looong-awaited new film from Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead. Synchronic is everything I thought it would be and more, but it also surprised me. These guys are great filmmakers who will no doubt become Nolan-level in time, and I feel privileged to have now seen the film that I believe will bridge the 'Independent' era of their career with what comes next.
Also, Monday night was a double-feature, and Ray and I were also lucky enough to catch the premiere of Justin Simien's new film Bad Hair:
Bad Hair premieres on HULU on October 23rd, and it's a damn good time. If you look up in the right hand corner of this page, you'll see my little Spotify widget has updated with our quick-take, spoiler-free review of both these films.
Finally, last night K and I sat down to watch a flick she's been wanting me to see for a few months now, ever since it popped up on Prime. And what I realized once the film began is, even though I'd been seeing the VHS cover art since I was a little kid, I had completely missed or forgotten that Dolls is a Stuart Gordon film! This, of course, won me over immediately, as did the film, which is excellent in that 'the storm forced us to knock on the door of the creepy old mansion and now we're all being picked off one by one' way that keeps coming up lately, whether it be in Dolls, April Fool's Day, or Clue, all excellent films in my humble opinion. Also, I'm really making an attempt to watch some new stuff this year, instead of just filling the month with my standard October films. This and The Wolf Man were good starts in that direction.
1) The Wolf Man
2) From Beyond/Monsterland: Port Fourchon, Louisiana
3) Mulholland Drive/Creepshow (1982): The Crate
4) Waxwork
5) Synchronic/Bad Hair
6) Dolls
Playlist:
Deftones - Ohms
The Plimsouls - Everywhere at Once
Mastodon - Leviathan
Ainoma - Necropolis
Type O Negative - Life is Killing MeVan Halen - 1984
Mastodon - Medium Rarities
Fear Factory - Demanufacture
Card:
Cause and Effect: I've been unable to right for about a week, and my self-esteem is in the toilet. Go figure.
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