From my favorite Skinny Puppy album, 1991's Last Rights. This record blew my mind when I used a gift token from Coconuts to purchase it back circa 1992/93, not knowing what to expect, just that the weird/cool Industrial Senior in my art class named Matt once told me, cryptically, "The keyboards in Skinny Puppy will make you feel... like... you're... GOD!"
He wasn't wrong.
31 Days of Halloween:
Unpopular opinion: I actually prefer Carrie 2: The Rage to Brian De Palma's original Carrie. Now, I'm not saying Carrie 2 is a better film, but for me, there are a few major irks with De Palma's film.
Carrie is well made, but the 70s were often an ugly decade, and all the costume design and set decoration seems (to me) to revel in that ugliness.
This is an excellent story; such a raw treatise on bullying and the personal, world-bending pain that comes of it. That’s something I love and respect. That and most of the performances. Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie are a fucking powerhouse, and Nancy Allen is an unforgettable bitch.
Alas, a lot of the suspense just doesn’t work for me. The entire protracted sequence before the bucket spills feels absurd on a cartoon level, with Sue and the Gym Teacher looking here, looking back, looking at each other, looking away… it ends up taking away from the blood and fire of the climax. Not completely, but enough that I get annoyed.
Finally, I’ve said this for three decades, but travolta is not a good actor and really brings down every scene he’s in.
Katt Shea fills Carrie 2 to the brim with a sense of embitterment and isolation that, while affecting, fails to measure up to those feelings in De Palma's. That said, I think there is something about the time between the two films (1976 and 1999) and the severely different aesthetics of the eras that helps Carrie 2 feel like a natural extension of the original. Does it need to exist? Absolutely not. The entire movie is really just one long wait for some widespread comeuppance, but when Shea's film delivers this, it is GLORIOUS! I love that pretty much no one is spared. Does the film suffer from that pre-millennial cheese that so many films from this era do? Yes, but it also references both Scream and New York Ripper in the same line of dialogue! I feel some Twin Peaks in here, some NOES 2, a lot of disparate influences that work together to make Carrie 2 way more watchable than a lot of films from this time.
Will I revisit this again? Maybe. Will I revisit the original? Absolutely. I check back in every few years on this and Dressed to Kill to see if my problems are me. So far, that has not been the case.
1) The Killing of a Sacred Deer
2) The Houses October Built (2011)/Texas Chainsaw Massacre (50th-anniversary theatrical screening)
3) Loop Track
4) It's What's Inside/LONGLEGS
5) The Babysitter/Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein
6) The Hitcher/Lost Highway
7) GDT's Cabinet of Curiosities: Graveyard Rats
8) V/H/S Beyond
9) Killer Klowns from Outer Space
10) Terrifier 3
11) Summer of '84
12) Rosemary's Baby/Suspiria ('77)
13) Daddy's Head
14) Undead
15) Moloch/Tea Cup (episode 1)/ Evil Dead 2
16) Smile
17) Laura Hasn't Slept/Smile 2
18) Terrifier
19) The House of the Devil - Last Drive-in Presentation (original air date April 26, 2019)
20) The Woods
21) Rob Zombie's 31
22) Carrie 2: The Rage
NCBD:
This week's pull starts off with one I've been excited about since seeing the cover solicitation.
Playlist:
Purple Hill Witch - Eponymous
Ritual Howls - Virtue Falters
Allegaeon - Apoptosis
The Soft Moon - Criminal
The Kills - Midnight Boom
Ministry - HOPIUMFORTHEMASSES
Justin Hamline - The House With Dead Leaves
John Frusciante - Brown Bunny OST
Card:
Today's card for study is XIX - The Sun:
Crowley says it in his Book of Thoth: "This is one of the simplest cards; it represents ... the Lord of the New Aeon in his manifestation to the race of men as the sun."
The dancing children (?) represent humanity accepting the revelation of the new aeon, Crowley's Age of Horus. The philosophical reality of that can be argued, the important thing on the non-Crowley level of just reading the cards is this indicates the person in question will change.
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