I'm a couple days late with this but talk about shitty news. Here's to your fuck, Ben.
Watch:
I'd never seen William Malone's 1985 Creature, but I grew up seeing the VHS box cover art on the wall at the local video story and been curious as a kid.
Somewhere in the intervening years I completely forgot about this one, until Vinegar Syndrome announced a new, restored version they're releasing at the end of this month. Pre-orders are closed - I didn't act fast enough while I tried to figure out if it was worth spending the money on when I'm still really limiting my frivolous expenses in preparation for moving across the country - but I believe will go live again for VS's Black Friday sale.
So is Creature worth it? Well, as I stated in my quickie Letterbxd review, this film isn't great and it's not even really good, however, I feel like there are echoes within echoes that lead me back to this one. Probably the best of those 80s Sci-Fi Monster-in-Space Horror flicks that ballooned overnight as a response to the success of Ridley Scott's Alien, Creature reeks of the B-Movie, down-n-dirty pulp atmosphere that a low budget required filmmakers excel at in order to make up for the otherwise lack of expensive sets/props/production value. And from this era, that's not a bad thing in my book. Well, not in this case, anyway. Creature is a pinnacle of the zeitgeist landslide of cheap and fast Sci-Fi that created a zeitgeist in the 80s, one that washed up on the shores of comics, role-playing, and all kinds of other geek-centric mediums. Watching it for the first time at 45, Creature felt like a well-spent hour and forty-odd minutes that triggered all kinds of peripheral genre memories, or as I've come to think of them, PGMs. So yeah, I'll probably plunk down the $$$ for this one. Would make a fantastic double feature with Richard Stanley's Hardware.
Playlist:
Pilot Priest and Electric Youth - Come True OST
Dream Division - Beyond the Mirror's Image
Mastodon - Hushed and Grim
Soviet Soviet - Fate
Motörhead - Ace of Spades
Ted Leo and the Pharmacists - Shake the Sheets
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Let Love In
The Who - Live at Leeds
Odonis Odonis - Spectrums
Odonis Odonis - Post Plague
Perturbator - Lustful Sacraments
The Fixx - Reach the Beach
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Keeping a keen eye out for portents and omens today.
This album is really one of my recent stalwarts. I've come to love every song, but it's an intense journey and often, I don't make it all the way to the final song. The last two days I've really had to knuckle down on the physical side of work, and using this record really helps me conquer exhaustion. When I hit "Apoptosis" this morning, it felt like a revelation, so I wanted to share it here.
NCBD:
Jeff Lemire's Mazebook has really become one of the main books I look forward to. Pretty cool, considering I almost skipped it altogether.
I guess I jumped the gun on Venom #1 last week. Or it was delayed? I'm not sure. Either way, I'm still not going to be lucky enough to snag this variant, but with a gazillion covers to choose from, I'm sure I'll find something good.
I know nothing about What's The Furthest Place From Here except the pedigree of the creators. That's enough to have me pretty freakin' excited.
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It's looking like come November 19th there is going to be a serious lag on Netflix. First Cowboy Bebop premieres, now a new Horror tv show from Train to Busan creator Yeon Sang-ho:
This trailer runs the gamut from what looks like a home invasion thriller to a fight scene with creatures that look like they'd be right at home in a Marvel movie. Cowboy Bebop takes precedence, but I'm pretty curious about this one.
Now, all we have to do is catch up and watch Midnight Mass, Doom Patrol Seasons 2 and 3, Squid Games, Castle Rock 1 and 2 (finally!), plus have a full Stranger Things rewatch, before.... oh fuck it. This one will end up on the list.
Playlist:
Small Black - Cheap Dreams
Motörhead - Ace of Spades
Arctic Monkeys - AM
Blood Red Shoes - Get Tragic
QOTSA - Era Vulgaris
Allegaeon - Apoptosis
Anthrax - Among the Living
Dream Division - Beyond the Mirror's Image
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I'm not entirely sure how to interpret this at the moment, so we'll just have to see.
Some friends recently saw High on Fire at a small venue in Chicago and hearing them talk about how awesome it was really made me miss seeing this band live. Over the years, I've seen Matt Pike and crew several times, one of which was at the Viper Room in Hollywood - a venue that felt waaay to small to contain a sound as big as theirs. Thinking on this, I decided to dig back into their music, only this time, I started with their most recent records and began working my way backward. 2018's Electric Messiah is an album I have not spent nearly enough time with, and running through it the other day, I realized that while I definitely think it's the weakest of the band's six albums, it still contains some absolutely devasting tracks. This is one of them.
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Another Stranger Things teaser for Season four!
I really can't wait for this next season of Stranger Things. K and I need to start that rewatch of 1-3 soon.
It's been a minute since I've kept up with Odonis Odonis. Back in 2016, their album Post Plague was a constant in my ears and on my turntable, however, the band's subsequent releases, while good, didn't quite live up to the same high regard I'd assigned them after what I still feel not only sums up a small era of my life but is one of my favorite records of that decade. So I guess that disconnect explains why I totally missed the fact that they dropped a new record back in October, and what's more, it's FANTASTIC. Special thanks - as always - to Heaven Is An Incubator for posting a track from this and alerting me to it. If you dig, you can order one of the thirteen remaining copies (fourteen until I ordered mine) of Spectrums over on their Bandcamp or from the always marvelous Felte Records.
It goes without saying I'd developed an affinity for this particular song, as it shares a title with the series of novels I've been working on for several years now.
Time Machine GO!!! 1991:
In this past Wednesday's NCBD section, I casually mentioned an idea that kind of occurred to me on the spot but didn't really sink in as to what a profound self-insight I'd inadvertently made, the idea that my reversion to a fairly rabid Marvel Zombie/comic collector had more to do with a return to the things that had made the tumultuous task of navigating adolescent as an unconscious way to deal with the equally rocky navigation of Middle Age. This started with an out-of-the-blue interest in following the last year of Nick Spencer's run on Amazing Spider-Man but has pushed me not only back into following some of the modern X-titles (really, just one and a few mini-series), but a nearly inexplicable longing to rebuy and reread a bunch of the post-Claremont X-men stories, first with 1994's The Phalanx Covenant and now, of all things, the original Onslaught opus.
I want to point out here that these are books that I do not in any way shape or form consider 'good.' Conceptually, perhaps, but writing-wise, not at all. And while Fabien Nicieza had some pretty good chops, when we get into Scott Lobdell territory, well, I just consider that era of X-Men pretty mediocre-to-downright-awful stuff. And yet, here I am, combing the back issue bins at the Comic Bug and reading some of this stuff. And that off-the-cuff comment about reaching back into my past to reconnect with touchstones of my adolescence as a coping mechanism for the Horrors of aging in an era of little compassion and perhaps less tolerance really strikes me now as another instance of how our minds will do what they need to do to cope and survive, even if our personalities are completely unaware of those tragedies. So with that in mind, let me resurrect a moniker from my old Chud days to you about what I'm reading from the past, what I think of it now, and how it holds up.
Okay, granted this 1991's Muir Island Saga is still protected as awesome in my book because it's penned by Chris Claremont, however, it's Claremont's final entry and thus, the gateway to the end of his continuity, or rather the way he approached continuity, so I've always kind of held a grudge against both this series and it's villain, the Shadow King, who for whatever reason, I just could not care less about. That's my 'historical' perspective of this small, four-issue 'saga' that really doesn't feel like a saga at all. A bit short and to the point to be a saga. That said, in this instance, the brevity is good, and unlike the full-blown crossovers and X-Events that began to clog the continuity after the near-perfect triumph of Inferno, Uncanny X-Men 279-280 and X-Factor 69-70 feel like a pretty good story that lines 'em up and knocks 'em down, reworking all the allegiances Claremont had, up to this point, used to divvy up the characters and keep things interesting, paving the way for the 'Blue' and 'Gold' teams that would surface in Jim Lee's X-Men #1 and Uncanny 281, which realigned all the original X-characters like Scott and Jean with the Xavier camp and made X-Factor the new equivalent of Freedom Force, under Valerie Cooper - a character I had completely forgotten about.
Playlist:
The Neverly Boys - The Dark Side of Everything
Lower Dens - Escape From Evil
TVOTR - Return to Cookie Mountain
The Bronx - The Bronx (IV)
Motörhead - Ace of Spades
Motörhead - Overkill
Converge and Chelsea Wolfe - Bloodmoon: I (pre-release singles)
I'd completely forgotten about Future Islands until Julia Ducournea's Titane put them back in my head by using "Light House", from their 2014 4AD release Singles.
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A couple years ago, I totally missed out on Mixtape Massacre. Now, the creators of that have a new game on Kickstarter, and by the looks of it, this one is a definite for me:
I'm really trying not to spend $$ on stuff like this, so there's a bit of a tug-o-war going on as I watch this. We'll see. Either way, I wanted to spread the word.
Playlist:
Allegaeon - Into Embers (pre-release single)
Allegaeon - Apoptosis
Allegaeon -Proponent for Sentience
Megadeth - Rust in Peace
Converge and Chelsea Wolfe - Blood Moon I (pre-release singles)
The Besnard Lakes - A Coliseum Complex Museum
Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds - The Good Son
Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds - Abattoir Blues
Lower Dens - Escape From Evil
The Neverly Boys - The Dark Side of Everything
TVOTR - Return to Cookie Mountain
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Two days in a row, I receive positive reinforcement for a series of investments.
No More Tears turns 30? Shit man, I'm old. That doesn't mean I can't enjoy the hell out of his new, super cool video for one of the best songs on a pretty solid Ozzy album (his best, IMO). The version on the album was co-written by Lemmy - as were several other tracks - but did not feature him on co-vocals, although if memory serves this version with both Ozzy and Lemmy singing surfaced somewhere years later. Either way, I've always really liked this song, and the video is super cool. Reminds me A LOT of Daniel Warren Johnson's Beta Ray Bill series from earlier this year (that I'm still super hung up on).
NCBD:
Another great week at the Comic Shop - NCBD has really come to be something I look forward to with rabid anticipation again and being that I psychoanalyze myself constantly, I'm pretty sure this is a nostalgia blanket, something that I needed to reinstate in midst of 2020's uncertainty. Why else would I revert back to following Spider-Man so rabidly for 6 months, pick up a new Defenders series with a bunch of characters I know nothing about or are not particularly keen on, or fall back into an X-book? Being a Marvel Comics fan is what got me through the uncertainty of adolescence, and as such, I've apparently flipped that switch again in order to navigate middle age. Whatever the case, I start looking at what's hitting the stands as early as possible, assemble my list, and then wait with bated breath for Wednesday to come around.
Speaking of which, this week we begin with the return of a new friend I hardly had a chance to get to know before it up and disappeared back in the spring:
Definitely not something I normally go in for, I ended up really digging the first two issues of James Stokoe's Orphan of the Five Beasts, and I'd begun to fear it was never coming back. Speaking of returning titles...
I love The Silver Coin so much, and am extremely pleased it proved popular enough to continue on after what was originally supposed to only be five issues.
The Me You Love in the Dark - ghost fucking, huh? Based on the cover art, there might be trouble in paradise for our heroine.
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I've recently been getting into the films of Alex de la Iglesias. My end-of-night movie on Halloween ended up being his 2014 Heist-turned-cannibal-Witches flick Witching and Bitching. Here's the trailer:
This movie is completely fucking insane. I mean, the last twenty minutes is... well, spectacle filmmaking at its finest.
Here we are again. Remember what yer grandpappy telt ya, November brings the Opeth.
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Finally!!!
When they brought Fett into the second season of The Mandalorian, I was bummed. I mean, with the creation of Mando, it seemed a misstep to overturn Fett's death, because the brilliance of following another character in the beloved armor floored me as a simple and elegant solution to the problem of how to bring back one of the most popular characters in the franchise. By the end of that season, however, when I realized Fett would not end up a regular character on the show, I warmed to his presence. The masterstroke of setting up a new, Fett-centric show with the post-credits sequence on the final episode proved a masterstroke to me, and now, here we are! With Bossk people, Ree-Eyes, Sand People, Bib Fortuna and Gamorrean Guards a'plenty, I am super excited for this one. Bring it on!
Playlist:
Opeth - Blackwater Park
Mastodon - Hushed and Grim
Jerry Cantrell - Brighten
Type O Negative - Dead Again
HEALTH & Poppy - Dead Flowers
Boy Harsher - Careful
Boy Harsher - Country Girl Uncut
Slayer - Decade of Aggression
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The shortest distance between two points isn't always the fastest. Swiftness can come by way of out-thinking a dilemma.
