My Top Ten Favorite Science Fiction Shows

I grew up watching a lot of SciFi on TV and I don’t think I’ve ever talked about my top favorite series cuz I got favorites y’all , and this time I’m actually going to rank them fromleast to most in the order I’m supposed to instead of just tossing them up in any kind of order like I normally do.

This isn’t a list of best and worst SciFi because I don’t normally think of the media I consume in terms of best and worst. What most matters to me is how I felt when I watched it, how long it sticks in my memory, and if the show had any personal relevance for me, not whether or not other people (who I decided are not me) liked it. Don’t get me wrong, I love it when people like the things I like, but that doesn’t often factor into whether or not I like it.

10. The Bionic Woman (1976)/Wonder Woman (1975)

And right off the bat, you can see where some of my little baby feminism is leading. I had to do a twofer on this one because I watched both of these shows around the same time. Like a lot of little girls I’ve known I wanted to see women and girls onscreen, having adventures, kicking booty, etc., and in the 70s and 80s, this is what I got! I count these two shows because I had the TV all to myself at the time of day these shows aired. I don’t know where my brothers were, but they never bothered me during these shows. I remember they used to air on Saturdays, usually around 11AM or Noon.

The Bionic Woman was a spinoff series from The Six Million Dollar Man and I thought of both them as superhero shows. I didn’t learn about The Bionic Woman until some time after The Six Million Dollar Man left the air in 1978. My brothers had Steve Austin (which I also watched) but I had Jamie Somers, and I have a very distinct memory of all of us doing that slow-motion running thing that the main characters did in the series. Yes, it was silly, but this was the 70s and we were like 7, 8 and 9 years old. The series was about a woman who had had various body parts, like her legs and arms replaced by machinery which gave her the ability to run really fast and super strength. Needless to say, this was not depicted very well on network TV, but it was good for what it was. There was a one-season remix of the idea in 2007, which had an engaging lead character and better special effects but couldn’t overcome the nostalgia factor of the original I guess, because It didn’t last long.

The Bionic Woman first aired in 1976, and Wonder Woman aired in 1975. I was five and six years old and I watched them in syndication around nine or ten. The lead character in WW was Lynda Carter who has had a bit of a resurgence in her popularity since the release of the WW movies. I’m sorry guys but Gal Godot is pretty and all but she is, at best, a whispy presence next to the truly Amazonian frame of Lynda Carter, who will always be my favorite Wonder Woman, with her sunny smile, twinkling eyes, and truly impressive bosoms. I also remember the themes songs from both series and yeah, and I and every other girl my age definitely did that twirling around shit that turned Lynda into Wonder Woman.

9. The Incredible Hulk (1977)

This was one of my favorite shows and I have the memory of watching it with my Mom. I’m often surprised by how laid back and relaxed a lot of the shows we watched were from that time period. I watched a retrospective of this series a few years back and I was struck by its wholesomeness, Bill Bixby’s gentleness, and intelligence, and the series’s complete lack of urgency, something of which was captured in Mark Ruffalo’s version in The Avengers, which is probably why I like him so much.

Another reason these shows are favorites is because of the theme songs. The song for The Incredible Hulk was a treacly piano number titled The Lonely Man and it just perfectly captured the tragic vibe of the series, where Bixby’s Banner had to keep moving on from place to place, getting involved in various adventures while dodging the authorities and a nosy news reporter who was determined to out him to the rest of the world.

The Incredible Hulk was one of the few SciFi shows introduced to me by my mom, even though she wasn’t into superheroes and didn’t watch many SciFi shows. I know she approved of Bill Bixby and knew that I liked him from shows like My Favorite Martian (which she did watch), and The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. When The Avengers came out The Hulk was one of the few characters we could talk about, and I think it was because of her grounding in this series that she was able to smoothly glide into a discussion of superhero movies.

8. Space 1999 (1975)

This is one of my favorite shows right now. I remember that a lot of my relatives thought the show was pretty boring because they didn’t think much happened on it, but I also have the distinct memory of watching this show in my grandmother’s living room, and my other relatives indulging my love of this show because it aired around the same time as Star Trek and Lost in Space. I think the reason they indulged me most of the time is because the theme song for the show just slapped, but there were times we would groove to the title song, and then turn the channel.

I was only a kid but I remember Martin Landau from other shows I watched, and I grew to like Barbara Bain, but my favorite character was the shapeshifting Maya, played by Catherine Schell, but she didn’t show up until about season two or three. I thought she was beautiful and exotic at the time but I saw this series before I watched Star Trek so I didn’t know she was a kind of Spock ripoff. Admittedly the show and the characters were slow-moving and very non-dramatic in their behavior, which prompted quite a few people to say the show was boring. It’s true that it was not an especially dynamic cast and the show was a lot more cerebral than most of my family was willing to sit through, but part of the reason I liked it was for its Horror elements. The show was genuinely scary in its first season.

The show was ind of built on a Horror premise about a group of scientists on Moonbase Alpha who get lost in space when the moon gets knocked out of Earth orbit. Yeah, the basic premise is silly, but I watched a retrospective of the show on Youtube a few months ago and the episodes not only still hold up, but fit right in today’s shows from a plot point of view, and involved things like portal aliens that swallowed people alive, a man who was turned into a vampire like creature and had to be stopped, and creatures that were like ghosts. Every episode had a mystery that needed to be solved, the outcome wasn’t always predictable, and people died in some fairly gruesome ways.

There were also a number of toys associated with this show and I remember I had a large replica of the spaceship from this show. I don’t remember if my Mom bought it or I stole it from one of my brothers but I cherished this toy and played with it with my Legos! I was not a Star Wars fan. I was a Space 1999 fan.

7. Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone (1959)

Watching this first iteration of the Twilight Zone is one of my earliest memories of watching TV shows with my Mom. She was a huge fan of Rod Serling, probably because of the social messages in his work. I remember having discussions with her about the meanings of some of the episodes we watched or just hearing her talk about some of her favorites.

One of our top favorite episodes was It’s a Good Life, with Billy Mumy from Lost in Space as a kid with reality-bending superpowers, which was genuinely terrifying to me at that age, and one of my Mom’s favorites was Nightmare at 20,000 Feet which starred William Shatner before I knew him as Captain Kirk. I thought that episode was a bit overdone but some of the scarier episodes for me were Time Enough At Last, about a man who manages to get time to read all he wants except for one little hiccup, the Living Doll episode which might have something to do with why I find inanimate objects that move so terrifying, and The Monsters are Due on Maple Street spoke to both of us. I think the saddest episode was Five Characters in Search of an Exit, about five characters trying to escape some kind of prison, but with a horrible twist.

The Twilight Zone aired after Primetime and was one of the few shows she would let me stay up late on a weeknight to watch, which was a big deal when I was ten, sitting in my Mom’s bed while I drank milk and she had soda, and my brothers were already asleep. She and I didn’t have a lot of favorite shows that we watched together (although she carefully monitored what I watched sometimes) but whenever the original series aired we’d be right there for it, so you can imagine there is a huge nostalgia factor for me here. I was very young and until my own tastes started to diverge I simply watched whatever she watched and she had some fairly wide-ranging tastes. I did however draw the line at soap operas. She absolutely loved her “Stories” while I found them uninteresting.

6. Aeon Flux (1991)

When I was in college MTV and the Syfy networks used to air a program called Liquid Television very late in the evening, and this was where I first saw Aeon Flux. I loved the animation style but otherwise was kind of puzzled. I didn’t know what to make of the plots or stories and I wasn’t sure if they were supposed to be funny or not. Later, I decided that only some of the episodes were meant to be funny. Aeon herself was something of a sad sack. She never accomplished her goals and almost always died either because she was simply unlucky, or just through her own clumsiness.

When the series began the episodes were just one-offs that were not entirely connected to one another, although some had recurring characters, like her arch-nemesis Trevor Goodchild, who was the leader of some kind of authoritarian state that Aeon was in opposition to. Later, the single shorts became an entire series which was every bit as bizarre and puzzling but at least Aeon lived to the end of the episodes, sometimes.

The very first episode I saw, I thought was pretty groundbreaking. In it, Aeon is fighting a running battle between two different hordes of soldiers, and all of the viewer’s focus is on her until she gets taken out about halfway through it. I wasn’t expecting that! There’s another one where she’s doing some spy stuff on a train with Goodchild and she accomplishes her goal but is unlucky enough to get strangled by her own rope as she escapes. In another episode she just gets shot in the head by her enemy before she can finish the job. As an artist (who studied animation in school), the animation style was very exciting to me and unlike any other style I’d seen on TV, although it looks kind of jerky today, and I still don’t get why everyone was wearing BDSM gear, which I thought was pretty funny.

5. Star Trek Discovery (2017)

Before the show aired, I’d been watching Sonequa Martin Green’s character on The Walking Dead. I was pretty upset that she was killed off that series but later found out that she asked to be written out of the show because of her newest project. And then I heard about this show, and I was very excited since I really liked her. When I heard that she was starring in the series as an Ensign I was a little put out by that because I was led to believe the entire series would be based around her and it couldn’t be that way if she wasn’t a Captain. See, up to this point, all the Star Trek shows revolved around Captains and their crews.

But the show had something a little more subtle in mind because it turned out to be a psychological study of the effects of trauma, and a chronicle of Michael Burnham’s fall, redemption, healing, and eventual rise to Captaincy. I saw this pattern by the second season, but I don’t think a lot of people understood what the show was trying to do. I also had to explain to several people that weren’t used to seeing this kind of thing that this Black woman was basically getting the Full Hero Treatment that is usually given to straight white dudes in these types of stories, and that in itself was groundbreaking for Star Trek!

I have to admit, I couldn’t contain my excitement for this angle of the series, and I had (and still today) no patience for other people’s criticism of this show. To Hell with all of them! This was what I wanted to see and I don’t give a damn if people call it pandering because I want to be pandered to as much as every other demographic! This was what I’d been asking for for years. This was the representation I always wanted to see of women who looked like me. I waited forty years of my life for this, and to have Star Trek do the thing was enormous to me, and celebrating this kind of story was the reason I started this blog. The top four genres of film and TV (Action, SciFi, Horror, and the Western) had almost entirely erased the existence of Black women. We showed up from time to time and said a few lines, or supported some other character’s journey, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with any of that, but when that is the only type of character you infrequently get…

Michael wasn’t just a sidekick or a token. She is the hero. She is the star around which all the other characters and the plot orbited, just like what happened on shows with white lead characters. She is passionate, smart, brave, reckless, and foolish, and I watched this character grow and learn and become everything she is to today and I am here for it. And she wasn’t the only great character on this show. I grew to like all of the top characters, (Tilly, Saru, Stametz), the tech was unique, and there were also all my old friends, the Klingons, the Romulans, and the Terran Empire. And I am fortunate to have gotten four whole seasons of this series.

Don’t get me wrong. I liked the other Star Treks well enough (at least the ones I watched), and consider at least one of the spinoffs some of the finest hours of television ever made, but you can’t tell me nothing about Discovery. Straight white guys have had umpteen bajillion SciFi series where characters who look like them were the center of attention, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that but…

This one is mine!

4. The X Files (1993)

I’m not sure what I can say about this series. it was my first introduction to conspiracy TV via Chris Carter. I was initially attracted to the show because when it first began it used a monster of the week model, and it was the monsters that kept me addicted to it. Along the way, I got a heaping helping of alien conspiracy theories, and a will they/won’t they love affair between the two lead characters, Mulder and Scully, which I only halfheartedly rooted for. I have never cared too deeply for romance in the shows I liked.

I remember when the show first aired I kind of hated Mulder who I thought was like every mansplaining, arrogant, know-it-all nerdy white guy I’d met in college, but over the years I grew to like him and his better qualities (one of which is that he turned out to be more or less right in his theories.) I liked Scully right away, although later in the series watching her get damseled always irritated me, and eventually, her skepticism became rather annoying, but I never stopped liking the show, not even after both lead actors left, and I continued to watch it even when it was briefly rebooted a few years ago.

I don’t always know why I like certain shows and The X-Files falls into that category. I can’t exactly pinpoint why I loved it so much, which is something I can do for other shows like Buffy and Supernatural. The X-Files just happened to show up at the right time for me to like it, I guess.

3. Farscape (1999)

This is another show I don’t have a whole lot to say about other than it was one of my all-time favorite SCIFI series, back when the SYFY network was firing on all thrusters. I loved it purely for the aesthetics, and there has really never been anything like it since. I watched all five seasons multiple times. I just liked spending time with these characters, and it had puppets, and it was funny, and actually, it was a very sexy show without being too upfront about it, with lots of black leather and high heels.

Not pictured above is the actress Virginia Hey who played the elegant, blue-skinned, Pa’u Zotoh Zhaan. This was an actress I remember from The Road Warrior. My favorite character wasn’t Crichton though, it was Gigi Edgly’s Chiana, who was just weird, and I really liked the weird. The aesthetics for this show were just crazy. I can say it was one of the prettiest and most imaginative SciFi shows on TV. The fashion, the colors, the special effects, and no bumpy-headed humans. Since the show was created by the same company that created The Muppets, they had the ability to make aliens that really looked (and in many cases acted) truly alien.

Storywise, the show wasn’t a rival for Star Trek but it made up for that by being hella sexy, about an American astronaut who flies through a wormhole, ends up on a living ship with a bunch of galactic prisoners, and gets chased around this new universe by various baddies while trying to find his way back home. I’ve never seen that much black leather in another SciFi series. Yes, I had favorites, but all the characters were engaging, which made the stories terrifying, funny, or sad just because you cared about what happened to them. Speaking of which, I kinda miss these guys. It’s probably time for a re-watch.

2. Mork and Mindy (1978)

I don’t think there are enough words to express how much of an effect this show had on me in my formative years and just how much I miss Robin Williams. He was a strange guy and Mork was a weirdo and this series taught me that it was okay to be like that, no matter what anyone said. This show taught me to love and accept myself, and through that love, accept the eccentricities of others. I was a strange little girl. I didn’t get picked on too much or teased a lot when I was little but I did get raised eyebrows from a lot of my teachers and my family, and most kids my age were disinterested in me or just generally avoided me. My mother however never batted a single eyelash at her strange daughter, who dressed funny, had odd but very focused interests, read everything that wasn’t nailed down, was a picky eater, watched entirely too much TV and liked the weird shows, and talked like the books she read. My Mom just rolled with all of it, loving me no matter how weird I was, never asking why, and indulging every one of my odd artistic interests, like weaving!

I remember watching this show when it first aired because I was in the fourth grade. I remember this because I went to a school in my neighborhood and I remember wearing those exact suspenders to school every day. No one and I mean absolutely no one, recognized those suspenders, but I loved them and wore them with everything. I guess that was my eight-year-old version of cosplaying. Other little girls had tutus. I had Mork Suspenders. I memorized Mork’s catchphrases and hand gestures (the sideways split hand greeting) that I later recognized from Spock, sitting in chairs on his face, how each and every episode was Mork discovering some new thing to report back to his people. This show went a long way towards explaining other human beings to me and as Mork discovered these things, so did I.

I loved this show so much, and if that’s how I felt about Mork and Mindy, then you can imagine how I must have felt about Star Trek!

1. Star Trek: The Original Series (1963)

What can I say about how great this series is that hasn’t already been said:

From Forbes Magazine:

Star Trek stories are humanistic; they are founded in Gene Roddenberry’s belief in the perfectible human. They provide an optimistic vision of our future. Star Trek tells us that no matter how crazy the world may look today, it will get better. We will get better. There will be a time in which doing great things will be the norm.

Star Trek depicts a meritocracy. The characters were cool not because of looks, wealth, or social position, but because they were very good at their jobs. It is a rare television show that sends the message that it is cool to be smart.

Star Trek’s optimistic view of the future stands as a contrast to the bulk of science fiction. Most television and cinematic science fiction depicts varying dystopian futures. Dystopia provides writers with shortcuts to conflict; it’s easier. When just making it through the day provides conflict, writers don’t have to generate as many new ideas. Star Trek thrives on those new ideas.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/07/28/theres-a-reason-why-star-trek-remains-so-popular/?sh=42326b231dc3

Star Trek showed blacks, Asians, and women in roles of respect in a time when that was not the norm. Whoopi Goldberg has talked about freaking out when, as a child, she tuned into Star Trek and saw that black women were part of the future. Nichelle Nichols has told the story of how when she was contemplating leaving the show, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told her not to, because her character was a symbol of hope for equality.

Oh, and we not gonna talk about how I wanted to grow up to be Spock when I was a kid, or how I used to pretend I was visiting a new planet whenever we moved into a new house, or how eventually my goal in life became being as elegant and beautiful as Lt. Uhura. The ideology of the series became something to aspire to. It was okay to be smart in this universe. The focus was on solving problems, not infighting, or shooting things (although there was some of that too). The show was pretty imaginative for the sixties, and I liked the aesthetics, the uniforms, the bright colors, and the fashions.

Star Trek was the show to which I compared all the other shows, tbh.

Stupid Movies I Love

(And One I Hate)

These are not smart films. I actually made a small list of those films a couple of years ago and I’m reasonably certain none of these movies were on there. What constitutes a “dumb” movie could be lots of things, but mostly it’s the plot and characters. I really hate dumb characters and by that, I mean characters that do very obviously stupid things, that no one in their right mind would do, but this character has to do it to move the plot forward. Sometimes it’s a plot that is entirely hinged on how stupid the characters are.

Sometimes it’s not the entire movie that’s dumb but one major plot point that takes me entirely out of the movie and makes me yell at my screen. Normally, I hate dumb movies, but sometimes a movie has at least one redeeming quality that allows me to sit through it with a minimum of fuss, while I just laugh at the dumb sections. And yeah, there’s a reason why all of these are action movies. It’s easy to compile a list of dumb action films, but harder to make a list of dumb action movies I will watch multiple times because I like the actors, or the action is really good, or just because of the lead-up to that one scene.

Sometimes the movies are stupid, but a great deal of fun, usually due to the strength of the personalities involved. The Rock and Nicholas Cage, for example, could star in just about anything, and I’ll watch it. It’s always great fun spending time with either of them, just don’t always expect an intelligent plot. In some cases, like Scorpion King, don’t even expect a coherent plot. Some movies are very well-made but are corny and/or silly, like Independence Day, although Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum manage to save it.

Cobra (1986)

Cobra is a Sylvester Stallone joint from 1986. Now, Stallone is no stranger to making dumb films and the 80s are pretty much famous for dumb Action movies so this was bound to happen. I remember watching this movie late one night when I was probably supposed to be asleep and thinking, “This movie is deeply stupid.” Which was true but it was also deeply funny with lots of happy and mindless ultraviolent fun. It’s one of those dumb movies that gets repeated viewings on the strength of Stallone’s performance and the cinematography. The movie just looks cool.

The 80s was known as the golden age of what we now call Copaganda. Movies about cops and other law enforcement officers being rebels, breaking all the law enforcement rules, and pretty much acting like America was still in the Wild West stage of history, were all the rage back then. Just about every other Action movie starred a rebel cop or an FBI agent blowing stuff up, and frankly, I’m glad we’ve moved on from that to having other types of professionals blowing things up, like assassins, car valets, and insurance agents.

This movie has all the usual tropes. There’s the rebel cop with the cool name, Marion Cobretti, Cobra for short, a hot blonde played by Brigette Neilsen, who I kinda liked back in the day (I don’t know why). Brigette plays a business/model named Ingrid because what else are you going to name a six-foot-tall blonde white lady. Brian Thompson was your typical bad guy with a dubious philosophy and even more dubious plan for taking over the world by killing disabled people, I guess, because it was all very radically Dawrwinist, and he has a gang of followers and nameless henchmen.

When Neilsen’s character witnesses some malfeasance by the gang they need to hunt her down and kill her and she comes under the protection of Cobra who naturally falls in love with her. But that’s really not what makes the movie fun. What makes the movie fun is the action and the dialogue. Yes, the dialogue is stupid but it was really fun to watch these characters trying to emote while being too tough to show their emotions, and I actually liked Stallone’s character. Neither he nor the villain will be winning any Mensa awards so they’re about evenly matched. He and Cobretti get into a knockdown, drag-out fight at the end of the movie, which I enjoyed watching (I don’t know why.)

10/10 will most likely watch this again on some idle Saturday afternoon.

Nemesis (1992)

Nemesis is a cyberpunk action thriller from 1992 that contains all the well-worn tropes of a Copaganda/Robocop Ripoff. There is a burnt-out cyborg cop, a wayward former partner, a manhunt, a missing computer McGuffin, or bomb, or something, and several beautiful but deceitful cyborg/AI women. It also stars three of my favorite actors, Olivier Gruner, Tim Thomerson, and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa ( I don’t know why.) And I don’t think it was a coincidence that Brion James was involved in this movie. I was not a fan of Brion James, but I guess I am now, because he was everywhere after his stint as a robot in Bladerunner, so I built up a tolerance. This movie is bad in all areas of badness. The acting is atrocious, the action scenes are well done but make no sense, and quite frankly I didn’t care enough about any of the characters to root for or against anyone, but I remember watching this blatant Robocop rip-off multiple times, and will probably do it again at some point in the future since it’s free on Youtube.

For some reason, I was really crushing on Olivier Gruner at the time and remember watching several movies just because he was the star. He could be described as a low-rent version of Jean-Claude Van Damme, and he does have actual martial skills. Here, he plays an ex-cop, who is also a cyborg, named Alex. He gets recruited by an old boss or something to hunt down his former partner who runs some kind of underground rebel group. The plot involves a lot of shooting and blowing up of things. Do not even try to make any sense of the plot because you’ll only hurt yourself. I, on the other hand, am a professional bad movie watcher. This is what I do and I couldn’t even make sense of it.

I think I just liked the idea that half the characters in this movie were cyborgs, and the dialogue was pretty funny, even if the delivery was horrible. Nowadays, I’d watch it because there is a considerable nostalgia factor involved. But I don’t think you should watch this movie just because I have no shame.

The Rock (1996)

I wanna start off by saying that okay, Michael Bay is a horrible director, but I had to watch most of his 90s movies to figure that out, apparently. I did eventually learn my lesson and stop looking at them but not soon enough to miss seeing this. It also has the added benefit of starring both Nicholas Cage and James Bon- uh, I mean Sean Connery. Ed Harris is in this too and he’s worth about two and a half Connerys. Both William Forsythe and Michael Biehn (from The Terminator) also star in this movie, so Bay somehow managed to gather some of the hottest action stars of the 90s to take part in this novel, but still somehow mediocre plot.

This movie has everything. SEALS, the SAS, the Pentagon, ex-government prisoners, a rogue general, some rogue Marines, Alcatraz island, nerve gas, rockets, hostages, threatening an American city for ransom, and did I already say it? Nicholas Cage and Sean Connery hating to work together to accomplish their goals.

This is a movie where the plot actually makes sense in that it’s relatively easy to follow and keep track of people’s motivations, more or less. It did pretty well at the box office, a lot of people seemed to really like it, and it even won an Academy Award for Best Sound! But I’m going to argue that it’s the earnest and occasionally charming performances of the actors that make it so watchable.

The Rundown (2003)

Have no doubt, this is a dumb movie, that makes no pretense of trying to seem like it’s smart, but I love the hell out of this deeply stupid film. The Rock (Dwayne Johnson) stars in this movie and while he is not known for making smart films, he is such a fun and charming character in all of his movies (even though he pretty much just plays different versions of himself) that I always enjoy watching anything in which he shows up.

The movie also stars two more of my favorite actors, Christopher Walken and Rosario Dawson (and Stifler from American Pie, but I am not a fan of him though). The Rock plays a bounty hunter who gets sent to Brazil to hunt down his employer’s son, who is in Brazil hunting an object called The Gato (a gold-plated cat. Why? Who cares!), which is also an object of seeming importance to both Rosario and Walken. The three of them juggle this McGuffin between them for most of the film while Dwyane tries to keep Stifler alive to get him back home.

There are jungle scenes, a political resistance camp of some kind, angry monkeys, toxic fruit, explosions galore, a herd of stampeding cattle, and a batty Scotsman who spouts biblical scripture, and is also a helicopter pilot! Frankly, this guy is my favorite character in the entire movie. You have to watch it just to see the last thirty minutes, which is how I stumbled across it on cable, one idle weekend.

Universal Soldier (1992)

This was my and my Mom’s favorite Jean Claude Van Damme movie. She was a huge fan of his (so was I) and she really loved this deeply goofy film which we watched and laughed through multiple times. Now the movie isn’t exactly dumb but it is a bit cheeky. It takes itself just seriously enough that the introduction of those cheeky little moments of humor don’t feel out of place. The plot is non-sensical (in the sense that the science behind it goes completely unexplained), but also surprisingly easy to follow. Oh, did I mention that Dolph Lundgren is in this movie? No. Well, I should have, because that man can chew scenery like nobody’s business, even though he’s only playing a low-rent Arnold Schwarzenneger.

Jean Claude and Dolph play a couple of soldiers who died during some kind of personal skirmish in Vietnam, but through the magic of science fiction movies, they get resurrected as Special Operations soldiers who decide to pick up where they left off. But the best character is Veronica, played by Ally Walker, as a television journalist trying to get the latest scoop about some dead soldiers, who is also a great audience stand-in, as she speaks our minds most of the time. She spends most of the movie not believing what’s happening to her, but never comes across as stupid, which was very refreshing. She also gets all the best lines and I love her!

Why this particular military team is committing war crimes in Vietnam, long after the war is over, is never explained. Why do these two US soldiers have clearly non-US accents is never explained (although the writers do try to sell us the idea that Van Damme’s character was from Louisiana, so there’s that)? Why these two characters have beef is also not explained (outside of one of them being crazy). They just do. But the writers do make sure to explain why Jean Claude needs to take his clothes off in one key scene, though. There’s a little bit of Robocop, a little bit of Apocalypse Now, and the action scenes are, of course, EXTRA. With butt cheeks!

My mom and I used to crack the hell up so hard at this movie, which we watched every single time it aired on TV, no matter how late it was.

The Fifth Element

I just want to make it very clear that Milla Jovovich is a horrible actress, yet for some reason, she keeps getting cast in Action movies even though she has all of the fighting grace, and emoting talent of a 2 x 4, and I blame this movie for starting her Action movie career. I just wanna let it be known that while I don’t like her very much I am willing to tolerate her when she’s surrounded by better actors like Bruce Willis, Gary Oldman, and of all people, Ian Holm!. Hell, even Chris Tucker, as an androgynous television presenter named Ruby Rod, while deeply annoying, is at least trying to be funny, and more or less succeeding.

But the standout character and the one which most moviegoers remember is Diva Plavalaguna, a blue-skinned, tentacle-headed, 7 ft. tall opera singer, who gets about five minutes of screen time, but still manages somehow to steal the whole damn movie (by twerking), despite the distracting hairstyles, fashion sensibilities, and atrocious accents of all the other characters. Ian Holm plays a space priest, and I don’t know what Bruce Willis is doing in this movie, other than being himself, but they are the two most normal characters in the entire movie, which is kinda saying something, but I’m not sure what.

Bruce Willis’ character has to escort Milla’s genetically perfect mutation to a special location so she can save the universe from the Darkness or some such nonsense. This involves lots of aliens, elemental stones, kung fu, Gary Oldman choking on a cherry pit, and shootouts with said aliens. Don’t bother to follow the plot. It’s essentially meaningless. On the other hand, the director somehow managed to get the French fashion designer, Gautier, to do the costumes, hair, and makeup for the film, so pay attention to that.

The movie is a visual treat and occasionally funny, with acceptable action scenes, but do not mistake any of that for greatness. This is very much a niche movie for Sci-Fi Action fans only.

Venom

I resisted putting this movie here but finally relented because although I enjoyed it immensely, it’s not a smart film. I liked the characters, but they are not especially bright and there are a number of things that remain unexplained. The pacing is off, the plot is easily followed but makes little sense, and the dialogue needs some serious help. That said, the movie just leans into its inherent goofiness, with no shame, and I kinda liked that. It’s a lot of fun, mostly funny, and bears almost no relation to the things going on in the comic books, outside of the characters’ names.

This film was popular mostly on the strength of Tom Hardy’s performance as a journalist that’s kinda like himself, and the alien symbiote who falls in love with him, named, of course, Venom. Michelle Williams and Riz Ahmed are also starring in this but no one remembers that. This is strictly a Tom Hardy joint, where he plays a man possessed by an alien that takes over his body, falls in love with him, and decides it doesn’t want to join its murderous brethren in taking over the world and eating humanity, although it still wants to eat people.

The movie’s got some problems, which is everything in the movie that’s not Tom Hardy. But I am a huge Tom Hardy fan so I was able to tolerate all the other problems in this movie like the dialogue, the plot, the villain, and the special effects. Still, I was able to pull a handful of things that I really enjoyed besides Tom, like the relationship between Venom and his character is funny, and the relationships between him and most of the other characters are quite wholesome. Even the villains are suitably despicable.

I think most of this movie’s fans would never argue that this is a good movie. However, if you are a fan of Tom Hardy…it’s a great movie!

Face/Off

I tried to add other movies to this list but I kept coming back to this movie, which I have watched multiple times. Like the above-named films, the science and plot are just sort of hand-waved away, which gives me the nagging sensation that the movie is unfinished, but doesn’t otherwise hinder my enjoyment of this spectacularly goofy film. I think you can guess that I’m a big John Woo fan. He has made a number of these types of movies with some silly plots, starting with the very first one I ever watched, Hard Boiled. That movie was so wild that I had to backtrack and catch some of his previous movies. I didn’t love them all. John Woo is the kind of director that can just make you watch a plot that, if proposed by any other director, would get them laughed out of the studio, and I am here for it. It is the existence of John Woo that makes the John Wick franchise possible since he is the one who pioneered what we now call Gun-Fu!

Get this. Nicholas Cage and John Travolta play a cop and a criminal (it doesn’t matter which is which) who get their faces surgically altered in Travolta’s face-swapping plot to, pick one: blow up some shit, get revenge, or steal something. How about all three? Good! There’s all kinds of battiness going on in this movie, multiple Mexican standoffs, little children oblivious to shootouts happening just out of their fields of vision, nuclear bombs, boat chases, husband swapping, endangered daughters and wives…you name it, it’s probably in here, and all done with a style and swag that makes John Woo the Godfather of modern action cinema. The only thing this movie is missing is Chow Yun Fat, the star of Woo’s previous Hong Kong films.

As you can imagine both Cage and Travolta are chewing the scenery like it’s a BLT, but there are, as in all of Woo’s films moments of startling beauty and pathos that make it worth taking a look at. But if you’re going to start watching John Woo’s films, don’t start with this one. It’s best to ease into it with something like Hard Target or Mission Impossible 2, to prepare yourself for all his slow-motion, Mexican standoff finery.

Double Impact

I know a lot of people would pick Hard Target, which is pretty dumb but this is quite frankly one of the dumbest Jean Claude Van Damme movies ever made, and that is saying something when you consider some of the other films he’s famous for. This movie, like Universal Soldier kind of knows how silly it is, and JC more or less plays these twin characters completely straight, except every now and then he does or says something with that little mischievous twinkle in his eye that lets you know he knows this movie is deeply silly, and he looks like he’s having the time of his life.

Jean Claude plays some kind of yoga instructor who likes to show off his leg flexibility to the ladies in his class (seemingly the only reason they are there is to look at JC’s butt in tights, and I’m not gonna lie, that’s why I would attend such a class). Of course, back in the day, JC would take every opportunity to show off his naked leg muscles at even the slightest provocation. He is separated from his twin brother when they’re children after their parents get killed by some Hong Kong Triad gangsters or something. Anyway, they meet again as adults and have to team up to take down the people who killed their parents even though the two of them intensely dislike each other, which makes for some brotherly shenanigans as they show their love by punching and kicking each other. Eventually, they do get along long enough to blow things up.

To give you some idea of how silly this movie is, there is a completely unnecessary dance scene, with JC working it out with a couple of beautiful women in what appears to be a shed, and I enjoyed this scene immensely. It never fails to crack me up, mostly because it matches absolutely nothing else in the entire film, and yet is entirely in keeping with his character’s character! The brother, also played by Jean Claude, does not dance, hates black silk underwear, and is a grumpy, unlikable, stick-in-the-mud, who still somehow manages to make that look cool, and yet also appears to be living his best life.

You have to watch this movie just for the dance scene, because JC, unlike a lot of white guys I know, can actually stay on beat and appears to really be enjoying himself, as he should.

Bonus Movie:

Prometheus

I don’t even know where to start with this movie. I have friends who like this film and I guess if you turn your brain off and only see this as a Horror/sci-fi/Action film, it’s okay, but my problem is I know far too much about how the scientific method works to ever enjoy this movie. I kept getting pulled out of the movie by the character’s actions.

These are quite possibly some of the stupidest scientists to ever grace a Science Fiction movie. And the non-scientists aren’t too bright either. These people are so stupid they had me screaming at my television screen and that’s not a good look for any movie.

There are a good half dozen dumb character moments in the movie, and if you’ve seen this movie, then you know which is the worst one, but if you haven’t let me illustrate this for you. Towards the end of the movie, two characters are running away from a massive rolling ship (do not ask why it is rolling, you will only hurt yourself). One of the characters manages to avoid being crushed by the ship by accident. She falls down (as is traditional in Horror movies even though she isn’t wearing heels), and the other woman (who is wearing heels) also manages to fall down but does not avoid being crushed. Both characters could have avoided the entire thing by just not being stupid, and running into the wide open spaces to either side of the rolling ship!

This is my whole feeling during the entire movie!

You have scientists getting lost who aren’t supposed to be getting lost, people afraid of things they’re not supposed to fear, and/or touching things they’re not supposed to touch.

I was rooting for the monsters.

All the monsters!

Five Black Women We Forgot About (in Music)

Okay, I don’t know if any of yall forgot about these women but I didn’t even know some of these women were a thing until a few months ago and got mad at my Mom for never mentioning them to me, but I realize as much as she knew about music she didn’t know everything and she also might not have known about these women. Of these women, Betty Davis is the one I knew the least about and is my personal favorite.

Betty Davis

I just love this song so much. It says so much about my Mom’s life and how Black women are never expected to know or care about other forms of music outside of Pop and Spirituals. In the future, I’ll make a list of Black women in different genres of music that people rarely think about like Country and Punk. But I guess she was a part of the whole Afro-Futurist Funkadelic thing that happened in the 70s, which is kinda sad, because we only ever hear about the guys who performed that time of music!

Big Mama Thornton

I have mentioned Big Momma on this blog before. I stumbled across this version of Hound Dog in a Tom Cruise movie years ago and wondered how it was I’d never heard this particular version of the song before. It turns out that the Elvis Presley version is nothing more than a cover song, and although I like Elvis okay, I feel he made a very washed-out version of this funky little song and I prefer this version. She has an incredible voice and I wish more people knew about her which is why I’m putting her on this list.

Barbara Lynn

This is another song (and another performer) I’ve fallen in love with. Now I’ve actually heard this song before, I just didn’t know the woman who sang it. I only discovered the video for this song a few weeks ago, and I don’t remember how I stumbled across it. I tried to find women from different eras of music to show that this is an ongoing problem of forgetting the contributions of women (especially Black women) to American culture. I’m reasonably sure that most people don’t know about these women because I’m a person who makes a point of knowing things about things and I didn’t know about them!

Bernadette Cooper

Bernadette is the lead singer in one of my favorite girl groups from the 80s, Klymaxx. I was a huge fan of their music and didn’t know her name. It turns out that Bernadette not only wrote this song but produced and wrote a lot of songs from the 80s by some of our favorite performers like Teena Marie and madame X. I love this song and every time I hear it, it brings me to tears. Apparently, I’m not alone in that response as this song’s sentiments seem to resonate with a lot of people. It’s a romantic song but it speaks to anyone who misses anyone they love, I guess.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe

This too is one of my favorite songs. My Mom definitely knew about this performer but for some reason never talked about her to me much. I stumbled across this video years ago and then promptly forgot that I did so! But I didn’t forget her name, just like I didn’t forget her voice.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915 – 1973) is often referred to as the “original soul sister” and “the mother of rock and roll” for too many good reasons to display at once. Among others, Tharpe was among the very first recording guitarists to incorporate heavy distortion on her tracks.

For some reason, there is a long history of Black women guitar players that has been lost to time, and well, we know why. For the same reason that there’s a long list of white female painters whose names no one ever mentions. As in all things, women do extraordinary things, but it’s only men who get all the attention, and then only very specific ones. I hope I can do my part to fix this with one tiny list at a time. Some of these I’ve heard of and some I’ve only encountered for the first time very recently.

130 Historic Black Women Guitarists and Bassists You Need To Know

7 Guitarists That Prove Black Women Were Pioneers In Music History

New Trailers Dropped For 2023

New trailers just dropped for movies being released next year. Later I’ll post a full list of my most hotly anticipated movies and series for next year.

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

I found myself really excited by this video. I checked out of the Transformers franchise after the first two films because they just became increasingly awful to watch. Michael Bay was definitely getting on my nerves, but the franchise regained my attention with Bumblebee, consequently, that’s now my favorite character.

Admittedly, I was not there for the Beast Wars saga, so I don’t know much about it, because I was elsewhere doing other things. I heard about it, though. I know only a handful of characters in this movie (Mirage and Optimus Primal) but not who else. Still, the nostalgia factor is pretty big with this one and it was really nice to see so many grown-ass men being childishly excited about this movie on YouTube! The trailer looks really good. Hopefully, the creators can keep the momentum they began with Bumblebee. Will I go see it in the theater? Idk. It depends on what else is being released that month because June is a lot!

Yeah, Optimus Primal is being voiced by none other than Ron Perlman.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

This movie’s nostalgia factor hit me pretty hard. I probably will not go see this movie, not because I don’t love Indy but because there are three other movies coming out in June I want to see, and this one falls low on that list. I do not have limitless movie theater money, so Indie, I’m afraid, is going to lose. Sorry Indy, I will wait for it to reach streaming services.

This looks really exciting though and if you guys go see it, write something down, tell us all about it.

Guardians of the Galaxy 3

I’m really looking forward to this movie. I enjoyed the last move and the holiday special a lot, and I like spending time with this group of goofballs. There’s not really a nostalgia factor here but it will be interesting to get rocket’s backstory, and it’s nice to see Gamora (or at least an alternate-universe version of her) again. I’m still not a fan of Chris Pratt (he is after all the least likable Chris) but his acting isn’t bad, and he’s not so awful I cannot tolerate him in a film with a bunch of other great and funny characters.

Elemental

I really, really, liked this trailer which is a great introduction to this world and its rules. I’m not really into the forbidden romance angle of the story, but I do like the easy Jazz music of the teaser. Everyone who saw this trailer was quick to point out how she is the only Elemental on the train who is made of fire and noting the different interactions between the Elementals. So the creators have already set up how these characters interact, have both negative and positive effects on each other’s existences, and why the fire elementals might not be included. I’m probably not going to the theater to see this one though because…Summer.

Cocaine Bear

This is one of those ridiculous comedies that get released every few years. This one is about a bear that gets high on a stash of cocaine that some criminals lose in the woods, and I’m not going to see this but Hey, if this is your bag, go for it!

Five More Movies Too Scary For Me to Watch Again

(But I Still Like Them)

Here’s a slightly different list from the last one which mostly consisted of movies I didn’t like or didn’t finish, either because they were just bad films, or I had no patience for them. This is a list of movies I actually like. They’re perfectly acceptable and watchable movies where I liked the characters, the plot, and it looks good, but I feel no great urge to watch these again because they were emotionally exhausting, too disturbing, or genuinely too scary, at least they were for me!

Arachnophobia

Stick with me here because there’s a story that goes along with this movie. Yeah, I do have really bad arachnophobia and have had it since I was a little girl. I was the kind of person who used to look for signs of spiders in any new space I walked into. (I have since calmed down about this over the years, though.) The way my memory works I can actually recount the incident that gave me this issue ( but we not gonna talk about that). I can talk about the event that happened to me when I was in college and before this movie was released. I know it happened in that order because after I came home from college was when I saw the trailer, and my Mom would tease me about being scared to watch it. She seemed to enjoy the movie a lot, thought it was pretty funny, and wanted to share this scary movie with me, but I’m one of those (stubborn muth*fck*s is what a friend once called me) who, once she makes it up in her head to NOT do something, I don’t do it!

I was in living in a very nice house one Summer vacation. I was working at the time, but I was also in the house alone because my roommates had all gone home, and I was sitting in my room, lights and TV on, when I saw a tiny little speck near my lamp. It was not a little speck, it was a tiny spider. Yep, I had a spider egg hatch in my bedroom.

To say that I freaked the f*ck out would be an understatement! I was a hot emotional mess for a week! Luckily, I had some of the world’s greatest friends who, once they understood what the hell I was jibbering about, helped me smoke bomb my bedroom (twice) and cleaned and moved all my belongings to another part of the house. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but I was at least able to relax long enough to fall into an exhausted sleep in my own bed after two days of emotional hell. Well, my friends didn’t mock me, kept their smiling to a minimum, and seemed happy to help a damsel in distress.

Mom knew about the spider incident and understood my attitude, but she always encouraged me to move past my fears because if I didn’t at least try they would always control me. (This is from the woman who apparently had some kind of phobia about boats and New York City! What was all that about?!) Eventually, I did agree to sit down and watch it with her, with a bunch of caveats and addendums, like leaving the room if I got too scared, squealing as much as I liked, and covering my eyes if necessary. I got through the first half okay, but covered my eyes and squealed a lot for the last thirty minutes. I didn’t leave the room though, so technically speaking, I did sit through it.

And you know what? It turned out not to be a bad movie although I have not watched it again in the twenty-plus years since then, and I have no plans to watch it again in the future. Personally, I consider sitting through that movie to be one of the bravest moments in all of cinematic history!

The Void

I was not particularly weirded out by the title or the synopsis of this movie. The thumbnail of the movie on Google looked intriguing. So I sat down to watch this with the idea that it would be your typical Lovecraftian pastiche of images culled from his works and got something I wasn’t at all expecting. I more or less understood the film’s plot, and what it was trying to do, but I didn’t expect bizarre nameless cults (although I should have) body horror images (I should have expected that too), and a kind of monster siege, working the night shift sort of film, where everyone dies horribly, except when they don’t stay dead.

It’s easy enough to describe the movie, but any description you give it won’t actually resemble the movie you will be watching, but I’m gonna give it a try. There’s a bunch of people stuck in a hospital on the night shift, only a few of whom are actually medical personnel. The rest are random townsfolk who are trapped in the hospital because some oddly dressed cultists besieged the town and were killing people, so the rest ran to the hospital. There are some weird medical experiments going on in the basement that involve the birth of an infernal creature from a young girl, the opening of Hellish portals, and lots of goo, blood, guts, and some tentacles.

That was as much as I understood, but that doesn’t mean the movie is ineffective. I’ve no great urge to watch it again because it was a genuinely disturbing film whose effect lingers long after it’s over, and I don’t have to watch it again because I clearly remember how uncomfortable I felt while looking at it. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing because there are movies that do this that I have re-watched, and if that is the kind of mood you’re looking for, then by all means, go for it, and tell me how it worked out for you.

Imma wait over here!

Annihilation

I generally like the works of Alex Garland, someone I didn’t pay any special attention to when his career began with The Beach in 2000. I didn’t even watch The Beach. I dismissed it. But then he came out with 28 Days later and I perked up. There was a new cinematic voice in Horror, and I’ve been present for most of his movies since, like Sunshine, Dredd, and Ex Machina. I sat through most of those without issue, and they were all very good, but in 2018 Garland released Annihilation, based on the book by another of my favorite artists, Jeff Vendermeer. When I heard about the movie I decided to read the three-book series, and I enjoyed them, for the most part.

The movie combines all three books of the series into one long story with yet another Lovecraftian theme. A section of the US has been taken over by something called The Shimmer. Elena’s husband went into The Shimmer, which warps biology, and he disappeared. Except he also came back, alone. Intrigued, she and a team of 4 other women go into The Shimmer to explore its purpose, with each woman having her own agenda. Elena wants to find out what happened to her husband. Each of the women find some thing they weren’t expecting which has a profound effect on the rest of their lives.

There are some genuinely panstshittingly frightening moments in this film, like when Elena and her team are attacked by a mutated bear that screams with the voices of the people it’s killed, but beyond that the movie is just weird, and sad, and yeah, there’s that word again, disturbing. It’s not a bad film. I actually like the film. It’s also not particularly hard to watch because it contains some genuine moments of true beauty. But it is another movie where the mood and flavor of it linger long after it’s over, and I have not been in the headspace to be able to watch it.

I will likely watch this again at some point in the future, because it is an effective, thoughtful, and terrifying film, but not yet.

The Revenant

Honestly, this is a great survival horror film, and if you like those types of films you should by all means watch this, but be prepared to feel as if you’ve been emotionally defenestrated in the aftermath. This movie is exhausting on a physical level, too. I just felt wrung out after watching this.

Starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy the movie is based on the true story of a man (DiCaprio) who was left for dead in the wilderness by his business partner, (Tom Hardy) who, after killing DiCaprio’s son, went back to the nearest town and made the claim on his half of their business dealings, only to have his partner stumble out of the wilderness several weeks later.

For some reason the most distressing movies for me seem to involve bear attacks, although I do not think I have any kind of bear phobia. DiCaprio’s character braves the worst excesses of trying to survive an environment that is inimical to human life, like snow, freezing water, wild animals, lack of food, and angry Indigenous people, just to enact vengeance on his partner.

This movie just slaps the shit out of you emotionally. Well, it did that for me, but your mileage may vary depending on how much energy reserves you possess. This is another excellent film with great acting, cinematography, and a very compelling story that I will probably never watch again. Or if I do, I’m going to need to rest up, eat my vitamins, and do my breathing first.

The Descent

Oh man was this movie hard to watch, and not because of the monsters. I don’t actually have claustrophobia but this movie might give it to you if you don’t. It’s a harrowing film. I was exhausted and saddened after watching it. The most devastating moment isn’t the deaths at the beginning of the film but something that happens midway through it that completely upends the relationships between the rest of the characters.

A team of women friends decide to go caving in a previously unexplored system after the death of the main character’s husband and child in a driving accident the previous year. The team are attacked by a race of terrifying cannibalistic mutants and taken out one by one until there’s only one of them left. There’s plenty of blood and gore, but that’s not what upset me the most, and no spoilers, but it’s about the characters, comes completely out of left field, changes everyone’s dynamic, and therefore their chances of survival.

It’s a very effective film. I don’t often mind when films do the unexpected or throw something at me out of the blue, especially when it’s as well done as it was here. I didn’t choose these movies because I disliked them. I chose them because I liked them. Some of them are great films, but were so emotionally draining I simply don’t have the emotional bandwidth to put myself through them again anytime soon.

Halloween Music Playlist

One of the great things about October is listening to some of my favorite songs that come from Horror movies. So let’s catch some of these needle drops from Horror movies, which are perfectly okay for listening to all year long.

These first two songs I discovered on YouTube. They’re not from movies, but they are entirely appropriate for Halloween, so I thought I’d put these first. I don’t know what I was looking for at the time but I found these songs by The Merkins ridiculously funny. There’s an entire album’s worth of these, each one of the characters in the group also gets a solo song, and it just tickled me that all of them are sung completely straight like this. Incidentally, “to merc” is the new slang for murder so even the group name is a joke.

Dreamer’s Paradise – The Merkins

I’ll Kill You That Way – The Merkins

This one is one of my new favorites and it comes from one of the top Horror movies this year, Jordan Peele’s Nope – Exuma: The Obeah Man.

I am one of five people that probably even remember this song from the 2016 Ghostbusters: Ghostbusters (I’m Not Afraid) by Fall Out Boy/Missy Elliott.

No One Believes Me by Kid Cudi from the 2011 Fright Night. This is one of my favorite vampire songs. I absolutely love this video and how much I wish it were a movie.

Here is a song from another Jordan Peele joint (the man has impeccable taste in music), I Got Five On It, from the movie US. I’ve always thought this song was creepy but there were no Horror movies associated with it until Peel made it explicit.

Here is The Candyman from the 2021 version of Nia Dacosta’s Candyman.

From the 1990s version of Stephen King’s The Stand: Don’t Fear the Reaper by Blue Oyster Cult. This was also used in John Carpenter’s Halloween.

This is a very popular song for movies but it was very well used in Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake When the Man Comes Around by Johnny Cash.

Here, using The Munster’s theme song as the foundation is Missy Elliot’s Get Your Freak On.

In case you have not had enough Jordan Peele, here is Childish Gambino’s Redbone, from the movie Get Out!

This is from one of my all-time favorite vampire movies, Joel Schumaker’s 1987 The Lost Boys, the song Cry Little Sister.

The Addams Family movies had some good songs attached to them. Here is the theme song from the first movie performed by MC Hammer, Addams Family Groove.

And for those of you who haven’t seen it in a while, A Bonus Video:

More New Trailers

Hey, we got a bunch of exciting new trailers that recently dropped so let’s check them out! Which ones are you looking forward to, and why. Let me know in the comments!

Jurassic World: Dominion

This is such a great trailer for the movie. I would watch an entire season of short snippets of people coping with dinosaurs, so I’m really excited to watch this. I hope it’s a really good movie because this was the kind of stuff I used to imagine when I was a kid and I don’t want to walk out of the theater disappointed.

Wow! I mean just think about it! What if dinosaurs existed at the same time as modern humans? We’d have to take the good (incredible images and photos) with the bad (possibly being eaten). What if you lived in a place with a dinosaur infestation? What would your insurance be like? How would you explain being late for work because there were some triceratopsians blocking the freeway? What if the local pack of herbivores showed up in your backyard and ate your flower garden? And let’s be honest here, there is a part of me that thinks watching human beings be menaced by giant predators is just deeply entertaining.

Incidentally, if you like this video there’s a trilogy of books by James David called Footprints of Thunder that has this same plot, with dinosaurs having made it into the modern world through a time rift! Not sure if it’s still in print but if you can find some copies, check them out.

As I mentioned before, my youngest niece and nephew have already decided we’re going to see this film, and I believe in shamelessly indulging their interests. My Millennial sister likes dinosaurs too, so I hope to turn this into a full family affair, (although my oldest niece may miss out because of work).

The Winchesters

Okay, I have no intention of watching this. I watched all 15 years of Supernatural and I have no more taste for their story. I stuck it out to the end, and have moved on. More than likely this is an appeal to a younger generation of supernatural fans who while they may have watched the old episodes, are probably more likely to watch this than those of us who sat through 15 seasons of the original series. The actors are all very pretty but I don’t know any of them and I don’t want to supplant any of my memories of the original with any images from this one, so I’m going to pass on it.

But I know there are some people who are greatly interested in this, so I’m giving y’all a heads up in case you hadn’t heard the news.

The Umbrella Academy

I am very excited about this series and I’m really looking forward to the season three premiere. If you haven’t seen the first two seasons, I implore you to check it out. There will be at least one character you will fall in love with. I thought the character I would love the most was Klaus, who acts like a free spirit but is mostly traumatized by his ability to speak to the dead, and so self medicates. To my surprise, my favorite character turned out to be Number Five, an old man in a child’s body (due to time mishap) and who is the smartest sibling along with being a complete badass.

But this series is notable for having Eliot Page. Eliot came out as non-binary transgender last year and everyone was wondering how the character he played on screen in seasons one and two would be treated in the story. It appears that the character has also come out as transgender since the writers changed the name of the character from Vanya to Victor. Hopefully, Victor won’t try to destroy the world again as they did in the first two seasons. See how new this is. This is something that so different from what we’re used to that I don’t even know how to talk about a fictional character. How do I talk about Vanya? Is it deadnaming to talk about her since the new character is named Victor? And is it okay because she’s fictional? Somebody help!

She Hulk

I was a huge fan of the Jim Byrne run of the She-Hulk comic series, and I love what they’re doing here with the character. They seem to have perfectly captured the sensibility and mood of the books and now I’m looking forward to this. It looks fun and funny. I love how they made her a sexual being with appetites who makes it clear that she wants what she wants. The comic book version was often sexy and sassy, with a lot of snark and attitude, and yeah, Bruce Banner is indeed her cousin.

All that aside, I do hate the CGI. It looks awful and cheap and simply not up to Disney standards. The face is just wrong, especially in her Hulked-out state, and her body looks too thin, and not very muscular, which is a real problem I have with female characters who are supposed to have super strength but whose arms look like twigs. I hope they correct all this by the time the series airs. (Note: Jane Thor and King Valkyrie have just the right amount of muscle for such characters).

Note: I read that the CGI has been upgraded to look a bit better, so I checked it out, and the trailer was improved a bit. She looks more muscular than before, but her face still looks a little bit off to me. It’s not as bad as in the original trailer though.

Sandman

I have not read the Neil Gaiman comic books on which this series is based, something I plan to correct before the series airs in August. Since I am only passingly familiar with The Endless, I don’t know enough to be really excited about this, but so far, I like what I see, and I’m looking forward to reading the books, and watching the show.

But, whether or not I watch this also depends greatly on what else will be out at the time. Sometimes I have every intention of watching some show or movie, and then I don’t, or only watch some of it, not because it’s bad or anything, not because I’m bored, but because it’s sometimes hard for me to keep up the momentum, which has been stolen by another series. But even if I don’t watch the series, I intend to refresh myself with the books, which I haven’t even glanced at since I was a young’un.

New Thor 2 Trailer

Well, I already had plans to see this. Yeah, I’m an MCU fan and no shame in that, because I go to the movies to have fun and adventures, and MCU films deliver every single time. If I’m gonna spend that much money to be entertained I want it to be worth it. (Yeah, I’m not going to pay the cost of birthing a child in the US to watch a movie about pain and tragedy, unless it’s by Martin Scorcese.)

One of the primary reasons I love Taika Waititi (the director) is his ability, almost his compulsion, to take famous characters, sometimes famously evil ones, and deconstruct them, making them human and relatable, while never denying they’re not actually good people. He did this with vampires, Hitler, pirates, and superheroes, and he’s done the same thing for Thor, and I find it a really interesting habit. I’m gonna have to talk about that some more in another post.

So, yeah I’m looking forward to his interpretation of Jane Thor, King Valkyrie, and this new villain, Ghorr the Godslayer, who is played by Christian Bale.

Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning

Okay, these actors are starting to get up there in years, (except for Rebecca Ferguson, who I believe might be a vampire), but I don’t care. The Mission Impossible franchise consistently hits it out of the park in the Action genre, and you have the usual required scenes of Tom Cruise jumping onto something while clenching a woman, and running really fast somewhere. I’m probably not going to see this in the theater because it’s simply not on my list of movies to watch this Summer. My mom used to throw my whole watchlist into disarray every year, but fortunately, I can dictate to my sister’s kids, and they kinda have to go along with my tastes if they wanna eat free popcorn.

I don’t actually have much to say about this trailer except the Action doesn’t look as wild and crazy as it has in previous films, but maybe they’re just holding back on those images, and when you’re sitting in the theater you’ll get that familiar sensation of your stomach dropping down to your knees, and you’ll clench the arms of your seat in terror, and paying five thousand dollars to see it will have been worth it.

Willow

I don’t normally engage in a whole lot of nostalgia, but for this movie, I will make an exception! The original movie was released in the 80s, and when it was available for TV, I remember watching it multiple times. It’s been thirty+ years and we have a sequel television series. As soon as I heard there was a trailer for this, my mind started playing the John Williams theme from the original. Yep, I still fondly remember that.

The reason the movie was so special to me was because of Warwick Davis. He was my first exposure to a dwarf actor, and I thought he was very handsome and very charming. In the movie, he is tasked with the care of a tiny baby girl that is the “chosen one”, But the movie isn’t about her, because she’s, like, one year old and has no speaking parts, so much as the hero’s journey of Davis’ character, Willow. It’s a little bit of a remix of Snow White, and surprisingly progressive for its time, with a woman warrior character and an evil Queen.

This sequel happens many years later and the “baby” is an adult, and Willow and some companions have been called to save their world again. The original was also my first real exposure to High Fantasy that I actually liked, as I was mostly indifferent to these types of books and movies, and most of them made no impression on me. But Willow snuck in and got to me, and I’m obviously going to have to do a deep dive before this series release!

I’m looking forward to it because it looks like a lot of fun and the nostalgia factor really kicked my ass while watching this!

Resident Evil

Despite that I’ve watched almost none of the movies, I do love a good horror series with lots of monsters, so I’m looking forward to this series. I’m not enthusiastic exactly, but anytime I’m watching a trailer, and I am sitting on the edge of my seat or just nope the fuck out (the giant spider scene), it’s definitely worth checking it out. so zombies, spiders, chainsaws, Black women being included in the story? I’m in!

I am glad to see more Black girls and women being involved in fantasy and horror movies and series. For the longest time, at least since the seventies, the existence of Black women as an audience that could be pandered to was not a thing. There’s nothing wrong with being pandered to in a narrative, despite the fact that straight white male audiences want to turn it into a dirty word, which is really ironic since for the past seventy years they have been the ones being pandered to by every form of entertainment media that existed.

Creators, almost all of whom were white men, literally didn’t think about other groups of people, in fact making it expressly clear that white men, between the ages of 15 and 35, was the ideal audience they were chasing after, and there is a contingent of online assholery that actually wants to go back to a time when we were considered nothing but maids, slaves, and servants to be abused in whatever stories we were in (hence the current online trolling of Black actresses who happen to find work in these genres). I’m glad to see these creators and writers remembering that WoC watch shit too, recognize that we also have money and choices, are willing to chase after PoC for their money, and that we want to see ourselves in these narratives as heroes and villains. Putting that message out into the world is one of the primary reasons I started this blog.

So yeah, I’m excited to see a Black girl in this series who is apparently being a total bad ass.

Strange World

I am a really huge fan of Lost World type movies, and my personal favorite is Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2. I just love watching movies about goopy aliens, monsters, and weird environments and this looks like hella fun, plus it’s got this retro-vibe that I find aesthetically appealing. I don’t normally watch a lot of the kid’s stuff on Disney, and I don’t go to those type of movies anymore (cuz I don’t have that kind of money), but I would pay money to go see this. I think it’s just going to be on the Disney+ app though which has more than shown it’s worth in the series Wandavision, Hawkeye, Moon Knight, and a bunch of movies and documentaries.

I’m not sure how I feel about the characters, because as I said many times, it’s not just a plot or some imagery that pulls me into something. It’s got to have at least one or two characters I’m drawn to, although the characters do look really cute! I didn’t see much of their personalities in this trailer so I don’t know what to think of them yet, (and although the pilot looks appealing, it doesn’t mean I will like her) but the trailer looks like weird goopy fun, which is enough of an attraction for me, I guess. It’ll get a look-see.

The Menu

And finally there’s this gem, starring Ralph, Fiennes, and one of my favorite new actresses, who I hope will be around for a good long while, Anya Taylor-Joy! I have the feeling this movie is about one of my favorite topics, cannibalism, and I’m always up for a good humans eating humans movie, especially if it’s an “eat the rich” story. I only just heard of this movie, so I don’t have a lot of knowledge beyond the visuals, but I will probably watch this when it streams.

5 Haunting Horror Movies You Haven’t Seen…Yet!

I’ve been watching horror movies since I was a little girl ,who was supposed to be asleep at 11 o’clock at night. I went through a period, with my mother, where I think we tried to watch every horror movie that got made between 1980 and 1988, before I went off to college, so I have seen a helluva lot of movies, many of which have been forgotten, unless your’e a serious horror movie fan. I admit, not everything I watched was any good, but I found something interesting in these five movies, which have stayed in my memory even though I haven’t watched some of them in decades.

 

Don’t Look in the Basement (1973)

This move was made back in 1973 so I wouldnt go in expecting it t be enlightened about mental illness. I saw this movie when I was a teenager, and there was just something about it that I found deeply disturbing. Yes, the characters are disturbed, certainly, becasue this is an asylum, but that’s not the reason why this movie has haunted me for years. I suspect its some quality of mood, or lighting, or acting that I found mesmerizing back then.

A young nurse gets a job in a remote asylum for the mentally ill, and has a great deal of difficulty doing her work, as the director of the facility seems as deeply disturbed as her patients. You can probably guess what the twist is long before the plot spirals down into a hot mess of murder and mutilation.

https://youtu.be/ys27ZxU3M3g

 

 

Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things

A troupe of method actors and their despotic director head out to Coconut Grove, Florida where, as a prank, they exhume a corpse called Orville and are subsequently horrified when his similarly deceased friends emerge from their graves to play some deadly games of their own. Filmed as America experienced its post-60s comedown, director Bob Clark’s first horror feature began a truly terrifying trilogy that continued with the powerful anti-Vietnam war statement Dead Of Night and climaxed with the classic seasonal (and subsequently re-made) scarefest Black Christmas.

You can definitely tell this movie was filmed on the cheap, but this is also one of the first zombie movies I ever saw, long before ever watched Night of the Living Dead, and of course this is nearly forgotten, except by zombie movie enthusiasts like me. The acting isn’t great, and the special effects aren’t either, but the movie has such a distinctive feel, that I’ve never forgotten it, despite having not watched it in decades.

https://youtu.be/FrwAJWGYdqY

 

 

Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971)

I haven’t seen this movie in decades but for some reason I still remember the haunted feeling I had watching this. The plot is a little fuzzy, but I think its about a woman who moves out into the country, with her boyfriend, to recover from a nervous breakdown, and encounters strange events, and possibly ghosts and vampires.

The movie is surprisingly well acted for a horror movie from the 70’s, and the cinematography looks gorgeous. The only drawback seems to be that the plot is a bit murky, but I do remember enjoying watching this on late night TV.

https://youtu.be/d-NZTNwqKhI

 

 

Psychomania (1974)

This is another movie I remember watching as a kid, late one night, when I was supposed to be asleep. I haven’t seen it in decades, but I still remember it pretty well, although it took me some time to find the title. I remember that I started off excited about the movie because, Hey! Zombie Bikers!, but by the end I recall a distinct feeling of melancholy for the bikers, and their inability to die, and at least part of that was due to this song.

I remember thinking something along the lines of how all these characters eventually became pretty jaded by the1974 lifestyle they thought was a form of true freedom, only to be trapped in a kind of hellish living afterlife.

https://youtu.be/HCJ5naKUVmg

 

 

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976)

https://youtu.be/vK4za8v8_YI

This is another movie I watched late one night, without my mother’s permission, even though she was the one who told me about it! Its more of a mystery than a horror movie, but I’m going to put this here because it does have some onscreen kills. It stars a very young Jodi Foster, who was still riding on her fame from Taxi Driver, I think, which came out the same year.

It’s been awhile since I’ve seen this, but I think one of my mother’s objections to this movie, is the character is a serial killer ,who genuinely regrets killing people. My guess is that my Mom was opposed to kids killing adults in movies, which is understandable, but it might also have been the pedophilia from one of the characters, which she thought I was too young to be watching.

I wanted to see it because I was under the impression, at about nine years old, that Jodi seemed to be about my age, when she was, in fact, thirteen, at the time. I have observed that little girls often gravitate to movies about other little girls, and I was no different, except I gravitated to horror movies that starred little girls.

I cannot recall if she was alone because she killed her parents, but I do remember her making up various stories for the adults who investigated her situation, as to why she was alone, and killing the ones who got too nosy, as well as a man who was trying to get too cozy with her, if y’all know what I mean.

Summer Playlist: Talkin ‘bout a Revolution

I was initially going to call this “The New Shit”, but changed my mind, after I encountered a lot of new music that was protest related.

What’s happening today, is indeed a revolution, and every revolution has a soundtrack. In the sixties, the songs revolved around the war in Vietnam, and racial civil unrest. In hindsight, I should have expected this, as there can be no revolution, without Art!

There’s a lot of songs out there, that were written by white folksingers, during the Vietnam War, but plenty of Black musicians wrote stuff, too. I tried not to choose songs that readily come to mind when considering protest songs. I tried to choose the  kind of songs that people might know, but probably don’t think of as revolutionary. 

Here’s a list of revolution songs by Black artists, both past, and present, and maybe even the future. Some of y’all might not have come across these yet, as most of these will not see radio play, and and some of them won’t be offered on conventional streaming apps, either. On the other hand, many of them are available on YouTube, but you can’t research what you don’t now, right?

 

(Say it Loud) I’m Black and I’m Proud – James Brown

This song was groundbreaking for its time. I’ve found that there’s two different types of revolution songs, songs of grief, and songs of defiance. This is definitely the template for the latter type of song. It is defiantly and unabashedly Black.

Songs like these are important, because they are declarations of worth. They remind people of why they’re fighting, and what they’re fighting for, and  if its one thing a bully hates, it’s when their victim gets back on their feet, and declares their worth!

I’m Black and I’m proud is not any different from saying Black Power, or Black Lives Matter.

 

 

F*ck the Police – NWA

This song was incredibly shocking for its time. Not only did it get banned, but it sparked a wave of censorship against Rap music, which did nothing to actually stop Rappers from speaking truth to power, but it did spur music companies to begin focusing solely on Rap music that had no consciousness to it, and only talked about Black crime and partying.

If you’re wondering why conscious Rap music fell out of favor, then the censorship wars of the mid-eighties certainly played a role. White suburban parents did not want their children listening to songs about questioning and disrespecting authority, and so they did what White parents have always done,when it came to art they didn’t want their children exposed to, like Jazz, and  Rock.

Declare it immoral, and use that as an excuse to ban it!

 

 

Redemption Song- Stevie Wonder 

Here, Stevie does a cover of the song originally written by Bob Marley. Its not that I don’t like the Marley version, but I’m a huge Stevie Wonder fan, this version has always been my favorite, and I’ve always loved when Stevie got political.

Or you could try:

You Haven’t Done Nothing

Its Wrong

Misrepresented People

Blowin’ in the Wind

Heaven Help Us All

Village Ghettoland

 

Fight The Power – Public Enemy

I thought about featuring the official song video for this selection, but decided to go with the opening credits for Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, which is what launched this song into everyone’s consciousness. This was a lot of mainstream white people’s first introduction to political rap, like Public Enemy.

I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to Rap music when I was growing up. I didn’t have favorites, or closely follow certain groups, although I certainly knew who PE was. I knew about who and what was hot, because it was the music that everyone around me listened to, so it was always in the background, while I explored other musical tastes.

I’m not going to say this type of music didn’t influence my thinking, because it most certainly did, but I didn’t realize how much so until I was older.

 

 

 

Talking About a Revolution- Tracy Chapman

I talked in my last post about my regard for tracy Chapman’s music. This is another of her many political songs, which still gives me chills many years after I first heard it. This song, along with the last song I listed, is from her first, self titled, album, which was released in 1988.

You can try:

Across the Line

If Not Now, When

Freedom Now

Subcity

 

Hell You Talm ‘Bout – Janelle Monae

This song was released a few years ago, to minor acclaim. Not many people paid a whole lot of attention to it, outside of the Black community, but this song gives me chills every single time I hear it. It is, in the end, a raucous litany of the dead.

 

 

 

This Is America – Childish Gambino

This song became a nine days wonder when it was released a few summers ago, and has not lost its effectiveness. People are still puzzling about the video’s many images and their meanings.

 

https://time.com/5267890/childish-gambino-this-is-america-meaning/

“The central message is about guns and violence in America and the fact that we deal with them and consume them as part of entertainment on one hand, and on the other hand, is a part of our national conversation,” Ramsey tells TIME. “You’re not supposed to feel as if this is the standard fare opulence of the music industry. It’s about a counter-narrative and it really leaves you with chills.”

 

 

Black Excellence – Buddy

I have no idea who Buddy is, but this is one of my new favorite videos, for its celebration of Black history, and I just love to watch good dancing!

 

 

Glory – Common/John Legend

This is one of my Mom’s favorites, but mostly because she’s a big John Legend fan. This song is from the movie, Selma, by the Black female director, Ava Duvernay. I have not been able to bring myself to watch the film. I probably never will. I’ve had my complete fill of movies of Black people overcoming trauma, whose stories I already know, anyway.

The other day, my mom said something very intersting to me. She said, about the current protesters,  “At least they’re not singing We Shall Overcome. I’m sick of that song.” Remember, my mother grew up doing the civil unrest of the  fifties and sixties, and was a member of the local chapter of the Black Panthers, just before I was born. 

I get the distinct impression that  the white people who are talking about today’s issues the loudest, are 1). the kind of people who have never protested for anytihng in their lives, and have 2). not lived with this nearly their entire life. 

My mother is seventy years old. She’s been actively fighting to uplift Black people since she was a teenager! She is not unhappy to see young people picking up where she left off, after her unofficial retirement.

The other day we were talking about her mom, and how she passed just before Obama became the first Black president, and how she would have loved to have seen that. My mom said she was glad to have lived long enough to see that, and to see what’s happening today. 

So yeah, all those white people bitching and whining about the current uprising, can sit down and shut the whole hell up. They’re nattering ignorantly at a people for whom fighting for their rights is a generational lifetime profession!

 

I Just Wanna Live – Keedron Bryant

This is one of my favorite current protest songs. Its also one of the saddest because Keedron is only twelve years old.

There is almost no discussion about the levels of trauma our children are  going through, and not just police brutality, but the presidents behavior, and their constant exposure to the ignorance of online agitators, who are always quick to insist how little their lives matter.

Our kids need to see this. They need to know this. Sadly, they’re the warriors of our future. They’re  going to need to know how to fight this battle, and unfortunately, teach their kids because the battle to be treated as human beings is never going to be over.

 

 

Black Parade – Beyonce 

I want to end on a high note though. On Juneteenth of this year, Beyonce dropped one of the Blackest songs of the year. This is a song of joy, and celebration, and well, there’s definitely some bragging involved.

And then, at the end of this song, she also dropped a list of Black owned businesses. 

I love this song! I’m not the fighter/confrontational type. That doesn’t mean I won’t beat your ass, though. It just means I won’t enjoy doing it, and will be embarrassed at my loss of composure, afterwards! I don’t do things the way my mother did them, but I contribute in the way that I can, in a way that works for me,which seems to be Beyonce’s manner of approach too,  and that’s by celebrating, and uplifting, every opportunity Black people get to shine.

I’m no badass. But I can happily cheer on a badass.

Summer Nostalgia Playlist: Black Women’s Edition

 I thought for quite awhile what header to put on this intro. I thought maybe I should put some facts and figures about the women in these little song blurbs, but I finally decided, to hell with it, Im just gonna say why I love these songs, and why the music of these Black women have been an integral part of my life.

I hope you learn some new things, and most of all, ENJOY!

Oh, and:

Happy Juneteenth!

 

Big Mama Thornton

I did not hear this song until I was an adult and I heard it, in, of all places, a Tom Cruise movie. I wondered who the singer was, because I was diggin’ it,  and I’d always liked the Elvis Presley version of the song. It turns out that Big Mama is the original singer of Hound Dog. Well, now she tore it up, and as far as I’m concerned, this is the only version worth listening to.

It turns out that Elvis appropriated a lot of Black music, so now I make a point of finding out if there was an original singer, if I like one of his songs..

 

 

Sarah Vaughn

I only sort of like this kind of soft jazzy music, when I’m in a very particular mood. Kinda sweet, and melancholy, and tired, but just a tiny bit happy, too, like I just spent a whole lot of money doing something I love all day, and I’m exhausted, happy I had the experience, but sad I’m now out of money. I heard this song in some movie as a child.

What movie, I don’t know.

 

 

 

Sister Rosetta Tharpe

I came across this video on YouTube a few years ago. I’d known about Rosetta through my Mom, who is also a huge Blues fan. I find  the incongruity of someone dressed like my grandma, in a church coat, riffing on an electric guitar, deeply funny.

Also, the song is hitt!

 

 

 

 

Koko Taylor

Koko is another one of my Mom’s favorite artists. I only like some of her music, but this song is one that stays on my playlist, and gets regular play. Most of the time I find her music to be like watching a soap opera. There’s a lot of romantic drama in it, that I don’t much care for, but this song is very cool.

 

 

Jessye Norman

When i was a little girl, I caught one of Jessye’s performances on TV, in what I have no idea, and decided I was going to become an opera singer. I loved to sing, I sang in school, at home, around the house, in the yard, and I wasn’t bad, but I found another madlove (drawing and painting), and eventually gave up on the idea of becoming an opera singer, when my voice changed, after I hit puberty.

 

 

Roberta Flack

I don’t know when i first heard this song. I was a child, so it must have been on the radio. A lot of people probably don’t get that, back in the day, kids just listened to whatever their parents listened to, (because the Walkman, Spotify, or MP3 players, and such didn’t exist), and then, as they got older, they branched off into their own musical tastes. So I ended up with a thorough grounding in Classic R&B, and Blues,before moving on to Rock and Techno!

Also, I’m a sucker for blatantly romantic songs like this.

 

 

The Staple Singers

The Staple Singers, headed by the great Mavis Staples, is one of my all-time favorite singing groups. I’ve loved this song sine I was a kid, but my favorite movie moment, for this particular song, was from the movie, Children of a Lesser God.

 

 

Minnie Riperton

Before Mariah Carey, there was Minnie Riperton. I feel like there’s not a lot of people who know about her, but this is probably one of her most famous songs, because of those incredible high notes she keeps hitting out ofhte park throughout the whole song. Trust me, everyone tried to hit those notes when we were young girls. It is absolutely impossible for me to hit them now.

 

 

Deniece Williams

Deniece Williams was really hot in the 80s. She had a bunch of songs, but like I said, I’m a sucker for a treacly romantic song, especially when its sung with such a beautiful voice. This song is one of my big favorites, and great for singing in the shower. Still ain’t hitting them high notes though!

 

 

 

Tracy Chapman

Here’s another deeply romantic song, from someone I discovered in the early nineties. The first song I ever heard by her was called Fast Car, which is arguably one of her most famous. After I heard it, though, I bought every one of Tracy’s albums, which were a heady mix of romantic, and socially conscious songs, that appealed to my twenty-something self.

If you have never heard of her, you need to get in on this. She sang all of her songs with this same amount of passion, and yes, she’s singing to a woman!

 

 

 

Queen Latifah

Okay, I have a confession to make. I chose this song for this list, because when I was a teenager, and this song came out, I sang it really, really loud, in the house, everyday, and just replaced her name with my own name, because our names are almost exactly alike!I have two younger brothers,and I’m not sure if they remember this phase of me telling them I’ve had it up to here, and that I was their queen! Hopefully not!

This is for those of you who, for some strange reason, do not know that Latifah was a rapper first, and an actress later, and she made the transition so effortlessly, that people barely noticed she did it. We just accepted her as a actress, without asking a single question!

 

 

 

Monica

The first song I heard from Monica was not The Boy is Mine, it was, Just One of Them Days. Yeah, I liked her right away, child that she was, but she grew into a phenomenal singer, who covered one of my favorite treacly romantic songs, Misty Blue, which was originally sung by Dorothy Moore.

 

 

Next up: This is the New Shit: Summer Playlist!

 

The Gay Anthem

http://socialdance.stanford.edu/syllabi/disco_lifestyle.htm

 Seventies Disco was born on Valentine’s Day 1970, when David Manusco opened The Loft in New York City, and it rapidly faded in 1980.  When the Disco movement peaked in 1978-79, the demographic was predominantly white, heterosexual, urban and suburban middle class.  But it didn’t begin that way.  For the first eight years, Disco was an underground movement.

Significantly, the discos also offered a taste of freedom and self actualization for three other subcultures during the seventies: Gays, Hispanics and African Americans.  After decades of marginalization for each of these minorities, they all found a supportive home in the discos.

******************************

 

Reflection: Mulan

The I want Song

When Howard Ashman came to Disney to work on The Little Mermaid, he brought his years of theatre experience with him, and he shared his expertise with the animators on the film. In an interview taken from one of his impromptu “lunchtime lectures,” Ashman described the theatrical idea of the “I Want” song:

…Early in the evening, the leading lady usually sits down on something and sings about what she wants in life — and the audience falls in love with her, and then roots for her to get it for the rest of the night.

The “I want Song” came out of musical theater, which has long been a safe haven for the LGBTQ community. Howard Ashman, along with his partner Alan Menken, wrote this particular theme song, and was the creator of many of Disney’s most well known and popular I Want songs. The I Want song is often an indicator of the primary character’s emotional goal for the rest of the film. its the “thing” they are in pursuit of, whether it be freedom, understanding, or adventure.

 

 

Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Judy Garland

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20190923-why-is-judy-garland-the-ultimate-gay-icon

To many gay men, Garland is the mother of all icons. But why? While Garland was still alive, critics made ham-fisted attempts to answer this question. A 1969 review of her Palace Theatre show in Esquire Magazine reads: “Homosexuals tend to identify with suffering. They are a persecuted group and they understand suffering. And so does Garland.” 

 

 

 

I Will Survive: Gloria Gaynor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_anthem

The lyrics of gay anthems are often marked by themes of perseverance, inner strength, acceptance, pride, and unity.^[2] Ten elements were identified by the editors of the 2002 book Queer, which they claim describe themes common to many gay anthems: “big voiced divas; themes of overcoming hardship in love; “you are not alone;” themes of throwing your cares away (to party); hard won self-esteem; unashamed sexuality; the search for acceptance; torch songs for the world-weary; the theme of love conquers all; and of making no apologies for who you are.”^[2]

According to Popular Music, a music journal, the song most commonly identified as a gay anthem is “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor.^[3] The song is described as “a classic emblem of gay culture in the post-Stonewall and AIDS eras and arguably disco’s greatest anthem.” 

 

 

 

YMCA: The Village People

https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/village-people

The disco music fad was brief, but heady for the original members of the Village People. Victor Willis, David Hodo, Felipe Rose, Alex Briley, Randy Jones, and Glenn Hughes reeled when record sales slumped in the early 1980s. “It felt like we’d been group-loved by the world, then all of a sudden group-rejected,”

 

 

It’s Raining Men: The Weather Girls

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Girls

“It’s Raining Men” has often been perceived as gay anthem.^[21] A campaign in Facebook was launched on January 19, 2014 to get the song to UK number one in response to a UKIP councillor blaming recent UK floods and adverse weather on divine retribution for the British government’s introduction of gay marriage.^[22] The campaign was reported widely and The Weather Girls’ version reached number 21 on the first day of the chart week.^[23] 

 

 

 

I’m Coming Out :Diana Ross

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_Coming_Out

“I’m Coming Out” has been regarded as an anthem for the LGBT community. The phrase “coming out” to describe one’s self-disclosure of sexual orientation or gender identity had been present in the gay subculture since the early 20th century,^[4] analogous to a débutante‘s coming-out party or celebration of her formal presentation to society. It has also been understood as “coming out of the closet” or coming out from hiding. The song is thus interpreted as a celebration of lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender identity and the encouragement of self-disclosure.

 

 

Go West: The Village People 

https://www.songfacts.com/facts/the-village-people/go-west

The song’s title comes from the nineteenth century quote “Go West, young man.” The term was originated by John Babsone Lane Soule in 1851 the Terra, Haute, Indiana Express as a rallying cry to head westwards, where gold and much else could be found. 

 

 

Constant Craving: K.D.Lang

https://www.songfacts.com/facts/kd-lang/constant-craving

In an interview with the Buddhist publication The Shambala Sun, lang (a devoted Buddhist) said, “‘Constant Craving’ is all about samsara.”

Samsara, as defined within Buddhism, is the continuous cycle of birth and death while one moves within the six realms of existence. Each realm can be either physical or psychological, marked by a specific type of suffering

 

 

 

Come to My Window: Melissa Etheridge

https://www.songfacts.com/facts/melissa-etheridge/come-to-my-window

 “Come to My Window” finds Melissa Etheridge baring her soul to her lover, letting her know that she will go that she will go to great lengths just to be with her. Etheridge is imploring her to sneak in through the window (much more romantic than using the spare key) so she’ll be there when she gets home.

 

 

Honorable Mention:

Believe – Cher

All of the songwriters and producers involved with this track were men, but they crafted the song so it would appeal to a female audience. The lyrics are about moving on with confidence after a failed relationship.

 

 

 

 

Addendum:

The Anti-Disco Movement

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Favorite Songs About Vampires

I’m feeling a bit of Pop Culture nostalgia this week, so here, have some of the vampire songs that are always on MY playlist!

 

 

I was on Tumblr, and I noticed a trend of people recommending vampire songs that 1. I didn’t recognize, and 2. Were all by white people and groups, as if PoC had never had any interest in vampires, and never made any songs about them. I really hate lists of music on there anyway. I have pretty wide ranging tastes, but these lists always seem to have the most obscure musical groups these people can find. Why these people can’t ever seem to listen to just regular songs, that maybe more than five people have heard, is a mystery! At any rate, there was one list I found, I listened to a couple of the songs and I think that person just has bad taste in music, because they were fairly bland. I mean if you’re gonna go through the trouble of making music about vampires, the least you can do is be EXTRA, like all the artists on this list.

But I’m often exasperated by the rather “twee” musical tastes of Tumblr patrons, who can be somewhat limited in their musical tastes, and helluva lot younger than me. Vampires are a global mythology, in that nearly every continent has one, so I’m also pretty sure other parts of the world have songs about them, but I’m Black, and American, so this is my focus. Maybe, at some point, I’ll do some research to find songs from other countries.

 

 

Bela Lugosi’s Dead – Bauhaus ( The Hunger 1983)

This is the classic Gothic vampire song, used in countless movies, and shows, that feature vampires. The first time I heard it was in the 1988 movie, The Hunger, which starred Catherine Deneuve, and David Bowie, as modern day vampires. If you haven’t seen that movie than check it out, as it’s an interesting snapshot of a very specific musical period (Goth) in the early 80s. The music, fashion, cinematography, and acting are all artifacts of that particular time, and the movie was groundbreaking, in that it was a mainstream movie, that featured an openly lesbian relationship, as Deneuve’s character puts the moves on Susan Sarandon.

Remember, that in 1983, this movie was the coolest shit we’d ever seen, because American culture hadn’t yet been saturated with Gothic imagery. In fact, I blame this movie for it!

 

 

Love Song For A Vampire – Annie Lennox (Bram Stoker’s Dracula 1992)

This is one of my favorite songs, and I believe it was specifically written for the movie, in which it was featured during the end credits. I was a huge Annie Lennox fan in the 80s, otherwise I’d probably have never paid any attention to it. It helps that Annie Lennox always looked suitably vampiric since the beginning of her career, which had been going for ten years strong, by the time she made this song. It fits the film perfectly, in that it has this deep throbbing heartbeat sound, just underneath the listeners perception, the instrumentation, and singing is lushly romantic and overdone, just like the movie, and still gives me chills so many years later.

You really need to hear this with headphones to get the full effect.

 

 

Moon Over Bourbon Street – Sting (Interview With The Vampire 1994)

This song was also written in the late 80s by the newly solo lead of the British rock band, The Police. Sting wrote this after reading Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, so I was expecting this song to be in the movie that was made in the 90s, but no luck. It wasn’t in it. But this isn’t my favorite version of this song, I prefer the Wozniak Club version, which I liked to jam to in the car, on my way to work. Of course, this is exactly the type pf song that would be played in the vampire club!

 

 

No One Believes me – Kid Cudi (Fright Night 2011)

https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/African+American+Vampires

Vampires have made only infrequent appearances in African American folklore, and, similarly, African Americans have been largely absent from vampire movies and novels through the twentieth century. 

When people recommend vampire songs, everyone seems to forget that Black artists make songs about vampires, too! I came across quite a few of them when researching this. This was the feature song for the Fright Night remake made a few years ago. The remake was not especially successful, and didn’t feature this song anywhere in it, which may account for why so few people know about it, but this video was, and remains, one of my absolute favorites.

 

 

After Dark – Tito and the Tarantulas (From Dusk Til Dawn 1996)

This is the song that plays when Satanica Pandemonium does her dance, for the two brothers, at the Titty Twister bar, featured in the movie. It’s not my favorite, but I like Tito and the Tarantulas other songs, and just want to recognize that Mexican people got vampire songs.

 

 

Seduction/Surrender – Grace Jones (Vamp 1987)

 

 

For some reason, all vampire movies must have a Club scene. We got vampires walking up in there, vampires owning clubs, dancing in clubs, hunting for a meal in the club, or all of the above. In 1987, Grace Jones owned, danced, and hunted, in the Club featured in this nearly forgotten movie. This song was specifically adapted for her strip scene.

The Hunger opens with a club scene, Interview with a Vampire has a club with actors, From Dusk til Dawn is set in a bar, Near Dark gets a bar scene, so do both Fright Nights, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, most TV shows feature clubs owned by vampires, and yes, the Blade movies have nearly famous club scenes!

 

 

Fatal – RZA (Blade 3)

 

As far as I’m concerned, despite the groundbreaking first film, it’s the second film, directed by Guillermo Del Toro, that’s the best of the Blade movies. This is Blade’s song, from the third, thoroughly awful, film. The song is every bit as badass as he is, and featured in the end credits, and it’s by the f*cking RZA, from Wu Tang! C’mon! How does anybody miss listing this song in any recommendations of vampire songs? On the other hand, the third film sucked, so that might have been the reason people simpy don’t remember that the RZA made a vampire song.

 

 

 

 

Cry Little Sister –  Gerard McMahon (The Lost Boys 1987)

I’m putting this here because this is my favorite song from this movie. If you haven’t heard the soundtrack, it still holds up after some thirty years, and has a lot of great songs, including the title song.

 

 

System – Linkin Park (Queen of the Damned 2002)

This is the song from the movie, where Alaska walks up in the club, and literally sets the roof on fire.

 

 

Confusion Dance Theme Remix –  New Order (Blade 1998)

This is the song from the film’s iconic opening scene, called the Blood Rave, where we’re introduced to the Blade character, and what he does for a living: killing vampires! This is very probably one of the most famous intros in vampire filmdom (is that a word?) The song itself doesn’t actually have anything to do with vampires, but every time I listen to it, this scene is what plays in my head.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Let’s Go Waaay Back to the 80’s

Bosom Buddies

Way back in the 80’s, this little gem starred Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari, and lasted for two years. I do have to admit, there is no way in hell you could get this on TV right now. In this environment, this show would be a massive mistake. But I loved the hell out of this show when I was about thirteen or so. There was just something about the goofy  humor of this show that just appealed to me, and Tom Hanks had incredible comedic timing.

The show is about two ad agency illustrators, working in New York city, who cannot afford an apartment together, so their friend Amy suggests they dress up like women to get in to the much more affordable all women’s apartment building that she lives in.They take on the personas of Buffy (Hanks) and Hildegard (Scolari), two sisters from some podunk town in the midwest.

A lot of the humor came out of the logistics of their double lives as men at work, and women in the evening, and navigating Buffy’s crush on his pretty blond neighbor down the hall. But it wasn’t all funny, sometimes the show liked to get serious by addressing the bigotry experienced by their glamorous Black neighbor, or discussing fatphobia, as Amy dealt with being a large sized woman, and along the way the guys got to know first hand what it was like to experience New York social life as women.

This show used to air on Hulu, but now the only place  can find it is on Amazon for pay. Its unlikely to experience a revival any time soon. We’ve grown in maturity, and awareness  since then, and you couldn’t do a show like this now  without making a lot of changes. This is another one of the many hundreds of shows and movies that has done the work of associating transgender women with the idea of deception, associating it with men in women’s clothing, and has helped to contribute to transphobia.

Another interesting note, is that in just about every single famous actors or comedian’s background, is a show or movie, which puts them either in drag, or has them play flamboyantly gay characters. These cross dressed characters, and flamboyant gays were ALWAYS meant to be laughed at. One of the other side effects of constantly having straight men mock lgbtq characters for laughs, is that real life lgbtq people simply didn’t get taken seriously as real people. The height of this show’s popularity was also the height of the AIDS crisis, which was ignored by the Federal government, because it was believed by them, that God was killing the correct people.

 

 

 

Knight Rider

I never developed the great love for David Hasselhoff that Dean Winchester did from watching this show. I liked the show when I was a teenager, but I think I mostly just loved the car, and wished I had one just like it. In fact, they used to produce these as toys when I was a child, and when my brother got one as a gift, I appropriated it for myself (i.e., I stole it), to use for my Barbie dolls.

As far as I was concerned, K.I.T.T. was the star of the show, voiced by William Daniels, and quite frankly, I thought the car was smarter than uh…whoever that guy was driving it. A few years ago there was an episode of Supernatural that referenced Knight Rider by having Sam Winchester get turned into the classic car. Y’all don’t know how much that whole thing just made me giggle like a complete fool. Even the theme song is a classic. If you were a teen when the show aired, you know how hugely popular it was, even to the point of having copycat shows, that tried to have cool classic cars that solved problems.

 

 

Designing Women

 This was very probably one of the most progressive feminist shows on Tv, and one of the templates for feminist shows that came after it. A group of white women living together, with different sexual morals, and ethics, arguing about them, while working. The only drawback I had to shows like these were there were never any women of color, lesbians, or poor, or disabled women involved in them. This was First Wave Feminism, which meant it was almost exclusively about white working women. There was no intersectionalism at this point.

The two stand out characters were Julia, and Suzanne Sugarbaker, who were meant to be direct contrasts to one another, and Suzanne was every bit as regressive in her politics, as her cousin, Julia, was progressive in hers. Suzanne was open in her sexuality, but often treated everyone around her as if they were her personal servants, which gave Julia plenty of opportunities to give speeches, show disdain for her behavior, or teach her a lesson in how to be less judgmental. In fact, Julia’s, breathlessly, outraged performances, were often the highlight of an episode. A lot of the shows messages were pretty heavy handed, but it was the kind of stuff a teenage girl needed to hear.

Meshach Taylor also managed to get some good one liners and quips as a kind of business handyman, sort of like the character of Benson. He was the transportation and heavy lifter, doing the kinds of physical work that these four, upper class, Southern white women certainly weren’t going to be doing for themselves. He was often put upon by Suzanne, but most of the time, he managed to get the last word, without coming across as threatening. In fact his character was so non threatening I assumed, in my uninformed teenage mind, that he was gay! But at that age I had not reckoned with the social dynamics of the modern southern bigotry of white women interacting with black men. He had to be nonthreatening, and couldn’t possibly be depicted as any kind of sexual being in the presence of four professional white women. Nevertheless, I do remember liking his character.

This is another comedy, like Bosom Buddies, that didn’t age well. You could make a show like this today, but it would be bland, yet at the same time, polarizingly heavy handed.

 

 

Back Down Memory Lane…Again

Cleopatra 2525 (2000-2001)

Even though I watched this show for its entire two season run,  I don’t actually remember a whole lot about this show, except that it was cheesy, cheap, and starred the modern Goddess, Gina Torres, She of the Divine Facial Features. Perhaps that’s all one actually needs to know about this show to be intrigued.

This was girl-power before such a phrase existed, or rather, somewhere around the same time that it came into being. The term girl-power has been around for a very, very, long time. I remember it being mentioned on The Powerpuff Girls, when I watched that show with my baby sisters, when they were, in fact, actual babies!

Anyway, the basic plot is that the young blonde girl, whose name is actually Cleo, although she’s not important while standing next to Gina,  was an exotic dancer, who got put in a Futurama type situation, where she wakes up so far into the future, that the world has become completely unrecognizable to her. She joins these two young women who are fighting against some type of totalitarian authority that likes to use drones, cameras, and an evil clown type guy to oppress them. Its really is kind of like Tank Girl meets Futurama meets Charlie’s Angels, as there were at least some good action scenes.

Once again YouTube has full episodes of this show, so check them out and let me know what you think, unless of course, you are going to argue against the beauteous divinity of Gina Torres, in which case you can keep that shit to yourself!

 

 

Special Unit 2 (2001-2002)

Not to be confused with Special Unit, which was your standard police procedural, this is Special Unit 2, a standard police procedural starring paranormal creatures. I remember eagerly looking forward to this becasue Buffy the Vampire Slayer was airing around the same time ,and this was a cheap, funny knockoff blend of that and a cop show.

The show really didn’t take itself at all seriously, it was zany and cheesy, and actually pretty funny. Or rather, it fit my idea of deeply funny, at the time I watched it, since I was just a kitten then. I don’t know that my humor has changed all that much, but I’m about to find out, as I plan to watch it again, since a lot of the episodes are available for free, on YouTube.

The show is about Nick and Kate, two seemingly regular cops who are part of a special unit of the Chicago PD, who deal with things like dragons, unicorns, elves, and gnomes, while trying to keep these creatures a secret from the rest of society. Needless to say, a lot of lying is involved. The show really did try to mine the Buffy and X-Files shows for some of its plots, and occasionally got a little serious too, although there was a lot of it that was played for laughs, including a gnome type character who worked in the office, and specialized in being a thief. I remember really enjoying the acting on this show, which was played very tongue in cheek by both Nick and Kate, with surprisingly little of the “will they-won’t they” dynamic that seemed required of such shows.

In fact, of all the characters Kate was probably my favorite, next to the, highly irreverent Carl, the Office Gnome. The show was interesting because Kate was the show’s regular everyperson, who stumbles onto some grand secret of the world, and is the audience’s stand-in, as we learn about this world at the same time, and this was probably why I liked her, since female, audience stand-ins, are kind of rare in this genre.

 

 

Haunted

I remember really liking this show, at the time, because there really wasn’t anything else like on the air at the time, except maybe Millennium, and the X-Files, and Angel, and even those shows attempted some occasional lightheartedness. This show did none of that. It remained horribly gloomy right up until the end of its seven episode run, and the dark gloominess of it was probably why.  There was almost no color in this show, except for the presence of that one Black guy these shows had to hire, to reach compliance for diversity back then. The show starred Matthew Fox, before he became famous for starring in the show Lost. I did not understand his appeal in that show but I did get the whole brooding loner thing in Haunted.

Matt Fox is a private detective, named Frank, who once got killed by a serial killer of young boys,  who now hunts for missing people. Oh, and because he died that one time, he can now see ghosts. Specifically he is haunted by the spirit of his own missing son, whose disappearance caused the collapse of his marriage, and he can also see the spirit of  the serial killer, Simon, whose accidental  death he caused, which also cost him his job. I loved the show, and it was largely because of the presence of Matthew Fox’s acting skills, and the cinematography, because the show was gorgeous, with lots of black, grey, and rain.

I managed to find a couple of episodes on Youtube, which is where dead shows go, apparently, and I’ve actually re-enjoyed the couple I watched.

 

 

Reaper

This was another show that I remember was a lot of fun. Not so much for its first season, but in the second season the show made a  u-turn, and kicked the plot into high gear. The writing got better, and the characters were energetic and fun, unlike the first season where the actors tried to take things a little too seriously for the silliness of the plot.

It starred that guy from Tucker and Dale Vs Evil, Tyler Labine ,who was the sidekick of the lead character, Sam, a slacker who had  somehow been  coerced into collecting souls for Satan. I don’t remember liking Sam very much in the first season, but in the second season things got better when he found out the reason why he’d been chosen to be a Reaper was because he was Satan’s son, with Satan being played by the most excellent Ray Wise, who for some reason, was named Jerry. I remember thinking Wise was waaay out of league for this show, becasue he made what was otherwise simply a “meh” show, a very good one.

Despite Sam being the son of Satan, he continued to be whiny and incompetent at his job, and was most often saved by his accomplices, an ex-girlfriend from school, and Tyler’s character. Strangely, it’s often Satan who comes off looking sympathetic in this show, even while committing what are clearly evil acts, or acts that are at least deeply annoying ones for Sam. He and Sam used to have interesting discussions about the nature of Heaven and Hell, and why Satan can’t eat ice cream.

 

Witchblade

This was a very short lived series based on the comic books. I had actually been reading the comics right before the series was announced so I was very excited to see what they were going to do with the show. The trailers were intriguing and I liked the actress Yancey Butler, who I had last seen in the movie, Hard Target, years before. The show proved to be not as exciting as the trailers lead me to believe. The actng was fine, but the plot didn’t actually seem to go anywhere, and some of  had nothing to do with what I read in the comics. On the other hand, there were some hot guys in it, so there…

I feel like I need to explain what the Witchblade is to people who have never even heard of it, since this show has been off the air for almost twenty years, and has largely been forgotten except by its die-hard fans. Its a mystical gauntlet, suit of armor, that’s intelligent, chooses its wearer, and forms a partnership with them. They can hear it speaking, although I saw no evidence of this ability in the show. It was an extremely powerful McGuffin, that all of the other characters seemed to want, even though those who werent worthy of wearing it could potentially lose their arm.

Now we need to talk about the actress Yancey Butler. This is complicated because for the past twenty years, she’s had some substance abuse issues. At one point, getting arrested for passing out, and crashing her car, after which she was ordered to enter a rehabilitation program. I had to read about that on her IMDB page. She has started acting again (and is as beautiful as she ever was despite all her troubles), and is active on Twitter now, which is how I heard about her newest movie. At any rate, her problems didn’t start with the show, and I distinctly  remember reading about some of the problems she had  on set because of them.

Yancey,  like  countless women before her is a beautiful woman who developed substance abuse issues while working in Hollywood. I don’t know for sure if this was a problem before she started work as an actress, but I do know that Hollywood is a toxic place, that regularly chews up young actors, and then spits them out, severely damaged. And after #MeToo brought this knowledge into the mainstream, in a different way than before, its very difficult for me to believe that sexual assault and sexual exploitation doesn’t have at least some role to play in the massive amounts of substance abuse that we see in its participants. I sincerely hope that was not the case with Yancey, that she has gotten the help she needed, and worked past her demons.

 

 

 

 

Kindred: The Embraced

This show was loosely based on the role playing game, Vampire The Masquerade, which I never actually played, although I did read a few of the guide books, so I knew a lil’ sumthin-sumthin’ about that universe. So when I say it was loosely based on it, I mean exactly that. The show was pretty damn loose. So loose,  that all it seemed to have in common with the game, was its vocabulary. It was like someone read the books, but then  decided to base the show on a school book report about those, instead.

That said, I actually, sorta, liked the show. It was bad, yes, but it also had some really intriguing shit in it that kept me watching. Since the show only lasted 8 episodes, I guess other people felt the same way. Its not that the show was awful. It had some great characters in it, but it did have some terrible acting, and the plot became more convoluted with each episode. I guess the closest I can get to describing it is a Vampire Godfather, as it involved clashes between the various vampire clans in a city, along with their rulers, followers, and hangers-on. All of which has something to do with a renegade cop, named Frank, who stumbles across their existence when he falls in love with a female vamp.

The lead character was Julian Luna, played by Mark Frankel, who I thought was Latino, then later believed to be Italian, but turned out to actually be English. I found him interesting mostly because I thought he was pretty, and had a very nice voice. The best character was a member of Clan Nosferatu ,who are very old, deformed, and look somewhat batlike, with talons, long teeth, and pointed ears. Daedalus, as he was called, was played by one of my favorite actors, whose name I forget now, but that actor performed like he was in a Shakespearean play, while Luna acted like he was in the movie The Godfather III, and Frank the cop’s girlfriend, busily being extra, acted like she was in a Gothic soap opera. So the acting and dialogue was all over the place, but it best written for Luna and Daedalus.  I do remember the two had frequent conversations with one another, and that I looked forward to the times when they were onscreen together.

Whenever anyone else was onscreen, the dialogue and acting were cringeworthy at best. There were a couple of star struck young lovers from different clans, who were abysmal in their acting, especially, and I had to look this name up, Brigid Walsh, who played the human descendant of Julian, named Sasha Luna. Dear Jeebus! she was awful, which was not helped by her horrid dialogue. She played that role, as  someone who had perhaps heard of “acting”, by rough description, like she was playing the role of a  “professional angry-face” Model!

I would also like to offer my  apologies in advance for subjecting y’all to these images. Trigger Warning for: music video bad attitude, smirking, sniping, sarcasm, general batshittery, and horrible acting.

 

But the cancellation of this show seemed inevitable,  as soon after, or just before, that happened, Mark Frankel died in a traffic accident, while riding his motorcycle. I distinctly remember the reporting of this on the news,and  feeling some type of way about it.

Some Favorite Comedies

I wouldn’t call myself a film comedy fan, whatever that means, (although I have and will, watch plenty of TV comedies), nevertheless, I have watched a large number of them in the past four decades. Some of them have been more impressive than others, and by impressive I mean that I actually laughed at them, or  watched them  multiple times, “… and it keeps getting funnier, every single time I see it!!!”

I have a strange relationship with humor. I don’t often find funny what other people find to be funny, is much so, that I used to think something was wrong with me (but it turns out I’m, most likely, somewhere on the Asperger’s spectrum). I’m often unimpressed with the kinds of movies other people think are hilarious. I’ve been told, from time to time, that I’m pretty funny myself, and while I like to say silly things to strangers to break the ice, I don’t really think of myself as a particularly funny person.

I have noticed a pattern to what I find funny. My sense of humor is tends to be childlike,  just straight up silliness, solely for its own sake, and the movie usually has to be mixed with some other genre. Of all the movies on this list, The Nutty Professor is the probably the only movie which I would say was made solely for comedy’s sake, as its really not mixed with some other genre, (maybe sci-fi, since it’s a parody of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), and yeah, I am including the 1963 Jerry Lewis’ version. But most of these are Western, or Horror, or SciFi Comedy.

So here, in no particular order, are just some of my favorite comedies. I have several more favorites that, for whatever reason, didn’t make it onto this list, but hey, I can always so another post, right?

 

Galaxy Quest 

There is no such thing as the comedy to end all comedies, but if there were, Galaxy Quest would be the parody to end all SciFi parodies. After this movie got made, no more need be said on the subject.

I absolutely love the fuck out of this movie, taking every opportunity to watch it when it airs on TV, and here are only five of the reasons why:

1. Its a Star Trek parody, and I am an Old School Star Trek fan. Name a character, or play some music from the original series, and I can tell you the title and plot! I wanted to be Lt. Uhura when I was a little girl, and I would of course, marry Spock!

2.  Sigourney Weaver, the queen of my other favorite movie franchise, Alien. Sigourney gets nearly every great line in this movie,  and is only rivaled in the amount of great lines she gets by:

3.  Sam Rockwell, as Guy Fleegman, a redshirt nobody who is convinced that because his character has no last name, and is the head of security, that  he is going to die on whatever adventure they are having.

4. This movie contains one of my all-time, favorite, movie tropes, featured in films like The Three Amigos, Tropic Thunder, and A Bug’s Life, where a group of actors mistake a plea for help, from some unsophisticated victims, to be a request to do a show. The actors sign up to do a show, which  turns out to be the  real thing, and they have to now become actual heroes. This plot trope is also  a parody based on The Magnificent Seven, and The Seven Samurai.

5. Alan Rickman’s Dr. Lazarus, who is a loose parody of a conflation of the character, Spock, and  any number of Shakespearean English actors,  like Patrick Stewart, whose makeup becomes more, and more disheveled, the further we get into the movie, until its time to say that one line of dialogue that he absolutely hates, (but for real this time), during which his makeup becomes perfect.

Its not that Tim Allen’s character isn’t funny. He has his moments, but he is also the only character willing to take everything seriously, while all the other characters are like: WTF?!!! Especially Tony Shalhoub’s character,  Fred Kwan, who I think, spends the entire movie high as a f*cking kite, and still manages, somehow, to keep his game on point, and get the girl. I don’t think he actually believes that any of the shit that’s happening is real, and is able to just totally roll with whatever happens, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s probably a great way to get through most of the world’s minor tribulations.

One day, I have to do an entire post on this film, talk about why I love this so much, what tropes the film is parodying, the whole thing.

 

Raising Arizona

https://tvgeekingout.wordpress.com/2017/05/02/speaking-of-crime-raising-arizona-1987/

Before, Raising Arizona, I was not much of a movie comedy person. I watched most comedies on TV, and that was where I stayed. I grew up watching the Three Stooges,, The Little Rascals, and Looney Tunes, and moved on to more adult comedies like Mary Tyler Moore, Barney Miller, and WKRP in Cincinnati, and  comedians like Robin Williams from Mork and MIndy, or George Carlin, and Jonathan Winters, especially if they showed up on the late night TV shows I wasn’t supposed to be up watching.  Sometimes I would watch a Scifi comedy, or a Horror comedy, but I didn’t often watch comedic movies that were just whatever they were.

I mentioned in an earlier post how this movie came to resonate with me, and played a big part in my memories of college life. Everything about this movie strikes my funny bone, from Hi and his  friend’s highfalutin’  manner of speaking, despite that all of them are lowlifes, to the plot,  the music, and cartoonish action scenes. This is the only movie I will watch, (besides, Ravenous, and  Mars Attacks!), that prominently features yodeling.

 

Tucker and Dale Vs Evil 

I gave a review of this movie here:

https://tvgeekingout.wordpress.com/2016/04/24/geeking-out-about-tucker-and-dale-vs-evil-2010/

My favorite scene in the entire movie is Tucker being chased by bees, while wielding a chainsaw. I just lose it every single time, and you have to watch the movie, just to put that scene in context. This  movie is utterly ridiculous and knows it.

 

 

Best in Show

The great thing about this movie, isn’t the situation, although I do like Dog Shows, its the complete silliness of the characters. The Director is none other than the maker of This is Spinal Tap, Christopher Guest, an alumni from Saturday Night Live, who wrote the script with Eugene Levy, who has become another favorite of mine. They specialize in the kind of smug, off brand, humor that a relies on subtly, weird characters, and puns, and which is often called pretentious.

These are not laugh out loud, guffawing type movies. The humor goes much deeper than that, to tickle waaay down in your stomach. The characters are not necessarily doing obviously funny things, there is little  slapstick, and most of the humor relies on dialogue. In some cases, you are actually laughing at the characters, while others you laugh with, and this is some exceptional writing, when you can have multiple characters like this in the same movie. But what I love the most about this movie is no matter how funny the character’s are, none of it is mean spirited. Guest loves his characters, and doesn’t  humiliate them, just for the enjoyment of it. They are always either clueless, or hapless, people who mean well, but just, for whatever reason, can’t.

The movie follows three different couples as they navigate their way through a dog show. Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara play John and Cookie Fleck, a lower middle class couple, the owners of a Norwich Terrrier, who are out of their league at such a prestigious event as the American Kennel Club Dog Show. Cookie has a sordid past as the town futon, who is constantly running into old lovers, while Eugene is her hapless, two left-footed, husband.

Meg and Hamilton Swan are a pretentious, and neurotic, yuppie couple, who you are probably meant to laugh at, as they wax nostalgic about meeting each other at competing Starbucks, and freak out over their completely unperturbed Wiemeraner. Scott and Stephan are a gay couple, who are the charming, funny, and the gracious, highlight of the movie, and the sweetly pretentious dogfathers of a pair of tiny Shih Tzus.

The singletons are Mrs. Cabot, a trophy wife, who has an interesting relationship with Christy Cummings, played by  Jane Lynch, as a famous, over-competitive dog trainer of a poodle. And Christopher Guest himself rounds out the cast as an overly hopeful Basset Hound owner, who is totally out of his comfort zone, named Harlan Pepper. The most silly character in the film is the Dog Show announcer who embarrasses his fellow announcer by  making dumb, loud, and off-color jokes.

All of the characters are deepened with interesting side stories, and little quirks of personality that make them more likable than annoying. Guest is the type of humorist who doesn’t try to be edgy, or shocking, to the viewer. You can tell he likes these characters, even the Swans. He’s not trying to humiliate them just for shits and giggles, and most of them get positive, if not happy, endings. This is also one of my favorite movies about dogs.

(Yes, we have two dogs in the house, our dignified elder statesman, Sargent, a Rat Terrier, who has a bobbed tail. I like to call him Capt. Wiggle-Bottom, and our smalle, and  faster, back up model, named Rusty, a redheaded Yorkie, I like to refer to as The Squeaker, and  however you just pictured them, is exactly how they behave.)

 

 

 

Tropic Thunder

Okay, I know that I am probably not supposed to find this movie as funny as I do, filled as it is with Blackface, Black stereotypes, Asian stereotypes, Jewish stereotypes, and  its use of the R word, but I just cannot help myself. I just love this movie, and that is due almost entirely to Robert Downey Jr’s character, a White Australian actor, who spends  the entire movie masquerading as a Black man, while working next to  an actual Black man, and lecturing another White man on how that man went too far in portraying a marginalized character. I think what’s really the movie’s  saving grace for me, is the ACTUAL Black man, played by Brandon Jackson, who calls Downey’s character out at every opportunity. The people who made this film knew that everything they were doing was wrong, and still went there with it!

Tropic Thunder is meant to be a satire on war movies, and actor’s careers. Jeff Portnoy is meant to poke fun at Eddie Murphy. The makeup artist for this film, Rick Baker, also did the makeup for Murphy’s Nutty Professor movies. Tug Speedman is a play on Tom Cruise, who also has a cameo in the movie, (and almost steals the whole damn thing, even when you don’t recognize him!), and Robert Downey’s character, named Kirk Lazarus, was a statement about Australian and British actors who make it big in Hollywood, by playing chameleon-like roles.

As the film progresses, and the events that were only being faked on a movie set before, become more and more real, Lazarus’ makeup starts to wear off, and you can see his real face, as he becomes a White man,  with an incongruous, 70’s Blaxploitation accent. I remember when I first saw the trailer, I kept looking for Downey,, because I was told he was in it, and not finding him. It wasn’t until after the movie’s release that I realized I’d been looking at him the entire time. His makeup is so incredibly convincing that he looked like my late uncle, something which struck me as incredibly funny. Even after knowing it was Downey, I still kept seeing my uncle, (probably because he says a number of things that are exactly how my uncle would have reacted, under the same circumstances).

Some of my favorite moments aren’t even in the movie, like the DVD commentary, where Downey does a ridiculous Blaccent, the entire time, because  as Kirk Lazarus states,  he doesn’t break character until the DVD commentary. It is hands down one of THE funniest DVD commentaries I’ve ever listened to, as Jack Black is a natural born cusser, and, very probably, drunk during the whole thing.

 

The Nutty Professor (1963)

This is the original movie on which Eddie Murphy’s 1996 version was based. This is the one I grew up watching, along with a bunch of other Jerry Lewis films. It does differ significantly from the remake, but the basic plot is the same, a kindhearted, nebbishy, teacher transforms himself into the ultimate masculine man, to attract the attention of the beautiful woman he has a crush on. But the differences are interesting too, and not just the race of the characters. The original film is also a musical with a number of setpieces written by Walter Scharf, and performed by Jerry Lewis himself.

Jerry Lewis plays Julius Kelp, a nerdy, science teacher ,who has fallen in love with one of his students, Stella Purdy, who is played by the lovely Stella Stevens. To win her love he transforms himself with a potion, (ala Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) into an obnoxious character, named Buddy Love. Just as in the remake though, the potion doesn’t last, and his true self gets revealed for all to see.

From the opening scene, to the final act, the movie is filled with a lot of great physical comedy, but the highlight of the movie, at least for me, were the two musical performances by Lewis, and performed with maximum chill, called Old Black Magic, and my personal favorite, We’ve Got A World That Swings. But the movie is filled with some great little character moments, like the one below, where Dr. Kelp gets carried away by the song being performed by Les Brown’s Band of Reknown. He is truly among the world’s worst dancers! The dialogue is smooth and funny, with  Kelp and Buddy as very distinct characters. The most popular moment, for most viewers, is the introduction of Buddy Love, but Stella also gets her due, and her man. She may not be the star of the film, but she is always treated with respect, by the writers, and the other characters.

 

 

The Nutty Professor (1996)

The best comedies don’t just make you laugh while watching them, they make  you laugh while  thinking about them later. The 1996 Nutty Professor is a remake of the 1963 version of the Jerry Lewis film, only instead of a nerd scientist, made cool by chemistry, you get an obese man, turned into Eddie Murphy, at his most obnoxious, through the use of chemicals. The remake makes more evident, what the original only sort of played around with, that Buddy Love is a horrible person, who is not meant to be admired. This is done by contrasting him against Sherman’s sweet and gentle nature, as they both pursue a  romance with the beautiful Miss Purdy, played by Jada Pinkett.

I think most people who love this movie will agree, that the dining scene, which  happens somewhere in the middle of this movie and illustrates both the love and   shame that Sherman feels about his over sized family, is without a doubt, one of the funniest scenes ever. Eddie Murphy plays four different characters who all interact with one another, but its his Grandma who gets all the best lines, that people are still repeating to each other, over twenty years later. Even my mother loves this movie, and is just the right age, (apporaching 70), to get away with telling someone, “C’mon Cletus!”, while shaking  her cane at people, and have that shit be funny as hell!

 

 

The Blues Brothers

Here’s another comedy that’s also a musical. I was a big fan of John Belushi, mostly for his SNL parodies of Toshiro Mifune’s character from Seven Samurai, called Samurai Delicatessen, Samurai Stockbroker, Samurai TV Repairman, Samurai Night Fever, and Samurai Hotel, bearing in mind that, at that age, I had never seen Seven Samurai.

I was not a huge fan of Dan Ackroyd, but I was willing to tolerate him, for the sake of John, and in a delightful surprise, Aretha Franklin, performing Think, and Ray Charles, performing, Shake A Tail-feather. The movie has never struck me as especially deep. It doesn’t seem like its trying to make a point, and its not really all that laugh out loud funny, but what it is, is  pure, goofy fun because Jake and Elwood are the best possible brothers.

 

 

Evil Dead II

I remember watching the first movie a little while before I went to see this sequel. I remember I was not particularly impressed with the first film. I remember seeing this one at a theater downtown on a double bill with Robocop. I do remember those as some very enjoyable hours.

In hindsight, I cannot imagine why I was against seeing Raising Arizona, when I was in college, because that movie has some of the same ridiculous type of humor as this one, and I thought, (heck, I still do), that this is one of the funniest horror movies I’ve ever seen.

Have you ever watched anything so over the top, ridiculously stupid, that you have no choice but to laugh at it? That pretty much describes this entire film, from the image of a rotting corpse, dancing with its own severed head,  to a demon possessed hand, that’s trying to kill its owner, Sam Raimi just gave full vent  to his silliness, for which I will always respect that man. The movie cemented my love for Bruce Campbell, whose career I’ve been following ever since.

 

 

Kung Fu Hustle

I wrote about my love for Kung Fu Hustle here:

https://tvgeekingout.wordpress.com/2016/03/12/geeking-out-about-kung-fu-hustle/

This is another one of those movies, that is just so over the top ridiculous, that its hard not to like it. I love both Looney Toons, and martial arts films, and this movie is the perfect mashup.

 

 

Honorable Mentions:

Blazing Saddles – This is the scene, that caught me, right here:

 

The Birdcage – One of the thee funniest movies Robin Williams ever made, and what’s so hilarious about that is, he was the straight man in this duo, while Nathan Lane got all the best lines:

 

 

A Bug’s Life – I love the bloopers and outtakes scenes at the ends of the early Pixar movies. The creators didn’t have to do that, and I love that the writers went a little out of their way. But my favorite line in the entire film is in the bar scene: “Waiter, I’m in my soup!” 

 

 

What We Do In the Shadows – Who hasn’t Wanted to finish some “dark bidding” on Ebay?

 

 

Beetlejuice – The Wedding Scene