Short Stories, Film Reviews, and Recipes

Month: April 2021

Choosing Between Art House and Horror

I know several people who refuse to watch horror films. Some say the movies are too violent, moronic, or poorly made. There’s a great deal of truth to that criticism since many horror movies are incredibly dumb and difficult to watch unless you’re comatose.

However, the lines between horror, art-house, and thriller genres have been blurred since the late 20th century. Even the staunchest opponents of scary movies have probably viewed an award-winning film like The Silence of the Lambs.

How did Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins persuade people to watch a story about a serial killer who appreciates rare moths, tucks his manhood between his legs, and rips the skin off his victims so he can sew together a nifty skin suit to show off to other degenerates?

How does a mainstream movie get away with including a scene where a prisoner throws his semen in the face of an FBI agent in training?

The answer to both questions is talent. The Silence of the Lambs is a sick, disturbing movie, but it’s well done. No, Meggs’ DNA slinging sequence could not have been accepted by the MPAA unless it was produced with the utmost precision.

The actors rehearsed the scene for several weeks before the eighteen-hour shooting began. They worked with a biology professor, dermatologist, and adult film star to get a feel for the scene.

Method acting took on a disturbing new meaning to the troubled cast, and Jodie Foster spent a fortune on therapy after the shooting wrapped.

Wow, His eyes are pretty like mine. They sure keep this prison glass clean. Do they just use Windex–It’s got to be something stronger.

The nonsense I just wrote was only to prove a point that many scenes require days of preparation and hard work to accomplish for a few minutes or seconds of edited footage. Many horror movies (and movies in general) skip the preparation, and it’s often evident in the results.

Slasher films or monster movies are what most non-horror lovers associate with horror. They seem linear and uncreative on the surface.

Drunken teenagers who repeatedly ignore common sense and allow themselves to be massacred in inventive ways is a stereotypical plot that reached its peak in the 1980s.

Unlike many critics, I like slasher movies like Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street. They may not be considered cinematic masterpieces, but they sometimes scared and entertained me as a kid. Now, those films make me laugh, but they’re still entertaining.

Slasher films made a killing at the box office in the 80s, but most critics hated them and believed they were exploitative garbage. The late film critic, Gene Siskel, despised Friday the 13th (1980) and went to great lengths to show his displeasure.

He contacted Paramount and lectured them about their immoral filmmaking, and he wrote a letter to Betsy Palmer, the actress who played Jason’s mother (the real killer), to express his disappointment that she lowered herself to accept a role in such a horrible movie.

His efforts were in vain, and the fans won out. Until 2018, the Friday the 13t h series was the most successful horror franchise in history. The first film made over 59 million dollars in 1980, and it spawned sequels, a remake, tv-series and video games.

It launched the career of the untalented goofball Kevin Bacon and solidified Sean Cunningham as a horror director. I think it’s exploitative (which I didn’t mind too much when I was ten years old) and not as well acted or produced as Silence of the Lambs.

However, if you compare the plots of the two films, Friday seems tamer and less demented. If you take away the graphic violence, nudity, and bad acting (what the critics complained about), the movie has a lot of charm and a great soundtrack.

It makes you want to go to a summer camp, armed with a flame thrower and wood chipper, to relax by the lake. Why didn’t they ever try killing Jason (in the sequels) with a wood chipper? That should have worked.

I like some of the lousy slasher films, and I enjoy a few of the Oscar-winning thrillers, but trying to categorize horror films into several different groups seems pointless.

It’s more marketable to call a prestige film a thriller than a horror movie, and I understand why, but it still bothers me.

Is Blue Velvet Art House Horror?

In 1986, my parents went to see Blue Velvet.

Since they didn’t want me to be alone in the house unsupervised (I enjoyed pyrotechnics and fire in general as a child—no one was ever hurt or burned. I swear.), they took me along but wisely prohibited me from seeing the movie.

They bought me a ticket for The Golden Child and told me to have fun. As an eleven-year-old who had never viewed a movie without my friends or family sitting next to me, I wasn’t thrilled to sit next to odd-smelling strangers.

The theater filled up fast, and I wound up enjoying the movie with an exceptionally rowdy biker gang. They had matching leather jackets and mullets. Yes, the women’s mullets resembled the men’s.

They were joking around and making a lot of noise during the previews, but when Eddie Murphy’s comic masterwork came on the screen, they were silent—until the first joke cracked them up.

I respected that, and soon I wasn’t scared that they would torment me for not wearing a leather jacket.

At that point in my life, I was probably wearing a Member’s Only jacket. The bikers looked tough, but deep down in their souls, they were more like the Grease bikers than the Hells Angels-type bikers.

I had a good time, but I wondered what kind of depravity I was missing in Blue Velvet. As it turns out, I was missing a goldmine of depravity.

Even though his films have humorous moments and inventive cinematography, David Lynch is not for most tastes.

Compared to mainstream horror films, Blue Velvet is scarier, bloodier, and more demented. It was marketed as a shocking thriller, but you never hear the term “horror film” associated with the movie.

For a high-brow audience, I guess you can’t associate it with Freddy Krueger, Jason Vorhees, Michael Myers, or Mia Farrow.

It’s a strange film that’s difficult to handle in some scenes. I liked it, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone with anxiety problems.

It’s entertainment that induces anxiety rather than curbs it, and while that isn’t good for all people (or most people), it’s interesting that some movies can alter your breathing, heart rate, and comfort level.

I don’t think Blue Velvet would’ve turned me into a raving lunatic as a child, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have slept for a month or listened to Roy Orbison for the rest of my life.

Watching a lip-sticked Dennis Hopper terrorize poor Kyle Maclachlan while he quotes In Dreams is not good publicity for Roy Orbison, but strangely enough, it did revive sales of the song and his greatest hits.

The opening lines are pretty creepy for a hit song.

In Dreams

By Roy (weirdo) Orbison

A candy-colored clown they call the Sandman

Tiptoes to my room every night

Just to sprinkle stardust and to whisper

Go to sleep; everything is alright

Everything is going to be alright

Besides the horror of seeing Dennis Hopper huffing gas and speaking like a baby while he sodomizes Isabella Rossellini, you have Kyle MacLachlan doing the chicken dance, a severed ear, a love of Heineken beer in 1986, a graphic close-up headshot in slow-motion, a corpse with his brain hanging out that remains standing, and a horse-faced prostitute dancing in a pink mini skirt.

Now, that’s horror. So, if you hate horror movies, you can avoid the ones that aren’t marketed as something else, but you might accidentally stumble into one. Have you ever seen Howard the Duck?

Cooking and Gardening for American Slackers

Part One: Growing Tomatoes From Slices

Amish Paste, Green Zebra, Matt’s Sweet Cherry, Japanese Black Trifele, and Purple Cherokee

Summer is on the way, and you may be dreading the stories you’ll hear from your friends or relatives about their incredible heirloom tomato patch.

You may have an uncle Cletus that cooks the tomatoes down for a spicy Picante sauce or a mother who walks to her garden with her salt and pepper shakers so she can munch on fresh Black Krim tomatoes while she watches Duran Duran videos from her phone.

Your niece Moon Tulip Child, who lives out west in a friendly commune (not the manipulative one that makes you bathe in the outhouse), grows her Big Rainbow and Costaluto Genovese tomatoes for the organic tomato juice that she adds to her stew and breakfast cereal.

Your neighbor, Stewart, places a wireless speaker in his tomato garden and plays sad songs to enhance the growing process. From Ave Maria to Tracy Chapman, he plays a variety of songs, but they all have one thing in common. They’re all full of sadness.

Stew claims that depression, anxiety, guilt, fearfulness, and hopelessness are vibes that the plants absorb and use to grow stronger. “What makes us sad…just makes them more powerful.”

He sometimes fights back the heavy tears when he prunes his prize Brandywines while listening to Glenn Danzig.

He sends you and the neighbors a text when he throws his annual Heirloom Tomato, Artisanal Cider, and Bathtub Gin party. And you ignore it because Stewart is a nutjob, and you don’t want anything to do with him.

Yes, the freak can grow an heirloom tomato, but his theory about melancholy sound waves is too much for you to handle.

You remove him from all of your online accounts and sit back and ponder how to cultivate tomatoes without receiving advice from your strange family, neglected (psychotic) neighbor, or pompous friends.

Online seed companies are selling out of their heirloom vegetables quickly these days, but you can avoid inflated seed prices or underhanded seed dealers (not every seed company is reputable or has viable seeds). I call the sleazy, fraudulent dealers the bad seeders. “I bought pumpkin seeds, but it grew into Hemlock!”

Purchase an Overpriced Tomato

Even at a farmer’s market, heirloom tomatoes aren’t cheap. You can expect to pay one to three dollars more per pound for an heirloom variety. It’s true that they taste much better than grocery-store slicers, and their price can be justified by how difficult they are to sell in a large commercial market.

Heirloom tomato plants aren’t as prolific as some of the hybrid varieties, and depending on the type, some heirlooms are more susceptible to fungus and disease. They also ripen quicker than commercial varieties and are therefore harder to transport and sell.

When I planted fifty heirlooms in my backyard, I spent a lot of time keeping the pests from destroying the fruit, but I’m glad I grew so many because some of the plants produced only ten to fifteen tomatoes.

Summers in Eastern North Carolina are humid and hot, and the temperature doesn’t drop by too many degrees at night, but depending on the climate in your area, you may have a better yield with your heirlooms.

If you want to grow up to thirty heirloom tomatoes, all you need is one expensive tomato and a pot filled with potting soil. Find an heirloom that you like at a market or high-end grocery store and cut it into three or four slices.

The slices should be about ¼ inch thick, but you can set aside the stem side and bottom of the tomato. Those sections don’t contain many seeds.

Fill a two- or three-gallon container ¾ full with potting soil and place the tomatoes about an inch apart on the dirt. With three tomatoes, you can form a triangle on the soil. With four, you’ll create a square.

Cover the tomatoes with soil, add water, and place outside after the last frost in your area. Keep the soil moist with frequent watering, and you’ll start to see several shoots appear after ten to twelve days.

You can thin some of the plants out if you only want to grow a few, or you can carefully remove the plants and place them in small transplant pots until they get large enough to plant in your yard or a larger pot.

I’ve read about other ways to plant seeds from a purchased tomato, but some techniques are incredibly complicated and time-consuming.

One method requires drying the seeds for several days before you put them in a seed starter greenhouse. If you procrastinate and have lazy moments like me, that seems like too much work.

I appreciate complex techniques that achieve superior results, but waiting for seeds to dry is an extra step that you don’t need.

Slice up a tomato, and grab your friends for a game of organic horseshoes and toss the slices in the soil. Cover the tomatoes and play something sad and horrifying like How Deep Is Your Love by the Bee Gees.

Here are some heirlooms that I’ve grown and recommend:

  • Black Krim
  • Purple Cherokee
  • Green Zebra
  • Japanese Black Trifele
  • Yellow Brandywine
  • Amish Paste

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