Pimps Don't Commit Suicide

In the run-up to today's drop of Arrow's fancy schmancy blu-ray of Richard Kelly's mucho maligned 2006 flick Southland Tales -- which includes the also mucho maligned longer "Cannes Cut" of the film -- there have been approximately eleventy billion interviews with Kelly talking about the movie (this has been compounded by the 20th anniversary of Donnie Darko). Far more than I could ever begin to link to. Just google his name, they'll all come up, I promise. And I even watched the "Cannes Cut" a few weeks ago hoping I'd have something to say about the movie here. But... this movie, man. This movie still defeats my ability to say anything coherent about it. I both hate it and love it in equal measure -- it confounds me. I thought it might be better, 15 years on, but...

I AM GOING IN
WISH ME LUCK pic.twitter.com/qaCHHTdBnz

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) December 27, 2020

... no. Nope. Nada. I still just kind of sit there dazed by the thing. (By the way that tweet above, if you click over to Twitter, will give you a Twitter thread from December when I re-watched all three of Richard Kelly's movies -- Tales, Darko, and The Box -- within a 24-hour span.) I feel like I could make two columns, a Love and a Hate column, and diagram Southland that way, and maybe that flatness might approach the actual way Southland makes me feel, but then I'd be no better than the Jim Cunninghams & Kitty Farmers of the world, would I?

I love that Kelly got to make Southland Tales more than I actually love the experience of sitting through it -- it's always inspirational when batshit of its magnitude gets funded. I just don't think Southland, and what it is about, speaks to me like Darko did and does and forever will -- even The Box on this re-watch felt like it had more to tell me than Tales does. But if Kelly ever does get to make the sequel like he keeps saying he wants to in all of these interviews (he will not) I will be there opening night, that I promise.

10 off My Head: Dunk Me To Hell

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Earlier this morning I made mention of my current Channel Zero obsession. If you're unfamiliar (and you might be given how under the radar this show's been even for me, a horror nut) it's a season-long anthology series on SyFy that's currently on its fourth. So far I've watched the first season (an incredibly strong run of six episodes subtitled Candle Cove and starring Paul Schneider & Fiona Shaw) and I'm a little over halfway through the fourth, having skipped the middle ones, which I'll spin back to next. 

Anyway in the fourth episode of this fourth season, which I just watched last night, there is a weird and scary scene that happens in a high school swimming pool, and as I watched it unfurl a sudden laundry list of "Horror Movie Swimming Pools" popped into my head. They're very much a thing! So why not list some of my faves? Why not, indeed.

10 of the Scariest Swimming Pools in the Movies

Let the Right One In (2007)

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Poltergeist III (1988)

It Follows (2014)

The Fan (1981) (see more here)

The Final Destination (see more here)

The Strangers: Prey at Night (2018)

High-Rise (see more here)

Shivers (1975)

Cat People (1942)

The Devil's Backbone (2001)

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There are of course tons more....

So what are some of your faves?

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Poltergeist (1982)

Diane: You were saying about poltergeists. 

Dr. Lesh: Poltergeists are usually associated with an

individual. Hauntings seem to be connected with an area.

A house usually. 

Marty: Poltergeist disturbances are of a fairly short duration. 

Perhaps a couple of months. Hauntings can go on for years. 

Diane: Are you telling me that all of this could 

just suddenly end at any time? 

Dr. Lesh: Yes, it could. Unless it's a haunting. 

But hauntings don't usually revolve around living people. 

Diane: Then we don't have much time, Dr. Lesh, 

because my daughter is alive somewhere inside this house. 

Beatrice Straight, who won an Oscar for her minuscule role in Network in 1976, was born on this day in the year 1914. She's even better in Poltergeist, if you ask me, although she always gets overshadowed by the more colorful Tangina (played by the more colorful Zelda Rubenstein). We posted about our love for Dr. Lesh before right here.

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I Am Link

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--- Mind Tricks - Wow you know I'm sick and doped up and distracted when it takes me this long to mention the news that Tom Hardy is joining the Star Wars universe. Ahem. Let's do this thing - hey didja hear that Tom Hardy is joining the Star Wars universe? But don't get your Jedi Robes all wet with spooge just yet - it sounds like it's only a cameo, and an undercover one (a la Daniel Craig in The Force Awakens) at that. But gayer! Gayer is good!
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--- Beetle Breakfast - This is the sort of news that makes me want to set the internet on fire - Collider asked Tim Burton about Beetlejuice 2 and he said that we've blown that story way out of proportion; that he has talked to Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder about doing it but there's no actual movement on it right now. They don't even seem to have a story. Headlines last year made it seem like it was going to shoot any minute, but that's all hot air, says the man who would know. Given Burton's recent garbage-stuffed track record I'm clearly skeptical about this project, but I'd really love for Winona Ryder to have a great big role in something again, so that's what excites me the most about it.
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--- Monsters Maker - Director Brian Bertino has taken it distressingly slow since  popping out with The Strangers in 2008 - he's only released one movie in the eight years since, the admittedly pretty good found-footage flick Mockingbird (my review). But his new movie is close at hand - it's called There Are Monsters and it stars Zoe Kazan (whose sweet face and big eyes were just made for horror movies) as the mother half of a mother and daughter who are being terrorized in the woods by... something. Presumably, given the film's title, a monster. The Playlist has a picture and a poster for the movie. No word on an exact release date yet though.
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---  Queer For Cable - Our pal Manuel did a fantastic job looking back at the history of LGBT productions on HBO over the years for The Film Experience - I use the past tense because he just wrapped the series up today, click over to read his finale. On top of all the good reading you'll be gifted with an image of Matthew Bomer in a towel that you won't soon forget, I promise you.
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--- Dry Heat - If you missed our review of Luca Guadagnino's new film A Bigger Splash, read it here - we clearly fell in love with it, clearly.  And it seems as if Nat did too, given yesterday's Top Ten list over at The Film Experience - "The Ten Sexiest Things in A Bigger Splash." Seriously though, this movie's so sexy that if I was making the list myself I'd only place Matthias Schoenaerts in five of the ten spaces - there are actually other things that manage to be sexy in the presence of naked Matthias! That's a lot o' sexy.
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--- Vroom Vroom - More word on that movie Lucky Logan that's bringing Steven Soderbergh out of retirement (see previous news here) - it's being sold at Cannes right now, meaning it's real and Soderbergh's a phony, trying to pretend he's not un-retiring. It will star Channing Tatum (of course it will, as Steven's obviously obsessed with those sweet cheeks of his) and Michael Shannon and Riley Keough and it's about "brothers who attempt to pull off a heist during a major NASCAR race."
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--- Crazy Pants - Several new images from the Assassin's Creed movie starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard showed up the other day - click here to see them all. Lots of Fassy in hospital whites, which is a good look for him. He even makes "about to be capital punished" sexy, the bastard. Oh and for some fun head over to The Film Experience to caption one of the pictures. Also supposedly we're getting a trailer some time today.
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--- Red Tape - Just a reminder that you need to be clicking over to Final Girl every single day this week because Stacie's double-sized "VHS Week" fest is still going strong - she's taken on several great titles including an Argento giallo, an anthology film with Ingrid Pitt as a vampire, Zelda Rubenstein as a pervy momma maniac, and one very special armpit-sphincter/vagina-needlepenis to top it all off.
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--- And Finally it's the video we've all been waiting for ever since they first unveiled the first image of Bald James McAvoy way back when - below the X-Men team show off the real-world erotic shaving sequence of our collective fantasies.

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This House Is Clean (Of Me)

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I got places to go, places to be, people to see! Here's the deal, folks - I'm outta town for the next several days. I'll be off-blog til Wednesday. Per usual if you see any news you think might tickle my toes or curl my fancy leave a comment here at the blog below, or tweet me, or send me an envelope filled with white powder in the mail - whatever. The usual. Catch ya on the flipside!

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I Am Link

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--- Festival Fever - Eli Roth recounts taking his first film Cabin Fever to the Midnight Madness section of the Toronto Film Festival back in 2002, and the way the buzz was built from the internet outwards into a crazy thing. It's a really sweet funny piece, I don't care what you people say, I still like Eli. Can't wait to see his new one, which apparently gobsmacked the censors. (thanks Mac)

--- Hey Pervs (aka people who like to look at females naked) get ready, Jennifer Lawrence says that she's going to be doing the whole nekkid Mystique thing a whole bunch more than she did in the first X-Men movie in its sequel. Although apparently she's a liar because in the next breath she says it's a body suit she wears now, and not just make-up. Dirty fantasies dashed!

--- Ghost Ginger - We've loved Jared Harris ever since he serenaded Jane Adams with "You Light Up My Life" as a strangely sexy mustachioed Russian taxi driver with sticky fingers and a violent wife in Happiness, so we're super happy to see him sign up for both The Man From UNCLE with Armie Hammer and Henry Cavill (yummers) and also the Poltergeist remake where, get this, he's playing the Zelda Rubenstein part. Okay okay the part's been totally changed, which was smart because there was no way they were gonna be able to touch what Zelda did. But still. His part is playing the role that Zelda did. This house is clean, my ass.

--- Rave On - Greta Gerwig is teaming up with French director Mia Hansen-Love to make a movie called Eden, which will chronicle the early 90s techno music scene; Gerwig's actually just one part of a globe-trotting cast that will follow a DJ caught up in the ecstasy-fueled rave run. Brady Corbet will also star.

--- Master Detective - Ian McKellen is re-teaming with his Gods & Monsters director Bill Condon, hooray! They're going to make a Sherlock Holmes movie, too! McKellen will play the sleuth in retirement, getting pulled back in to a case that never got solved that's been driving him batty. This is so much more appealing than those RDJ stinkers.

--- Father Killer - Jim Mickle is quietly but assuredly building up a nice filmography - so far he's directed the surprisingly creepy rat-people movie Mulberry Street, the vamp-pocalypse flick Stake Land, and the upcoming horror remake of We Are What We Are, all good, shockingly understated for what they are movies. So we're paying attention to him. Just announced he's lining up what's next - a revenge thriller called Cold in July, which will star Sam Shepard and Don Johnson as two grieving fathers.

--- Brie Crazy - Over at The Film Experience Nathaniel got to talk to Short Term 12's Brie Larson, and that right there ought to be enough to make you click over. But beyond it just existing, it's a really great interview! She is, to quote Mike Yanagita, such a super lady.

--- About Adam - Jason Reitman made Young Adult, and for that, a lifetime of passes. (I also love Juno, for what it's worth.) His next movie Labor Day, with Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin, is out this Fall, and now comes word his next film will star... Adam Sandler. But you know - actually trying to act Adam Sandler. Like Punchdrunk Love. (Hopefully not Spanglish. And hopefully not Jack & Jill, but that's a given.) Jennifer Garner, Rosemarie Dewitt, and Cameron Diaz are all circling the film too.

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I Am Link

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--- Scoot Catches Fire - Scoot McNairy, who's coming off quite a year movie-wise having rocked Argo and Killing Me Softly, has just joined the cast of Lee Pace's TV show Halt & Catch Fire that I told you about the other day. Sounds like he's the co-lead. Yes please, this is very fine news.

--- Laugh Once For Yes - Over at The Film Experience Beau took on the trailer for Frances Ha "Yes No Maybe So" style; y'all know I am nothing but Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes, so head over there for someone who won't make you crazy.

--- Ghost House - I loved Monster House and think it might be an inspired choice, picking its director to remake Poltergiest. Or it could be awful, who knows. Since it can't have Zelda Rubinstein in it, her being dead and all, it's already got a huge uphill battle.

--- Green Thumbs - I guess it wasn't official when we blogged about it back in January, and now it is - Kate Winslet will indeed be starring opposite our beefy Belgian boyfriend Matthias Schoenaerts in A Little Chaos, about rival horticulturalists in 17th Century France. Alan Rickman is directing it.

--- Dead Dad Drama - Shawn Levy is lining up quite the cast for his funeral comedy This Is Where I Leave You about a family reuniting for the death of their patriarch - Jane Fonda plays the widow, while Tina Fey and Jason Bateman and Corey Stoll (mmm Corey Stoll) play three of her four kids (the fourth isn't cast yet I don't think).

--- Tweet Whedon - Hopefully Joss Whedon's giant yet cuddly ego won't let him quit once he's done promoting the movie - he's finally begun tweeting under the guise of the Twitter account for his Much Ado About Nothing movie, which you can hit up right here.

--- South Korean Superstar - Hey here's an interview with Park Chan-wook, that dude who directed Stoker, that movie I was really excited about and saw a whole week ago and totally enjoyed it and then never wrote anything else about, huh, how about that. I totally intend to write something today, I pinky swear.

--- Snow Bug - Ron Moore, the co-creator of the fantastic Battlestar Galactica remake, is making a new series for SyFy - it's called Helix and it's about a group of scientists in Antarctica dealing with some sort of out of control virus. You'd be forgiven for immediately thinking of The Thing, since it kinda owns snow-bound petri dish storytelling. And there's a picture of Tahmoh just because he should obviously be in it, wearing only that, frostbite be damned.

--- Screen Savers - Gothamist lists the twelve best movie theaters in New York. I know they show great shit and all but the Film Forum is just an awful way to see a movie. So cramped and such tiny screens. My favorite places to see movies are the Ziegfeld (seeing Oz the Great and Powerful there tomorrow!) and the Walter Reade theater in Lincoln Center. The screens at MoMA aren't bad either.

--- And finally, here's the first trailer for Eli Roth's werewolf series for Netflix, Hemlock Grove. I haven't watched this yet myself. All of the episodes drop on April 19th.

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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Poltergeist (1982)

Tangina: These souls, who for whatever reason are not at rest, are also not aware that they have passed on. They're not part of consciousness as we know it. They linger in a perpetual dreamstate, a nightmare from which they can not awake. Inside the spectral light is salvation, a window to the next plain. They must pass through this membrane where friends are waiting to guide them to new destinies.

Well, duh. 

Happy 70, Tobe Hooper!

5 Off My Head - Poltergeist Is 30

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Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist was unleashed upon the world thirty years ago today on June 4th, 1982. Well how technically it is "Tobe Hooper"'s film is always disputed - some say he was too cranked up on dope to be much of a director and producer Steven Spielberg took over much of his duties. And it certainly feels like a Spielberg film more than a Hooper film. But whatever the case, it was formative for this person here. How formative? Well let's take a look. Here are five lessons I learned from Poltergiest.

1 - My parents were smoking pot. 

Relatedly, Craig T. Nelson could be sexy?

2 - Clowns are evil.

3 - Also evil: televisions, chicken legs, swimming pools, old trees, your mother's underpants, goo-covered baseballs, kitchen chairs, bathroom mirrors, drawing compasses, ancient tribal burial grounds, steaks that slither across countertops, closets, beds, windows, under the bed, long hallways, staircases, doorways, driveways, lawns, skies, and little girls.

4 - Little people can make mistakes, too. 

5 - And finally and most importantly, you don't 

leave the bodies and only move the headstones!!! Lies, lies!

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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

you can learn from:

Poltergeist III (1988)

Bruce (Tom Skerritt): You better be careful. Remember what happened to Narcissus?

Donna (Lara Flynn Boyle): Nar-who?

Bruce: Greek mythology. He was a guy who loved looking at his reflection so much in a pond that he fell in and drowned.

Donna: Well, only a boy could be that clumsy.

Pat (Nancy Allen): You got that right.

I was so excited when I saw that Netflix has Poltergeist III available 

for watching instantly. Magic at my fingertips!

Wanna Know Who's Awesome?

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Beth Grant is who's awesome, that's who. Not that anybody could have  ever doubted such a thing in the face of so much evidence of awesomeness, but it's good to have solid right-up-in-my-eyeballs confirmation. Last night the 92YTribeca held "Meet the Lady" in which we... met the lady, the lady being bright shiny beautiful Beth herself. Host (and friend of MNPP) Tom Blunt sat her down and we all went on a ride through her career together, from Judge Wapner (speaking of her scene with Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man she told us, "He can fart on command!" I hope he puts that on his resume.) to Sparklemotion to Chucky and beyond! 

Some more fun facts: Director Richard Kelly told her to just whip up a German accent for her character in Southland Tales as she sat in the make-up chair an hour before filming her first scene! Zelda Rubinstein had a sexy ass husband! She once did a version of Madea on stage that involved her naked covered in gold paint being served by Donna Mills! The mind boggles. And every night I spend from here on out will feel a little emptier for not being as much fun as last night was. What a wonderful lady.

"Meet the Lady"'s a monthly series. You can keep track of it here.

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Is It Just Me...

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... or does Jake's ass and crotch appear to be emitting great golden rays of light? Maybe I'm just having a seizure from staring at him in a tux? Maybe this is what Tangina meant when she yelled to go into the light? You know those scenes in movies where characters go to Heaven and the pearly gates open wide and they're swallowed by the brightest whitest heavenly spectacle and a choir of angels sing, "Hallelujah! Hallelujah! You're in Heaven, bitch!" I think I may have have just found my great beyond. I do believe! I do I do I do!
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RIP Zelda

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Damn it. Just when I'd put that health scare with Zelda from a few weeks back outta my head, she goes and dies on me. Sadness. I'm terrible at eulogies, so let's just let all my previous posts on the fine lady speak for themselves. She made all our lives a little richer, and stranger, and more delightful. Thanks, Zelda.
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Stay Strong Zelda!

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When word broke last week that Poltergeist star Zelda Rubinstein had been ill and was being taken off life support, I very nearly broke in from my hiatus to post on it, since I've been such a big fan of hers forever and ever. But then there was no more news, and so I'm glad I paused, because today comes this (via):

"She's OK. Vitals are good. She's apparently doing better. Internet sources exaggerated the story."

So glad to hear she's doing better! Maybe 2010 will be less of a death-fest than '09 was? Too much to hope? Anyway I did make the banner in her honor, and she's more than deserving. She rocks.
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A Little Love For Dr. Lesh

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Beatrice Straight's performance as ghost-ologist Dr. Lesh in Poltergeist always gets overshadowed, doesn't it? On the one hand, you've got Zelda Rubenstein sucking up all the oxygen (for such a little person she sure does take up space, doesn't she?), and on the other... well, people tend to talk about the scary bits and the special effects and all the behind-the-scenes intrigue with this film more often than they do "the performances" I've found.

But I caught a bit of the film on TV last night and as usual whenever I find it on I have to watch some of it and it was Straight's performance that caught my eye this time. She adds so much heart and thought to the film. The friendship she forms with JoBeth Williams' Diane is one of the nicest things in the whole film.

Drink up, sister!

And that whole scene where the bedroom of poltergeistiness is revealed rocks - specifically that thing she does with her hands as that possessed compass comes at her:


Cue the quick jazz hands of ghostly deflection! Anyway, Straight is this movie's unsung hero. So I'm singing.

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Thursday's Ways Not To Die

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Poltergeist III (1988)

I left in a few extra screen-grabs of Lara Flynn Boyle screaming her ever-loving head off there, because I appreciate the fact that the film allows her to scream and keep on screaming for a good while after erupting out of a little person's dessicated corpse. Because... I think screaming is the correct course of action for her at this point, no?

And thus went one of the great modern day horror characters... not so much with a bang (no "Go into the light!" for her), but more with a "WHAT IN THE HOLY FUCK?" Looking through these shots, the look on Zelda's face just before Carol Anne's evil-mirror-double touches her and turns her into a bug-eyed sawdust-mummy says it all:


I couldn't agree more, Zelda. But hey, you got the only really memorable moment in the entire flick, so that's something.

Then there's the creepy cover-up the filmmakers played in the final scene... Heather O'Rourke, who played Carol Anne, died before they'd finished filming Part III, so they hired some random little blond girl to fill in. You never see Carol Anne's face in the final scene - just this random little girl in those trademark red pajamas with her face buried in Nancy Allen's enormous shoulder pads:


Creepy. And an integral part of the supposed Poltergeist Curse that's wreaked havoc on everyone associated with the films! None more so than Lara Flynn Boyle, obviously:


Urgh! That's the scariest picture posted on this entire page. And speaking of Miss Boyle, I came up with a handy guide to knowing which Donna you're dealing with in this film:


Wash away the AquaNetted halo-o-hair and flip that stylin' polo collar down and suddenly she's Satan's Spawn! And doesn't that just sum up all of the Eighties? Scariest thing that decade ever gave us was those dancing robot ladies behind Robert Palmer, after all.

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Previous Ways Not To Die: Satisfying Society's "Pop Princess" Blood-Lust -- Done In By The Doggie Door -- Tuned Out -- Taking the 107th Step -- Rescuing Gretchen -- Incinerated By Lousy Dialogue -- Starred & Striped Forever -- Vivisection Via Vaginally-Minded Barbed-Wire -- Chompers (Down There) -- Run Down By M. Night Shyamalan -- Everything Up To And Including The Kitchen Toaster -- Sacrificed To Kali -- Via The Gargantuan Venom Of The Black Mamba Snake -- Turned Into An Evil Robot -- The Out-Of-Nowhere Careening Vehicle Splat -- "Oh My God... It's Dip!!!" -- Critter Balled -- Stuff'd -- A Hot-Air Balloon Ride... Straight To Hell!!! -- Puppy Betrayal -- High-Heeled By A Girlfriend Impersonator -- Flip-Top Beheaded -- Because I'm Too Goddamned Beautiful To Live -- By Choosing... Poorly... -- Fried Alive Due To Baby Ingenuity -- A Good Old-Fashioned Tentacle Smothering -- Eepa! Eepa! -- Gremlins Ate My Stairlift -- An Icicle Thru The Eye -- Face Carved Off By Ghost Doctor After Lesbian Tryst With Zombie Women -- Electrocuted By Fallen Power-Lines -- A Mouthful Of Flare -- Taken By The TV Lady -- Bitten By A Zombie -- Eaten By Your Mattress -- Stuffed To Splitting -- Face Stuck In Liquid Nitrogen -- Crushed By Crumbling Church Debris -- Bitten By The Jaws Of Life -- A Machete To The Crotch -- Showering With A Chain-Saw -- In A Room Filled With Razor Wire -- Pod People'd With Your Dog -- Force-Fed Art -- Skinned By A Witch -- Beaten With An Oar -- Curbed -- Cape Malfunction -- In The Corner -- Cooked In A Tanning Bed -- Diced -- Punched Through The Head -- Bugs Sucking On Your Head
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