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Ten Things I Think I Think: December 2024

Ten Things I Think I Think: December 2024

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Time for a Ten Things I Think I Think as we close in on Christmas. Those two things are unrelated, though…

So, I think that:

1) The Two Towers is Still My All Time Favorite Fantasy Movie

As you’ll be reading, I’m in a Lord of the Rings deep dive. I re-watched the trilogy (Extended Edition, of course) for the first time in quite a few years. I grew up with fantasy movies like Krull, Sword and the Sorcerer, Sheena, and the Beastmaster. Don’t even get me started on Ator!!!! Some were better than others. I liked Clash of the Titans, but Dragonslayer didn’t really do much for me. I have a friend who sees it the opposite. Ah-nuld’s two Conan films moved the bar on popularity and look for big screen fantasy.

But Peter Jackson did for fantasy what Star Wars did for sci-fi. Critics of the movies can move along. I have a serious Tolkien shelf, and I love what he created with Middle Earth. But I will take watching the movies over reading the trilogy, any day (and that’s from someone who is reading a 800 page book of nothing but LotR annotations right now). The pace alone is a significant improvement.

Anyways – that second film, with Helm’s Deep, and the other action scenes, is simply spellbinding. Seeing a Nazgul flying onscreen always takes my breath away. I like the first and third films, but this second one remains the best fantasy movie I have ever seen.

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Jumping the Shark, Part II

Jumping the Shark, Part II

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House Shark (SRS Cinema, 2017)

So, here we go. A new watch-a-thon, this one based on a handful of the 500+ shark movies that I haven’t seen (or gave up on). I’m not holding out much hope for these – shark movies are, on the whole, awful, but I know for a fact that some of these are among the worst films ever made. This 20-film marathon is me just trying to understand why they get made, bought and streamed.

House Shark (2017) YouTube

What kind of shark? A huge, rubber puppet. With three eyes.

How deep is the plot? One span.

Anyone famous get eaten? Nope.

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Jumping the Shark, Part I

Jumping the Shark, Part I

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So, here we go. A new watch-a-thon, this one based on a handful of the 500+ shark movies that I haven’t seen (or gave up on). I’m not holding out much hope for these — shark movies are, on the whole, awful, but I know for a fact that some of these are among the worst films ever made. This 20-film marathon is me just trying to understand why they get made, bought and streamed.

Apex Predators (2021) Prime

What kind of shark? Stock footage and a rubber dorsal fin.

How deep is the plot? There is no plot.

Anyone famous get eaten? No

Let me preface this by saying I have a lot of respect for anyone who tries to make a feature film (having tried myself), however, I have not one ounce of respect for Dustin Ferguson, who wrote, directed and edited this utter shit show.

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Taking in the Trash: Paul Cantor’s Pop Culture Trilogy

Taking in the Trash: Paul Cantor’s Pop Culture Trilogy

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Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, November 28, 2001)

Having just finished a very lively and thought-provoking book, I did something I almost never do — I decided to write the author a fan letter. Naturally, I hopped on Google to get his contact information, only to discover that he died almost three years ago, in February of 2022. Why do these things always happen to me?

The book I just finished, Pop Culture and the Dark Side of the American Dream: Con Men, Gangsters, Drug Lords, and Zombies was published in 2019, and is the third book in a loose cultural criticism trilogy written by Paul A. Cantor, a well-known Shakespearian scholar (Shakespeare and Rome: Republic and Empire) who was for many years a professor of English at the University of Virginia. The other volumes in the “trilogy” are Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization (2001) and The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in American Film and TV (2012).

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Maybe I Am Romantic

Maybe I Am Romantic

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I love them.

Good afterevenmorn (whenever you happen to be reading this), Readers!

I’m still on a Chinese costume drama kick. It has been my crutch when dealing with the terribleness of the world of late. I don’t know why, but there we have it. Everyone who knows me is sick to death of me proclaiming my love for The Untamed, which remains the golden standard for serialised Chinese costume dramas for me. Since then, and since I last mentioned it here, I’ve watched a number of them (when I tell you I’ve spent the majority of my time rotting on the couch watching unfairly beautiful people swan about in obscenely beautiful clothing, I mean it). Some were silly. Most of them were entertaining. One in particular I have added to my ‘would really like to own on DVD/BluRay’ list. It has a dumb as hell title (Wonderland of Love. Had I not seen a short of one of the battle scenes in the series on YouTube, I would not have watched it at all based on that title), but was a great story. I did a review of it on my personal blog.
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Alien Overlords, Part III

Alien Overlords, Part III

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Cosmic Sin (Saban Films, 2021), Empire of the Apes (Polonia Brothers
Entertainment, 2013), and Dune Drifter (4Digital Media, 2020)

This is Part III of a new, 20-film marathon. The rules:

Must include aliens
Cannot take place on Earth
I haven’t seen it before
Free to stream

Cosmic Sin (2021) Netflix

Aliens? Alien… zombies…? Not sure.

CGI heavy? Plenty, with varying degrees of success.

Any good? A bit of a disappointment, really. I loved Bruce Willis once upon a time. Loved him I tells you. So it’s doubly sad to see him limp through the last decade or so, phoning in performances and generally not having a good time.

This film is no exception, but Bruce is the least of its problems — there’s the germ of a great idea about genocide and first contact, but the film doesn’t deliver, instead falling back on Frank Grillo scowling his way through some firefights.

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Goth Chick News: Somebody at Mattel Is Getting Fired

Goth Chick News: Somebody at Mattel Is Getting Fired

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Though this sounds like something I would plot to do to get around Black Gate Big Cheese John O’s moratorium on any of my content that isn’t family friendly, this is for real, and I’m not responsible.

You can’t spit a piece of gum these days without hitting some type of promotion for the upcoming theatrical adaptation of the musical Wicked. There is the Aldo Wicked shoe collection, the Vera Bradley Wicked cosmetic bag, Wicked makeup, perfume and coasters – and that’s just what I found doing a quick search. Considering the film about to be released is part one of two, the Hollywood promo machine is just warming up.

What all these items have in common is that they are marketed toward adults. The list of items aimed at kids is even longer, starting, of course, with dolls. However, there is one unintentional crossover item that will likely go down as the collectible of the decade.

Unfortunately, instead of getting a promotion for a level of buzz money simply can’t buy, the responsible party over at Mattel will likely be filing for unemployment before the holidays.

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Arthur and Out

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Arthur and Out

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Tristan & Isolde (20th Century Fox, 2006)

Greetings, friends, and welcome to the last Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords article, at least for a while.

I’ve enjoyed hanging out with you here on the regular, but circumstances have changed for Your Cheerful Editor, and my writing output must adapt to accommodate them. For a good while, I had reached an equilibrium in my writing, balanced between work for the day-job at Larian Studios, making progress on my nine-volume Musketeers Cycle of Alexandre Dumas translations, and churning into the 21st century for the Cinema of Swords review series.

But life is change: I’ve finished the Dumas translations, we’ve gone into pre-production on Larian’s next game, and perhaps most significantly, my health is not what it was, as over the last year, in addition to the other indignities of late middle age, I’ve developed late-onset asthma. And it’s hit pretty hard, diminishing my energy and forcing a decline in productivity in my side projects.

In addition to these articles for Black Gate, for a year or three I’ve been making two weekly postings over on the Substack platform, one for the Musketeers and one for Swords. I’ve had to face the fact that it isn’t sustainable and I need to get off that treadmill. So, both Substack series have been suspended, and likewise this is my last regular article for Black Gate.

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Alien Overlords, Part II

Alien Overlords, Part II

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Inseminoid (Jupiter Film Productions, 1981) and Alien: Reign of Man (Pikchure Zero Entertainment, 2017)

This is Part II of a new, 20-film marathon. The rules:

Must include aliens
Cannot take place on Earth
I haven’t seen it before
Free to stream

Inseminoid (1981) Prime

Aliens? Bug-eyed baby gravy donor, murderous spawn.

CGI heavy? Nope.

Any good? Released overseas as Horror Planet, this British film is just another of the Alien rip-offs that dominated video store shelves in the early 80s. Made for one million great British pounds, they saved about 50 quid by tacking a lengthy bit of narrated exposition to the beginning explaining how the fodder were on the planet, clumsily unearthing archeological bits and bobs. Judy (Space 1999) Geeson as the unfortunate mum is excellent and things get bloody very quickly.

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Goth Chick News: My Weekend at “The Overlook” Hotel

Goth Chick News: My Weekend at “The Overlook” Hotel

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I have always loved The Shining.

Granted, I saw the movie first and fell in love. It was the idea of a hotel that comes to life in the desolate isolation of winter, preying on a fragile family unit – a father who was white-knuckling sobriety and dealing with the humiliation of a big comedown in his career, a codependent mother with a tattered self-esteem after years on the receiving end of spousal abuse, and a little boy coping with his dysfunctional parents as well as a supernatural talent. Cutting these three people off from the rest of the world would be a recipe for disaster of the kind that could unfortunately show up in any headline anywhere. But add in the terrors that lurk in the Overlook hotel?

For me, what’s not to love?

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