The cliche view of Rob Zombie is that he is a shock rocker who branched out into horror filmmaking. With the song and the music video for Foxy, Foxy, Zombie shows that he is just as much a descendant of Lynard Skynard’s as he is of Alice Cooper’s. And though the video may not have the horror themes that most people expect from a Zombie production, the song itself was at least partially inspired by a Lon Chaney film, He Who Gets Slapped.
Yes, that is Sheri Moon Zombie showing up at the outdoor concert.
An alcoholic writer is driving drunk when she runs over a little girl. At first, she gets out to help but when she sees that the girl is dead, she just apologizes and drives off. Later, she and another writer are at a rustic retreat. The drunk writer has writer’s block. The other writer has a secret. A neighbor tells a story about another little girl who was killed mysteriously. Eventually, a ghost shows up because the alcoholic has been living in the shadow of guilt.
I liked the idea behind this one but the action moved slowly and the two main actresses were not convincing. It’s only a 62 minute film but it seemed like an eternity. The ghost special effects were effective enough, though there were a few times when it looked like the ghost’s mask was about to fall off. Brian Stewart, as the neighbor, did a good job in his one big scene. They should have made the entire movie about him. Main message: Don’t drive drunk and things like this movie won’t happen to you.
Three Dog Night was a band that was prominent in the days before music videos but fortunately, they left us with a wealth of live performances that were captured for television. I don’t know what show this was filmed for, just that it’s from 1975. For our purposes, the MVP of this video is the keyboardist who goes out of his way to bring some Halloween flavor to the proceedings.
Originally written and performed by Leo Sayer, this cover of The Show Must Go On was Three Dog Night’s final Top 10 hit in the United States. The best part of the song, the intro, was severely shortened for the song’s radio edit but it still became a hit.
After someone is obviously meant to be Henry Kissinger (played by Ron Moody) is assassinated when he loses his diary and extends the wrong greeting to a welcoming party in the Middle East, someone claiming to be a direct descendant of the infamous Prof. Moriarty sends a letter to the U.S. President (Joss Ackland) taking responsibility and claiming that it’s the first step in a plan to control the world.
Who better to stop the descendant of Moriarty than the descendant of Moriarty’s greatest enemy? Arthur Sherlock Holmes (John Cleese) operates out of Baker Street with Dr. Watson (Arthur Lowe), who is bionic, and their housekeeper, Miss Hudson (Connie Booth). Holmes solution to bringing out Moriarty is to host a gathering of the world’s greatest detectives and to dare Moriarty to try to take them out with one fell swoop. Soon, everyone from Sam Spade to Columbo to McCloud is showing up at Baker Street.
This is a joke-a-minute comedy. The jokes that work are funny but, unfortunately, there aren’t many of them. Some bits, like Joss Ackland’s impersonation of Gerald Ford, start off well and then go on for too long. Other bits, like the famous TV detectives showing up at Baker Street, have potential but fail due to poor execution. Unfortunately, much of the humor is just not that clever to begin with, which is not something that anyone would expect from a script co-written by John Cleese. As an actor, John Cleese is funny but underused, playing Sherlock Holmes as being an even denser version of Basil Fawlty. Arthur Lowe’s comedic befuddlement is consistently amusing but I wish the script has done more with the idea of him being bionic. Connie Booth is both funny and sexy and the best reason to watch this misfire.
You can probably already guess that this video and song were both controversial back in the day. Not only was the video’s symbolism blatant but the song was released at a time when the AIDS epidemic was very much on everyone’s mind. This was the type of video that MTV would have banned in its early days but, by the time the 90s rolled around, the video was considered safe for viewing by none other than Beavis and Butthead, neither one of whom was ever having sex.
This video was produced by H-Guns Labs, the same studio that was responsible for many of Nine Inch Nails’s early videos.
LaTour was a disc jockey from Jack Kerouac’s hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts. Despite the urban legend to the contrary, he never recorded a follow-up called People Are Still Having Lunch.
Eight “urban explorers,” who have the own streaming show where they film themselves in haunted locations across Britain, try to spend the night at the long abandoned Pelosi Asylum. Pelosi Asylum (and it’s a British film so don’t read too much into the name, as tempting as it may be to do so) is supposed to be one of the most haunted locations in the UK. It’s scheduled to be demolished and the explorers plan to be the last people to spend the night at the Asylum.
None of the supernatural explorers actually believe in the supernatural. Before entering the Asylum, they joke about how everything that they do is just for show and how all of the “supernatural” things that they’ve filmed have actually been created through clever editing. They don’t even plan to actually spend the entire night at the Asylum. Once they do enter the Asylum, they decide to split up to explore and get as much footage as they need to edit something together. That’s when they discover that they are not alone. The Asylum is full of former patients who consider the building to be their home and who did not welcome uninvited guests.
Night Explorers: The Asylum starts out as a found footage film but it quickly abandons that and instead becomes a standard slasher film where people split up for no good reason and get picked off one-by-one. There’s nothing new or surprising about Night Explorers but there are some effective jump scares and fans of gore will find a lot to look at here. The film’s killers are frighteningly ruthless and the violence is not for the squeamish. For the most part, the cast is hampered by undeveloped characters but everyone is convincing enough as the type of moron who would think breaking into an abandoned asylum was a good idea. I’ve definitely seen better than this film but I’ve also seen much worse movies that cost considerably more money to make. What Night Explorers lack in originality, it makes up for in blood and atmosphere.
Both this song and this artist were unknown to me until I searched YouTube for “scary music video.” This video was one of the first that came up and I decided to go with it. It’s a video that captures the spirit of Halloween and the importance of doing it all yourself. Maddy Ellwanger not only wrote and performs the song but she also directed, produced, animated, filmed, and edited this video.
The video features Karla Partida in plenty of strange situations, whether she’s playing with an oversized brain or posing like Vampira. According to the description of the video on YouTube, Karla Partida is not only Karla The Strange but also Miss Black Lagoon.
A film that gives new meaning to the word pointless, Do Not Disturb is about a screenwriter (Stephen Geoffreys) living in a run-down motel. He hasn’t written anything in two years and is haunted by the murder of his girlfriend. When a crass producer comes by to demand that the writer get to work, the writer decides to kidnap the producer, bound him in a bathtub, and remove his body parts one-at-a-time. This gives him the inspiration to write again, which makes his agent (Tiffany Shepis) happy even if she is not always happy about the method he’s using to regain his creativity.
This talky movie is about living in a crapsack world. Everyone is greedy, unlikable, and depressed. Stephen Geoffreys and Tiffany Shepis both give good performances, showing they have more talent than their films usually allowed them to show. But the movie itself feels pointless, a slow-moving and meandering slog through a world that just isn’t that interesting.
Do Not Disturb (which was originally titled New Terminal Hotel) got some attention in 2010 as the last film that Corey Haim completed before his own death at the age of 38. Haim was dating Shepis at the time and was visiting her on set when he asked if there was any part that he could play in the movie. A role was invented on the spot and Haim plays a jaded rock star that the screenwriter meets at a bar. It’s an extended cameo and a pointless one at that, with Haim playing the role with an accent that I think was supposed to be Australian.
There is a twist at the end of the movie but it’s not worth the trouble that it takes to reach it. Some people may want to see this film just because of the cast. To many people, Stephen Geoffreys will always be Evil Ed and Corey Haim will always be Sam Emerson. Those people will have more fun rewatching Fright Night and The Lost Boys than sitting through this movie.
David Bowie was one of the first artists to truly understand the potential power of a good music video and, as can be seen in this video for Ashes to Ashes, he was an early pioneer of the form. At a time when most music videos were just performance clips, Bowie put together a narrative that offered an artistic interpretation of the song’s lyrics and themes and which invited viewers to interpret the song on their own.
The video was largely shot on two beaches in the UK, at Beachy Head and Hastings. Interior scenes were filmed on the set of the Kenny Everett Show. Bowie’s followers were played by the Blitz kids, who were known for frequenting the Blitz nightclub in Covent Garden.
Bowie said that the video was meant to combine the past and the future, which is why Bowie not only appears as an astronaut but also as an Edwardian clown. The scenes with Bowie as an astronaut are, as the lyrics make clear, a reference to Major Tom. The look of the scenes was heavily influenced by H.R. Giger’s work on Alien.
David Mallet would go on to become one of busiest directors of music videos of the 80s, directing videos for Queen, Iron Maiden, AC/DC, and others. David Bowie would also go on to play a huge role in MTV’s history, due to both his videos and his willingness to call out that station’s initial refusal to feature videos from black artists.
I don’t know who designed the poster for Bachelor Party. That name has been lost to history. And it’s not even that good of a movie, though it’s easy to understand why Tom Hanks would give up every other woman on Earth for the chance to marry Tawny Kitaen. But this poster has done more to establish my opinion of the ideal bachelor party than any of the real bachelor parties that I’ve ever attended. Bravo, unknown artist.
Through the Shattered Lens