This song is off of Iron Maiden’s 17th studio album, 2021’s Senjutsu. Directed by Swedish animator Gustaf Holtenäs, the epic music video for Stratego imagines an battle in ancient Japan. Thematically and visually, it goes along with the cover of the album, which featured Eddie dressed as a samurai and holding a katana.
Enjoy!
Back in frontier times, a warlock named Walter Machden (John Carradine) terrorized the citizens of the town of Oakmoor Crossing so they tracked him down and lynched him. Before he was hung, Machden cursed the town. A demon with a jack-o-lantern for a head terrorized the town until the Kelly Family defeated him and buried him underneath a cross.
Jump forward one hundred years. It is Halloween night and some drunk teenagers knock over the cross. Jack-O comes back to life and kills the teenagers. Jack-O sets out to get revenge on the Kelly family but, for some reason, he decides to kill their neighbors, some more teenagers, and a TV cable guy before going after his targets. It’s up to young Sean Kelly (Ryan Latshaw) to figure out how to defeat Jack-O for a second time.
The most interesting thing about Jack-O is that it features John Carradine, even though he died a full seven years before the movie was released. That either means that Jack-O had an unusually long post-production period or the Carradine scenes were shot for another movie and were clumsily inserted into Jack-O. Carradine was not the only deceased star to make an appearance in Jack-O. Cameron Mitchell, who passed away in 1994, also makes an appearance as a horror movie host. Because you can’t have a movie with Carradine and Cameron Mitchell without including Linnea Quigley, she appears as a babysitter who takes a lengthy shower. Fortunately, Linnea Quigley is still with us.
Overall, Jack-O is regrettable. The demon, with his Jack-O-Lantern head, is more likely to inspire laughs than screams and it never makes sense that Jack-O would take so much time to kill everyone except for the people that he is actually looking to kill. The best death involves a toaster but Jack-O doesn’t do anything with the toaster. Instead, someone just slips and sticks a utensil in the toaster, leading to a shocking death. Combine the poor acting with the poor special effects with notably ragged editing that often makes it unclear how much time has passed between scenes and you have a Halloween film that is no holiday.
You were just a traveler, passing through Power, Montana, when your car broke down. Temporarily stranded, you were thankful when a local farmer offered to let you stay in his guest room for the night. But then something terrible descends upon Power and you find yourself running through the town, fearful for your life.
The objective of Power, MT is straight-forward. Make your way through town and hopefully, find some sort of protection before you are captured by the strange, apparently supernatural storm that is pursuing you. To be able to do this, though, you’re going to need the flashlight on your phone to see where you are going. And, with each turn, that flashlight drains your battery and leaves you that much close to being plunged into a darkness from which there is no escape. It’s a simple and relatable premise. Who hasn’t hit the panic button while searching for a place to recharge their phone? The game is well-written and there are a lot of places to explore, even if there’s not always a lot of time to reach them. Power, MT captures the feeling of running for your life. It’s a challenging game (so be prepared to die a few times while figure it out) but it’s also not impossible to win.
Brother Cane’s And Fools Shine On is best-known for appearing on the soundtrack of Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. No matter what else people say about that movie, the general consensus seems to be that at least the music was good.
The video is slightly horror-themed, though Michael Myers doesn’t show up. Instead, the video feels like an homage to the expressionistic cinema of F.W. Munrau and Fritz Lang, as if someone tried to combine Nosferatu with Metropolis.
Enjoy!
Scientists at an arctic base make an amazing discovery when they find the body of a prehistoric man that has been perfectly preserved in the ice. Dr. Stanley Shepherd (Timothy Hutton) and his fellow scientists suspect that the Iceman (John Lone) might be in a state of suspended animation. Instead of performing an autopsy when the body thaws it, the scientists attempt to resuscitate him.
And somehow, it works.
The Iceman, who is eventually named Charlie, is stunned to be in the modern world and does not know how to react to the scientists studying him. Only Dr. Shepherd treats Charlie as a human being instead of a laboratory specimen. Despite not speaking the same language, Charlie and Shepherd bond. Shepherd realizes that Charlie misses his family and eventually, he figures out that, when he was frozen, Charlie was attempting to stop the Ice Age by offering himself up as a sacrifice to a bird god. When Charlie sees a helicopter, he mistakes it for his god and starts tying to escape from the base. Realizing that Charlie will eventually be killed and experimented upon, Shepherd tries to help him escape.
If, and it’s a big “if,” you can overlook the implausibility of Charlie being in suspended animation for over 40,000 years, Iceman is actually a really good film with intelligent performances from both Timothy Hutton and John Lone. Lone is especially good as Charlie, capturing his confusion, fear, and eventually his heart. Even though he’s in a strange place and time, Charlie never stops thinking of his family and trying to get back to them. The film works because, like Shepherd, it understands Charlie is too good for the modern world.
The Twine Fishing Simulator starts out like an old school fishing simulator. At first, everything about it, from the font to the simple directions, reminded me of the type of clunky but addictive text games that I used to play back in the early 90s. Back then, we didn’t need a lot of fancy graphics or even much descriptive text. We just needed our imagination.
You are fishing. You start at the Lake. If you catch enough different types of fish, new locations will be opened. Each new location gets bigger and there are new fish to catch at each place. There are also various rewards that you can get after you catch certain fish. There are NPCs who you can talk to. You can ask them questions about fishing. Some of them offer hints. Some offer side quests. Some ruminate on the nature of existence.
The further you get into the game, the stranger it gets. This is not a typical fishing simulator. It’s not just about catching the fish. It’s about why you’re catching the fish and why you’re moving from one location to another. It starts out as nostalgic fun and then gets increasingly surreal as the game progresses. I can’t reveal too much about it without spoiling the game’s puzzles but it’s ultimately one gigantic mindscrew disguised as a fishing simulator, and an entertaining one at that. Anyone can write a strange game but it takes talent and imagination to write a strange game that, like this one, is worth playing and even replaying.
It was only after I finished the game that I realized that I could have just stayed at the Lake and kept fishing.
Is Alice Cooper haunting her dreams or has she been hypnotized? According to this song’s Wikipedia page, this video received “virtually no airplay” on MTV. 1994 was at the height of MTV’s embrace of grunge and also the beginning of Britpop so I guess Alice Cooper was not high on the channel’s radar.
This song appeared on Alice Cooper’s 13th solo album, The Last Temptation. All of the songs on the album dealt with a mysterious showman and his attempts to get a boy named Steven to join his traveling show. At least some parts of the video feature Alice in character as the showman.
Enjoy!
Swamp Thing made his first appearance in DC’s House of Secrets #92 (July, 1971). It was a stand-alone story that was set in the early 20th century. It did not have much in common with the Swamp Thing that was all know today but the issue will always be remembered for its cover, which was drawn by Bernie Wrightson. The girl who is coming her hair while Swamp Thing approaches was modeled on Louise Jones, who would later be known as Louise Simonson and would become an important comic book writer in her own right.
Previous Great Moments In Comic Book History:
The third and final Sometimes They Come Back film has nothing to do with the two films that preceded it. Those two films dealt with dead juvenile delinquents who came back to life to haunt the people who they blamed for their deaths. They came back for revenge. The third film has more in common with The Thing than the other two movies. If you’re going to make a movie that invites comparisons to The Thing, you better have the goods and unfortunately, this film doesn’t.
Captain Sam Cage (Clayton Rohner) and Major Callie O’Grady (Chase Masterson) are dispatched to an Arctic research center to follow up on reports that one of the researcher has snapped. For Cage, the mission is personal because his brother-in-law is at the center. What they discover is that almost all of the research personnel are dead and that Dr. Jennifer Wells (Faith Ford) and Lt. Brian Shebanski (Max Perlich) are the sole survivors. Someone at the research center had been studying Satanism and that, along with a portal to Hell under the station, leads to trouble. Soon, the dead are reanimating and stalking the living.
Sometimes They Come Back… For More gets off to a good start with the mystery at the base and a visual emphasis on the harshness of life in Antarctica. Clayton Rohner appeared in a lot of straight-to-video horror movies and, by the time he made this one, he was a pro at handling bad dialogue. Once Cage and O’Grady reach the base, the movie starts to go off the rails as the survivors make increasingly poor decisions, Faith Ford struggles to be a believable scientist, and an absurd twist is introduced concerning Cage and his brother-in-law (Damian Chapa). The movie was obviously influenced by The Thing and Alien but it never duplicates the claustrophobic intensity that made those films work. Not surprisingly, after this movie, they would not come back.
When Jon Porter was a child, he witnessed the murder of his sister by three delinquents named Tony (Alexis Arquette), Vinnie (Bojesse Christopher), and Sean (Glen Beaudin). The three thugs would have killed Jon too except that they were electrocuted by an electrical wire in a puddle of water. Years later, the now adult Jon (Michael Gross) returns to his hometown for the funeral of his mother. Jon is now a psychologist and has a daughter named Michelle (Hillary Swank).
The death of Jon’s mother was no accident. Tony has come back to life and Michelle, not knowing that he’s a demon, has a crush on him. Tony soon brings Vinnie and Sean back to life and they seek revenge on the man who they blame for their deaths.
This straight-to-video sequel to Sometimes They Come Back is slightly better than the first film, mostly because Tony and his gang are more intimidating than the ghost greasers that haunted Tim Matheson and Michelle wanting to date the man that her father killed adds a new wrinkle to the story. There’s nothing about Hillary Swank’s performance that would make you think she was a future Oscar winner but she is likable and sympathetic. The member of the cast who make the biggest impression is Jennifer Elise Cox, playing Michelle’s Tarot card-reading friend. (Cox is probably best known for playing Jan Brady in The Brady Bunch movies.) Cox brings a lot of kooky charm to the movie and is featured in the film’s most memorable scene. Sometimes They Come Back… Again may not reinvent the horror genre but it’s a passably entertaining straight-to-video horror film.
Through the Shattered Lens 