It never occurred to me that there would be a world of Haunted Mansion fan art out there! Jill Harness on neatorama: 13 Great Pieces of Haunted Mansion Fan Art.
Mind you, I’m posting this while sitting beneath several framed Shag Haunted Mansion 40th anniversary postcards.
Meanwhile, over at Reddit you can see a photo of the greatest sexy halloween costume, ever: Edgar Allan Ho.
I now propose that we bury the sexy halloween costume obsession under the floorboards, where it belongs.
Getting messages asking what this year’s Halloween theme is going to be and when I’m going to start posting. It’s October 5th already, isn’t it?
But wait! I’m not 5 days behind! I can make this year’s theme Archaeology & Anthropology in Horror and then I’m actually ahead of the game because I’ve already been obsessing over this for months.
Everybody wins.
I’ve been sick for a while, but posting will resume soon.
As long as I’m not mutating like the anthropologist in The Relic. If I turn into a South American lizard-god we may have to re-assess the project…
Until the running and the screaming starts, I’ll be working on a subject tag for these posts.
[embedded video: Addams Family]
Look, I’m an Addams Family girl. Always have been, always will be. This means that I have, since my earliest memories, resented the Munsters. Despised them, even.
I thought the Addams clan was charming and funny and their house was fabulous.
The Munsters? Lowbrow and tedious, with very uneven direction and too much mixed-monster mythology. Even a kid could see that.
I was going to embed the The Munsters theme but I’m only allowed to link to it. So here you go.
Additionally, since we only had a black and white TV when I was a wee child, I failed to understand that these shows were in reruns and the Munsters were not, even as I watched, actively conspiring to destroy my beloved Addams Family.
When I got older and co-curated an exhibit on horror movies and television, I learned that the networks really had waged this battle. And the Munsters lost. It was only in syndication that the Munsters seemed to have primacy, and only then because their reruns were obviously cheaper than the Addams Family. As a kid, I didn’t understand that “back to back” episodes really meant, “We got this crap super-cheap.”
Despite all this pop-cultural monster baggage, I tivo’d the pilot episode of Mockingbird Lane so that we could watch it and give it a fair shot. It’s from Bryans Singer and Fuller, so at the very least I figured it would be more visually interesting than the original.
The show was MUCH MUCH MUCH better than the original and, most importantly, I want every single item that Lily (Portia de Rossi) wore. Even the spider dress. Okay, maybe just the dress, you can keep the spiders (although that kind of instant tailoring would be very handy…)
You know why I didn’t remember that this movie was released? Because it’s terrible.
Jesus wept.
I don’t even know how to explain to you how terrible this movie is. It’s not capital B bad. It’s not good-bad. It just sucks. (For an example of a good-bad movie, see my review of Hellbound).
This movie is so terrible that filling this review with profanity would be a complete and utter waste of perfectly good explicatives.
Plot and action-wise, there’s a lot going on in Brothers Grimm, but none of it’s interesting.
Matt Damon and Heath Ledger play the title characters, and although Monica Belluci gets top billing, Lena Headey is actually the female lead. Since Damon, Ledger, and Headey have all amassed a sizable body of work that demonstrates that they can take direction, it’s pretty obvious that their ghastly performances are the fault of the director.
This has to be the worst thing Terry Gilliam has ever made.
Contemplating all the ways the movie has gone wrong is better than trying to pay attention to why, for instance, the guy who’s a villain for 99% of the movie suddenly has a Big Dramatic Scene where he inexplicably screams mournfully to the heavens when a character who, up until that moment was his nemesis, dies.
The overall ghastliness of this movie is a worthy thing to contemplate if you’re ever tied to a chair and forced to watch this movie. Paying attention to the pointless action and bad plotting and confusing characterizations will pass the time.
Contemplating the badness could probably keep you distracted enough that you don’t ruin your teeth trying to chew through either the ropes or one of your limbs in an effort to escape. The thing that keeps you from expending all of your energy hoppity-hopping your chair-bound self over to a window and figuring out how to fling yourself out of said window, thus leaving you with no energy to do the actual flinging. The thing that keeps you from having a Lovecraftian-break from reality and beginning to rant about how the Old Ones want you to destroy your blu-ray player in an effort to exorcise the badness from the universe.
This movie is terrible. It’s an expensive, loud, elaborate, poorly directed, paced, plotted, and acted mess. It’s too boring and dark for children. It’s too stupid for adults. Maybe dogs would like it?
It’s like someone gave Mork access to all the sets and costumes from a Monty Python film but didn’t make sure he understood what was funny or engaging or even interesting about Monty Python. Or, um, anything really. Anything related to Western Earth Culture, at the very least.
This movie felt like it was 6 hours long. About half-way through it I tried to cheer up by paraphrasing from my favorite review of Blood Rayne. I kept muttering to myself, “Brothers Grimm is still more fun than getting your eyelid caught on a fishhook!”
An hour later, I wasn’t so sure this was true, although by then the movie had left me too depressed to conduct any experiments on the matter, which, in retrospect, is for the best.
If you persist in watching this movie to the end the result will be either a nagging sense of self-loathing or a lot of clean, folded laundry.
I opted for laundry. Husband chose self-loathing. I think he may also have set a new personal Angry Birds high score.
We were both happy to see those final credits role.
Poltergeist 3. 1988. Shoulder pads. Aqua Net. Polo shirts, popped collars, buttoned up to the neck.
Enough said.
There is no god.