The power of the masses serves as a metaphor in this North Korean Godzilla ripoff produced by Kim Jong-Il and directed by the guy Kim Jong-Il kidnapped, and yes, I just said Kim Jong-Il kidnapped someone to make a Godzilla movie because that's a plot that would be better than the plot in Pulgasari.
Here's the lowdown: A man fashions a small reptilian talisman out of rice and gives it to his daughter because that's a gift that keeps on giving, and a drop of her blood brings it to life because of course it does. After enjoying a light snack of sewing needles, the creature grows and grows. Then it battles an evil king wearing a small table for a hat.
Featuring suspect mustaches, dodgy forced perspective, obvious rear projection, 1980s headbands, anti-capitalist propaganda, and a guy in a rubber monster suit with soulless, unblinking yellow eyes, Pulgasari isn't as awful as I'd hoped, but it sure isn't great. There are sword fights, stick fights, extravagant headwear, and feudal missiles. Someone hurls food into a hunger striking prisoner's jail cell window, horses are cooked, piles of swords are eaten, and people are crushed by rolling logs and unconvincing boulders. An army kidnaps the woman who controls Pulgasari, forces it to climb into an enormous cage it just happens to have handy that no one seemed to have noticed before, and then sets the cage on fire which just makes the beast angry, and you can tell he's angry because he's bathed in the glow from a red light. Then the army digs an enormous hole to trap Pulgasari and hires a priestess to do an exorcism dance for some reason that has to be seen to be believed. Hey, let's watch that right now!
I don't know how you feel about that, but that clip fills the void where my heart should be with something that approximates what I can only assume is the opposite of unhappiness. Pulgasari is boring, over-long, and takes just about almost nearly forever to get to the giant monster part, but I would begrudgingly recommend it if you like stuff that sucks, but just so you can tell your friends you watched a Godzilla ripoff produced by Kim Jong-Il and directed by the guy he kidnapped.
Hey, that trailer almost makes Pulgasari look exciting.
Dinner party guests are snowed in, and a medium uses a machine to contact the dead in this modern, extremely low budget black-and-white horror story that pays homage to gimmicky director William Castle. I'll discuss that in a minute. Since I have you here, I'm first going to tell you about my trip to Pittsburgh.
Oh, stop complaining. You'll be fine.
I hopped in the Volvo 1800 and drove to Pittsburgh for Monster Bash, which is a monster movie horror convention. Until very recently, I never attended horror conventions. I'm not certain why, I just never got around to it, I suppose. Now I'm a big fan.
While I was kind of hoping to hang out and chat with The Creature From The Black Lagoon, he wasn't there. This is just a statue.
I was also hoping to be able to chat with Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, and the Wolfman. They couldn't make it, either. I took a photo of statues of them as well. While this was a major disappointment, I had to settle for talking with the director of Spider Baby, Jack Hill. It was fun talking to this legendary director, and by "fun" I mean "awkward and brief, and then I ran away". I'm not very good at talking to people. I'm better at talking to monsters.
There were several tables set up featuring the cast from Night Of The Living Dead, but unfortunately, there were no zombies signing autographs. Oh well. However, I did have a conversation with the sheriff from Night Of The Living Dead. It was fun talking to a human who was in a film, and by "fun" I really mean "awkward and brief, and then I ran away".
I somehow managed to make a little conversation with the director of House Of Ghosts. It was also awkward and brief, and then I ran away. Just before I fled I bought his film House Of Ghosts, and he gave me a free Fear Shield, which is to shield my eyes from the intense horror on screen. It was nice, but I think I can handle a little horror. I've seen it before. More on the movie after we look at some of my trip photos first.
Oh, stop complaining. You'll be fine. My photos aren't inane pictures of people doing inane vacation-y stuff because those kinds of pictures suck. I take pictures of eerie things that make people uneasy. Sometimes there are pictures of my dinner, but usually my dinner is eerie, too. It's fine.
Anyway, if you've never been to a monster movie convention, I highly recommend you go. Bear in mind though, admission is a little steep, and as I learned, many of the monsters from the films don't actually appear.
After the convention I headed over to The Center For PostNatural History, which is a museum dedicated to organisms which were altered through selective breeding or genetic engineering. It was dark, creepy, foreboding, and pretty darn awesome. Here is a picture of a flask filled with sea monkeys.
I then headed over to St Anthony's Chapel, which is a church that holds 5000 saintly relics. Solemn, silent, and heavy with the aroma of candle wax, St. Anthony's is a meditative place. There were life-sized, carved wooden statues of the Stations Of The Cross, and many reliquaries containing bones and other saintly body parts. They would not allow photography in the chapel, so here's a picture I pulled from Wikipedia of a box containing a veiled skull.
I ventured over to the Mattress Factory, which is a complex of Victorian row houses that have been converted to hold art installations in the Mexican War Streets area of Northside. One of the buildings is by artist Chiraru Shiota, who cocooned 3 floors of rooms in black yarn.
It was nearly dinner time, so I went to Double Wide Grill, where I had the vegetarian TV dinner. I had the Coconut Tofu, the Barbecued Seitan, the beans and rice, and fries. It was pretty darn good.
Ok, so my dinner isn't that eerie. Whatever.
Back to the movie. Filmed on a budget of $3000, House Of Ghosts has wooden acting, stilted dialogue, and unsteady camera movement. There's also rubber masks, rubber claws, rubber spiders, theremin, Mellotron, a levitating dog, and subliminal messages. I found House Of Ghosts to be funny, charming, well-done for the budget, and in the very much in the spirit of William Castle's films.
A bunch of 30-year old teenagers battle creatures from outer space in this funny, clever, low-budget horror film parodying sci-fi films of the fifties. After a lengthy, ponytailed narrator's intro, something from outer space crashes to Earth and kills a secondary character wearing a poodle skirt. Another character gets doused in green and purple slime, and the thing that crashed to Earth turns out to be a tinfoil wrapped spaceship that plays Love Me Tender, I suppose. Elvis shows up for some reason, and people carry around an atomic bomb that looks like a painted volleyball. Then people rip open their skulls revealing their tiny brains on stalks.
Atomic Brain Invasion has a clever, screwball script, and funny dialogue. I could have done without the awkward musical numbers, but that's ok I guess.
Everyday people cope with the horrors of mind-altering drugs and voiceover narration in this less-than-convincing drug scare film. A kid that looks a little like Jerry Mathers has a bum trip, hallucinates a cartoon chicken, and gets a bloody nose. Some dude makes a drug deal at the Golden Arches where people walk slowly and deliberately, then someone juggles cats. A chick puts the make on a mannequin, then a guy eats a disappointing cracker. Two women have some sort of argument, then a bosomy bar patron cuts her own blouse off with scissors and does a tabletop striptease in a desperate attempt to keep people watching this film. Someone else has a bad trip involving unconvincing monsters and meat cleavers, then there's some random drag-strip action and a Hawaiian dance routine. The Weird World Of LSD would probably drive most people to try the hallucinogenic drug just to relieve the boredom of actually watching it.
The creation of the classic horror film Night Of The Living Dead is examined in this well-made documentary. Using black, white & red comic book-style graphics, interviews with George Romero, schoolchildren, and various film historians, and clips from the seminal film, Birth Of The Living Dead is funny, entertaining, and informative. Did you know the zombies in the film were eating actual organs? I didn't either. I often wondered if they might be, but I assumed they used some sort of phony organ substitute. Did Tofurky exist back then? Probably not. I guess people will do just about anything to appear in a movie, even eating offal outside an abandoned farmhouse. Anyway, I was charmed by both Romero and the children from a Bronx Literacy Through Film program, as Romero recounted the sad-but-true story of how a typo caused his film to lapse into the public domain, and the refreshingly candid viewpoints of the kids viewing Night Of The Living Dead for the first time in a classroom setting. Night Of The Living Dead still has the ability to shock and horrify four decades after its run in grindhouse theaters and drive-ins during the late-1960s, not only through the suspense and gore featured onscreen, but the subtextual parallel with the era's social upheavals, race riots and war protests.
World War II Russian soldiers stumble upon Dr. Frankenstein's zombie-creating laboratory in this shaky-cam found-footage horror film. I enjoyed the art direction, creature design, and locations. but I hated how everything jumped out at you like a haunted attraction. Frankenstein's Army was stagey, and the action moved from one set piece to another. Overall I was disappointed, but the film did have some interesting ideas.
Just so everyone is clear on the subject, the novelty of found footage as a plot device is over. Utilizing a random bit of film to forward the story jumped the shark a while ago, and its usage should be curtailed from now on.
Featuring high definition images of Vermeer's masterpieces, Tim's Vermeer examines the obsessive and painstaking efforts Penn & Teller's inventor friend Tim Jenison would go to in unravelling the mysteries of how the Dutch artist created his photorealistic, jewel-like paintings in this remarkable documentary. Using his video and electronics background, Jenison theorizes that Vermeer used a camera obscura, mirrors, and other optical technology to paint his canvasses. With seemingly unlimited time, money, patience, and resources, Jenison decides the best way to go about the quixotic undertaking of reverse-engineering Vermeer's secrets would be to reinvent Vermeer's paint, grind his own 17th century-style optical lenses, build Dutch Golden Age furniture, recreate the room Vermeer painted in, and copy the master's painting The Music Room...all by hand and with little-to-no experience in any of those disciplines. The result is amazing, and only solidifies what the world has already known for 3 centuries, that Vermeer was one of the greatest artistic geniuses who ever lived.
I saw the painting The Girl With A Pearl Earring last year when it was briefly on display in Atlanta's High Museum. It was a thrill to see this incredible piece of art up close, and by "up close" I really mean "from about 15 feet away, with dozens of other people, from behind a barrier, while it was being protected by bulletproof glass and an armed guard". Still, the painting had an otherworldly glow about it, and the colors were brilliant. Photos do not do it justice. If you get a chance to see one of Vermeer's paintings, do that. If you don't, see the film Tim's Vermeer.
