With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story

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Did Mary Poppins Go To Hogwarts?

[Found @ Miss Cellania. A big Bonez THANK YOU!]

UPROXX  Published on Jun 22, 2018
Readers were transported to Hogwarts for the first time with the release of Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone in 1998, but what if the Boy Who Lived was not our first significant magical student? With her magical bag, enchanted umbrella, cleaning spells, and ability to transport people into paintings, Mary Poppins may have been a Hogwarts student herself. The latest episode of In Theory makes a compelling case that not only was the world’s most famous nanny “practically perfect in every way,” she may have also been trained by the best.

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License: Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed)

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Freaks 1932

Freaks (1932)

Ever wonder what the movie FREAKS is all about but don't feel like watching the movie? Don't worry, Mike Frenden watched it and summed it up here so you don't have to...

Airplane! was a remake?

Ok. So who else knew that Airplane! (1980) was a remake of a schlock film called Zero Hour! from 1957? That totally blows my mind.

Batman: Dead End

So I saw the headlines in the news today about the Growing Pains actor who was missing and later found dead in Vancouver. I didn't think much about it since I'd never seen the show and didn't recognize the photo of him. Then I read that his name was Andrew Koenig and he was the son of Walter Koenig, aka Pavel Chekov from classic Star Trek. Then I read that not only was he on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine once, but that he also played Joker in the promotional short film, Batman: Dead End. This is way before Heath Ledger, of course, and some might say the definitive Joker portrayal -- certainly truer to the comic version than anything we've seen in feature films.

I Drink Your Blood

Every once in a while you see a film that ends up being way better than it deserves to be. You can't necessarily call it a good movie, per se, but it definitely has some kind of spark that you're not entirely expecting. I discovered one such movie earlier this week at the Plaza theater in Atlanta and thought I would take a moment to recommend it to those who haven't seen it yet. The film in question is I Drink Your Blood.

Don't come into this thinking that this is an amazing movie. Or a great one. Or even a competent one. It is the lowest of the low in terms of budget and the acting is pretty hammy across the board. But horror fans have come to expect that few films in the genre are actually good movies. They're usually varying degrees of bad, but with some creative or innovative means of storytelling thrown in for good measure.

The plot of I Drink Your Blood is your standard "Boy injects meat pies with the blood of a rabies-infected dead dog in order to sicken a roving band of satanic hippies who have taken up residence in an abandoned hotel and who have dosed the boy's sister and grandfather with LSD, but in fact ends up giving the hippies rabies which sends them on a rampage of bloodlust and violence" story. One that's been told countless times before, no doubt.

I Drink Your Blood was produced by Jerry Gross, the producer and/or distributor for a number of exploitation films that have since become classics: Mondo Cane, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, I Spit on Your Grave and Zombie, to name a few. Having seen the success of Night of the Living Dead, Gross wanted to capitalize on its popularity without being completely derivative. To that end, he hired David Durston to create a film that worked on a similar level but without utilizing zombies. He wanted something more rooted in real life. Durston wrote a script called Phobia that dealt with a group of Satan worshipping hippies that became rabid and terrorized a small town.

Gross liked the idea and allowed Durston to begin filming it. Gross ultimately decided it would be best to release the film as a double feature with an older black and white zombie film he had. In a stroke of genius, Phobia was retitled as I Drink Your Blood and the other film became I Eat Your Skin. Of course, this led to an ad campaign that utilized those names to their fullest.

Once the movie was completed the next hurdle presented itself. The film received the very first X rating given out based solely on violent content. This presented an issue for the producer, as every day that the film was not released was another day that the film wasn't making him money. Very few theaters at the time were willing to present X rated material, so he sent the prints to the theaters and left it up to the individual projectionists to edit the film as they saw fit. As a result of this decision, no two copies of this film that one could see were the same.

The version we saw at the theater this week was a full 8 minutes shorter than the "full version" available on DVD. In the case of our print, a good deal of the gore had been removed, as well as some sexual material. This led to interesting plot issues, such as a complete lack of explanation on how the virus spread to the dam (it was a gang rape), how one of the cultists had died (she had been killed after being gang-raped at the dam) and an absolutely amazing edit where a scene was cut in the MIDDLE of the exposition explaining the plot.

The hippies of the film were an obvious reference to Charles Manson and his "family". Given that the film was made in 1970, this reference would still have been quite relevant. Not only were they hippies, but they worshipped Satan, and apparently Benetton as well, given the racially diverse nature of their group. This included a black man, a mute, a middle-aged Asian woman, two white guys, and an Indian.

So, after all, this, am I recommending that you rush out and rent I Drink Your Blood? Not necessarily. If you are at peace with bad filming, bad dialog, inexplicable cuts, terrible acting, and the general feel of a 70's exploitation film, then you probably find this to be an enjoyable romp. It's not great. It's not amazing. But, if nothing else, it is very entertaining.

And isn't that all we want from a film?

An Experiment....

Harry Potter intently watched the pirated video of Britney Spears' boobs on his iPhone.
"If the RIAA or MPAA ever caught wind that I was watching an illegally downloaded movie of these tits on an Apple phone..." he thought to himself. His thoughts no longer on sex, he tossed the iPhone aside and picked up his iPod to listen to the latest podcast from Fox News. Story after story on Scooter Libby and all that rubbish on the Valerie Plame affair assaulted his ears. The Democrats were pulling another power move and were attempting to place the blame on George Bush and Dick Cheney again.
"Damn liberals", he thought to himself. "Republicans know damn well that Al Qaeda and the terrorists want nothing more than to take away freedoms, our American Idol and our porn. He loaded up Google to find the exact address for the Wikipedia page on WWE, thinking this might calm him down. Suddenly, his screen darkened and then switched to the dreaded blue screen of death.
"Damn you Microsoft!" he roared, as he threw his NASCAR cup at the wall. "Fucking Windows XP!!!" he cried. "I should have bought Windows Vista or at least used Firefox instead of Internet Explorer!!!"
"I have probably got a virus infection or a load of spyware due to the torrents and P2P I've been using", he sighed to himself. Oh well, even with the desktop down, he still had his PowerBook that was set up to use Linux. Pushing the stack of Pokemon cards off the top of it, he opened it up and turned it on. Back to the internet, he went in search of the latest football and baseball scores. He paused to look up nominations for the Emmy Awards and the Oscars. He wondered if the Transformers would get a nod. He knew many Christians, Muslims, Atheists, Buddhists, Hindus and Jews that thoroughly enjoyed that film. He thought of loading up World of Warcraft to have a go with his character, "Jesus Mohammed", but opted instead to play some Runescape. Finding himself bored, he opted instead to search for a Disney based poker game, but his searches returned nothing but "hot xxx virgins" and "barely legal webcam whores". Sighing to himself, he closed down his computer and resigned himself to an evening of Halo 3.

The Shining is Feel Good Movie of the Year

Coming soon to a PC theater in front of you, The Shining, starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall in a heartwarming story about a family's journey of self-discovery. In this hilarious re-mixed trailer, one of the greatest horror films of all time is transformed into the feel-good movie of the year. Chosen as one of IFilms' top clips of 2005 you will want to watch it and pass it along to your friends.