GOOD QUESTION

REVIEW: THE MILLENNIUM BUG

The year was 1999. The Brooklyn Dodgers had just won their 17th pennant.  Dewey did NOT defeat Truman. World War II had just begun.

Just kidding, of course. The truth is, nothing happened in 1999 except the Y2K scare and the release of the feature film End of Days.

If you remember Y2K, you remember how stupid you felt the minute clocks struck midnight, welcoming the year 2000, and computers did not become self-aware and begin enslaving the human race. Either that, or they didn't shut down and wipe out our account balances and cease to remember how to function. I forget which was supposed to happen.

But the point is: all the people who had stock piled water, canned foods, batteries, flash lights, etc, felt really, really embarrassed. And they should have, because, seriously. If ever there were a more ridiculous fear campaign perpetrated by the media, I haven't heard of it.

Were there some folks who took it one step further and retreated into the middle of the woods, far from technology, just to play it safe? It's possible. In fact, more than possible, because I can say for certain that the Haskin family did just that. With their car packed to the brim with luggage, Christmas cookies, and good intentions, the Haskin family 2.0 - now featuring a new stepmother - have set off for their first New Year as a New Family. It is a quasi New Year celebration mixed with a honeymoon mixed with an escape of the alleged Y2K everyone's been talking about. It was supposed to be nothing but champagne, noisemakers, and stupid hats.

Until an inbred family of maniacs crash the party and kidnap the family. 

But wait! Seems there is a large mutant bug running around the woods as well!

But wait! Seems as if there is an archaeologist or a zoologist or some kind of ologist tracking the mutant and recording nearly every move!

But wait! Seems as if someone is giving birth to a mutant baby!

For having such a stupid concept, The Millennium Bug has a lot going on. We have the Haskin family venturing into the deep dark woods; we have a minute military presence wandering around those same woods; and we have a Texas Chain Saw Massacre-inspired family of inbreeds living in a cramped farmhouse in - you guessed it - the woods. It's natural that all of these subplots would soon meet as one, and the results are...odd. 

A large part of The Millennium Bug's marketing campaign has focused on the whole no CGI/practical effects only thing. Is that something to be proud of in 2013? Even with insanely low budgets, yes, it is. For far too long filmmakers have used CGI to tell their story - and I'm not even talking about low budget productions. So many of Hollywood's biggest films are nothing more than promo reels for the visual effects artists responsible for destroying the world, or resurrecting gigantic robots, or destroying the world by resurrecting gigantic robots. The magic is gone. Demands of "how did they do that?" have become irrelevant, as the answer is now boring, and one word: "computers."

That is where The Millennium Bug shines. It wears its humble influences lovingly on its latex-covered shoulder. Rubber heads, red-dyed corn syrup, camera tricks. The golden age of cinema - in both technique and concept - is temporarily back. But with it comes the unfortunate pratfalls that littered those "classics" as well, the biggest offender being the less than convincing acting. But this is throwback territory, after all.

At times it feels as if there is a bit too much going on. The Haskin family, the scientist, the weirdo inbred clan - though they all intermingle in a perfectly fine way, it still feels a bit too crowded. The scientist, for example, could easily have been lost and not affected much. He exists for no other reason than to provide exposition, which no one requires in a movie of this ilk, anyway.

The mutants of the '50s and the grime of the '70s are ever present. What we have here are two fairly straightforward and familiar horror tropes - the mutant in the woods, and the inbred crazy family - instead they've been joined together, and the events legitimately become unpredictable. Characters whom we're led to believe will be the hero...definitely aren't. Those we're sure will survive get bullets through the head, or hatchets to the chest.

We also get multi-nippled breasts, which no one ever expects. 

The actual in-camera effects are admittedly great. This deserves special attention, as this is definitely a low budget affair. The effects become less convincing when greenscreened in behind a fleeing character, but again, given its budget, it feels spiteful to point that out.

The best thing about The Millennium Bug is that it does not want you to take it seriously. A throwaway joke involving a man carving what looks like a penis until he turns it around to reveal it's some kind of holy relic pretty much solidifies that fact. It's there for no other reason than to make its audience laugh their best Beavis & Butthead laugh and say, "that's a wiener."

Will audiences be talking about The Millennium Bug in years to come? Probably not. But it certainly makes for some good present conversation, as there is currently nothing else like it.

CREEP

There have been sightings of the black car near a small town an hour drive to Ottawa, Ontario. We found out out the hard way.

The place is very eerie and quiet. Myself and 2 other friends were driving to Ottawa late night when we decided to stop by for some food and use the restrooms at a nearby small town. To reach the town, you had to drive through a section that had nothing but corn fields left and right.

While we were driving, headlights shone behind us. It was pretty bright. We decided to slow down and let it pass. My friend and I both looked out to see the car (1930s classic Ford). Inside were an elderly couple. As the car passed by us, behind the moonlight, the man looked directly at us: he had no jaw, just the upper jaw and the eyes did not twinkle in the moonlight, as if they were dead eyes, or a matte black. We slowed the fuck down to a crawl, freaked out by what we saw. The driver, being the ass that he is, decided it was a good idea to chase the car down.

He gunned it. We were doing 120kph on this narrow and bumpy road. The next exit was a turnpike a few KM away. There is absolutely NO WAY that car had the speed to match us. There were no houses, no exits, just corn fields. Where it went, we had no idea.

Creep.

Image.

DELETED ENDING

Screenplay for the deleted original ending of The Shining. When the film was first released, a hospital epilogue was located between the shot of Jack frozen in the snow and the long dolly shot through the lobby that ends on the July 4, 1921 framed photo.

Kubrick decided to remove the scene very shortly after the U.S. opening, dispatching assistants to excise the scene from the dozens of prints showing in Los Angeles and New York City. All known copies of the scene were reportedly destroyed, although it is rumored that one surviving copy may exist.

Stolen with love from The Overlook Hotel.

NO SHAME

This is too amazing.

From a review of The Asylum's Hansel & Gretel by Dread Central:

No doubt designed to capitalize on the big screen release of Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, The Asylum’s Hansel & Gretel is a mockbuster in name only. A different beast altogether, a Texas Chainsaw fairy tale of sorts, in which two modern teenagers named Hansel and Gretel get trapped in cannibal witch Dee Wallace’s gingerbread house of horrors where innocent young people are turned into meat pies.

Hold on a sec!

Wait just a minute!

What’s that quote on the cover art?

I guess I don’t need to bother finishing this review since, according to the box art, I already did.

“PRETTY DAMN GOOD HORROR MOVIE” – DREADCENTRAL

I’m the only person on this website who has ever written about this film so I know it has to be my quote. In fact, here’s the quote:

"…it looks like it has the potential to be a pretty damn good horror movie judging by the preview."

That’s from a story I wrote about the Hansel & Gretel trailer back in October – not a review.

I guess that’s good enough.

That is a new low, The Asylum. I am in awe of how scummy a tactic that is.

Although it's still better than the unattributed, unquoted one-line praising statements that usually appear on your garbage,

HOLY SHIT

Parasitic Worm VIDEO Shows Huge Nematode Emerging From Dead Spider Host, Biologist Says 

When YouTube user Brent Askwith saw a freakishly large worm slither out of a spider he had just killed, he recorded the ghoulish event and appropriately named the video "WTF IS THIS?!?" 

"I was just editing my latest montage and this huge spider came out, so I sprayed it and killed it, then this fricken alien worm came out," Askwith wrote in the video's description. 

That "alien worm" is actually a parasitic nematode, also known as a roundworm. While the nematode in the YouTube video is larger than most, Harvard University entomologist Dr. Brian Farrell told The Huffington Post that every human is infested with thousands of tiny nematodes. 

"Most have no obvious effect on us, and we are mostly unaware of their presence," he wrote in an e-mail, "but a few are large enough to cause diseases such as trichinosis."

Source.

THE PANZRAM FILES

I have kind of a thing for Carl Panzram. I've covered him previously here, here, and here.

I've long thought and will continue to think he might be one of the most fascinating figures in the 20th century. (If you don't know the man, catch up.)

Which is why it is beyond awesome that San Diego State University, to whom former prison guard/Panzram confidant Henry Lesser donated all the original writings by Panzram himself, has digitized and made available for free download the entire hand-written manuscript that went on to become A Journal of Murder we all know and love today.

Panzram's words are still as powerful as ever, but to see them in his own hand is pretty remarkable. 

The page below will lead to so much more. Click if you dare.