The Nether Realm is a hot and fiery place, so Scorpion and Quan Chi are not exactly pleased with this weekend’s weather in New York. Sub-Zero can screw himself with an icicle as far as I’m concerned. Which leads me into my first item of today’s You Suck!
Snow is the devil’s tool— And snowmen are his agents. I’m a summer baby who should have been born on some tropical coast, where the sexy lady Islanders are scantily clad and dance along the sandy beach. Instead, I was born on Long Island, and have endured many a snow storm and a few blizzards in my life. Granted, I’d be at work and not writing this piece if the whole NYC and LI areas didn’t get buried in that frosty evil two nights back. But then I also wouldn’t have gone without food yesterday, when Dominos cancelled my delivery 2+ hours after I entered it online. Sure, snow is a huge part of the isolation in John Carpenter’s THE THING, one of my horror favorites; but it’s also a huge part of that crappy prequel/rebootmixmagining. And I really don’t want to be absorbed by an intergalactic shape changing alien that crash landed in Flushing, Queens eons ago. Yeah, screw snow.
Chiller’s opening lineup for this April’s show— While we’re on the subject of chilly weather, Chiller revealed its opening lineup for the April ’15 show. I really need to give up on Chiller altogether. After 11 years of shows, it’s high time I stop checking their guest list. Even if I put aside all the non-horror guests at a show called Chiller Theatre, just how many ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW reunions will this con run? I know Peter Tork and Mickey Dolenz have been doing the show for years, so do we really need one-half of a Monkees reunion, this one including their songwriter Bobby Hart? At least their MADMAN reunion from last fall, while an odd choice, was inspired because it was a rarity. And they’re not sporting their umpteenth JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR reunion. Not yet anyway. I think it’s time for me to come clean and admit to myself and the world, that my last Chiller was my LAST Chiller.
A fan tried to eat Norman Reedus— While we’re on the subject of the horrors of horror shows… Before I became a GM at my new restaurant last month and time slipped out of my hands, I intended to devote a whole You Suck! to this particular incident. I’ll recap my unfinished entry here. From the accounts I’ve read, it went down like this:
At the Walker Stalker Con in New Jersey, Norman Reedus was signing his usual 4,000 autographs per hour when something most unusual happened. During a photo-op, an overzealous fan BIT HIM ON THE CHEST. You read that right. In fact, I know you’ve already read this, because all the big horror sites covered, and a ton of mainstream press. Security threw her out. Later that day, she posted some babbling apology on social media, lamenting over how she lost out on two other expensive photo ops, and how remorseful she was about trying to eat her favorite actor.
Look, I love Hannibal, and I was very jealous a few weeks ago, when I found out that Hugh Dancy visited one of our sister restaurants. Had he come to the NYC location, I’d have had to do everything to stop myself from drooling and asking him all sorts of questions about his character Will Graham. At no point would I have picked up a fork and tried to EAT him. The Walker Stalker Con has enough problems without a fan trying to devour a guest. This harleygurl68 is an embarrassment to horror fans all around, and makes us seem like the closeted, unstable nutjobs that non-fans have always assumed we are. Even worse, any time the phrase “fan attack” bleeds into the press, it’s likely to scare many celebrities away. Well, looking at my point above about Chiller, maybe it didn’t scare off Mackenzie Phillips. But then again, she’s got well documented issues of her own.
BONE TOMAHAWK reviews on horror sites— While we’re on the subject of cannibals, when I bought myself my Amazon Fire Stick for Christmas, I was jazzed to discover that BONE TOMAHAWK had been added to the Amazon Prime. I’d been reading all these reviews of it on horror sites saying it was an instant classic; and it starred not only Kurt Russell, but Patrick Wilson, two of my favorite actors. A Western horror with these two fine thespians? What could go wrong?
Plenty, unfortunately. If you’ve seen John Ford’s classic Western THE SEARCHERS, you’ve seen an infinitely better version of BONE TOMAHAWK. You’ve also seen a film that comes just as close as TOMAHAWK to being a horror film. There’s some brutal violence in the more recent effort, don’t get me wrong. But horror is all about tone, and though it’s got a few creepy scenes, TOMAHAWK doesn’t qualify any more as a horror flick than TWILIGHT. It’s more a “find and save the damsel in distress” film than a “fight and escape the cannibals” film. We don’t even see the cannibals until way into the flick; lots of talk about how terrifying they are, but not much of them actually terrifying so much as a cactus.
So what the Hell was the horror community going nuts over, and why were so many of its bloggers reviewing this flick? I’ll speculate we have Eli Roth to blame. How so? Call it The GREEN INFERNO Hangover. Cannibals became a hot topic over the summer, when Roth’s long-delayed ode to Deodato hit screens. Given how frothy the horror geeks got about the flick, and how divided they were over it, it seems their residual energies had them raring to jump on anything involving the word “cannibals.” So when they came across the plot description of TOMAHAWK, the pack devoured it and regurgitated a bunch of reviews.
Which is exactly why I’m going to review BONE TOMAHAWK. Not because I want to join the herd. You know me much better than that. No, I’ll review it to discuss exactly why it shouldn’t be reviewed on a horror site. Sure, I’ll be taking “beyond fright” to new heights, but maybe my readership will read it as a litmus test. And maybe some of the bandwagon jumpers on other horror blogs will take notice as well. At least I’ll be able to discuss the fine acting of Kurt Russell and Patrick Wilson. Even in a boring flick, that’s worth it.
So to snow, Chiller, cannibals and Westerns in disguise, IT’S OFFICIAL! YOU SUCK!
-Phil Fasso
