The rock ‘n’ roll slasher movie musical

An indie band heads for the woods to work on their music. There is a sign as they enter that says DON'T GO IN THE WOODS, which is also the title of this 2010 movie. It would have been more proper for the sign to read DON'T BOTHER WATCHING THIS MOVIE.

The band plays typical shoe-gazer music, introspective and pretentious. They are led by doe-eyed Nick, played by Matt Sbeglia. Nick is serious about making music, to the point of taking his band into the wilderness and setting up tents so they can concentrate on their songs. He also smashes their cell phones (oh the humanity!) Depending on your interpretation of this incoherent mess, he may also be the person responsible for the killings. This is Sbeglia's only credit on the Internet Movie Database, and I'm sure this is a movie he would not want casting directors to see.

What we're led to believe is that we're going to see a slasher movie. Normally I avoid movies about crazed killers attacking young people in remote locations, like woods or old farmhouses. I watched this movie because it was directed by Vincent D'Onofrio, an actor whom I admire. My advice to Mr. D'Onofrio is much the same as what I gave to Matt Sbeglia. Don't show this to anyone if you want to get another directing job.

The movie goes long stretches while these young men do their songs. They present the songs in their full form. So the movie takes a long time to get to the action. Some girls show up. Nick doesn't want any women around, but the girls apparently didn't get the message and have invited themselves. The girls also sing, which we see when they are walking in the woods to go home, or running away from a killer. The band plays songs while playing their instruments, the girls can sing with full accompaniment even without instruments. I didn't have closed captioning and I couldn't make out all the lyrics, but I heard enough to know the songs are full of angst and lost love.

Two of the girls, mad at the boys in the band, decide to take off in the middle of the night and drive to a motel. They sing their way through the dark forest with only lanterns to guide them, until they find the car, which won't start. In a short sequence one of the girls disappears, only to reappear a few seconds later (!) in the form of a chopped off leg on the hood of the car, which our killer, wielding a sledgehammer, has wrecked by busting out the windshield.

If I thought girls singing while going through dark woods was bad, it got worse. Later in the movie one of the girls who speaks only French, for a reason not made clear in the script (not unlike everything else in this story), runs to the group to tell them her friend has been dragged off into the woods by a mysterious man in a black topcoat and black fedora. She resorts to singing in French. About the time I got my jaw back off the floor from the silliness of that bit of business I was watching Nick and his girlfriend run from the killer. Nick stopped to sing a song. His girl tries to get him to come but he stands his ground, screeching out his ridiculous lyrics. It was more painful than watching people get whacked with a sledgehammer! The girl, as she runs from the killer, is knocked to the ground, where the killer appears to be pulling pieces of flesh from her back. The movie isn't short of gross-out special effects, but as she's being attacked she's singing. My chin dropped back to the floor and stayed there.

Nick makes it out, the only one alive, with some indication he's actually the killer. Eric Bagosian, who is credited with being in the movie, has two lines in the very last scene. Since he played D'Onofrio's boss for a time on Law and Order Criminal Intent, he might have been doing his friend a favor by stepping in for a quick scene. The ending is supposed to be some kind of surprise, but by then I didn't care, I just wanted the thing to be over.

If not for the endless music being played and sung in this movie I believe the movie would have been about ten minutes long. But as it is, it seems much longer than its listed 83 minutes.

There's a 1981 movie with the same title, which also scores about as low on the Internet Movie Database rating. It gets a 3.0, whereas this turkey does slightly better with a 3.1. If there had even been any sex or nudity I would have given it at least a 1.5, but on the IMDb rating I give it a 0.5 I watched it on Netflix online, and at the end where Netflix asks the viewer to rate it I gave it a "hated it" rating.

I believe at some point in the development of this movie it must've looked really good on paper. My advice is if someone suggests renting this movie hit 'em with a sledgehammer. Honest, you'd be doing them a favor.

This movie gets my personal Postino FLUSH-IT award.

Murder in Magna

Magna, Utah, is a town on the western side of Salt Lake County. It’s a working class town, where family names are apt to be Greek or Italian. A hundred years ago immigrants came to work for Kennecott, the company that owns the biggest copper mine in the United States. The town was on my school district route from 1980 to 1992, so I read this story from a true detective magazine with interest. A woman was killed in Magna. No murder is routine, but there wasn't much about this murder that would have gotten much attention. A white woman went into a boarding house with a “dark-skinned man,” an Indian or a Mexican. She ended up dead. In 1945 when the murder happened some bigots might have even said she deserved it.

And that's what struck me most about this article, published in 1950, the racist attitude that pervades the entire piece. As it says toward the end of the article, “Deputies Beckstead and Caldwell sighed with satisfaction and relief. ‘I had no idea there were so many Indians, Mexicans and Spaniards [sic] in Utah!’ grinned Caldwell, ‘nor that they all looked so much alike.’”

The hook for the whole story is a Navajo belief that one can tell a lie three times, but never four. Read the article from Chief Detective #2 for the reason.

J. C. Penney reaching out to new customers

The headlines tell the story. Today, June 11, 2012, I googled polls gay marriage support and going down the page the headlines say: “Same-Sex Marriage Support Growing in New Poll” (Huffington Post), "Majority of Americans support same-sex marriage: poll” (New York Daily News), “Poll says gay marriage ban losing support in Minnesota - Twin Cities” (www.twincities.com).

But in yesterday's Wall Street Journal Sunday (owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also owns Fox News), the headline for Al Lewis' column was “Shop ‘Gay C. Penney’”, which appears to be a slam at gay people, and gay people who shop at J.C. Penney, in general. Lewis says Ron Johnson, the new C.E.O. of the company, is attempting to target gay customers at the expense of the “regular folks” who shop at JCP.

I'm not gay, and I don't shop at J.C. Penney. Mr. Johnson notwithstanding, and the iconic status of J.C. Penney as a department store chain considered, I'm probably not in any of the demographics J.C. Penney is trying to reach. Mr. Lewis said the brouhaha is about a Father's Day promotion for JCP that shows two men under ad copy that reads: “First Pals: What makes Dad so cool? He’s the swim coach, tent maker, best friend, bike fixer and hug giver — all rolled into one. Or two.” A conservative group calling itself One Million Moms is protesting the ad and J.C. Penney, and according to Lewis, “It's fair to say One Million Moms hardly represents a million moms . . . But it's also fair to say this organization, though often branded as antigay, is expressing a sentiment common among the middlebrow demographic that J.C. Penney serves.” But does it?

Intrigued by the story, I searched out the June JCP brochure that came with my Sunday paper, and there wasn't anything gay about it at all. It must have been another ad that is causing problems with One Million Moms, and I missed it.

Apparently the campaign using two dads was only one of the ad campaigns launched by J.C. Penney for Father's Day. In the second half of the catalog they dispensed with the Father's Day stuff altogether, and showed this picture of a young, frisky couple obviously in some sort of sex play. No gay people there!

I believe the polls mentioned in the news stories with headlines on Google this morning are correct. What seemed unthinkable just a few years ago is now coming true, acceptance for letting gays marry. It's a long way from happening nationwide, and maybe in some areas it will never be recognized—in spirit if not in law—but it's coming. I've followed human rights movements all my life, civil rights, women's rights, and now gay rights, and every time a movement is started, with its argument of injustice and unfairness to them, it follows the familiar path of controversy and non-support, then support, and at some point it becomes written into the law of the land. We're going through those latter stages now.

Maybe J.C. Penney under its new C.E.O. will fail in its overall plan to increase business, but I don't know how reaching out to a segment of the community is a bad thing.  Support for gay marriage is growing, but that isn't what this is about. It's about JCP attempting to attract consumers that even Al Lewis said he never sees in J.C. Penney stores, openly gay people. (He doesn't say how much time he spends hanging around J.C. Penney looking for openly gay people, couples or otherwise.) If people view ads aimed at gay people as being threatening then they sound paranoid.

We're going through a period where the total demographics of the United States is changing, from a white majority to white minority. That is also threatening to the same types of people protesting gay marriage. They probably hate ads aimed at Spanish language speaking people. They'll lose there, also. It's only good business sense to be all-inclusive in attracting customers, and despite some vocal paranoics the public won't be affected at all by having gay people shop at J.C. Penney. The company is doing the right thing.

The Al Lewis column is here.

Hey!! Kids Comics

  Copyright © 2012 Postino 

     On an August day in 1961 thirteen-year-old Kenny, preoccupied with going through this week's comic books at the drugstore, was suddenly aware of a presence. He turned quickly to see an old man standing behind him. A peculiar-looking old man, at that. He had gold-colored wire rim glasses, gray hair, a bushy, drooping mustache with a white beard, a pot belly he was trying to cover with a Hawaiian shirt, denim shorts and, of all things, white tennis shoes of some strange design. He could have been a bum or a beatnik. The man was too close. He was grinning like an idiot, and Kenny began to shrink away.

     “Hey!" said the man. "Kenny, right? My name's Ken, too! I see you're looking at comic books and I wanted to recommend something.”

    Kenny was puzzled, but also alarmed. An old man talking about comic books? Hadn't his mom and dad and teachers all warned him about being approached by strangers, especially strange old men? They said they'd try to get at a kid through the kid’s interest.

     “No, no,” the man said, as if reading his thoughts. “Really, I'm not trying to scare you, Kenny. I read comics when I was your age and noticed this one here.” He pointed at one toward the bottom of the Hey!! Kids Comics  spinner rack. It was called—and despite his trepidations Kenny found himself bending down to read the title—The Fantastic Four. The cover illustration showed a big monster coming out of the ground and four people fighting it. “That's Fantastic Four #1, Kenny. My advice is you use your dollar allowance and buy all the copies you see here—” the man reached and quickly flipped through them, as Kenny moved back and away from the man's hand “—six copies. With that buck you can get them all. Then you know what? This comic book will be valuable someday. You put these copies away somewhere safe and guard them, and someday, fifty years from now, you can sell them for thousands of dollars each!” The man continued his grinning and Kenny's mind whirled. He looked past the man to see if he could just bolt and run, get to his bicycle and ride for home. The druggist and his teenage clerk were busy at the register with a customer but Kenny supposed he could shout and get their attention if the man tried to touch him.

     Ken sensed the boy's unease and backed up a few paces. “Really, Kenny, trust someone who knows. This will be valuable.” He had the imploring look of someone who believed what he was saying, but Kenny, who liked superheroes just fine, was looking for the titles he usually bought: Green Lantern, The Flash, Justice League of America...he didn't recognize the comic book the man was pointing at with such enthusiasm.

     “I know this seems weird,” the man continued, reaching into his back pocket, “buy anything you want, but make sure you get that Fantastic Four...” The man took a wallet out of his back pocket, thought about it for a second and put it back. “I'd give you money to buy it, but my money wouldn't be good. Where I live I use plastic to buy everything.” He shrugged. “Even if I had some cash it would have the wrong dates.” Kenny looked at him blankly.

     The man glanced at his watch. “Look, kid, I'm sorry if I sound funny. I'm really trying to help you, here, but I'm going to go and just let you do what you want to do because I can see I'm spooking you.” To Kenny's relief he stepped back into the aisle, leaving him some breathing room, at least. “But, I have more advice for you, okay? Because I know a bit more about you than you think.” Ken held up his hands and with the index finger of his right hand started ticking off fingers on his left. “First off, in a few years stay away from a girl named Debbie. You're a bit young to know about sex, but it'll cause you a lot of misery.” Kenny's face registered more alarm. Sex? No adult had ever mentioned that word to him. “Next, when you get your driver's license don't buy a black ‘57 Ford. It'll be too much trouble.” The man got to his middle finger. “Third, don't drop out of college or you'll end up in the Army. Fourth, remember the names Apple and Microsoft. Buy stock in Apple and in Microsoft when they come on the market. You'll be a grown man by then and money will be a little tight, but buy what you can...”

     He might have said more, but Kenny decided to make his break. “Excuse me,” he said, as he brushed past the man, who let Kenny go. He watched him rush through the door, and through the store window he saw the boy jump onto his bicycle seat and speed off without looking back.  

. . .

     Ken woke up with his dream still fresh in his mind. It was so real, so vivid. It was like he’d been in a real place. That old pharmacy, those old comics; an old memory coming back strong. He’d mention it to his wife, Stella, and make an observation. “Even if I could go back in time to those moments where we could tell our past selves what to do and what to avoid, it wouldn't work.” After sixty-plus years he knew himself too well, thousands of dollars in psychotherapy to find out why he made the mistakes he did. He told Stella, “I was the kind of kid who never listened to anybody, not my parents, not my teachers. If I had I would have avoided a lot of problems. I was the kid that even if I’d been told by my future self what to do to make life easier I wouldn’t have done it."

     Stella, who had heard him talk like that often, let him have his say because she knew she couldn’t stop him anyway.

     “If I'd only known then what I know now...” he let his voice trail off. “Stubborn. Huh. Stubborn and stupid. Oh well.” he said with resignation. Stella got the remote and turned on the Today program. Ken went to the kitchen for a bowl of cereal and a cup of coffee.

. . .

   In 1961, Kenny woke up, put on his clothes and brushed his teeth. The drugstore opened in fifteen minutes and he’d be there to pick up the comics he missed yesterday. If he saw the old man there today he’d tell the druggist, and he would tell the old man to leave Kenny alone. What was that he'd said about holding onto comic books for fifty years? Jeez, the guy must be mental as anything. Fifty years! The last thing Kenny needed was some old geezer bothering him, telling him what comic books to buy. Huh. And as for that “advice” he was handing out, what to do about anything else, for that matter.

. . .

Fantastic Four #1, with a cover date of November, 1961, went on sale August 8, 1961. This copy was sold for $47,800 by Heritage Auctions in 2011.

I bought my own copy of Fantastic Four #1 from the “Hey!! Kids Comics”  spinner rack at Millcreek Pharmacy in Salt Lake City. In 1969 I got married, so I sold it with my other early Marvel Comics for $175. I used the money to start a checking account with my wife, Sally. In that pile were perhaps a hundred thousand dollars worth of comic books in today’s market.

I can’t do anything about that but continue looking for a way to go back through time to tell my youthful self to hang on to those comics, and to hope he'll listen to me.

Goodbye, Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury in New York City, 1939. Photo by Julius Schwartz.

68 years ago today...June 6, 1944

A contemporary account of the invasion of Europe from Life magazine, cover-dated June 19, 1944.

Copyright © 1944, 2012 Time-Life, Inc.

The unprincipled principal

When I started my career in a large county school district in 1976 a female principal was a rarity. Out of sixty-nine principals there was one woman. Today more than half the principals of what is now a district with over one hundred schools are women. But when the district started promoting women to the position they came under a lot more scrutiny than men, sometimes for the better, sometimes worse.

Scarlett (not her real name) was a female principal who was very sexy. When she got her job in the early eighties the talk was that she'd slept her way to the top. It's the kind of sexist stuff you expect to hear when an attractive woman gets promoted. But in Scarlett's case, after knowing her for a couple of years, it wasn't hard to believe. Scarlett had been a teacher when my wife got her job in the district and they worked in the same school. “Scarlett,” she said, “had hair down to here,” (indicating her waist) “and her skirts up to here,” (indicating her butt). Scarlett was also a rich girl with a rich husband. They lived in a big house, and Scarlett had a governess for her child.

Not Scarlett but a good facsimile. Long hair and short skirt picture is for illustration purposes only.

The school they gave Scarlett was one of the oldest schools still in use in the county, built before World War I. This is a picture of the actual school in 1916. Sixty years later when I first saw the school it hadn't changed much. Modern schools have gone from three-story to one-story for safety purposes. At this  school in its last years a child fell down a stairwell and was killed. It precipitated the decision in 1995 to close it down. A few years later an arsonist destroyed the empty building.

If the first mistake the district made was promoting Scarlett to principal, the second mistake was assigning her, a rich woman wearing expensive clothes and jewelry, spike-heeled designer shoes, tight skirts and frilly tops to a school in the lowest socio-economic area of the county. Over 90% of the children attending the school lived under the poverty line, qualifying for free or reduced lunch.

In that area a car ten years old was considered new, fashion was what you got at Kmart if not the local thrift shop, and bling…well, forget that. It’d take an electron microscope to see the diamond in a wedding ring. Not like Scarlett’s large diamond rings, which caused temporary blindness from reflected sunlight. Scarlett was nothing if not condescending to the citizens who populated her school. There was no doubt it wasn’t her first choice of assignments.

Scarlett’s secretaries, Julianne and Cindy, had plenty to tell me about her. Among the many stories (too many to tell here) was the one where she called fellow principals to her school for a special luncheon. Scarlett had invited only male principals. Just before the luncheon Scarlett slipped into her office and changed her clothes. Her secretaries’ jaws dropped when she walked out in a white pants suit, through which they could see her colorful bikini underwear. As Julianne told me, “She put on quite a show for the guys!”

My own story of Scarlett’s exhibitionism came when I walked up to the front doors of the school. There was a school maintenance vehicle parked on the sidewalk. When I got to the entrance I looked through the glass doors and saw a maintenance man, a hunky guy in his twenties, standing just inside the doorway. He was at the bottom of a stairway to the second floor. Scarlett was at the top of the stairs, squatting. She was wearing a skirt, high heels, with her legs open, exposing her crotch. She was giving the guy a beaver shot! I walked through the door and she stood up. Show was over. The young guy gave me a look, as if to say, “Whoa, did you see that?!” I acted as if I’d seen nothing.

Britney Spears demonstrates what I saw that day.

Unbeknownst to anyone, during her second year as principal Scarlett had met another rich man and left her husband. The day after school was out for summer she put her letter of resignation on her supervisor’s desk, then left town. I heard she had moved with her lover to Texas. When they got the news at the school there was jubilation, a “ding dong, the witch is dead” style celebration.

The district immediately appointed another principal, a much more levelheaded and serious woman, who had to undo the damage done by Scarlett. For one thing, Scarlett had spent all the school’s money. I never heard the word embezzlement, but there was an implication that she had spent a lot of it off the books. The new principal had to be given special funds to set up school for the upcoming school year.

I was surprised to see Scarlett coming out of the district office the very next March. It was a cold day and she was wearing a mink coat that came down to her ankles. Through the grapevine I found out she had been asking to come back to work. The love affair hadn’t worked out and she had returned from Texas. This time the door was shut to Scarlett. She never worked for our school district again, and whether she got another job in education I don’t know. Over the years until my retirement I worked with many women in administrative positions. Most of them were serious educators, with the school their priority.

We’ve come a long way since the schoolmarm of old!

Even so, some were sexy, and attracted attention. For the next twenty-five years I heard the occasional story about female principals (and several stories about male principals, too, who got themselves in trouble in greater numbers than the women). None of the stories ever approached tales of the legendary Scarlett.

"The Last Train"

Yesterday we had a shaggy dog story, today we have a story that ends with a turn of phrase. Having one phrase with two different meanings is confusing as hell to people who are trying to learn the English language. We really don't think about it. We have spoken it, heard it, and we understand the context.

Fredric Brown, who with just a few words could deliver a punch like a heavyweight boxer, wrote this short-short, "The Last Train," for the January, 1950 issue of Weird Tales. Up to the last paragraph it isn't weird in any sense, but in the last couple of lines takes on a totally different meaning. Just as the shaggy dog story sets us up for expectations that are unrealized, this story sets us up for an ending that is totally unexpected.

Brown was one of the top genre writers of his day. He wrote pulp stories, mystery, fantasy, weird and horror. He wrote paperback originals. He wrote the classic What Mad Universe, where an editor ends up in an alternate universe based on a science fiction fan's imagination. He wrote the story, "Arena," which has been filmed several times, including as a Star Trek episode. I read once that Brown, when plotting his novels, would take off on long bus rides and work out his plots. Whatever a writer needs to make something work is good. Obviously, those trips through America on a Greyhound bus helped his creativity.

Brown was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1907. He died at age 65 in 1972.

“The Mysterious Card”

The definition of a shaggy dog story* is one of escalating events that build the reader’s expectation for a pay-off at the end, and then doesn’t deliver. It's a deliberate way of telling a story, usually told as a joke. “The Mysterious Card,” by Cleveland Moffett, published in Black Cat magazine in 1896 and scanned from a 1969 reprint, is not a joke but is still a shaggy dog story. It was popular because sometimes people are happy to be fooled by the unexpected, even if the unexpected is shaggy.

From the anthology, Great Untold Stories of Fantasy and Horror**, 1969, edited by Alden Norton and Sam Moskowitz. (Note: Moskowitz's introduction to the story is garbled due to some production error that slipped by the proofreader.)

Copyright © 1969 Alden H. Norton

*There’s disagreement as to what the original shaggy dog story was, but one of the stories vying for original went something like this. (My version is told without all the build-up of the original.) An American sees an advertisement in a local newspaper. A rich man in London is offering a reward for his lost shaggy dog. The man goes out looking, finds a shaggy dog, and has a series of adventures getting it across the American continent, on a ship to England, then from the port to the rich man's home. The butler opens the door. “Sir,” says the American, “I have found your shaggy dog.”

The butler sniffs as he closes the door in the American's face, “My master's dog is shaggy, but not that shaggy.”

**The title is misleading and hyperbolic. The stories aren’t exactly great, nor are they untold. They are fantasy and horror, though, or in the case of “The Mysterious Card,” unclassifiable as either genre...just...shaggy.

Tom Lea with the U.S. Marines on Peleliu

I'm a couple of days late with my Memorial Day posting. I think we should remember our dead every day, not just on the last weekend of May.

It's hard to forget what people went through in World War II when looking at the dynamic paintings of artist Tom Lea. During his time as a combat artist he painted images that sear themselves in our minds. These dramatic paintings were done to show the carnage of the fight for the island of Peleliu in September, 1944. A painting comes from the soul of an artist. Maybe that's why there were combat artists, to show us the soul of war.

The uniforms change, but the effects of war don't. Recently I read that 45% of our current veterans apply for some sort of disability.Lea's painting of a marine with the "thousand-yard stare" reminds us that no one who fought in any war punched a time clock at the end and went home without having their lives changed.

Lea went on to a successful career in art. I have some of the books he illustrated, including my favorite, Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver by J. Frank Dobie. Lea died in 2001 at age 93. There's more information on him at the Tom Lea Institute web site.

This article is from the June 11, 1945 issue of Life.

Copyright © 1945, 2012, Time-Life.

Happy birthday, John Fogerty

John Fogerty is 67 today.







Happy birthday!

Jesus by the numbers

Lord help me, I'm addicted. I'm a collector.

I'm not rich. I'm a collector on a budget. Friday Sally and I visited a couple of thrift stores and I walked away with an armload of used paperback books, average cost about 75¢ per book. I don't need 'em, don't always even want 'em, but when I see books with these kinds of covers I must have 'em. The collector sickness comes out in me, and I feel the familiar tug of the compulsion, that damned addiction.

Must...have...books...

I like horror stories. I like ghost stories. I like anthologies. For some reason I can't get enough copies of W. W. Jacobs' classic, "The Monkey's Paw." Here's yet another book containing that story. How many copies of that story do I now have? Who cares? I'm a collector, not a counter.

I love English paperbacks when I can find them. I've never been able to actually read a book by Edgar Wallace, a popular author of the 1920s (he died in 1932), but I had to have this Pan Book from the UK. What a fantastic cover:

But books aren't always enough. I must also have funky things that move me. For instance, incredibly tacky paint-by-number artwork, like this 16" x 20" Jesus. Sally and I found this in a consignment shop yesterday and I walked around the store thinking about it before making myself the owner. I knew if I didn't get it I'd be kicking myself all night. Compulsion won out.

I'm not religious, but crappy pictures of Jesus make me a hallelujah-shouter. What can I say about paint-by-numbers except god bless the wannabe artists who sit down at those numbered canvases and make their own art with little paintpots and cheap brushes. Older paint-by-numbers are sought after collectibles, like black velvet paintings. They are crass, kitsch, and they are wonderful.

Here's a brief history of paint-by-number: American History "Every Man a Rembrandt"

The collecting addiction is hard to get over, but then, I've never really tried. I just feed the addiction by acquisition. To continue with my addictive behavior I have to make room for all of these items. I've felt many times I couldn't squeeze one more thing into our small suburban tract home, but I always do.