Double Farm Weeks!!!

Happy National Farm Animals Awareness Week! Oh, wait and Happy National Farm and Ranch Safety and Health Awareness Week! Seems as though they should have spread these weeks out a little so as to maximize the celebration of farming. How do you celebrate these weeks anyway? Buy the pigs some new slop and fix that broken piece of fence around their sty? If only there was a movie that could honor both of these occasions. Of course there is and that movie is Black Sheep! No not the Chris Farley/ David Spade sort of sequel to Tommy Boy. That’s not a true horror movie but New Zealand’s Black Sheep? That’s horror. So to celebrate, I watched a movie with farm animals run amuck and so should you.

The Movie

Angus and Henry Oldfield grew up on one of the largest sheep farms in all of New Zealand but Angus is something of an asshole. He kills Henry’s sheep, Dudley, and as if that was not enough, torments him by wearing the skin and scaring him. As if this is not traumatic enough, Angus only stops when they are given the news that their father has died. Fast forward many years and a still shaken Henry is returning to the farm to sell his share to Angus. Needless to say, Henry has tremendous, sheep related anxiety that borders on phobia. In the years since, Angus has grown into an especially charming human being who may or may not be banging his herd. Angus is attempting to elevate the family name into the upper echelons of sheep herding by introducing a new, genetically modified sheep- the Oldfield. While the brothers enjoy a tense reunion, two eco/social justice warriors sneak onto the farm to expose the genetic laboratory on the farm. Grant and Experience sneak into the lab and Grant steals a sheep fetus in a jar. They are seen and flee with Oldfield scientist in hot pursuit. Grant is an idiot and he trips and breaks the jar. Not only has he lost his evidence of the genetic crimes of the Oldfield lab but it turns out the sheep fetus is not dead. The fetus latches onto Grant’s ear in a most Mike Tyson-esque fashion and crawls its way towards the main herd, spreading its odd genetic traits by biting other sheep.

Despite Henry’s phobia, he has agreed to spend a little time with farmhand Tucker. Their drive through the property is disrupted by a sheep in the road. Tucker gets out to try to move it while Henry panics and calls his therapist when they are waylaid by Experience who apparently has none with a rifle. She doesn’t know how to take the safety off and gives Tucker the gun so he can show her. Tucker is smart enough to keep the rifle. As Experience lectures them on the evil of the farm and the world, the trio notice smoke on the horizon and rush to the scene. Turns out Mike left has left the stove on and does not appear to be anywhere. They search the house and find bad feng shui, dead Mike and a really pissed off sheep- like head rammed through a door pissed. Tucker shoots it and they run for the truck only to find it surrounded by sheep and Henry freezes. Experience helps Henry ground himself by telling him he’s a tree and other new agey crap about chakras and branches which seems to work and they get to the truck but there’s already an sheep in the cab with Tucker but they speed off anyway. From here things devolve into mammoth woolly mayhem. Will Angus continue to be a baaastard? Can his genetically modified sheep shear the competition? Why does Tucker have a sheep foot? Will Grant be able to hold to his vegetarian principles? Can Experience pay off to save Henry and his new love? Watch Black Sheep and find out!


How It Fits I With the Day/ Why Did I Choose This Movie
With all the farm-based horror to choose from, why Black Sheep? Black Sheep is animal mayhem at its finest. It balances a sense of humor with the gore and scares that any good animal attack movie needs. Cheesy? Sure but also so much fun and it advances the cause of farm animal awareness and farm safety like no other movie could.

Lessons

• Do not sneak onto farms and steal genetic material even if it is for the most noble causes. Forget the criminal aspect. That’s likely the least of your worries. You never know the kind of humanity destroying shit you’ll unleash.
• Always make sure your weapons and tools are ready to use. Take the safety off the rifle, turn the chainsaw on and prime it. The seconds you waste doing it in a sheep crisis could be the difference between life and becoming a human sweater.
• Do not let sheep drive. They can’t. Even if they have been infected by a genetically modified sheep fetus. They did not slip driving ability into the genetic code.
• Pearl Jam album art is an accurate depiction of a sheep apocalypse. Get your copy of Vs. and watch Black Sheep. It will become very clear.
• Do not let crazy scientists conduct genetic experiments. I’m not sure how to feel about the whole GMO thing but if the scientists doing the experimentation are absolutely, sheep shit crazy, they should not be involved.

National Video Games Day

September 12th is National Video Games Day a day to celebrate sitting on your ass, eating snacks and mashing buttons on a game controller for hours and hours. I’m not much of a button mashing kind of guy but the rest of it sounds spectacular so I needed to celebrate the day with a movie. There is definitely no shortage of horror movies based on games. Hell there’s like a thousand Resident Evil movies. There’s even a bunch where games are a major plot point but none of those are Brainscan. And none of them have a villain like the Trickster.

The Movie
Brainscan is the story of Michael a teen obsessed with horror (weren’t we all?), video games, and his next door neighbor Kimberly. We know this very quickly because stares longingly at her from his window as she changes in her room. He also takes pictures of her- not ones she knows he’s taking. Michael is also very tech savvy and has a whole early 90s video call system and a computer that dials for him. When his best friend Kyle reads him a review of a new game called… Brainscan, Michael has to have it. He calls to order it since it will satisfy his sickest desires. The game interacts with his subconscious and he’s all in. The next day at school, Michael shows his horror movie club a particularly gross film called Death Death Death Part 2 which causes the principal to ban the club. Michael is mad but things get better when he gets home to find his Brainscan CD Rom in the mail. Oh and there’s also been a murder in his neighborhood and he meets Detective Hayden played by Frank Langella in an award worthy performance in which he shows off a wide range of emotions… well not so wide a range, really just kind of pissed.

Michael loads the game and the instructions are intense. He is ordered to hide clues and act as though he is a murderer. Michael hesitates but not for long and soon he is in a stranger’s room, killing the man and slicing off his foot. After the game, Michael is exhilarated, celebrating with milk and suddenly he has the courage to talk to Kimberly. He heads over to talk to her but while waiting in her living room (he didn’t break in, her parents let him in), he sees a news report on the murder of a local man- the same man he just killed in the game. He runs off and winds up at the crime scene and another run in with Detective Personality sorry Hayden who shoos him off again. Some twisted logic leads Michael to go play the game again but this time the game sends him an ambassador, The Trickster. The Trickster, a red mohawked man in standard 90s goth clothing, dances for an unimpressed Michael. He also gouges his own eyes, tells Michael there is a witness to the murder he committed and that he is also a witness. Don’t worry Michael, the Trickster won’t tell unless they play country music then he’ll tell everything. As the movie progresses, Michael’s interactions with the Trickster become increasingly strange- Trickster settles in to watch TV- and more violent as he tries to convince Michael to kill Kyle and Kimberly so they can’t rat him out. Michael is pretty fucked but you’ll have to watch Brainscan to see if he extricate himself from his technological nightmare. Will the Trickster eat all of Michael’s food and take over the house like some ginger mohawked, pale Kato Kaelin?- Hey it was a timely reference when the movie was released. WIll Frank Langella’s Detective Hayden portrayal continue to be Oscar-worthy? Will Michael kill the only two people in the world who seem to like him? What the fuck were we wearing in the 90s? Come to think of it, I don’t know the answers either.

How It Fits In With the Day/ Why Did I Choose This Movie
Obviously it’s a movie about the dangers of video games and how they can make you do bad things- nope that’s bullshit. Brainscan was the choice because of the Trickster and Frank Langella. The Trickster is one of the strangest villains of the 90s. He is as much unwanted houseguest as killer and the look is, well, very 90s. Some might say Frank Langella seems uninspired but the range of seriousness he portrays is stunningly small. Brainscan is definitely a product of its era and that’s not always a bad thing.

Lessons

• Don’t bring back 90s fashion. What the fuck was wrong with us? Who thought these looks were cool? Cut off flannel shirts? Those jeans? Just say no to 90s clothes.
• If a strange man comes through your TV and dances for you, let him but make him leave afterwards. Before long, he’ll be watching your TV, eating your food and trying to kill your girl.
• If a CD Rom game promises to fulfill your sickest desires and is delivered to you even when you chicken out and don’t order it, don’t play it. This probably holds true for video cassettes, CDs, 8 tracks or any other outdated media.
• Frank Langella=Legend.

Bowling League Day

September 3rd is Bowling League Day in the United States, a day to celebrate drinking beer and tossing your balls down a lane. Obviously, the preferred form of celebrating is to grab your buddies and your balls and go join a league. Equally obvious by now, I’m not going to go throw balls, I’m going to watch a horror movie and what better way to avoid a gutterball than Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama. Sorority Babes is the perfect game every bowler dreams of.

The Movie
Sorority Girls in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama is the story of college kids doing college kid things that get a bit out of hand. Jimmie, Keith and Calvin are nerdy guys just hanging out watching horror, looking at porno mags and drinking beers or in Calvin’s case- beer. They are craving excitement and girls. They know that tonight is the night the sorority house is initiating its latest pledges and that means naked girls so Jimmie and Keith drag Calvin to go peep on scantily clad sorority girls. Lisa and Taffy are going through their initiation at the hands of Babs, who loves to paddle the initaites, and two other sisters. Plastered Calvin and his buddies get an eyeful of the paddling but that’s not enough so they sneak in to get a better look. Needless to say, they are caught by Babs who alters the initiation to include these three clowns. She orders Lisa, Taffy and the guys to break into the local bowling alley and steal a trophy. Lisa and Taffy will complete their initiation and the guys will not be reported under the Babs Plan so they all comply and head for the bowling alley with Calvin now suffering the nasty effects of one beer- vomit! Babs follows to scare them when the time is right.

This seems like an easy mission for this quintet especially when the bowling alley doors are unlocked. They split up to find a trophy but Calvin finds the real trophy in Spider (Linnea Quigley) who is robbing the place. She does not like Calvin’s friends and she tells them stealing is wrong but these fools do not listen and find a trophy which they then drop. The trophy opens, releasing...Uncle Impy, a fucking imp. Impy offers them a reward for freeing them- wishes granted. Clearly, he is a benevolent imp so there is no way these wishes could sour on them, right? Wrong. Impy is a dick and everything the kids wish for goes awry. And the wishes??? Gold, sex and being prom queen??? Fuck, some of these kids are dumb. But not Spider and Calvin who wisely resist the temptation. As the wishes blow up in their faces, the bowling alley devolves into chaos seen only during midnight bowling. Demon sorority girls and a fucking imp? Nothing could possibly go wrong now. Who can survive the wrath of Uncle Impy? What the fuck is an imp anyway? Can you even stop Impy? Can these fools escape the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama? Why is there not more Spider in this movie? Watch Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama for the answers to these questions.


How It Fits I With the Day/ Why Did I Choose This Movie
Most of the movie is set in a bowling alley so I think it fits. Besides, I make the rules for this blog and I really wanted to add a movie with Linnea Quigley. In Sorority Babes. Linnea Quigley is the bad-ass Spider, a role she is well accustomed to. Linnea Quigley is also one of the longest lasting celebrity crushes I’ve had, starting with her role as Trash in Return of the Living Dead. She is also one of the best B-movie actresses ever so Bowling League Day is hers.

Lessons

• Beer puts hair on your chest and it will make you want to go peep on the local sorority. Drink responsibly. Hairy chests are not that cool and peeping on women is even less cool.

• If you find an imp/genie/demon in a bowling trophy who wants to grant you a wish, it should be a hard pass. There is no way it’s not a trick. He’ll grant your wish but it will definitely have some weird twist to it.

• Do not break and enter. I don’t think you should get your legal advice from this blog but there it is. Nothing good will come from B & E.

• Linnea Quigley is amazing. Did I say that before? Watch anything she’s in. Seriously.

Happy Labor Day

It’s Labor Day!!! Time for us to unofficially say farewell to the summer, kids to go back to school and I to go back to work. It’s also a day to celebrate the working men and women with one final barbecue, fireworks display or beach trip, all in a drunken haze. And so, to celebrate this Labor Day, I watched The Belko Experiment.

The Movie
The Belko Experiment is set in the Bogota offies of a not for profit organization that facilitates some shit for American corporations looking to exploit South American markets. This day, however, is very different. Office hero Mike arrives for work and is met by increased security, including bomb sniffing dogs and heavily armed guards. Then he learns that all the Colombian staff has the day off. None of this worries him enough for him to go home because he is that dedicated to his job. We also meet new employee Dany, who is wondering about the microchip the company implanted in her, Wendell, the office sexual harasser, Leandra, Mike’s office romance and Wendell’s target and Keith who has an ant farm at his desk and has named the ants. Just the kind of guy I want to sit next to for 8 hours a day. Mike is curious enough to call his buddy Evan, the in-building security guy but he knows nothing. As things seem to be normalizing, a voice comes over the intercom with a stunning announcement. The voice tells them that most of them will be dead by the end of the day. They are instructed to kill two people. Before they can escape, the building is sealed by shutters and the wifi and phone lines are dead.

Mike enlists help to escape including Bud the janitor but clearly there is no way out. Mike continues to look for peaceful, non-violent ideas but the situation worsens as the voice informs them that time is up and detonates the microchips of some employees to prove that this is a serious situation. Now they have to kill 30 people or the voice will kill 60. COO Barry Norris and his goon squad start to formulate a plan to achieve this goal while Mike still tries to explore alternatives and other factions form including the stoner conspiracy theorists who come to believe it’s all a poisoned water hallucination Barry and company start sorting the staff into groups to kill while a Spanish version of California Dreamin’ blares on the radio. Surely this plan can’t fail. Certainly the voice will be satisfied by this sacrifice. Death, violence and mayhem ensue. Can anyone survive The Belko Experiment? Shit just watch it and find out.

How It Fits I With the Day/ Why Did I Choose This Movie
The Belko Experiment definitely does not celebrate the American worker but it does highlight some of the charming coworkers you will have at any job. The callous, dickhead of a COO. The sycophantic, ass-kissing middle managers. The ineffective, whiny people who never do anything right. And you - the hero, the one who always gets more than his share of work done with no praise while standing up to the boss and respecting your coworkers. The Belko Experiment is a microcosm of the soulless, meaningless grind of your everyday existence. (Sorry, just a little bummed about having to go back to work).

Lessons

• If one of the requirements of your job is having a tracking microchip embedded in your neck, don’t take the job. You are not an employee, you are property. Your boss will know everywhere you go. No more strip clubs or late night trips to your dealer. And they might put an explosive in that chip and make your head explode.                                                                                           
• Do not let the retired special forces guys form the crisis response team. They could have flashbacks to their service and they will be very difficult to stop if need be.

• The life of migrant workers is not easy. Any employer could be their own personal Belko. Cut them some slack.

• WORK FROM HOME. There will be no chaos other than what you create. Unless you’re into conducting personalized psychological experiments. Don’t do that.