Archives - Detente With Hippie, 1972

I came across this shot of yours truly and my best friend Michael, April 1972. Michael's parents let him wear his hair long and he had flowery hippie shirts. I got away with messy but short hair, but the buttondown collar was here to stay.

Archives - Postwar tourists

My father (left) and uncle in Spain, ca.1947.

Archives - Mom Whoops It Up

My mother, about age 20, dancing with a neighbor who looks to me like he's wearing a suit coat and different trousers, Christmas, 1956, in Hartsdale, N.Y.

Archival Style

My grandfather in the middle, and great-uncles and such on either side. Shot sometime in the 1920s.

Seems they anticipated the ESPN anchorman style with the jackets done all the way up.

Morons Seek Jungle Setting

"Slaves of the Cannibal God" (1978) is an indifferent entry in the "Stupid White People in the Jungle" genre. Ursula Andress, looking like the Bride of Wildenstein, and Stacy Keach star in this feeble tale of a woman supposedly looking for her lost brother in New Guinea, but really after uranium deposits.

Lots of stock animal footage. A heavily made up (and hosed down) Ursula, with concomitant safari-shirt gazongitation tease. Bad teeth. Ritual sacrifice of iguana, and subsequent rejoicing. Two quarts blood, some used as sauce. Flesh-eating. Cannibal dwarf. Bad dubbing. Croc horror.

Way too much plot getting away of the story, and minus one full star for not showing Ms. Andress' upper torso nekkid.

Two and a half coils

Tweed Body Armor

This elderly Brooks Bros. tweed suit is one tough garment. It could be worn skiing, it's that thick.

The fabric repels water, snow, ice, mud — and snotty remarks.

I think the shoes are a little too sleek for this suit. Should have worn gunboats.

Home On Deranged

A tender moment in the shed with Ez and Sally

Deranged (1974) is a goober version of Psycho, with Ezra the weird farm boy as the backwoods Norman Bates. (Both flicks were inspired by the Ed Gein case.)

Ezra's domineering mama dies, but not before warning the boy about wicked wimmen. And after about a year in the ground, Ez digs her up for company.

'Course, she smells a bit, so he bones up on his taxidermy and embalming. Eventually he collects a whole set of corpses, nicely arranged around the dining room table.

Which comes as a nasty surprise for Mary the barmaid.

This is a surprisingly good film, with some dark comedy and a fair bit of glop. We've got dead bodies galore; one newly dead body, upside down; one barmaid in her skivvies; one fat lady at a seance; deer hunters; girl stuck in bear trap; demonstration of proper corpse dressing. Two breasts, recently dead. The cheesy narration by the newspaper columnist with the bad necktie kinda seals the deal and makes Deranged a solid three-coiler.

Ez putting on a happy face for his mama

So Bad It's...Bad

A tender moment and plaid pants fail to save Zombiegeddon from abject suckitude

Sometimes bad movies are exactly that — bad. Which is why the tagline of this blog used to be "I Watch the World's Worst Movies...So You Don't Have To."

So as a public service, I offer the following comments:

Don't waste your time watching Zombiegeddon. Even for a Troma film it's bad. Somebody please tell Lloyd Kaufman that a superficial resemblance to Mel Brooks does not make him funny.

Also skip Girls Nite Out, a college slasher that held initial promise as it was made in the mid-80s (the Golden Age of the Splatter Flick) and stars the relentlessly cheesy Hal Holbrook.

Alas, it is an incoherent mess with no redeeming anything.

I went to college in the early 1980s and I promise you if it had been like this I too would have donned a dancing bear suit and killed as many of these tools as possible.

Just In Time for Copenhagen Style

Warm and sunny today in NW Connecticut — clearly the result of man-made global warming from old trucks like this 1983 Ford F100 which I insist on keeping around, the better to exploit the world's resources.

Why? Because I am Eee-ville.

This J. Press jacket is kind of an odd duck — a 3/2 sack with twin vents. I grabbed last winter at the Washington store, where it was languishing on a rack of odds and ends. I forget what kind of a deal they gave me but even I could swing it. (Eee-ville just doesn't pay like it once did.)