This was out on the curb in my neighborhood. Obviously the result of a very crazy person trying to be funny and clever, I like how the text, written from the perspective of "Giant Chest of Drawers," goes completely off the rails at the end. "It's odd." Yes, indeed.

Sorry about the photo quality. Taken with my cell phone, which I've had since about 2006.

While going through old postcards at a flea market outside of Columbia, MO over the holidays, I happened upon a box of a family's photos, which the proprietor hadn't realized was there and sold to me for a dollar. This was by far the pick of the litter. You'll note that the print is dated January 1971 on its border.

I don't know these people at all, but this is an amazing image and I hope they had rich, fulfilling lives up to the point that their treasured heirlooms wound up at a mid-Missouri flea market.

So, I'd planned to skip the latest "Terminator" movie, since it is by all accounts a stinking piece of garbage that reportedly cost somewhere between $200 million (publicized) and $360 million (inside scoop) to produce, not counting marketing costs, an act of budgetary hubris so great that its inevitable failure can only be more amusing than the film itself. That is, I'd planned to skip it until my filmmaker pal Mike Williamson, a cinema connoisseur in the truest sense, announced on Facebook that he would be seeing the movie in a theater equipped with the brand new D-Box technology and was looking for someone to join him.

What is D-Box, you might ask? And indeed, you might have to ask repeatedly, as D-Box's marketing campaign can thus far be described as "secretive," or perhaps "totally ineffective." Whereas other recent cinema gimmicks, such as digital 3-D and fake-ass IMAX screens, are aggressively pimped out in every multiplex, D-Box has been quietly installed in a handful of theaters with the sort of fanfare that usually accompanies a change in upholstery, which is actually a pretty accurate comparison. But I'll get to that.

D-Box is something William Castle might have thought up if he had a shitload of venture capital financing and was having a not very creative day. According to an awesome video on the D-Box website, D-Box "felt inspired to allow audiences to experience the true, intended emotions of watching movies." Then they show the actual D-Box Simulator chair, and it's just a cushy chair that vibrates a little and has hydraulics on the bottom that can raise it up an inch or so. It's notable, in fact, just how few times the chair is actually shown in the fifteen-minute promotional video. It's really only onscreen for a couple of seconds; all other times, the purported experience of sitting in the chair is being illustrated through the awestruck reactions of actors and various CGI effects. It's like the makers of D-Box realized that people would look at it and say, "Wait, a chair that vibrates when something onscreen explodes? And it costs $50,000*? Are you fucking kidding?"

(*Price listed on site for a single chair. Really.)

Here is the best part of the FAQ page:

Are the motion effects designed to reflect "movement" in a film, i.e. a car chase, the "rumbling" of explosions, both, or more?

Yes it is.  Only D-BOX Motion System can offer motion effects and intelligent vibrations perfectly synchronized with the action onscreen.  The D-BOX Motion System generate 3 types of movements and intelligent vibrations: pitch, roll and heave, that move you forwards and backwards, from side to side and up & down and create an unmatched realistic immersive experience,   the most amazing Home Entertainment experience you have ever tried.

Yes it is indeed. That about sums it up. The chair is synced with the film to move around a tiny bit to simulate the movement of whatever's onscreen. For a mere $20 a ticket, if you live in Los Angeles, you can enjoy "Terminator Salvation" in a chair that rattles around a little whenever something is happening.



Is it worth it? Well, no. No, it really isn't. As Mike put it, "I wouldn't want to see a movie I was really excited to see that way, because it's kind of distracting. But then, why would I pay $20 to see a movie I didn't really want to see?"

Apparently D-Box commercial screenings began with "Fast and Furious" a month or so ago, and that would have probably been the best possible movie to see in a D-Box seat, as it does convey the impression of being in a moving automobile rather nicely. (Although at the Mann Chinese 6, our theater, the D-Box seats are all in the very back row, which is kind of lame; shouldn't they be up front?) "Terminator Salvation" also kind of worked nicely. The only good things about that movie are its technologically staggering action sequences, and my chair dutifully reared and rumbled along with those, making an otherwise pretty dull and intolerable film seem a lot more fun that it actually was. When the D-Box seat was active, it was actually pretty fun, but I guess I was hoping for more extreme hydraulics for my buck. I had my chair on the highest setting and still found the experience frustratingly subtle at times, in stark contrast with the acting onscreen.

I don't know what the next D-Box movie will be, because their website doesn't tell you, but I kind of have a feeling that D-Box is not the cinematic revolution its makers claim and will be completely forgotten in a year or so. So with that in mind, if it sounds fun to you, by all means you should check D-Box out as soon as possible. D-Box chairs might be the Fisher-Price turntables and PixelVision cameras of the future, a retro technology that seemed delightfully, bizarrely anachronistic even at the time of its introduction.



(Author's note: I do not, in fact, own a pair of Reeboks.)

Brian Collins and I have recorded yet another commentary track, this time with special guest Evan "E.L." Katz, of Autopsy/Pop Skull/Home Sick "fame." This time, I was really hungover and exhausted and Evan and Brian were boozing. Also, this time Brian managed to select a film possibly even more horrid than Cathy's Curse, 1988's whimsical slasher-in-a-campground shitfest Memorial Valley Massacre.



How to elucidate the plot of Memorial Valley Massacre? The most accurate summation would probably be something along the lines of, "A bunch of assholes stumble around a camping site saying mean things to each other and occasionally running into a homicidal caveman." But that doesn't fully explain the fact that the caveman is the son of the campground's drunken supervisor, who's been looking for his son for the past twenty fucking years with no success even though he lives in the one fucking cave in what appears to be a fairly small area of land. Hey, drunky, a hint for next time: Your son probably isn't hiding at the bottom of that bottle of Jose Cuervo. No, he's probably not hiding at the bottom of that bottle of Evan Williams, either. You're missing my point.

Point! Get it? Ugh, I'm sorry. Anyway, this is a still from the best scene in the movie, so... yeah.

Memorial Valley Massacre is a fucking horrible movie. Really, the only good thing about it is no one bothered to copyright it so now it's in the public domain and you can stream or download it online for free and listen to Brian, Evan and me bitching incessantly over the inane dialogue.

I didn't even fully understand this last time, but these videos are freely available via iTunes as a podcast. Just search for "Bloody Disgusting" or "Horror People" or something to that effect. 

You can also either download or stream Memorial Day Massacre with our audio track from this webpage right here. If you click on the "Pod" button it starts playing in Quicktime. Or Brian's uploaded the streaming video to his blog page here, which seems to work better for some reason. Though both work fine.

This will probably be on the Bloody Disgusting website soon enough, to keep some variety for their readers who aren't solely seeking casting information for Breaking Dawn or Rob Zombie's Halloween 3: The Season of the Witch, which is actually just a video montage of Rob Zombie repeatedly depositing checks at his local bank branch and laughing. But you can get it here first.


And as we learned from Cathy's Curse, wildly inappropriate video box art always means a good public domain find.

Coming up next: Suburban Sasquatch It's serious.

You know what's cool about having all these statewide elections in California? I feel like I'm really aware of everything that's happening in terms of our state government and its regulations, and actually have a say in it.

You know what sucks about having all these statewide elections in California? I feel like I'm really aware of everything that's happening in terms of our state government and its regulations, and actually have a say in it. Regarding that last part, sure, I know I'm smart and have informed opinions on things. While you were confusedly putting G.I. Joe on top of Barbie, I was reading "The Red and the Black" in its original French and masturbating to the really hot scenes in which Sorel considers seducing Mathilde de la Mole. But that doesn't mean I'm an expert on everything. Like, remember the last election, oh, three months back, when there was a proposition on the ballot that the L.A. Times figured out would have affected exactly one living person in the last ten years? Did I really need to educate myself on that subject enough to vote on it? Isn't there, like, a committee of people, elected officials, maybe, who are experts on this sort of thing and can make a decision on it without my input?

The answer, of course, is: THAT'S COMMIE TALK! Now get ready, 'cause it's votin' time again in California!!!

California Statewide Special and Consolidated Elections - May 19, 2009

State Measures

Okay, so this election starts off with six state measures that I guess are the raison d'etre of the whole thing, all about trying to balance our state budget and its infamous $42 billion deficit. By all available accounts, these measures are terrible, everyone hates them, and we all have to vote for them because they're better than the alternative, which involves California spiraling further into bankruptcy and decay until we're all wearing leather masks and murdering each other for gasoline like in a dystopian Bruno Mattei movie.

I've never seen such a wide range of endorsements from ideologically similar publications, with newspapers like the Los Angeles Daily News and the San Francisco Chronicle urging a "Yes" vote on all six measures and the San Francisco Bay Guardian and San Diego Urban Tribune urging a "No" vote on all six measures, with all the others mingling in between. Having read a lot of these conflicting endorsements, I am left without a strong opinion on most of these measures. They all seem like they have both good and bad aspects to them. I'm only posting my endorsements here because I continue to think doing so is funny, but if you disagree with my endorsements below and you have a good reason to do so, let me know and you'll probably change my mind. Unless you're JT Kleiser. In which case, fuck off.

1A - "Rainy Day" Budget Stabilization Fund. - Yes

This, the first one, is apparently the biggest deal, judging by the amount of junk mail and posted signs I've seen about it. The idea here is to extend some temporary tax increases and channel three percent of state revenues into the titular emergency provisions account each year, which would give the government some flexibility in dealing with crises such as state bankruptcy or an earthquake turning Santa Monica into an island. I understand this isn't normally something that state governments need to do, but it seems like an okay idea to me under the present circumstances.

1B - Education Funding. Payment Plan. - No

This would require $1.5 billion in additional education spending each year until $9.3 billion has been spent, an amount that was supposed to have been spent on education under Proposition 98 but wasn't due to the financial crisis. The problem here isn't the education spending, which I'm all for, but the budget mandates, which aren't necessarily a good idea at the best of times. In other words, if we'd had this money to spend on education, we would have spent it, and if we create budget mandates saying we have to spend it that's only going to make things worse overall. There's furthermore little flexibility in terms of where this money would go in the school system, and money should be able to be moved to where it's most needed in times of crisis, right? Supposedly this is only on the ballot to get the school unions to support all of the measures.

1C - Lottery Modernization Act. - No

Okay, let me see if I can explain this. This would slightly expand the California State Lottery system while allowing the government to borrow $5 billion against future lottery profits to balance our current budget. We'd then have to take that money from education spending to repay that loan, but we'd then repay the education money from the General Fund, which is where we put the loan money in the first place. And the increases to the lottery system would theoretically guarantee the future profits we'd borrowed against. I can truthfully see both sides of this; why not increase the lottery system to get the money we need right now? But, on the other hand, that just kind of seems like the sort of financially irresponsible shenanigans that got us into this mess in the first place. So I'm voting no on it, but you should feel free to vote yes if you like lottery tickets and stuff.

1D - Children's Services Funding. - Yes

Isn't kind of weird that measures have names like "Children's Services Funding" when what the measure is proposing is taking funding away from children's services? I mean, I get why it's called that, it's just weird. Anyway, back in 1998 California voters approved Proposition 10, which created a tobacco tax to raise money for children's services, particularly First 5 commissions, which support programs for at-risk children under the age of five, in each county. Apparently much of that money has been badly spent on ads backing Rob Reiner, due to a lack of specifics in the proposition, but a lot of the non-Rob Reiner spending has undoubtedly done some good. This measure would temporarily reallocate about half of that money - $268 million - each year for five years to help out the general fund and balance the budget. The First 5 organization currently has $2.5 billion in spending reserves, but not every country has spending reserves, while others, such as L.A. County, have a lot, meaning that these counties would be least affected. I'm tentatively for this, at least until that spending reserve goes away.

1E - Mental Health Funding. Temporary Reallocation. - Yes

Similar to 1D. In 2004, votes approved Proposition 63, which was a 1% income tax on persons making $1 million or more per year in order to fund services for the mentally ill. I think I voted for that. This measure would take $230 million of this money away each year for two years and spend it instead on Medi-Cal, particularly on screening young Medi-Cal recipients. Again, the state has $2.5 billion in money from Prop 63 that has yet to be spent, which will offset the loss of $460 million over the next two years, which Medi-Cal also needs. Again, I'm all for public services for the mentally ill, which are certainly underfunded, but this doesn't seem like it would have much of a negative effect on anything.

1F - Elected Officials' Salaries. Prevents Pay Increases During Budget Deficit Years. - Yes

Finally, an easy one. 1F essentially affects nothing; it's just on there to make voters feel better, an implied slap on the wrist for the legislators we blame for running our state into the ground. But there does seem to be some logic to it; in times of economic hardship, when we're stealing money from children's services and treatment for the mentally ill to balance the budget, should any of our elected officials be getting pay increases? Probably not. I can vote yes for this with little debate, I think.

City/School Elections - Los Angeles City Attorney and Community College District Member of the Board of Trustees

What we have here are run-off elections from the previous election, for positions in which none of the candidates managed to secure the majority vote to win. So now they've narrowed these down to the two top candidates and you get to vote again.

City Attorney - Carmen "Nuch" Trutanich

Let's see, in the last election I voted for Michael Richard Amerian instead of Carmen Trutanich or Jack Weiss. Apparently I was in the minority. Of the two, Ol' "Nuch" seems the best candidate, as his opponent, Jack Weiss, has been running misleading attack ads about how "Nuch" successfully defended criminals as a private attorney. I get how there's some moral ambiguity there, but it sounds like the guy is good at his job. Why not elect him to where he can do all of us some good?

Member of the Board of Trustees, Seat No. 2 - Angela J. Reddock

I voted for Angela J. Reddock in the last election and now I get to vote for her again. I'm not sure what my reasons were last time, but undoubtedly they were fair and informed. Brilliant, even.

Member of the Board of Trustees, Seat No. 6 - Robert Nakahiro

Damn, in the last round of these elections I endorsed a pity vote for Jane Ardigo Scott for Seat No. 6, and apparently not enough of you listened to me because now she's out of the running. So, okay, of the two we have left, I guess I'll pick Robert Nakahiro. Nancy Pearlman, his opponent, is the incumbent and has supposedly done an okay job, nothing great, with a focus on environmental building construction. That seems to me to be beside the point in our community college system. I looked over Robert Nakahiro's website and there's nothing particularly good or bad on it, but he seems enthusiastic and nice enough. So let's shake things up on old Seat No. 6.



Yay, voting. Yee-haw.

In order to improve upon my script pitching technique, I will often record my meetings with a small digital audio recorder in order to listen them later and determine what I did right or wrong. Thus, I am able to transcribe my pitch for this project verbatim.

Unsuccessfully Pitching the New "Footloose" Remake

Okay, fuck. Is it hot in here? It's hot, right? Like an oven. Oh, you're not...? No, I don't think it's hot. No, I'm comfortable. I don't know why I said that.

Okay, fuck, "Footloose," right? Okay, sorry, yes, let's get on with it. I hear you. Enough chitchat.

So, okay, like, in the first "Footloose" there's this small town where public dancing is forbidden and Kevin Bacon goes to it and he likes to dance and all the kids in the town like to dance but all the adults are like, "No, no, no dancing," but all the kids dance anyway and everyone's happy. That's cool, but obviously we can't do that same plot again.

Why not? Well, it's just common sense, right? I mean, dancing isn't illegal anymore, is it? Maybe it was, like, back in the eighties, but I don't know anywhere where dancing is illegal now, even kinds of dancing that probably should be, you know what I'm saying? Unless you set the remake in, like, a Mormon fundamentalist cult or something. That's an interesting idea. But you'd lose the Mormon audience then. Most of Utah. Parts of Missouri.

So yeah, my idea was like, let's update this thing. You know, take "Footloose" to modern times. And what are all the kids into these days that their parents don't approve of?

Hip hop culture? Well, maybe. But no, I'm talking about crack. Crack cocaine.

So okay, picture this. You've got your kid from the big city, you know, and he loves crack. I mean, he lives crack, you know, that's his lifestyle. And his parents move with him to this small town where, like, nobody does crack. Like, they haven't even heard of it when he asks them about it.

So he starts slinging the crack around, you know, he gets a bunch shipped in from his old friends in the city, spreading the word of the rock. And before you know it, a lot more kids in this little town are doing crack. And it gets to the point where all the kids are doing it. And they love it.

So the parents in the town are like, "Well, I don't know about all this crack stuff," and maybe somebody at the PTA meeting, a preacher maybe, is all like, "There's no crack cocaine in the Bible," so they pass a law in the town to ban crack. But they don't really understand how important it is to their children to have this freedom, because that's what the crack is to them, a symbol of independence. The kids in the town don't want to give that up. Like, they need the crack now. They don't want to live without it. If the adults don't let them do it, they'll get very sick. Maybe there should be a scene where a guy tells his daughter, "I don't want you doing that crack anymore with that new boy," and she goes upstairs and she hangs herself and then the guy really regrets it. Too dark? I don't know, I'm just riffing here. But there should definitely be a scene where a guy says that to his daughter. Maybe afterwards she could just cut herself.

What? Oh, you're not really feeling the crack cocaine angle. Too edgy? Oh. Okay. Well, let's see, what else is banned now that kids are really into... Anal sex is still technically illegal in a lot of places, right?

Oh, that's it? Okay, yeah, sure, I've got another meeting now, too. But okay, you'll call my agent? Well, I'm just saying he can be really hard to reach. If you call him a few times and he still hasn't returned your calls, just send him an email, that's what I always do. His assistant will get back to you. Oh, okay. Yeah, no, I know how to find my way off of the lot. No, it's cool, I can go by myself. Alright, so, we'll talk more about this later, okay? Okay, great. Looking forward to it. Great meeting with you guys. Oh, this is your pen? Sorry.

So, now you don't have to download a 200 MB file if you want to watch it. You can just watch it.

Now that the technology has been worked out, we're going to be doing more of these, with more guest commentators. If you want to try to stop us, now is the time. We've set the bar low, but I do believe it could get a mite lower...

I have never previously ventured out to the obnoxiously-titled City of Lights, City of Angels (COLCOA) festival, L.A.'s annual festival of contemporary French cinema, mainly because they rarely seem to show any movies I want to see. Which is odd, because I don't hate French movies. In fact, I can think of at least three recent French films that I am eagerly anticipating the domestic release of (not even counting Gasper Noe's Enter the Void, set to premiere shortly at Cannes). The problem, of course, is that all of these movies I want to see are horror films. And, despite the fact that the innovative trend of recent extreme French cinema is more or less being universally copied right now, the COLCOA programmers would hardly deign to show a horror film. No, sir. They showed High Tension back in 2003 and that was quite enough for them. No genre films since.

So instead what you get are a spate of utterly mediocre comedies and dramas, the French equivalents of our Marley and Mes and State of Plays, that would normally never play at an international festival, but are devoured by the snooty COLCOA crowd, who would never allow themselves to laugh at a comedy that wasn't in French. Really, the COLCOA audience represents the worst of both French and Hollywood culture, a whining pack of spoiled, old rich people who can't understand why they aren't allowed a seat next to them for their fur coats at a sold-out screening and treat the festival volunteers like shit, which in turn prompts the festival volunteers to treat everyone else like shit. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Last year, due to my disinterest in the COLCOA festival, I missed seeing the U.S. premieres of a couple of good films, most notably Cortex, one of my top ten of 2008. So this year I was determined to finally see a film there. And looking over their schedule I was happy to see that they were showing a couple of films I wanted to see. Literally, two films.



The "Focus on a Filmmaker" portion of COLCOA this year was dedicated to Costa-Gavras, a legendary filmmaker who is best known here in the states for, well, nothing really. Oh, he directed Z. Never saw that. Anyway, they were premiering his latest film, the excruciating-looking Eden is West, and showing a French Cinematheque archive print of his first film, 1962's The Sleeping Car Murders, which has yet to be released on DVD. I was interested in seeing this film primarily because it is an adaptation of a Sebastien Japrisot novel. Japrisot, a French novelist who never quite caught on overseas (he most famously wrote the book upon which A Very Long Engagement was based, which isn't much of a recommendation), started his career with a trilogy of supremely weird noir crime novels, including the baffling The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun, which I highly recommend. The Sleeping Car Murders was his first novel, and, while I haven't read it, I assumed it would at least have a train and some murders in it.

Before the film, after a fawning introduction by the head of the French Cinematheque, who compared The Sleeping Car Murders to the early works of Godard and Truffaut, Costa-Gavras went up to the microphone and muttered into it in barely accented English, "That was all very nice, but really this film is just a thriller." The audience all laughed, of course, assuming that he was just being modest. Little did they realize that Costa-Gavras was if anything being overly generous to his film, which isn't much of a thriller at that. Really, there is a reason The Sleeping Car Murders has been largely lost to time. This is no buried gem, like Le Doulos, but instead a badly paced, by the numbers murder mystery with two unbelievably dumb protagonists and a mystery plot that makes not one iota of sense upon deconstruction. There isn't any cool train stuff, either. My love of train movies has burned me a lot lately (Transsiberian, the as-of-yet-unreleased-but-when-it-comes-out-for-the-love-of-God-don't-see-it Train) and this was just another disappointment, an utterly forgettable thriller with nothing more than the particularly stupid actions of its heroes to distinguish it.

Here, you can watch the whole thing on YouTube if you don't believe me (and speak French):



On Friday, COLCOA offered the international premiere of a film I was far more excited about: OSS 117: Rio Ne Répond Plus, which opened at number one in its native France just last week. (That title translates, somewhat delightfully, to "Rio does not respond anymore," but the English title the film is being promoted under is the far more generic OSS 117: Lost in Rio.) It is the sequel to the 2006 film, OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies.



For those of you who don't know, OSS 117 (aka Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath), the creation of writer Jean Bruce, was the French predecessor to James Bond and indeed would appear to have inspired Ian Fleming's Agent 007 more than just a little bit. A globetrotting spy, OSS 117 starred in dozens of novels and a few films back in the 1960s that were played more or less straight, like the early Bond films, but did not lead to a series with the same longevity. Then, in 2006, writer/director Michel Hazanavicius resurrected the OSS 117 character, but for a highly stylized spoof of these old spy films in which all of the OSS 117 character's flaws have been drastically amplified. The new OSS 117 is incompetent, boorish, racist, homophobic and blatantly misogynistic. And also, of course, hilarious.

OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies was set in 1955 and mostly drew its humor from the end of French colonialism, in which OSS 117's xenophobia and extreme cultural ignorance provide most of the punchlines. I enjoyed that film's style and loved the lead performance by Jean Dujardin, whose egoless yet cool comic style reminded me of my favorite Stephen Chow films, but ultimately it was a bit too slow and repetitive in its humor for me to fully love it. Happily, OSS 117: Rio Ne Répond Plus is the rare sequel that improves on the original. Set in 1967, OSS 117 is this time sent to Rio to assist the Mossad in tracking down a Nazi war criminal in possession of a microfilm list of French collaborators that OSS 117's superiors would prefer be suppressed. That description alone will probably tell you whether you'd enjoy this film's sense of humor or not.

Far from the joke-a-minute pacing of a spy spoof like Austin Powers, the OSS 117 films are fairly dry affairs, more sarcastic than silly. In achieving this precise tone, the acting of Jean Dujardin cannot be praised enough. He is simply amazing in OSS 117: Rio Ne Répond Plus, ridiculous, ignorant, anti-semitic and vain, and yet so good-natured about it all that you can't help but root for him. All that said, the films are definitely not for everyone. Despite the director being in attendance, there were quite a few audible sighs during the COLCOA screening and even a couple of walk-outs, and afterwards, when the audience was directed to vote for the film by placing their ticket stub in boxes labeled "Non," "Comme Ci, Comme Ca" or "Oui," I saw a surprising amount of people tossing their votes in the "Non" box. However, I really enjoyed every moment of the movie and found myself laughing out loud every couple of minutes, which I don't often do during movies that are actually trying to be funny. So, I would say it largely depends on your threshold for irony and overall appreciation of the spy genre. The first OSS 117 film, a huge hit in France, enjoyed a modestly successful limited release in the U.S., so here's hoping its superior sequel gets the same.



Not that my opinion should matter much to a festival with consistently sold out screenings like COLCOA, but I can't imagine I'll be back again. While both the films I saw were beautiful 35mm prints, presented in a timely fashion in the excellent DGA screening rooms, and therefore I have no complaints about the screenings themselves, I disliked the festival staff and snobby audiences enough to probably avoid any future screenings. The worst example of staff treatment by far was the woman who was selling wait line tickets for the screening of The Sleeping Car Murders. First, she accidentally charged several people $10 per ticket instead of the correct ticket price of $5 and didn't even realize her mistake until someone ahead of me in line pointed this out to her. Then, when an elderly man in line tried to buy tickets for a later screening that was sold out, and didn't understand her terse explanation as to why he couldn't, she sent one of the nearby volunteers to go get security to throw him out of the building! When he asked in confusion, "Why are you calling security?" she snapped back, "Because I don't have time for this!" Really? This wasn't just some flustered volunteer, either; this woman was the festival's ticket sales manager! Fortunately, the guy left before security got there and broke his arms at her behest, but that was one of the craziest overreactions I have ever seen. I was pretty unimpressed by that, to say the least. That experience, combined with the overall gross vibe of the supposedly elite festival attendees, was more than enough to permanently turn me off of the COLCOA fest. To be honest, I don't even really understand why this festival is so popular here and has such a devoted army of volunteers. I think I'll label it cultural envy.

Nasty Millionaire writes to tell me that his music blog at www.nastymillionaire.com is "getting better," and a cursory glance reveals that this is so. So for anyone who reads this blog and is annoyed by the fact that I won't post anything for a month but then I'll post three things in one day, I recommend a sunny vacation to Mikal's blog. His music is pretty consistently terrific. 

Nearly one week ago, horror writer/journalist Brian Collins (aka "B.C.," aka "Fright," aka "Ol' Beans") and I recorded a DVD commentary track for the marvelous 1977 Canadian horror film Cathy's Curse (aka Cauchemares). The idea was to start a regular feature on the Bloody Disgusting website entitled "Horror People, Dear Reader" (a reference that I hope is appreciated by some in the right spirit) that would just be people in various groups recording commentary tracks to terrible movies and posting them online, so that when you're watching a terrible horror movie, as you are most likely wont to do, you can download these tracks and bask in the shared revelry thanks to internet magic.

Even better, because Cathy's Curse is in the public domain, it occurred to us that we wouldn't just be able to post the sound file online for download, but we could actually sync up our commentary with the movie and post the entire feature film online with our comments as a genormous 200 MB Quicktime file! Talk about 88 minutes of procrastination suddenly available to you, the online viewer!

As of yet, Cathy's Curse is not yet up or streaming on Bloody Disgusting; it is just possible that my drunken diatribes failed to pass Q.C. over there. The entire Quicktime movie is, however, available for free download here:

http://sendshack.com/download/2bi6gg7

Just click on the "BD_Cathy'sCurse_Commentary.mov" link and your download will commence. I've downloaded it myself and can confirm that it seems to function, is virus-free, et cetera. Until we're up on Bloody Disgusting, this will have to do.

I cannot more strongly recommend this use of your time and hard drive space! Click on the above link immediately!

By the way, yes, the video quality is terrible. That's pretty much as good as any DVD copy of the film looks; they all seem to have been taken from the same Sinister Cinema bootleg. Easily one of the worst DVD transfers I have ever seen, if not the worst.

I began this commentary track drunk and ended it far drunker, so drunk, in fact, that my speech near the end is sometimes unintelligible as I slur my words together like a department store Santa on Christmas Eve. There was furthermore no preparation or research done for this commentary whatsoever. All of this, I think, is as it should be.

If this is a hit (and Brian already reports multiple downloads of just the sound file to our commentary, which implies that there are other people out there who own Cathy's Curse on DVD?), or even if it isn't, we plan to do more of these with other public domain titles that we can post online for fun. Any suggestions? We've already brought up Deadtime Stories and Death Ship, but if you can think of any others, let us know and there is quite a good chance we'll do a commentary track for anything you think of.

Oh, P.S., if you have the DVD of Cathy's Curse at home, first of all, really? Secondly, you can download the audio track of our commentary to sync up with your DVD here:

http://www.mediafire.com/file/my2dyywjjnd/Cathy_trackonly.mp3

But unless you really need to hear my intoxicated ramblings in crystal clear stereo, I'd say that Quicktime file is your best bet.

Thanks to Brian for ALL of the tech work here; all I did was show up at his apartment, drink too much and mutter profanities at his giant television set. Everything else - the recording, the commentary sync, the online posting - is courtesy of his efforts.