p e n g u i n d e v i l

Big day yesterday! This ol’ blog got 19 “comments”! Sadly though, this record setting event led me to blacklist all comments containing: “creampie”, “viagra” (how had I not done that one yet?) and “preteen”. Today, I added “guest” to the list, to end all of those “your guest book is great, try my hot (random female 1980’s star) pixxx!” comments. Those words join a variety of other words and any comment coming from the “.info” domain. Ah, the joys of the internet! It is nice how everything becomes an angle to make money. I remember back in the glory internet days of the mid-90’s when (this will show off my visionary sense) I couldn’t imagine that anyone would ever find a way to make any lasting money through it. Instead, they have found a way to make everything turn out money. While I can understand the “legitimate” angle of spam, I cannot at all see any excuse for comment spam. It is very irritating.

Other big news, and some that may probably lead to more movie/blogging time, is that the family leaves tonight. I find it a big bummer, but it may lead to me watching more movies over the next week as they gallivant around Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Anyway, I will certainly write more about this later at the family blog, which I have been very derelict with my duty towards lately.

Instead I have been pondering other things, like..

I continue to get really sick of China. I’ve long been ticked off about the whole Tibet thing. Even though China is an atheist country, I don’t like them messing with Tibetan Buddhism. I don’t really have problems with most eastern religions. I find that they (especially Buddhism) tend to seem more like philosophy’s than religions, and frequently lack the air of fascism that western religions carry. Over the last 15 years or so, I have known my share of Tibetans (and seen Kundun, of course!) and I think that it is terrible how China has laid waste to the Tibetan nation and culture and how everyone in the west loves to see the Dalai Lama and buy his books and all the politicians go nuts for him, but then ignore his cause and no one cares to intervene, like they did for Kuwait. Anyway, this most recent thing where China has officially stated that the Chinese Government has the sole authority to recognize the “reincarnated” Lama’s. I mean, the whole point of these Lama’s is that they are the same spirits being “reincarnated”, they aren’t selected. And while reincarnation is a bit ridiculous of a notion, it still is the way the culture sees these folks and to make it a political selection is adding even more insult onto the injury and dispersal and death that China has been laying on the Tibetans for 50 years.

Anyway, there is more information at Yahoo! news.

So back to regularly schedule business…

I watched The Thing from Another World! It is about time I’ve seen this, what with how many time I’ve seen the John Carpenter remake, The Thing. I haven’t ever read “who goes there” so I don’t know which follows the story most closely, but they certainly don’t follow each other. The have similar polar settings with The Thing being in the south pole and The Thing from Another Planet being 2000 miles north of Anchorage, but what this really presages is Alien, with mother turned into a scientist, Dr. Carrington, Geiger counters instead of motion detectors and James Arness (of Gunsmoke) as the alien. It is though a pretty entertaining old sci-fi film. Obviously, its location prevents them from unearthing a spaceship crashed long ago, but they are witness to something crashing and so they go to find it. After valiantly (oh, and accidentally) destroying the ship, they bring home a being in a block of ice and then argue about him. Of course, the scientist wants to thaw him out and learn from him while the army guys want to keep him frozen. Well, those army guys end up doing a lousy job of keeping him frozen and he gets up and goes about his business. While it is good fun, it is nowhere near the classic wonder that is The Thing, with it’s incredible and creepy story line. this follows more the traditional monster movie line.

So can one go wrong with a movie that is a sci-fi movie, a vampire movie and a zombie movie? You could certainly go right with so many elements. But, we’ll see… the following feature is brought to you by the Golan-Globus cousins, purveyors of much, much trash in the 80’s. Ok, it’s not all trash, but being known for Cobra, Death Wish, Delta Force, Masters of the Universe and American Ninja, well… Need I say more? This film, Lifeforce, while a cross of three favorites: Alien, 2001 and Return of the Living Dead, ends up being not a good film in any respect, unlike those that inspired it. A space shuttle (!) crew on a mission to investigate Halley’s comet encounters a two mile long space ship in its tail. Of course, they board it and find a lot of strange alien corpses, but also some containers holding some nude humans.

Did I say nude? In contrast to the average actress role where she wonders if there are any nude scenes she has to do, the primary actress in this only has one brief scene with clothes. She is wandering around completely nude in all of her other scenes. Now I’m sure we are all used to this sort of stuff, but it is a bit distracting to have someone walk around all over the place like that. Aside from that, there isn’t much to the movie. Energy vampireism, lots of fake looking shriveled up corpses, the acting is terrible and the script is dumb… Though some rather talented people are involved: Patrick Stewart, Aubrey Morris (once everyones favorite guidance counselor, Mister Deltoid), my favorite movie guy Dan O’Bannon (ensuring the blend of mastery and crap that is his screenplay career) and directed by Tobe Hooper, who reminds me that maybe he isn’t any good, I suppose that Texas Chainsaw and Poltergeist might be flukes.