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

Enough of this gibberish… Finally, back to the movies!

The first up this time is sort of a mixed blessing. I watched In The Mouth of Madness. This is one that I seem to recall liking alright, way back whenever it was that I saw it last, and now I tried it again, as people like to associate it with the “Lovecraft” movies. Well, it does contain lots of allusions to Lovecraft: the films title, the Pickman Hotel and the following novel titles: Haunter out of Time, Thing in the basement, Whisperer in the Dark. All of these are pretty blatant Lovecraft references… The movie itself though? Not so much.

In The Mouth of Madness is, on the back side, a promising and strongly cast thriller, but on the side that we see, it reeks of being a late 80’s TV movie of a Stephen King story (replete with a New England horror novelist named Sutter Cane, possessed kids and a made up town with evil afoot). It has some fun casting: David Warner and Charlton Heston, the generally questionable Jürgen Prochnow and the strangely familiar John Glover.

It also has potential, nice title and poster and John Carpenter, but once it starts with the terribly dated 80’s rock music and title sequence and you encounter all of the failed attempts at creepiness and the bad, cheaply made monsters, it’s too far gone. Sam Neill plays an insurance investigator hired to investigate the disappearance of old Cane, the worlds most popular novelist. He was sent away as a publicity stunt for his new novel, but he never came back. When he did sent a few chapters of his new book to his agent, the guy became a crazed axe murderer upon reading them! Our hero, the quite skeptical investigator, reads a bunch of his books and decides that his fictional town is actually a real town in New Hampshire, just one that is not on any maps and that no one has ever heard of. So off he goes looking for it. And he finds lots of things, things beyond the pale of normal horror, as I said before, beyond the pale like a Stephen King short story. In the end, it really doesn’t have anything going for it, and then I noticed from the credits that the cast includes a bit part for Hayden Christiansen.

It’s destined for the sell stack for sure.

On a much higher note, we watched a Documentary of everyones favorite opera singing, performance artist, popstar… Klaus Nomi. The Nomi Song. This was quite interesting. Of course I had heard of Klaus Nomi, as in I can certainly recognize him and I knew that he had been a wacky pop star and an early AIDS casualty, but that pretty much sums it up. For how many times I have stumbled on his records, I think it’s quite stunning that I’d never actually heard his music. Now that is all changed! His operatic vocals and hokey pop/new wavey kind of songs and clever stage productions are really quite engaging and though he comes across as a combination of Gary Numan and Liberace, he certainly had a real talent and a strong sense of what he was doing.

Klaus Nomi

This documentary is a pretty thorough history of his musical career, focusing on his years in the New York avant garde of performance artists in the late 70’s to his rise to popstardom in the early 80’s. They interview many people who were very closely involved with him, and show some old interviews with him, some interviews with his aunt and lots and lots of old show footage. Most all of which is quite interesting. They cover the development of his image, the development of his act, tells us (as always seems to be the case) that he was just sad and lonely… But they also include some other fun stuff like Klaus cooking desserts on TV. It is quite engaging and interesting and the old footage is priceless.