Episode 482 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
In this week’s show, Leslie Salas and I discuss Ziauddan Sardar and Borin Van Loon’s Introducing Cultural Studies.
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TDO Listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
Episode 482 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
Episode 471 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
In this week’s show, Leslie Salas and I discuss Kurt Vonnegut’ and Suzanne McConnell’s compendious Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style.
TEXT DISCUSSED
NOTES
TDO Listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
Episode 471 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
Episode 464 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
In this week’s show, Leslie Salas and I discuss Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole and a Half and Solutions and Other Problems.
TEXTS DISCUSSED
NOTES
TDO Listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
Episode 464 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
Episode 458 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
In this week’s show, Leslie Salas and I discuss Lynda Barry’s composition book-inspired musings on art, Syllabus, and how not just craft, but creativity itself is a skill.
TEXT DISCUSSED
NOTES
TDO Listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
Episode 279 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
On this week’s show, I talk editing and publishing and writing and the post-MFA malaise with Leslie Salas.
Episode 279 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
The Revenging Manta, the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando, said he had a surprise for me. A couple blocks from his apartment was a secret garage and inside that garage was a mint green Kawasaki Fury with matching sidecar. We would soon cruise to the Museum of Schlock in style. The bike helmet he gave me to wear was pink with Hello Kitty patterns all over. I asked if there was another helmet.
He said no.
—To be continued.
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Tonight’s movie is 1981’s The Unseen from director Danny Steinmann. It stars Barbara Bach in the lead. She was James Bond’s love interest in The Spy Who Loved Me and is married to Ringo Starr. And here she’s in a movie about a thing that lives in the basement of an old house and kills unsuspecting victims in horrifying ways.
The movie starts out with Jennifer Fast, a local television reporter, leaving her house in a huff due to a break up with her live-in boyfriend, Tony Ross (Douglas Barr). Jennifer heads to Solvang, CA to shoot a Danish festival with her crew, Karen (Karen Lamb) and Vicki (Lois Young). When they get to Solvang, all of the hotels are booked, but they run into a gross toad of a man named Ernest (Sydney Lassick). He offers them cheap room and board at a historic farmhouse that he and his wife, Virginia (Leila Goldoni), maintain.
Ernest is a character I’d like to punch dead in the face. He reminds of the type of character that would pop up in a 1970s Disney family feature. I didn’t see any Disney credits to Sydney Lassick’s name, but he frequently guest-starred on shows such as Baretta, Hawaii Five-O, and Eight is Enough. He plays a real creep in this movie. He has a verbally abusive relationship with his mousy wife, Virginia, who looks like she’s about to collapse from stress from taking care of the estate.
This old house has some dark secrets. Ernest is tormented by memories of his abusive father. There’s a sequence where Ernest revisits a conversation he had with his late father. We hear his father yelling at a teenage Ernest over the fact that he got his sister pregnant. Ewww. Then his father orders Ernest to pull down his pants so he can ensure something like that never happens again. Then young Ernest kills his father before he can disembowel him.
Unfortunately, this whole sequence of events is told through voice over and not through a flashback where you’d have actors playing a young Ernest and his father. So it falls kind of flat. Oh, and it didn’t take long for me to realize that Virginia is actually Ernest’s younger sister and not his wife. And what of their offspring? Could the malformed child be living in the basement of the house, waiting to pick off the house guests one by one?
I don’t know. The movie was mostly filler until the last half hour where Barbara Bach is trapped in a basement with a full grown man with the mind and demeanor of a baby, a full grown baby with violent tendencies. I have to be honest, I felt kind of oily after watching this one. I felt bad for the monster.
The Revenging Manta, the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando, fitted me with a kevlar vest because we were going back to the Museum of Schlock to clean house. Over the vest went the washed and pressed outfit of Gary, the drug dealer/pizza delivery guy. I know I hadn’t mentioned that we stole his clothes after the Revenging Manta had exploded his head with a flying bowling bowl. It must have slipped my mind.
— To be continued.
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Tonight’s movie is 2022’s Skinamarink from director Kyle Edward Ball. I’ve heard it described as an experimental horror movie from the new genre of lo-fi horror. I’d never heard of lo-fi horror before. If I ask the question in a Google search, I get this:
“Lo-fi” refers to the way the movie is filmed; usually on a shoestring budget, using the familiarity of a sputtering home video to incite terror. Found footage is often lo-fi, but it’s not the only indicator.
A photo from the movie Skinamarink accompanies this definition. Where can you watch Skinamarink? It is currently streaming on Shudder, a horror streaming platform.
I would have liked to have experienced Skinamarink on the big screen. Unfortunately, due to circumstances beyond my control, I could only watch the movie on my laptop. There’s a David Lynch video circulating on YouTube where he chides people who watch movies on their iPhones, saying that you haven’t really watched the movie if you viewed it on a screen that small. So perhaps I didn’t really experience Skinamarink which is good because what I did experience bored me to tears!
So this is not a traditional movie. Don’t expect scenes of two characters talking. Don’t expect to even really see any of the characters in this movie. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a glimpse of the back of a child’s head or a pair of feet. The camera may linger on a toy phone or some old cartoon playing on television. All of this is filtered through grainy film and crackling sound for about an hour and forty minutes.
What’s the movie about? From summaries I’ve read online, Skinamarink centers around two young boys who wake up to find their house is now without windows and without doors. No way in and no way out. And there’s something evil in the house. It’s even corrupted their parents. There’s a point in the movie where one of the boys slowly walks toward his mother. We see all this from his point of view. I think the mother warns him to not come any closer. And then she turns around to reveal a creepy face. Maybe this was supposed to freak me out, but it didn’t.
Nothing happens in this movie! Its brief instances of whispered dialogue by two toddlers and slap shot camera angles don’t show anything of consequence. Lingering shots of toys bricks on the floor or a half eaten bowl of cereal. It’s riveting and by riveting I mean the exact opposite of riveting.
I know. I know. I don’t get it. I’m a philistine.
And I watched Skinamarink on a laptop which means I didn’t really watch it.
I had spent the better part of the day grinding fentanyl tablets into a fine powder while wearing a gas mask. If I hadn’t known any better, I’d have thought I was involved in illegal activity, but there’s such a thing as street law, you know. The vigilante has his own code and if I had any hope of getting my museum back from a bunch of hoodlums, I had to help the Revenging Manta’s crazy scheme. We ordered some Papa Johns. The ninja sharpened his sword as I finished the last slice of stuffed crust. In two hours, we would reclaim the Museum of Schlock or die trying. — To be continued.
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This week’s movie is 2023’s The Old Way from director Brett Donowho and will you look at that poster? You’ve got Nic Cage wearing a cowboy hat. That doesn’t sell you? What more do you need in a movie? This is the first time in Nic Cage’s long career that he’s starred in a western, but don’t expect a singing cowboy flick. This is a violent affair.
The movie starts out with a public hanging gone wrong. A young boy named James is looking on as his father is about to get executed. The father tells the boy to go back home, but the mayor of the town wants young James to watch his father die, saying it will make him learn his place. Right as the man is about to be hanged, a shoot out commences and we’re introduced to Colton Briggs, a gun for hire after Walter McAllister, infamous bandit and the brother of the man about to be hanged. Turns out the execution was all about dragging this bandit out of hiding. Walter gets shot dead. So does the mayor. Colton has no interest in killing Walter McAllister’s brother, but shoots him when he turns a gun on him. He then turns his sights on the little boy, almost squeezing the trigger, but refrains and rides off.
Fast forward twenty years and Colton is a married shop owner with a young daughter to boot. He’s given up his violent life of hunting down bandits to raise a family and be an upstanding member of his community. Colton even walks his daughter to school, but takes her to work with him instead as the teacher is out sick. Colton patiently listens to customers talk about outhouse issues while his daughter methodically separates each and every jelly bean by color. Meanwhile, things are not so good back at the homestead as Colton’s wife has to contend with four escaped prisoners on the run from the law.
The leader of this gang is a young man named James McAllister (Noah Le Gros), the very same James that Colton didn’t shoot at the beginning of the movie. He kills Colton’s wife, Ruth (Kerry Knuppe), in an effort to taunt Colton into chasing him down to Mexico. The U.S. Marshall tells Colton to leave it to them to find the McAllister gang, but we know that isn’t going to happen. We know that Colton will see this through to a bloody finale with daughter in tow.
Did I mention that Clint Howard plays a member of this McAllister gang? He plays a guy named Eustace and he dons an old Confederate uniform. You guys lost the war. It’s 1898! Give it up already!
After a hearty breakfast of Honey Nut Cheerios and skim milk, the Revenging Manta handed me a gas mask. He then brought forth one grinding bowl filled with fentanyl pills, the pills we had stolen the night before after the ninja vigilante slaughtered a drug dealer named Gary. He ordered me to grind them into powder. I remember thinking one could make some killer pixie sticks with this stuff — To be continued.
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Tonight’s movie is 2009’s Splice from director Vincenzo Natali. This made it on Richard Roeper’s top ten worst movies of 2009. According to Wikipedia this film received generally positive reviews from many critics. Even Roger Ebert gave it three stars.
Splice would make my top ten worst movies of the aughts. It’s that bad. It’s a movie about stupid characters making stupid decisions and doubling down on those stupid decisions. It’s a movie that shouldn’t exist.
Two genetic engineering scientists named Elsa (Sarah Polley) and Clive (Adrien Brody) create a couple of flesh slugs that are quite disgusting looking, but everyone is amazed at how amazing they are. One is female and one is male (not that you can tell the difference). Elsa wants to start messing around with human DNA and cloning, but the head of their company N.E.R.D. ((Nucleic Exchange Research and Development) doesn’t want any Frankenstein monsters. Elsa and Clive are to synthesize a specific protein from the slugs to cure all maladies and make the corporation bags of money.
Elsa is impatient with waiting for permission to start gene splicing so she convinces Clive to help her break the laws of nature by creating a human/animal hybrid from the DNA of an anonymous donor. Elsa names the creature Dren which is nerd spelled backwards. Dren has a long tale with a deadly stinger at the end, cloven feet, a pointy tongue, and funky eyes that are a bit too far away from her nose. Elsa and Clive raise Dren in secret while neglecting their slug monitoring duties.
When it comes time to show the slugs off to the public, the female and male slugs attack each other because the female slug has inexplicably become a male. It’s a bloody mess and the press and investors get doused in slug guts. Meanwhile, Dren (Delphine Chanéac) has grown into a beautiful young hybrid in a matter of weeks. Elsa gives her a pretty dress to wear and some makeup, but won’t let her leave an isolated barn in the country. Dren grows wings out of her back and almost flies away until Clive says that he loves her and that sweet confession gets her to stay.
Clive starts to develop feelings for Dren and it’s then that he realizes that the human DNA donor for Dren was none other than Elsa. After Dren stings her pet cat, Elsa takes drastic measures and surgically removes her stinger. Later, Clive visits Dren alone and the two of them bump uglies because he can’t resist her charms. The cloven feet and the tale would be red flags for me. Dren’s stinger grows back. Dren dies, Dren comes back to life as a male hybrid. Male Dren forces himself on Elsa and kills Clive. Elsa kills male Dren. The company offers Elsa a ton of money to carry her pregnancy to term. What could possibly go wrong?
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