The Perfect Life #39 by Dr. Perfect

When Diets Won’t Die

Dr. Perfect,

My friend has been trying to do Keto for a year. It’s all she ever talks about.

How do I politely tell her that I truly, profoundly don’t give a shit?

Yours truly,
A victim

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Dear victim,

Like most frivolous endeavors, dietary trends come and go. Every so often, people attempt to curtail their gluttonous intake of processed foods and excess carbohydrates for something different. I’ve heard it all before. One eccentric reader recently extolled the benefits of cannibalism.So many preservatives!

Your friend appears to be seeking assurance or encouragement, or so it would seem. It could also just be her way of telling you and everyone else that she:

a.) desires a healthier lifestyle

b.) is more disciplined

c.) is bored with her life

d.) misses Bob Saget

We all miss Bob Saget.

What’s troubling is her lack of concern for your wants and needs. Every person you associate with should be devoted to those simple tenants. If they won’t be sycophants, who needs them!

Having said that, there’s nothing wrong with trying different foods. Just the other day, I had eggs benedict and found them thoroughly disgusting.

A couple I know went on about their new fasting diet ad nauseum. It’s part of this new starving fad.

“Technically,” Melanie (the wife) began, “we’re not starving ourselves. We have a light dinner in the evening.” I saw her louse of a husband (Garrett) in line at Five Guys just the other week. Fasting diet, eh?

I didn’t divulge Garrett’s dark secret but instead planted the seeds of suspicion. Inadvertent sabotage is as delicious as tender steak cutlets with a bottle of Château Lafite.

I tried the fasting diet for a few days and didn’t mind it. I got so much drinking done.

It’s time tell it straight to your Keto-loving friend. You’ve heard enough and respectfully wish to move on from the subject. That, of course, would be the simplest route. But it’d be more fun to drone on endlessly about your new Mediterranean diet.

Don’t be surprised if she jumps ship and converts. Then celebrate your victory with a night out an all-you-can-eat-buffet. I’m there if you’re buying.

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Dr. Perfect has slung advice across the globe for the last two decades due to his dedication to the uplift of the human condition.

The Curator of Schlock #391 by Jeff Shuster

Edge of the Axe

Scream prototype. 

I had infiltrated a marsupial slaughtering factory under the guise of a welder. They had recently installed some factory equipment for their illegal kangaroo canning operation. I was to inspect this equipment and give it the okay.

While the security guard explained this to me, three cages housing kangaroos wheeled past me. Through the bars of the last cage, I saw Edwige, my kangaroo companion, who I’d thought I’d never see again!

— To be continued.

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This week’s movie is 1989’s Edge of the Axe from director José Ramón Larraz. This curiosity was a co-production between the United States and Spain. Such cosmopolitanism reminds me of Madhouse, an Italian-made slasher movie I reviewed last year. Like Madhouse, Edge of the Axe was shot in America and featured American actors. And while the movie takes place in California, Edge of the Axe follows the Canadian slasher movie model–it’s a whodunit.

Edge of the Axe begins with a woman sitting in her car as it enters a car wash only to have her window and face smashed in by, you guessed it, an axe. The killer is masked and one wonders if this movie was an influence for Scream.

When the killer where’s a mask, everyone is a suspect.

We’re introduced to Gerald Martin (Barton Faulks), a young man obsessed with computers who needs the latest technology to play those newfangled computer games. He works at a pest control business with his best friend Richard (Page Moseley). The two of them get called over to a bar to investigate an odd smell coming from the basement. First they see rats, but upon further investigation, they discover the corpse of a murdered barmaid.

With two confirmed murders, the town is in a bit of frenzy. That doesn’t stop Gerald from sweet talking Lillian Nebbs (Christina Marie Lane), the daughter of the bar owner, into going out with him. Just like Gerald, she’s into technology and he gives her his old computer so the two of them can communicate through the computer? Imagine that. Being able to communicate through a computer!

Lillian confides in Gerald about a sordid incident involving her cousin, Charlie. When she was little, she pushed her cousin a little too hard on a swing set and sent him flying head first into a brick wall and whatnot. Charlie got sent to a mental hospital to recover. Lillian suspects he may be the killer. Charlie was released from the hospital about two years ago, but Lillian never made contact with him.

 There are more murders. I have to admit that Gerald is a little too calm during all of this. Maybe he’s too busy playing Preppie! or Crush, Crumble, and Chomp (look them up). The murderer gets revealed, the axe swings, there’s a case of mistaken identity, etc. I found Edge of the Axe on Prime streaming, though there’s also an Arrow Home Video release of this one. Check it out.

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Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, and episode 496) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #161 by Drew Barth

Psychedelic-Tinted Lenses

History in graphic novels is always interesting to behold. We’re given that midway point of intimacy between written accounts and documentaries—the interplay between visuals and words that comics does so well gives us that time and space other mediums can lack. And this is proven even more so with works like Project MK-Ultra: Sex, Drugs, & the CIA by Stewart Kenneth Moore. This fictionalized history of Project MK-Ultra dives into the era of the project in all its psychedelic horror with the unflinching eye of a journalist digging up the most putrid dirt.

Seymour Phillips is a writer for the San Francisco Examiner in the early 1970s—a struggling journalist trying to find the story that could finally make his career, which he thinks he has in the drug trafficking arrest of Ronald Stark. Stark, caught with a kilogram of LSD (equivalent to about ten million doses), has been arrested before, but was bailed out by someone with tenuous connections to the CIA. From there, Phillips’ life takes a drastic dip as he’s falsely caught with enough pot to send him to prison and enough time away to make him a pariah in most circles. But an unnamed man leaving him clues propels him back to the story that nearly ruined his life. As Seymour learns more about the classified Project MK-Ultra, we see more of the project’s history and the nonchalant misery enacted by the men at its helm.

But then we don’t know how much in this history is true or false. MK-Ultra has long been the realm of the conspiracy theorist, even when it was acknowledged as a real project the 70s. Due to the destruction of many of the project’s documents, not much is known outside of rumor, conjecture, and the scant surviving files that brought to light the CIA’s efforts to develop their own methods of mind control. This, however, is what comics can do best. By observing what may have occurred—the bits and pieces we can glean from the people who had lived through it—we can start to understand the magnitude of its scale and how people were affected. And while we can never know everything that happened as a result of the project, we can get a glimpse of the possibilities and the horrors of it.

Unflinching in its intentions, Project MK-Ultra is the kind of graphic novel that brings what we know about a shady past to the forefront, but gives it to us wrapped in a story and a protagonist we want to follow as the horrors unfold.

Get excited. Get dosed.

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Drew Barth (Episode 331 & 485) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Alas & fuck, there will not be a new episode this week.

Year 2 of TDO vs. The Curator of Schlock will begin next Saturday.

The Curator of Schlock #361 by Jeff Shuster

We Are the Flesh

We are not amused. 

Edwige and I have looked for a place to hide. We’re outlaws now.

I found an abandoned mall on the outskirts of Pittsburg. I’m thinking starting a campfire where the water fountain used to be. I’m going to roast me some weenies since I found some hotdogs at an abandoned Nathan’s in the food court. Hot dogs don’t really have a shelf life.

This week’s Arrow Home Video release is 2016’s We Are the Flesh from director Emiliano Rocha. I really don’t know what to say about this one. Is it an art movie? Yeah, kind of. Is it a sick movie? Do you find graphic depictions of incest sick? The movie is a French-Mexican co-production if I’m to trust the limited information I can find online about this production. It is a Spanish language film, with English subtitles available.

The movie begins with a strange gentleman named Mariano living in a dilapidated office building or apartment building. One gets the impression that this movie takes place after the globe has been devastated by a third World War or something to that effect. Mariano lives a life of quiet solitude. He gets fresh eggs from a neighbor who passes them to him through a slot in the wall. He’s busy working on a Papier-mâché project that will convert his lonely living space into a fake cave. Mariano is living the dream.

His peace and quiet is disrupted when two young people dig their way into his apartment. They are Fauna (María Evoli) and Lucio (Diego Gamaliel). Fauna asks Mariano if they can stay there for a while. Mariano offers them a raw egg. He agrees to let them stay if they’ll work for him and, naturally, help him build more Papier-mâché caves. Mariano then serves them a boiled egg.

And then the movie becomes all kinds of inappropriate. Mariano keeps questioning Lucio about Fauna, asking him why he hasn’t slept with her. Lucio takes offense to this as Fauna is not his girlfriend, but his sister. Mariano serves Lucio and Fauna steak. Lucio doesn’t want to eat it because he’s a vegetarian. Fauna chows down and gets really sick. Foaming-at-the-mouth sick.

Mariano is furious at the two of them because they stole an eye dropper of his. He forces Lucio to eat his steak or he won’t help his sister. That conflict gets resolved somehow, but now Mariano is obsessed with getting this brother and sister to have sex and this is about where I stop my synopsis.

Did this movie have to go there? I know. I know. I’m a prude.

I think some reviewer somewhere referred to We Are the Flesh as transgressive cinema that will never be accepted by the mainstream. Sure. I think I forgot to mention that there’s a cannibalism scene toward the end of the movie (because the stuff leading up to it makes the cannibalism seem tame).

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Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, and 477) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #108 by Drew Barth

A One-Shot Look

I’ve written about my appreciation for shorter comics. I appreciate how a two page story by Junji Ito contain more horror than most full-length films. Another master of the short story art, Hirohiko Araki, had his series of shorts, Thus Spoke Kishibie Rohan, animated last year and they will be released on Netflix this month. But there’s a slight problem here: these short manga have never been released in English officially. So, what to do? Luckily, Araki’s output is massive and he does have one short story out to enjoy while waiting for the others to be released: Rohan at the Louvre.

Even with Araki’s penchant for the bizarre, Rohan at the Louvre is one of his oddest works. The manga artist, Kishibie Rohan, travels to the Louvre to view a painting mentioned by a woman while living with his grandmother as a teenager. The woman had found the painting when she was just a young girl, but remembers the horror of it clearly. Painted with the blackest ink from a 1000 year-old tree, the painter was executed for cutting down the tree and it is believed the rage of his undue death is still imbued within the painting. As such, the painting was obtained by the Louvre and has been sitting in an abandoned vault deep beneath the museum for decades. So of course when people look at it for the first time ghosts erupt from the vault that had been holding it and the museum workers that had been accompanying Rohan meet a variety of grim fates. It’s that Araki brand of fun, you know?

What makes Rohan at the Louvreeven more interesting is that it is the first in a series of manga and comics commissioned by the Louvre itself to showcase the museum. Creators like Enki Bilal, Jirō Taniguchi, Marc-Antoine Mathieu, and others crafted stories centered in and around the Louvre and its collection. But Araki’s story really elevated what you could do with a story about a museum. The ways in which he utilizes color to imply time and motion are almost unseen in many of his other works, but here he was able to experiment like he had in his Thus Spoke Kishibie Rohan shorts. Araki manages to create a museum story that barely spends any time in the museum proper and instead focuses on the passage of time through the museum’s catacombs and the character of Rohan.

While it will be fun to see some more of Araki’s work animated, it’s also nice to appreciate just how good he is at creating short bursts of manga. It’s works like Rohan at the Louvrethat only excite me for the potential release of of more short works in the future with the success of the animated adaptations. From there, I can only hope for more short works from Araki as his latest series, Jojolion, begins to wind down.

Get excited. Get Bizarre.

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Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

The Curator of Schlock #334 by Jeff Shuster

Suspiria

The greatest horror movie of all time? I won’t argue. 

I made one request of Jervis. While I am busy scribbling away on the My-Dinner-With-Andre-but-with-vampires script, I thought a nice, cool glass of egg nog might hit the spot. I asked that the next time Jervis stop by the grocers that he pickle me up some. What does he buy me? Horizon Organic Low Fat Egg Nog. Are you kidding me? I can’t get the real stuff. I’m going to figure out a way to deal with Wally, Celestial, and Jervis. I’m as mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!

Speaking of hell, this week’s movie is 1977’s Suspiria from director Dario Argento. Jessica Harper plays Suzy Bannion, an American ballet student who travels to Freiburg, Germany to attend a famous dance academy. Unfortunately, there are sinister happenings going on at this dance school and by sinister happenings, I mean witchcraft. Nasty, nasty witchcraft.

Suspiria is the ultimate horror movie about witchcraft.

I believe it was the last movie in Europe shot with a technicolor camera. Accompanying the gorgeous visuals is a jolting score by the Italian prog-rock band Goblin.

So I’m struggling a bit to give my thoughts on Suspiria in that it’s as close to a perfect horror movie as I’ve ever seen. More often than not, horror seems to be about regular people running into evil. Sometimes that evil comes from the natural world, but sometimes it’s preternatural. And sometimes that regular person is destroyed by that evil. When you go into a horror movie, you don’t know if the main character is going to survive.

Take Suzy Bannion for example, an ordinary American woman visiting Germany. She comes European ancestry, might even be part German, but that country is as foreign to her as any other. When she arrives at the school, she notices another student running from the academy into the stormy night. Said student is murdered in a painful and terrifying fashion by some kind of spell. These spells attack other faculty and students at the school, anyone who gets too close to figuring out secret of the academy, that members are involved in the occult.

I remember when I first watched Suspiria, I kept trying to figure out who the witch was. Was it Madame Blanc, the aging headmistress of the academy as played by Joan Bennett? How about Miss Tanner (Alida Valli), an angry woman with a thick German accent that would probably feel right at home in the Third Reich? We’ve got Pavlos, a creepy Romanian dude with false teeth, and Albert who resembles Little Lord Fauntleroy. Which one of them is the witch? They all are.

The above mentioned belong to a coven running the academy. At the head of this coven is Helena Markos, a witch know as the “Black Queen,” thought to have died in a fire many years earlier. The coven kills anyone that gets wise to them. And they have set their sites on Suzy Bannon which they refer to as a “bitch of an American girl.” Well the coven shouldn’t underestimate the American girl. Sometimes it’s the American girl that will succeed where others failed. Sometimes it’s the American girl that will whoop your ass.

In Memoriam

Daria Nicolodi

June 19, 1950 to November 26, 2020

There would be no Suspiria without Daria Nicolodi. She cowrote the screenplay, inspired by tales she’d heard about a ballet academy run by practitioners of the occult, Daria Nicolodi starred in several Italian movies, but she was a writer as well as a performer. I’ve covered movies of her on the blog before and will cover more. May she rest in peace.

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Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443 and episode 444) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.