Guilt

Movie Notes from the Rust Belt.......... Youngstown, Ohio I had an hour to blow, so I fired up the ROKU device and went straight to Pub-D-Hub. Took a look into the Sci-Fi/Horror category and went into the “F” section. It's alphabetical, you see, and next to the Frankenstein stuff, I tripped across that 1946 thriller, The Flying Serpent. Like all decent movies made in 1946 that last for less than an hour, this one was released under two names (in my business, we call this an alias—you can call it anything you want), so The Flying Serpent is also known as Killer With Wings. Pretty straight forward here. Nutty scientist finds an ancient Aztec killer bird/lizard thing and captures it for his use—no, we don't know how he caught it. He just did. Oh, he also found a dump load of Aztec treasure, and every time someone gets close to the treasure, he unleashes the bird-thing—OK, they call it the Aztec God Quetzalcoatl—and it kills the offending treasure-hunter....

I pick on Wiki-How frequently. It's not really my fault.....they make an easy target of themselves. Sort of like when you poke fun at Wisconsinites for being hicks—When you say “Osh-Kosh-B'Gosh”, and wear those Cheese-Head hats, you've done it to yourselves, fellers. OK, today's offering on wikihow.com was titled “How to Get Low Cost Dental Work”. Here's the hot tips that no one on Earth could have figured out on their own (thank God for wikihow): -Get Insured -Look For a Free Clinic -Look for a Dental College -Go to Mexico As usual, speechless, I am.

Movie Notes from the Rust Belt..........Youngstown, Ohio I have some time to spare this evening, and took a look at the offerings on Pub D Hub via my beloved ROKU media streamer, finding a 61 minute 1959 offering by one of our favorites, Roger Corman, titled High School Big Shot. A tragedy in every sense of the word. It's a sad old story. Boy wants girl, girl wants money, boy finds some money to steal, other boy finds out, gunfight, boy dies, girl dies, fade to black. We got Phoenix native and John Denver look-alike Tom Pittman as the first boy. He had a busy movie and TV career from 1956 until his untimely death (at age 26) on Halloween, 1958 when he expired in a traffic crash in Benedict Canyon, El Lay. Sadly, his body wasn't found for three weeks. Bummer all the way around, Tom. We got Virginia Aldridge who, after this life altering experience, turned from acting to writing, appearing later in 1967s The Gnome Mobile, and then, also in 1967, in an ...

I know a guy who knows a guy. The guy my guy knows is from Canada. That guy found all 13 episodes of Brimstone being broadcast. In Canada. He taped them. Then he edited the commercials out of them. Then he made some DVDs out of the finished products. Then I got them. And watched them. It's nice to know a guy who knows a guy. Television Notes from the Rust Belt.....Youngstown, Ohio This is more or less straight forward. NYPD detective's wife gets raped. They catch the rapist but he gets off on a technicality (go figure). NYPD detective tracks down the rapist and kills him (sometimes there's justice, sometimes there's just us). NYPD detective is subsequently shot to death in an unrelated incident, and because of his previous behavior, is sent directly to hell. Where he is to spend eternity. Except that 113 of the most vile souls in hell escape back to Earth. Satan, being a pretty smart cookie himself, enlists the aid of the NYPD detective to...

I don't follow professional football much anymore. I watched one game last year, and that was the Super Bowl, but I'd be hard pressed to tell you who played. Or who won. Hockey? It's a Canadian thing. NASCAR? Really? And then there's the NBA. The traveling freak show where every team except the Warriors qualifies for their post-season. There are other sports leagues and associations where the participants get paid. Soccer, Austrialian Rules Football, Tennis....Other stuff. Don't get me started on golf, though. It's not a sport. It's an activity. Nope, I won't discuss it.....unless you already agree with me. Which gets me to the professional sport that I do follow. Every year. All year. Baseball. National League Baseball. The San Francisco Giants. This year has been good for my Giants. They wrapped up the Western Division of the National League last night by thumping the San Diego Padres (again). A good year. When they w...

Television Notes from the Rust Belt Youngstown, Ohio I recently finished watching the entire 17 episode run of Life on Mars (the United States version) from 2008/2009 via Netflix fed to my high definition wide screen television through my beloved ROKU box. OH MY GOD!!!!! It's 1973. Really. What a great time to be a cop. No kidding. Great time to be alive too. No kidding. The last time in American history that the gay guys didn't get the first crack at the good clothes. The set-up is pretty straight forward. Modern day NYPD detective gets hit by a car and wakes up in 1973. As a NYPD detective. Is he a time traveler? In a coma? Kidnapped by space aliens? Insane? No one knows. Doesn't really matter. This is so well written, filmed, and acted that it works as a time travel story, a police procedural, a drama/comedy.......whatever. This is television done right. They nailed the early 70s pretty well with cars, wardrobe, and everything else...

Movie Notes from the Rust Belt..... Youngstown, Ohio Courtesy of my ROKU box and Netflix, I recently watched Quest For Fire, that 1981 blockbuster of prehistoric times. It's a French movie based on a 1911 novel of the same name by, well, a French guy. Very Continental all the way 'round, wot? Not an excessive amount of plot to get in the way here. We got the Ron Perlman tribe of Neanderthals living a life of leisure in their cave when they get attacked by the Monkey-Man tribe, who are hairier. I mean HAIRIER, buster. The Monkey-Men swipe both the fire and the women from the Ron Perlman tribe, forcing a.....wait for it.....Quest For Fire. Ron Perlman and two of his pals take off in search of fire, and, as we will see, innovative women, leaving the rest of the tribe to twist in the wind. There are interfaces with wolves (that look mostly like German Shepherds), and Saber Tooth Cats (that look mostly like African lions), some really big elephant-things t...

Television Notes from the Rust Belt—Youngstown, Ohio Lost—The Post Mortem I did the seemingly impossible. Watched the entire 120 episodes of Lost. Let us begin with a partial listing of some of the dead-end plot lines, story fragments, bizarre stuff, and tricks utilized by the writers—I'm not a big daytime soap watcher, but it seems like a goodly portion of this stuff has its roots there—J.J. Abrams has mostly been action/scifi, but it looks to me like he's got a helluva future in daytime serial melodrama. He did one of the Mission Impossibles, and that was my quest—a mission impossible to watch THIS ENTIRE CRAPFEST without a single up-chuck. I've read some of the fan sites on the Internet about Lost—the fans are really loyal fans—they ate this shit up by the bucket-full. Wanted more, even. These folks must be the same ones who are actually preparing for the zombie apocalypse and thought that Harry Potter was a friggin' documentary. The only rea...