I watched GREMLINS 2: THE NEW BATCH for the first time a few weeks ago (I know, I know), and loved the self-referential scenes. From Phoebe Cates’ Lincoln’s-Birthday-related “Why I Hate Christmas Speech” callback, to Leonard Martin’s criticism of the first GREMLINS movie, the numerous fourth-wall-breaking moments transformed what otherwise could have been a throwaway kids’ sequel into a film still worth discovering twenty years after the fact.
But in a film full of meta scenes, perhaps the mostmeta was the scene where Gremlins interrupt the movie to show clips from a cutie nudie flick, which forces Hulk Hogan to, well… see for yourself:
Shortly after I finished the film, I got online to see if I could find a copy of the novelization, which I vaguely remembered seeing classmates read when I was a kid. I was curious to see how the novelist, David Bischoff, had handled the Hulk Hogan sequence. After laying down $.75 + s/h (thanks Half.com) and waiting a few days, I had my answer. And it was better than I could have imagined:
That’s right, Brain Gremlin waylays the novelist and writes two pages of a Gremlins New Capitalist Democratic Nice Folks manifesto. Click on the two images for a bigger picture, or just check out the text below:
There. The novelizer, Mr. David Bischoff, Esq., has been successfully waylaid and is now tied up in the bathroom of his Los Angeles apartment.
Do not attempt to adjust your book.
We have control of the programming.
Please excuse the rudeness. You have previously known me as the “Gremlin that drank the brain fluid” – or, as Bischoff quaintly called me, Mr. Glasses. Believe it or not, in the screenplay, I am referred to as BRAIN GREMLIN.
I want to take this opportunity to talk to you about our philosophy toward life, so that we will not be misunderstood and branded as “monsters.”
Yes, but faithful novel readers, I do not intend to cheat you. In the movie presentation, Gremlins take over the movie theater (ah, what a delicious conceit – excellent, Joe – was that you?) and Hulk Hogan comes to the rescue.
I do believe that Kenneth Tobey of THE THING is somewhere in there.
However, let us deal with more intellectual matters.
In the great paradigm of anti-intellectualism that is the vast American untermenchen, there needs to be a seismic quake of thought, a veritable avalanche of anarchy, to wake you somnambulent beings from your couch-potato torpor.
May I offer you the services of we Gremlins. You may hereafter refer to us as the New Capitalist Democratic Nice Folks.
Already our numbers are spreading out from the heart of America to aid you in this endeavor and although you may be viewing this physically for the first time now (except for those lucky citizens of Kingston Falls who received a foreshadow some years ago) our intellectual forces have been at work for some time, albeit embodied in human form.
According to my contacts with our crypto-CD’s the Church of SubGenius it is generally not know, for instance, that the entirety of network television is programmed by proto-Capitalist Democrats.
However, the past is merely prologue, introduction, forward, with some long footnotes thrown in.
Our time is now!
So, my dear readers (oh, the few, the chosen literate who have been intelligent enough to purchase this volume) prepare for a New Age of the New Capitalist Demo -
Oh dear. Mr. Bischoff seems to have successfully axed his way out of the bathroom.
Methinks I need to fly and return this temporarily liberated keyboard to his suburb, urbane and witty prose -
Back I fly to the Clamp Cent…
Wow… those few paragraphs – which contain references to the novelization, the GREMLINS 2 screenplay, Kenneth Tobey and THE THING, Joe Dante, and the Church of SubGenius(!), among other things – are even more meta than the cinematic sequence they’re replacing. Kudos to Mr. David Bischoff, Esq. (apparently he’s a lawyer, as well as an author) for putting waaaay more effort into the novelization than he had to.
If you’re ready to join me in the New Capitalist Democratic Nice Folks party, sign up in the comments.
We talk about VHS quite a bit here on the blog and today, I’m very excited to review the new VHS for HOUSE OF THE DEVIL. Yes….I said that and I can hardly believe it myself. I’m reviewing a new release VHS!
There are a lot of “throwback” products these days. Lunchboxes, toys, t-shirts with the worn look, etc. Most of them are complete trash, so I’m really going to put the screws to this. I’m actually going to go into my collection and pull some VHS out from that era and compare them to the HOUSE OF THE DEVIL release. Let’s see what we find, shall we?
FRONT COVER
VHS tapes have a long history of amazing covers. Entire books have been written about them and movies were even banned in the UK based just off the imagery on the covers alone(called Video Nasties). To this day, artwork is a MAJOR part of what makes people rent or buy your film. HOUSE OF THE DEVIL understood that and made some of the best poster and box art I’ve seen in a long time. It was even recognized as having the best horror poster of 2009 in Rue Morgue magazine. I really appreciate the fact that they didn’t try to make the art EXTREME or SHOCKING. The people that did this must have a real knowledge and love for the genre.
The HOUSE OF THE DEVIL VHS is packaged in a white clamshell VHS box and has faux weathering on it which I normally despise, but it really works for this project. They added a cool “New Release” sticker on the box like so many other VHS in my collection have, too. Even though they reused the poster art (great choice) the format and layout of the box totally works. They kept everything really simple, didn’t over think it and it came out great.
Here is the VHS next to another big box of DOCTOR GORE. Notice the real wear at the top of DOCTOR GORE compared to the “wear” at the top of HOUSE OF THE DEVIL. From the pictures and even in person, you’d never tell it was designed that way.
Here it is compared to the HALLOWEEN rip-off, THE NIGHT AFTER HALLOWEEN. It totally matches the feel and tone of the old VHS. So far, so good.
BACK COVER
The back cover is inspired as well. There are lots of different styles for back covers and they went with text only which I kind of prefer. Some of my favorite big box VHS’ have went this route, too. Many tapes went with the notion of more is better and threw a shitload of images on the back cover of monsters and women. Don’t get me wrong, that’s cool and all, but I much prefer the simpler text. Also, click on the image to zoom in and read the write up. It’s pretty incredible. There are actually some write ups simliar to this that actually give away the entire movie. So much so, that it will end with a line like, “Then Jim killed the demon and got into his car and rode away. The End.”
As you can see, the back cover is almost exactly like the back cover of DEATH DREAM (minus UPC code). It’s also worth mentioning that they were both released by Gorgon Video which was one of the biggest distributors back in the day. Gorgon still carries a lot of weight and get lots of respect from cinephiles and VHS nerds. I thought that they might’ve put the Gorgon logo on the new tape as an homage, but I think it’s an official release.
ACTUAL VHS
It’s uncanny! I keep on looking for something they slacked on with this and I can’t find it. IT’S JUST NOT THERE. Even the inner label has been recreated EXACTLY, just inversed.
The video played fine all the way through. I was kind of terrified by the thought of them adding in tracking issues or making the image all fucked up, but thankfully, they didn’t. The video is clean. Speaking of Gorgon Video, they even put the old, AMAZING animated Gorgon intro before the movie. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s the video:
I don’t know about you, but watching that TOTALLY puts me in the mood to watch a movie like HOUSE OF THE DEVIL. The only thing better than the Gorgon Video intro was the 80’s HBO intro. I swear to you that the music in the HBO intro is WAY more inspiring than anything in ROCKY. I want it played at my wedding, funeral and at any other major even in my life. Rant over.
SPINE
When I pulled it out of the package this afternoon, the first thing I thought was, how will this look next to other titles on the shelf? Observe:
It’s totally legit. I guess if I had a bitch at all about the VHS, it’s that I would’ve liked to see the Gorgon logo on the back of the tape instead of the spine, but that’s like saying I’d like 2 cherries on my sundae instead of just 1. The fact that I’m reviewing a new release VHS in 2010 has not been lost on me. It’s kinda unbelievable this exists. The final test…this VHS in with the general population!
FINAL THOUGHTS
This is a dream come true. I did NOT expect this thing to be as quality as it is. From it being a Gorgon release to the design to the goddamn inner label, this thing is perfect. You’ve seen the pics….it totally goes toe to toe with almost any video in my collection and it looks great on the shelf. I hope they sell a billion of these so that maybe Gorgon can start putting out limited runs of VHS tapes for movies in the old style. I know I’d buy them. If MOON came out on VHS with a cool sci-fi case or something like that, I’m in line. Speaking of selling a billion, you can help with that. We’ve actually had a lot of people asking where they can get one and I just looked on Amazon and you can get the DVD and this VHS for only $23.99. Click HERE to buy. That’s pretty nuts. A truly great deal.
Seriously, even if you don’t have a VCR, be ironic and buy this….this is one of my favorite things this year, for sure.
Is it just me, or am I the only one that LOVES that people keep on thinking up cool new things involving STAR WARS. Looking around today I found a site that tells the weather in your city in terms of locations in the STAR WARS films. For instance, Mondo HQ is in Austin and as of writing this, it’s feeling a little bit like Naboo right now.
Then, over Butt-Numb-A-Thon weekend, our local maestro of the mattress Kayla Kromer debuted her follow up to the Hamburger Bed. She based it off of Han’s Millennium Falcon and got REALLY nerdy with the detail. It’s almost exact! She was even recognized by the official STAR WARS website and was a front page story!
And last but not least, there is the AMAZING 70 minute dissection of THE PHANTOM MENACE. I’ve embedded the first piece in this EPIC 7 part review. I’m not going to go into in depth, but set aside 90 minutes, turn your phone off and get ready to roll on the ground laughing.
Returning to the poster series is horror aficionado, Alex Pardee! Pardee decided that since the original TREMORS poster was a nod to the JAWS poster, he would do his version as a nod to the JAWS 2 poster. This poster is printed on black paper and is 9 colors!
Poster by Alex Pardee. Approximately 24″x36″ screen print on black paper. 9 COLORS! Signed and numbered by the artist. Edition of 100. Printed at D&L Screen Printing in Seattle, WA.
BASKET CASE is one of Alex Pardee’s all time favorite films and for good reason! This is Frank Hennenlotter’s masterpiece. Not all horror fans have good taste, but Alex’s is impeccable.
Poster by Alex Pardee. 24″x36″ screen print. Signed and numbered by the artist. Edition of 100. Printed by D&L Screen Printing in Seattle, WA.
If you’ve seen a picture of Alex Pardee at a gallery show in the last 15 years, there is a 99% chance that he was wearing a BASKET CASE shirt. Well, that shirt has been officially retired and this is his NEW BASKET CASE shirt of choice…after all, he designed it!
UPDATE: If any posters or shirts remain after the signing on December 1st, they will be made available to our online fans on December 2nd.
We are thrilled to announce that world famous artist and horror aficionado Alex Pardee will be at the Terror Tuesday screening of TREMORS Tuesday, December 1st at the Alamo Ritz. TREMORS is one of Pardee’s favorite movies and he is flying in to watch it and to also sign the new BASKET CASE and TREMORS posters he did for us IN PERSON before the show! The signing will start at 7pm and end at 8:30pm, so get there early as these posters are super limited!
Alex also did a crazy shirt for BASKET CASE that will also be released at the Tremors show on December 1st. Alex’s signings are always memorable (and sometimes blood soaked), so if you miss this, you obviously hate fun.
Alamo Drafthouse Cinema
320 E 6th Street
Austin, TX 78701
P.S. You can also read Pardee’s far superior blog posts about the event HERE and HERE.
Hello! Let me begin by saying that I’m honored to help add volume to the unstoppable day-glo tsunami of pop-and-sub-culture that is the World of Mondo. I’ll keep introductions brief and get right to today’s goodies. For more information about who I am, please visit http://wileywiggins.com. My assistant/bodyguard/biographer Niki and I spent this past weekend in San Francisco, thanks to the generosity of the San Francisco Film Society. After ingesting the requisite late-night mission-area burritos (delicious but dense boluses that we would continue to incubate inside our guts for the remainder of the weekend), we set our sights on Japantown. On a tip from Mondo Tees headquarters, we hit Super7 - an art toy mecca full of colorful objets d’art, books and shirts.
Saturday marked the first solo show of Lamour Supreme, but we were there too early to see the exhibit, and I had to be at the Clay theater that evening for the Film Society event we had come for. After a little gentle coaxing, the Super7 rep on duty let me photograph a few of the pieces that would be in Lamour’s show, as well as some shots of the store.
Lamour Supreme pieces at Super7
I bought a couple of Organ Donors toys on my way out, after ogling a gorgeous, mega-sized Frank Baum Wizard of Oz art book (if you’re not familiar with the actual Oz books beyond the movie, you may be surprised at how much tougher kids a few generations back were than our current crop of disinfected, peanut-terrorized CG-hypnotized lost-causes. At one point in the Oz books, the Tin Man finds his own head in a barrel of discarded body parts and they have a nice chat. The rest of his original bits get sewn together into a Frankenstein’s-monster-flesh-golem called “Chopfyt”.)
After Super7, we immediately hit Ichiban Kan. Ichiban Kan is like a Japanese 99 cent store- everything is Japanese, and everything is around $1.50. Every time I go to San Francisco I fill up a bag with random stuff from Ichiban Kan. Stationary, snacks (Pocky! dehydrated squids! Pink mystery fluids!) dishes, gadgets, bento boxes and bags and miscellaneous bits of plastic junk all emblazoned with amazing engrish nonsense to amuse and mystify. I barely even look at what I am buying when I go there, I just shovel that shit into a bag and I’m always surprised and delighted when I get home.
Finally we stopped in New People, a multi-level cultural center that boasted a genuine gothic-lolita clothes store. Niki and I were delighted to see a white otaku dude dressed in full on bondage-strawberry-shortcake pink gothic lolita garb, with a pink dress and frilly socks, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a pink parasol hidden somewhere as well. Can you imagine the beatings that guy must have taken to get to where he could proudly stride through the streets dressed as an anime girl? Or maybe he’s one of those home-schooled weirdos who never had to deal with the outside world and its cruel, socializing slurs and beatings, and has always existed in a pure state of self-actualized Sailor-Moon pervery. Either way, I salute him (and, no, I didn’t take a picture of him). However, it would have cost Niki 100 bucks just to buy a pair of socks in there, so we preceded to the gift store, where I immediately impulse-bought a Phaidon book of art by one of my new favorite artists, Yayoi Kusama- the polka dot queen.
Kusama hits a lot of sweet spots for me; a love of repeating patterns, a mystical horror that I associate with Op art and the way human perception systems work, and a fondness for women in spandex unitards. In the sixties, she filled rooms with millions of teeming psychedelic blobs, phalluses, and giraffe spots. She staged orgies of hippies covered in polka-dots to protest the fact that people were interested in artists only after they had been legitimized by death and commodified by their inability to produce new work. In short she’s kookoo awesome terrific, and she gets to live and have unlimited access to neon paint and sculpting foam after my cultural purges remove 95% of all currently existing media.
The top floor of the New People building was a gallery with an exhibit by Yoshitaka Amano, the artist behind Vampire Hunter D, Gatchaman, and a good chunk of character design in the Final Fantasy games. Now, I generally find playing Final Fantasy games about as exciting as doing my taxes, but I love Gatchaman. The sideburns, the white bell bottoms, thigh high boots, and bird-themed helmets. The art on display at New People were large panels of plastic that resembled painted animation cells, with lovely, bright glitter backgrounds. Every image was lickably candy-colorful and included Gatchaman characters drawn slightly more wobbly and sexualized and psychedelic than we’re used to seeing them… as if they were getting ready to boil down from characters into just a bundle of lines and fields of color with eyes.
Anyone that knows me is well aware that 1) I am on eBay way too much and 2) I love Harryhausen. Can you guess how excited I was when I found this up for auction? With a little over 3 days left as I write this, this original Ray Harryhausen model from GOLDEN VOYAGE OF SINBAD is going for a cool $20,000. I wonder what celebri-nerd is gonna pick this up? Someone call Seth Green to buy this and put it in Robot Chicken. Enough with the STAR WARS parodies…this is real claymation here. Here are some other pictures. Click on them to take you to the auction link.
If you don’t instantly recall this character from the film, check out the above trailer. She starts messin’ stuff up at about the 1:18 mark.
Also, in other INSANE Harryhausen news, I heard a rumor that Japan’s Bounty x Hunter was carrying this sweater. If you live in Japan, are going to Japan, know someone who is going to Japan or know someone that lives in Japan…get this in a size XL and I will have a son and give it to you.
Our good pal Lamour Supreme is having his first ever solo show this weekend at Super 7 in San Francisco. If you are out in SF, go to this. I promise you that it will be nuts. I can vouch for that. Lamour is a nice dude, but when it comes to vinyl toys (especially customs) he becomes a beast. Don’t believe me? Check out this custom I got from him a few months ago:
Here’s a few previews of things he’ll have at the show for sale.
He also did this killer shirt for Super 7 x Mishka that will be sold at the show:
Couple all of this crazy stuff with the fact that it’s almost Halloween. Rumor has it, that if you don’t come to the show dressed up, you won’t be able to buy anything. If you go this weekend, hit me up and tell me how it was!
Super7 Store
1628 Post Street
San Francisco, CA 94115
We are packed with cool new products for sale today. If you weren’t in Austin for Fantastic Fest, now is your chance to grab these goodies!
Tonight, we are having our first ever live screen printing show called HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER with artist Jon Vermilyea in attendance. We will be letting people design their own t-shirts in store and decided that we would extend the offer to our online fanbase as well. Below is a preview of what you can expect at the show!
Mix and match the monster heads and bodies to create your own one of a kind t-shirt. This is only going to be available until 9:30pm CST, so don’t let this chance slip by!
Next up is the GORGEOUS David D’Andrea ANTICHRIST poster that was made specially for Fantastic Fest 2009 this year.
Poster by David D’ Andrea. 12″x26″ screen print. $30 Edition of 100.
Ken Taylor is back with his take on Medusa from CLASH OF THE TITANS!
Poster by Ken Taylor. 24″x36″ screen print. $30 Edition of 110.
We also have the Medusa’s stare variant with glow in the dark eyes and teeth for $55. Edition of 40.
To go along with the poster, Skinner has produced this CRAZY Medusa shirt. He had emailed me about doing it and then a few days later I got a painting in the mail from him with the artwork! This shirt is printed on a super soft ringspun t-shirt. Available on a black and creme shirt.
I Had A Problem: We recently had some electrical work done to our house, and ended up with a huge hole in the sheetrock in our computer room. I’m not handy enough to fix it myself, and am self-aware enough to know that my laziness/cheapness will keep me from hiring someone to fix it any time soon:
The Problem
I Had A Solution: And really, it’s my solution to 50%-60% of life’s problems… let’s Cynthia Rothrock it:
The Solution
Problem solved! Not only do I get to ignore my sheetrock deficiency, I’ll be able to enjoy Cynthia Rothrock’s Ever-Poised Boot of Doom every time I check my email.
And this isn’t the first time my Martial Law II: Undercover (1992) poster (Available On Videocassette and Laserdisc) has saved me from an unsightly wall blemish. In 2006 I used this same poster to replace a wall-sized mirror in my home bathroom that had decided to spontaneously shatter:
Is There Nothing Cynthia Rothrock Can't Make Better?
That particular bit of home improvement lasted 3 months. I’ll keep you posted on how long Ms. Rothrock lasts this time around.
