#lots of cool details about costumes and puppet making and puppeteering and set building were displayed!

[rascheln]

We went to the (German) Sesame Street exhibition earlier today, so here's a couple snapshots of some true icons. Plus the picture I drew to add to a whole wall of children's and adult's anniversary congratulations.

[mst3kproject]

Planet of Dinosaurs

This movie is blessed with some pretty cool stop-motion dinosaurs and absolutely nothing else, and it’s got a Rifftrack.  That’s… that’s it, really.  Press play.

The spaceship Odyssey suffers a reactor meltdown and blows up with only just enough warning for the crew to launch a single lifeboat shuttle.  Luckily, there’s a life-bearing planet nearby where the spandex-suited survivors can land, but unluckily, it turns out to be inhabited by giant reptiles, not unlike the prehistoric fauna of Earth!  There’s also a spider the size of a Yorkshire terrier, for no particular reason.

There’s not really any plot from there, it’s just bad actors shooting toy laser guns at plastic dinosaurs, interspersed with Rock Climbing. At last the characters manage to kill the inevitable T-rex that’s been threatening them, whereupon they declare themselves to have conquered this planet.

There are a few attempts at human conflict but they’re pretty watery.  The first possible b-plot has to do with the vice president of the space-shipping company, Mr. Baylor, who was along on this trip for some reason and is among the survivors. So they’re not just stranded on Dinosaur Planet, they’re stranded on Dinosaur Planet with their boss.  He’s a jackass and his secretary quickly gets fed up with him and quits, which doesn’t do her a whole lot of good since they are, as I mentioned, stranded on Dinosaur Planet.  The writers run out of things to do with Baylor about halfway through the movie and kill him off, to everybody’s relief.

The second involves the bearded guy, Jim, who’s starting to take issue with Captain Lee’s command style.  Lee is trying to keep them all alive and uninjured until help can arrive.  Jim doesn’t think help is coming and wants to go full caveman and start slaughtering things. It starts to look like he’s gonna foment a mutiny, but eventually he and Lee overcome their differences and come up with a plan to kill the T-rex.

Finally, of course, the survivors inevitably pair off in heterosexual couples.  Sure is lucky there weren’t more men than women or vice-versa.  Very fortunate nobody’s left with no-one to bone but someone they’ve never gotten along with.  Quite improbable that nobody on the entire command crew was gay.  When one member of one of these couples becomes a dinosaur victim, the other thoughtfully dies a few scenes later, not because he commits suicide out of guilt or something, but just by coincidence.

One thing the movie actually does pretty well is day-for-night.  It’s not great, in that you can still tell it was shot in the daytime through a filter, but they chose the right filter to cool down the warm tones of the sunlight, and had the sense to keep the sky out of shot.  It never looks like somebody just turned the brightness on your screen way down and called it ‘night’, and I’ve seen so much worse that I want to at least acknowledge their competence.

The other thing Planet of Dinosaurs does well is the actual dinosaurs, which are a lot of fun. They’re lumpy and out of date, but some real care seems to have gone into building the detailed puppets and their movements are fluid and sometimes very lifelike.  There’s a nice variety of them, too.  As well as the T-rex there’s a smaller therapod that might be intended to be an Allosaurus, a couple of little Ornithomimus­-like animals, a Brontosaurus complete with the wrong head, a Stegosaurus, a Centrosaurus, and some kind of ankylosaur.  In real life these are a jumble of Hell Creek and Morrison dinosaurs who never met each other, but eh, it’s supposed to be another planet, it’s cool.

Unfortunately, there are several points where the effects people try to show us something they probably should have implied instead.  I commend their ambition, but knowing your limits is a big part of making special effects work.  In the first episode of Walking with Dinosaurs, the Postosuchus attacks a Placerias… but we don’t see as much of this as we think we do because our view is blocked by the body of the prey animal.  They knew their CGI wasn’t up to making the attack look good, so they tricked us into thinking we saw more than we did.  In Planet of Dinosaurs, a character stabs an injured Ornithomimus with a spear, and it’s painfully obvious that the stop-motion creature was just superimposed on top.  They could easily have set up the shot so we didn’t have to actually see it go in, but they didn’t.

The dinosaurs are clearly what they spent their budget on, which was wise – as I said in my review of Twelve to the Moon, if you can only afford to show us one cool thing, best make it the one in the title. Sadly, when I say spent the budget I mean the entire budget.  The rest of Planet of Dinosaurs looks like it was made in somebody’s backyard using stuff from the garden shed.  The spaceship that briefly appears in the opening had a previous career as a vacuum cleaner.  When it ‘explodes’ it just flickers red and vanishes with no further attempt at an effect.

The costumes look kind of like if they made the original Star Trek series ten years later but on the same budget, with producers who didn’t think they wanted this to be a porno but preferred to keep the option open.  The designated Himbo, Chuck, doffs his shirt within the first few minutes of the film and never gets it back.  The blonde who goes for a swim and is eaten by some water monster was wearing a bikini under her uniform for some reason.  By the end, they’re all dressed in cartoon caveman garb and Chuck is still shirtless.

Besides the dinosaurs, the main effect we see is the laser guns, which are among the most ineffective sci-fi weapons ever committed to screen.  They fire a beam of very slow red light which does absolutely nothing to any of the dinosaurs, even when the characters observe that one has been injured.  I think this is supposed to show us that the animals are tougher than the technology, but for that to work we would have needed to see a laser used effectively, perhaps to destroy something blocking the path. Without that, we have no basis for comparison.

If this were all Planet of Dinosaurs did wrong, it would be a bad movie classic.  Even the abysmally bad acting has its funny moments. What ruins the enjoyment is the movie’s lack of a proper story.

Planet of Dinosaurs is supposed to be a Cast Away or Robinson Crusoe sort of a film, about unprepared people thrust into the wilderness and forced to survive as best they can.  Such a narrative doesn’t need an overarching conflict per se.  It can be a series of smaller survival stories strung together, but Planet of Dinosaurs doesn’t manage to do that.  The ‘plot’ with Baylor depends on him being a petulant fool, and the characters are not sufficiently well-developed for us to have any interest in the ‘love stories’ that don’t affect the overall course of events.

The rivalry between Captain Lee and Bearded Guy Jim turns on how to keep the rest of the survivors safe from the large predators in the area, particularly the T-rex.  Lee wants everybody to hole up on a rocky plateau behind a ridiculously flimsy stockade to keep the animals out, while Jim wants to hunt down and kill the dinosaurs, to teach them to fear humans as wolves do on Earth.  The main problem with this is that we just don’t see enough of the predatory dinosaurs to justify this treatment of them.

We see the T-rex fairly early in the film, and it fuels the humans’ decision to see high ground where they hope such a large animal will not go. The much smaller Allosaurus shows up at one point to make a woman scream, is ‘injured’ with a laser, and the T-rex then eats it.  And just before the climax, the T-rex breaks through the stockade to chow down on Baylor’s secretary.  In between these incidents, we do not see and rarely even hear about these animals.  If we’re supposed to imagine them constantly lurking around outside, the movie makes no effort to reinforce that impression.  The T-rex is treated as the Final Boss, but the movie just hasn’t earned that.

At the end we see the survivors a few years later.  They’re building a farm, making their own clothes, living off the land, and raising their children.  One of the women asks the other if she thinks they’re ever going to be rescued, and the other replies that she doesn’t think it matters anymore. The implication is that they’re now happy here.  This is really not a bad little denouement, and ends the movie on a warm, optimistic note.

If you want to see some ridiculous 70s mustaches and ugly 70s dinosaurs, you’ll probably have fun with Planet of Dinosaurs.  Unfortunately, the movie was a little too ambitious in some places and not ambitious enough in others.  If I’d seen it at the age of six I probably would have become immediately obsessed with it for the dinosaurs alone, but as an adult I’m afraid my standards are just a little too high.  Unable to afford to be good, and unable to commit to being bad, it’s just another meh.

[reallyhardy]

regent’s open air theatre LSOH (2018) breakdown

act one. herein, two years later, i try to remember as much as i can about this production with the help of gifs i took from the trailer and shutterstock images. let’s go!

THE BEGINNING. i went to see a matinee so it was daytime, but the stage set was all black-and-white very newspaper aesthetic. my sister and i were very close to the front, five rows back:

and here we are, excited for everything to begin. (note my giant tooth earrings. was really hoping they’d catch matt willis’ eye.) soon enough crystal, ronette and chiffon took the stage for the prologue, belted their faces off and got me hype from the first moment. their costumes were kind of punky, street style (my favourite look was on the girl with the green jacket and shiny leggings:)

skid row was great. the grey set really highlighted the colourful costumes, and for this first number the set stayed black-and-white so the only colour were the main characters and urchins, and the ensemble wore black-and-white costumes.

and i remember being so thrilled by the costumes - in this photo seymour is wearing yellow socks but by the time i went to see it they were pink (to match audrey’s hair!) and audrey is wearing fluffy slide slippers in the promo photos but when i saw it she wore a pair of blue open-toe kitten heels.

once the song ended we got to see some character personality: marc antolin as seymour was adorable. he was (for most of the first act at least) very goofy and beamed a lot, he had a very cute smile. his voice was quite high and nasal and silly and i honestly had a really big crush on him. jemima rooper as audrey was equally sweet and adorable - she had a cotton candy pink wig and started off in kind of a sexy-ish outfit, with a sheer off-shoulder top over a bra. her eye makeup was light blue (and the bruise bright purple) and she was really short compared to seymour. mushnik was super tiny and greasy looking.

every interaction seymour and audrey had was just! so cute. at the start where audrey and mushnik discuss orin (the ‘you don’t meet nice boys on skid row’ conversation,) seymour is stood behind them kind of goofing around and he flips his shirt collar up pretending to be orin and acting macho but at the end of the scene audrey goes quiet and carefully fixed his collar back down before she left and it was!!! emotions.

da doo i can’t remember anything about how things looked :( during grow for me it really highlighted how…cute seymour was. he beamed the whole time, and the plant puppet in its baby form was fantastic, (the pod head at the top opened up and had little human teeth lmao) and they used like… household objects painted green for plants. the roses were red toilet brushes:

with red ink on them so when seymour touched the bristles there was visible blood on his finger which was fun. lots of attention to detail in this production.

seymour on the radio i think happened off-stage? so we just hear him being interviewed while we watch mushnik and the urchins listen to the radio together. the choreography during you never know was really fun too, with seymour and the urchins dancing together, seymour did a lot of hip wiggles and kept trying to stop audrey ii from trying to bite at the urchins as he danced. one of the green ping-pong balls fell off the puppet but nobody slipped on it so it was fine. also GOD the voices of the urchins were just so good in this one.

somewhere that’s green is a song that makes me cry most of the times i listen to it or watch any versions of LSOH, but this is the first time i’d seen a version where audrey was also crying. during this number the actress climbed up onto the top of the mushnik’s store prop and she still had the bright purple black-eye makeup on as well as the cast on her arm so she looked so beat down and sad and it was just toward the end of the song at ‘i’m his december bride’ where her singing started to break down and she started crying, and covered her face by the time she got to ‘far from skid row’ with her voice breaking oh my god the tears were flowing VERY much from my eyes.

and as a note the actress did not have this beautiful wig on when i saw it, she wore one with much less volume - it could have been the same wig just styled differently, (tucked under/trimmed to be just sort of...round?) but it was just... so much less cute lmao, you can just about see it here in this cast mirror selfie:

anyway. then it was time for closed for renovation! this one was fun, audrey and seymour i think were just...arranging plants and other things? the ‘mushniks’ shop prop might have expanded a bit? they turned it around?

there were some cute little dancey bits with the three of them together:

then audrey & seymour talk a bit. audrey gives seymour the kind of advice that she also needs to be taking herself -- seymour asks audrey if she’d go shopping with him, and then orin arrives on the scene.

dentist was amazing. i’ve seen a lot of bootlegs of kind of lackluster orin scrivellos but… well, me and my sister decided we were absolutely going to see this production when we found out matt willis was playing the dentist. (we were big busted fans lol) he wore this insane painted leather jacket with this tooth-themed biker gang design (he and his backup dancers all had hell’s teeth on the backs of their jackets) and his dentist coat underneath had the sleeves ripped off to show his tattoos… they gave him white foundation to make him look i guess more ill/joker like? it totally worked. he honestly kinda stole the show and he totally exceeded my expectations (which is saying something because my expectations were that he’d be perfect for the role and that i’d enjoy his performance thoroughly!!!)

then he comes into the shop, comments on the plant, poses around, treats audrey terribly. and not only does he abuse audrey in front of seymour who iirc was watching horrified (as you would) but also poor seymour gets his junk grabbed twice by villains in this production too lmao, orin grabs and squeezes seymour’s junk while he’s yelling at audrey. it’s a theme i guess???

(hell of a promotion image, that one.) then orin and audrey leave and it’s time for mushnik and son. they did a lot of the usual ‘awkward-tango’ choreo and it was just excellent really. there’s nothing i didn’t enjoy about the number, plus mush was quite a short guy but had a real big voice.

you get a good view of all the fun things they used to represent plants here too: cleaning brushes, feather dusters, hairbrushes, a small fishing net, a bubble wand...

so feed me was great because it starts off of course with the plant puppet prop:

but then by the second verse (when it comes to ‘does this look inanimate to you’) they opened up the puppet’s leaves like a mouth and audrey ii in drag queen form emerged (to thunderous applause). [i found a short clip someone got on instagram a while back, you can watch it here!] she was holding a microphone in her hands so when it came to seymour’s responses she held out the mic to his mouth and it was :’) really funny. and seymour gets his junk grabbed again:

because he can’t catch a break. staging wise i think i remember this was very bisexual - it’s important to note that the first wig audrey ii wears strongly resembles the wig that OG audrey wears - and at times during this number audrey ii acts quite flirtatious with seymour and he seems receptive to it and has to visibly shake himself out of it.

audrey comes back for her sweater (iirc it was a VERY jazzy 1990s looking one in aqua green and pink) and seymour and audrey ii make up their minds about what to do with orin.

so seymour heads out - the dentists chair was just a beat-up shopping trolley with various things stuck on (see there’s what looks like a plunger, wrist restraints too lmao) and orin had a bunch of bloodied weapons such as a power drill instead of a dentist drill:

anyway i usually don’t enjoy now(it’s just the gas) as a number when i’ve seen it in bootlegs but again matt willis had tremendous feral energy and he pulled it off. plus the gear was quite retro-futuristic very cool looking:

it was also especially funny just after ‘now’ because after seymour runs off with orin’s body in the trolley he comes back in with it all chopped up and he was pushing dismembered limbs (the arm was even painted with matt willis’ tattoos and nail polish which was a GREAT detail) into the windows of the prop mushnik’s building that audrey ii was inside of, and he even threw up into the audience which was :’) gross but funny. it was yellow. i didn’t see if it splashed anyone.

then... intermission. will continue this in [part 2, which is here!]

[imuybemovoko]

A profoundly bad childhood experience

I ...don’t have a whole lot of specific memories of my childhood. The things I do remember, I tend to lack good detail on. I think a good deal of this is because a lot of weird shit happened that I just don’t think about until something makes me think about it. A few months ago I was forced to think about some of the weird shit. I might be a bit lacking in specifics here, it’s been around 15 years since this happened and I don’t always have detailed memories from this period in my life, but I’ll do my best.

I’m writing a large document about my years of experience with Christianity and my eventual exit from it. I decided to write this in roughly chronological order, as best I could remember it, and trying to write about my early childhood in a small-town United Methodist church in upstate New York brought this experience crashing back in ...most of its weird sad glory. 

For those unfamiliar with this kind of environment, many churches run week long summer programs to indoctrinate children, calling them “vacation bible school”. In my experience, it was a week long, typically in June at this church, and was a bit different under like seven or eight years old than it was between then and sixth grade or so. The younger kids just like heard cutesy messages about Jesus and played little games all day, and the older kids moved around between like four or five little stations consisting of crafts, Jesus messages, music that even my kid brain found lame and awkward, a 20 minute TV show of a traumatizing chipmunk puppet called Chadder, and some teaching that took place in the context of an adult LARPing and setting up scenery. 

That’s Chadder. He’s fucking terrifying and his voice is annoying. He talks about Jesus entirely too much.

The first year I was old enough for this more mature version of VBS, on like the second day of the five, the theme was Jonah and the whale. For the blessed uninitiated, the story is basically that of a prophet called to yell at the city of Nineveh for their sins who runs away in a ship, then God throws a nice little hurricane at him, the crew of the ship yeets him overboard, and he spends three days inside of a whale, at which point he repents and goes to yell at Nineveh. (And then gets pissed off at God for sparing the city from destruction after they repent, but somehow that part isn’t taught to children and the rest of it is.) 

The adult who did the LARPing for this program every year was this lady about my mom’s age who I’ll call “Sharon” for anonymity. (I don’t remember her first name but it’s probably not that.) She always went all out with the costumes and got really into character, and the settings were usually pretty damn well thought out too. On this day, she’d set up an entire scene that fit with the theme of Jonah’s experience. Her scenes were always set up in this atrium area behind the sanctuary that could be closed off with one of those collapsible walls. 

Like this, but in a church. That fucking building was full of those, and even seeing them in person mildly triggers me half the time. :^) There was this atrium area behind it that people tended to gather in to talk before service got started, but for VBS Sharon repurposed it for scenes. The lights were generally pretty low, though I don’t think that was their only setting in there. The room also had this little hallway that was next to one of the narrow ends of it, with a door both going into the sanctuary and into this atrium, and attaching to the front door of the church with a crumbling stone staircase to the uneven sidewalk. 

They tend to break the kids up into small groups, the number and size of these groups depending on the number of kids in the program. I think there were eight or ten of us in each group this year, and we rotated through the stations they set up. They recruit the kids older than about 13 to escort us around all day. I think we were like the second group to go to the LARPing station this day, but I’m not completely sure. We came to the door from the corridor to the sanctuary and the teen leader knocked. Sharon came out dressed in this biblical-style outfit, trying her absolute best to look like the prophet might’ve. She may or may not have worn a stick-on beard or maybe one that hangs on and attaches behind the ears. She was easily dedicated enough to pull something like that. She certainly had one of these outfits going on: 

And definitely one of the male-styled ones with headwear. She led us into the corridor, acting all frantic. The corridor was very dimly lit this day, and as nervous as she was, I started to lowkey freak out too. I had no idea what was coming.

Sharon ushered us into the atrium thing, which was now very different from its ordinary state. My memory of the exact conditions in here isn’t perfect, so I’ll explain this as best as I remember it. The entire fucking room was dimly lit and lined with black plastic, I think she ripped up some trash bags and stuck them to the walls and ceiling in there. She was running some kind of high-octane humidifier and fan in there I think, because the whole place was dark and wet and humid. I’m a bit less certain on these two details, but she might’ve brought some pungent fish into the place to make it smell weird and played loud ass whale song on one of those little boombox/CD player/radio things that were common around that time. I think the other kids could handle it a bit better than I did, but this was a terrifying environment. Then she started talking about how the reason we’re in here is because she ran away from God (as Jonah; remember, she got real in character) and maybe this is her chance to repent and it’s so bad that she didn’t follow God’s command the first time. At some point in this display I freaked the fuck out and had to leave this place. They took me back to some room where the younger kids were doing something so I could cool off. My parents, and I think some of the other adults, expressed some disappointment about this. I don’t remember specific words; I do remember being shamed for being afraid of this ...intentionally scary display. And then when I was calm and they were done with all that bullshit, they brought me back in for Chadder of all things. 

I had a recurring nightmare for a while in elementary school. Every time I had this, it came in threes. I’d enter a dim, sweaty room where some faint, horribly distorted voices were crying out and have to climb a slope. I’d pass the first, shallow one fairly easily, but I’d go straight from that into a darker, sweatier, louder room with a steeper incline. I’d pass this trial too somehow, by this point being stressed and scared every time, and come straight into something so, so fucking much worse. This room was extremely dark, the incline was goddamn near to vertical, it was wet in there to the point where everything was dripping (or, in some cases, at least I was; I kind of think the scenery other than the light levels, sounds, and inclines varied quite a bit from instance to instance), and the voices. The fucking voices. They sounded like people yelling, except... through insane levels of distortion, to the point where everything was echo except the vowel sound, usually like the one in “sleep” or maybe a bit retracted. After the fact I’m inclined to project everything from coherent phrases to my first name onto the sounds, but I don’t remember them having any actual definition after all the distortion. These calls would kind of burrow into my consciousness as I tried (and, somehow, often partially succeeded) to climb this fucking smooth, deep slope, and when it all got too overwhelming I’d wake up sweating and terrified. (And usually I’d have to pee.) After I remembered this incident from VBS, I made a connection with this recurring nightmare and I kind of strongly suspect that it was a major contributing factor to these. This may or may not be accurate, but it bears some chilling similarities to Sharon’s whale stomach display: wet, loud, scary, dark.

I often have a fairly hard time writing about this. This shit had me shaking and unable to sleep for hours when I remembered it after apparently somehow repressing it for over a decade. Writing about it was easier this time, but I still kind of shake and struggle talking about it. It’s a whole time. I think I might need some therapy because of this and other fucky little incidents that happened during my childhood and when I was older and, for around five years, fully embraced Christianity and yeeted myself into some of its darker branches. But the more bullshit I remember from my childhood, the more I learn about the foundation, even from what I remember as a somewhat more progressive than average environment, that led me down my dark path. So that’s food for thought I guess.

Have a deepfried Chadder and a good day.

Chadder takes his mask off (2020, colorized)

[mrsbeef]

Heart-shaped herb flower display build

When I’m in an emotional rut, I often find the best way to distract myself is to throw my entire soul into some kind of project, ideally one with a bit of external motivation. And fortunately for me, just such a project suddenly fell into my lap. Some friends of mine were having a party that was part birthday, part LGBT community celebration. It was also Black Panther-themed, and the event name was “Queerkanda”. My task: design and build a punch bowl display based on the glowing purple flower of the Wakandan heart-shaped herb, so that party guests might imbibe and obtain De Strenkt of De Bleck Pentha™. I was only too happy to take up the challenge.

This whole project took 7 days, though only about half this time was spent actually building anything. The rest of the time was spent conceptualising, sketching, finding references, and toting feels.

 Step 1: Site visit

I had a little walk around the area where my installation was going to be placed on the night. The spot was a hedge approximately 2.5 – 3 feet high. The bowl itself was going to be placed in the mouth of a large acrylic cylinder, which would then sit in the middle of the hedge, giving the impression of the flower rising out of the foliage. Sounded simple enough.

Step 2: PINspiration

A bit of research showed that the heart-shaped herb flower from the Black Panther movie is not bowl- or cup-shaped like a lotus or a poppy, but actually more trumpet-shaped, like a datura. In fact to me it looks like nothing so much as ruellia tuberosa, a blue-purple flower that grows wild all over the place here in Trinidad and goes by the amusing local name of ‘monkey gun’.

(JM Garg under Creative Commons licence)

Then I started to have a think about glowing flowers. Immediately I thought of those lamps made of silk (or occasionally wool) with solid black edges that look almost like stained glass once lit up. You know, these things:

So I assembled a Pinterest board with pictures of purple trumpet-shaped flowers like monkey gun and morning glory, and pictures of lamps like these from Etsy. I’d refer to these images for inspiration throughout the project.

Step 3: Preliminary sketching

Having seen the site and the acrylic base I’d be using, and having acquired some reference images, I was now able to start imagining how I might actually build this thing. And what better way to do that than to get a pencil and start drawing stuff?

The basic idea was to make five separate flower segments to then be combined into the full trumpet shape around the cylindrical base. They’d be made of purple fabric with black fabric borders, over a skeleton of large-gauge wire. Each of these wire-and-fabric segments would then be illuminated from the bottom by a carefully-angled blue LED bulb, with another LED to be placed right below the bowl. My initial idea was also to add some different tints and tones to the purple by using bleach solution and blue fabric dye, if I could get my hands on it. This was because

a) using paint would affect how the fabric would look under the LED light, and I didn’t want it becoming opaque; and

b) bleaching and dyeing the fabric would allow me to add colour variation without the risk of colours running.

Now I had a much more concrete idea of how to proceed, which meant it was time to go…

Step 4: SHOPPING!

This was going to be an outdoor installation, and currently in Trinidad it’s the rainy season. And if you don’t know what tropical rain is like… well, it can be pretty merciless. So the key phrase in my design philosophy here was “all seasons”. This is why I elected to make the flower out of fabric instead of paper; I needed something that could stand up to the elements if— heaven forbid— it had to, without falling apart.

Luckily, Trinidad is the land of Carnival, so I was able to get pretty much everything I needed in the same store. However, Trinidad is also the land of public holidays, so I had to wait out the long weekend before I could buy stuff. By the time I got everything it was already Wednesday.

For the base fabric I chose a purple candy floss, which is a translucent material that’s quite shiny on its own. While in the store I used my phone flashlight to test how the candy floss would react to light; I found it had a soft glowing, almost frosted look to it, which I liked.

For the borders I picked out a length of black suedette, which just devours light like nobody’s business, so I figured it would make a very nice contrast with the more luminous candy floss.

Finally, for the wire bones I got a coil of heavy 12-gauge aluminium wire, the kind that’s usually used in the construction of Carnival costumes or large puppets or any other kind of sculptural armature of a certain size. It was a good weight, sturdy, pliable but not excessively pliable. All good qualities, but boy, did this wire cause me some pain. More on that in a moment…

Step 5: Construction begins

Aluminium wire of a certain thickness, when repeatedly bent at the same point, becomes hot to the touch.

Just a cool bit of science I happened to notice.

How did I come to notice this, you ask? Well, you see, as the picture shows, the only wire cutters in my house strong enough to take on the task of cutting through semi-hard 12-gauge aluminium wire were old and rusty and dull and horrible. So I ended up using them as a vice, clamping down one end of the wire while repeatedly bending it back and forth until it just broke. That is how I had to cut every. Length. Of wire.

Raw ends of wire like that are also sharp, and will cut skin when they swing around. I managed to slice open my cuticles twice just trying to get the wire cut. Somehow I was able to keep my eyes intact, though I found myself really missing my safety glasses, which are still in Toronto.

I would shape a single length of wire with the rusty pliers and my hands, leaving the two open ends at the bottom corner. I then bound those ends together with masking tape to give myself a closed fan-like shape. This process I repeated five times. Then I cut the suedette into long strips about an inch wide, and starting at the tape-covered join for a bit of extra stability, I glued the fabric strip in place with a hot glue gun before proceeding to wrap the suedette around the wire, which gave me a heavy black outline.

Finally, I cut the purple candy floss into squares and used hot glue to glue three squares of candy floss to the back of each covered wire outline, before trimming away the excess with scissors. It was an arduous bloody process, and I kept having to take long breaks to be an emotional wreck of a human being, so it did take quite a while.

But one square of fabric would have been way too diaphanous, and in the end it actually turned out to be a pretty good decision to use three sheets, for reasons I will explain later.

Step 6: Lighting tests

LED lights are great because they don’t tend to give off a lot of heat. This is good for my purposes, because any light that gets too hot would melt everything I’d made. That’s why black light bulbs were not an option. Those things get DAMN hot. I know because I burned my fingers on one. Between that, the hot glue gun and the wires, I’m essentially impervious to pain at this point.

Now here’s the fun part.

I could not find blue LED lights no matter where I went. Originally I wanted battery-powered bulbs, but then I relaxed my standards to mains-powered rope lights. Nothing doing. Couldn’t even find them in white.

So I had a poke around at home. I found a large bag full of close to 100 tiny battery-powered LED mini-bulbs in bright white, left over from previous birthday parties here. They weren’t very powerful, but I used them to test out how light would look on the flower segments.

How many bulbs will give enough light? One bulb? Three? ELEVEN?

The number of bulbs needed to satisfactorily light one segment was just prohibitively high (not all the bulbs in the bag worked), so I needed to try something else. I eventually settled on a spool of bright white LED Christmas lights. Using the coil of leftover aluminium wire and two large books, I set up an improvised frame that I could use to arrange the flower segments around the light string.

Hmm, looking pretty damn good if I do say so myself. But there’s something missing.

Step 8: Last-minute detailing

It became apparent to me fairly early on that the candy floss seemed to be completely immune to bleach. I don’t know what I was doing wrong, but I decided to jettison that idea. I also couldn’t get my hands on any fabric dye. But I still wanted to add a bit more black fabric to the flower segments, so that the finished flower would more closely resemble the silk lamps that were my original inspiration. So I got out the sketchbook again and drew out a few ideas.

Eventually I settled on the pattern of thin points of graduating lengths in the lower right corner; I cut them out of suedette and arranged them on top of a segment with straight pins. However, there was a problem: the black suedette absorbed way too much light, and pretty seriously affected the way the light hit the candy floss.

Solution: apply the detailing to the *back* of the segment instead, allowing the dark strips to be visible on the other side while still being covered by a layer of light-diffusing candy floss. I applied the strips of suedette very, very gingerly, using only small dots of hot glue. This is where it became apparent that it had been smart to use three layers of candy floss: the glue adhered only to the first layer of candy floss, so I avoided having spots of dried glue showing up on the surface of the flower and getting thrown into horrible relief by the light. Unintentional win! Now time to go to sleep and await--

Step 9: Installation

I arrived at the location with about an hour and a half of sunlight remaining. Borrowing two extra pairs of hands, I bound the five segments tightly together around the cylindrical base using a length of 14-gauge soft wire, which felt like freaking silk in my hands after everything I’d been through. Then I used some good old-fashioned elbow-grease to shape each segment convincingly and help create the trumpet shape I’d been after. Finally I stuffed the remaining purple candy-floss into the cylinder and arranged the lights before sticking a bowl on top.

Then it began to positively piss down rain. Luckily the outlet where the lights were plugged in had been wrapped up with a piece of a black bin bag, and the whole flower being soaked now meant it wouldn’t catch on fire! Can’t burn this one, Killmonger.

The rain turned out to just be a passing rain (though a heavy, almost hurricane-like one), so once the spot of bad weather was over, all we had to do was wait for sundown.

And there it is!

Queerkanda forever <3

[coolpolarbear123]

Band Camp Day 6

I guess I can march

August 25th, 2018

Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 7

HIT:

I guess I should start off by explaining the schedule for today. 

But first: DI is our drill instructor and SL is our section leader. Cool?

We started at nine again because we’re a good band, and it’s a shortened day, so we ended at five, ate dinner, then did evening activities at six instead of nine.

Except the band director let us out at four because we’re a good band, so we had two hours for dinner.

But let’s start at the beginning, because a lot happened today.

The picc inside jokes are currently: referencing the “Cha Cha Slide,” thighclaps, wanting to die and making every reference we can get, yeeting everything, gang sign, not last, and probably many other things I can’t remember.

We had three hours of marching rehearsal this morning.

Our section leader is back at it again with wanting to be hit by the van

Last night the seniors all got drunk to come to band with hangovers. Many seniors were not at band. My section leader was probably still drunk rather than hungover.

I heard that one girl threw up a lot

One girl chased geese with one of the fake geese we had? It was an interesting sight

One of the tubas brings a bassoon to band every day? Why?

Alright, so we ate lunch and headed to indoor band. We’re waiting for band to start, so one picc and I are sitting on a bench. Then another picc is walking by (she’s a librarian for the band, so I’m gonna call her “Librarian”), and looks at us and says, “I don’t appreciate all the thighclaps in the group chat” with a smile on her face.

So I immediately pick up my phone and put “#ThighClapsForLibrarian” in the groupchat

(I used her name, don’t worry)

So then everyone started doing that, and for the rest of the night, anytime we saw her, we would all say “Thigh Claps for Librarian” and give her a thigh clap.

Yeah she hated it

Nah she loved it

It was really funny. The DI and I next to each other in pregame, and Librarian is a little farther away, so later, when we were all on the field, DI and I were like “Thigh Claps for Librarian” and she wanted to die

Back to waiting for band to start, though, one of the piccs was about to enter the building, so we all swarmed her and thighclapped.

She promptly died of laughter

We were in sectionals, and SL was a mess. She tried to use this broken, splintered piece of wood as drum sticks (it was split in two). It did not work.

“I don’t think this is gonna work.” “Any of us could have told you that.”

While trying to find something she could use as drum sticks, she knocked over her coffee, which was in a travel mug that has a lid, but she didn’t want the lid, so she didn’t bring it in the first place.

All of us are dying laughing as she’s exiting the room to get paper towels.

Me: “You’re my favourite role model.” *Laughter increases*

“I will shank all of you” “Thank you”

There’s a lot of references to our band director uncomfortably holding all of our shoulders.

He asked me how to pronounce my name today

SL had her name tag in a weird place in her hood, and it was flipped, so it kept poking her in the face, and so at one point she just bit it and we lost it

SL really didn’t want to do sectionals today, and she was trying to be a good section leader, but we got her to end fifteen minutes early and so we talked about birthing stories

Piccs are weird, I know

I feel like my storytelling isn’t as good as it used to be (*cough* junior year of high school *cough cough*) and I’m sorry. These moments were super funny when they happened and I don’t know how to convey them

So we ate dinner, and it’s time for the evening activity: Hiking

Okay, it’s called something else, but the action is hiking, and if I tell you what it’s called, everyone who sees this will know where I am, so let’s not

It’s apparently a huge deal and tradition, so you’ve gotta show up to this one. Mandatory is a better word than optional for this one.

We meet at the practice field at six. The drum majors tell us to circle up. We do. They say it’s time for hiking... but first... let’s run pregame!

I’m sorry what.

Me: “What are we doing?” DI: “We’re running pregame!” Me: “That’s it--I’m quitting band.” DI: “You’re already in too deep.” Me: “I know.”

So we set for pregame, this is when thigh slaps for Librarian happens, and then: “Returning members, off the field!”

I’m sorry wHAT

So the newcomers have to march pregame. On our own. Literally let us die.

We did okay, I guess. I messed up a lot without people to guide to. We didn’t have our instruments, so I was able to shout stuff, though, like, “Dress down!” and “Wait for the line to go!”

So at the very end of pregame, we’re in a block for the SSB (if you don’t know that abbreviation by now there’s no helping you, please go read previous years), and the drum majors say, “You’re still at attention! Don’t break!”

Like, yeah, okay, we know. We’re standing, not moving. My shoulder hurts, whatever.

But then I start to realize what’s gonna happen, and I’m praying I’m wrong.

And we’re all the way at one end of the field, right? The cars and parking lot are behind us, and we’re pretty much staring down a road.

And suddenly there’s a noise from behind us

And then the returning members are running all around us, dressed in crazy costumes, using props, and doing their best to make us break attention. One girl had a cat, one dude was just skateboarding, one of the piccs came to thighslap in front of me.

She apparently did running thighslaps in front of other piccs. They broke, I think

Librarian came with a CD that had glasses drawn on it and put it right to my face so I could see my reflection. Once I realized it was her, I almost broke.

Anytime it was a picc that did something, I almost broke, basically.

One girl had a bird puppet that made weird noises that she shoved in my face.

And then it was done. It was finally done. “At ease” was said. We were free.

And then we weren’t.

“WE’RE ABOUT TO FIGURE OUT WHO FRESHMAN OF THE YEAR IS. ELIMINATION BLOCK.”

Elimination block. Where we get in a block and listen to commands as the drum majors give them. Mess up and you’re out.

Kill. Me.

The piccs are huddled. I go up to them.

“Not last, guys. Not last.” “We’re making a suicide pact.” “Not. Last.” “...okay.”

So we march in the block. And people keep leaving it. I see the occasional picc leave.

And then they have us condense. There’s maybe fifteen or something of us less. I’m not good with numbers, you know this. There’s a few piccs left. We’re not last.

And we keep going, and suddenly I get a glimpse of what’s around me. One girl. A piccolo. We’re the last two left.

And then she forgot to say “hit” and I was the last one.

And I won.

I’M SORRY WHAT

As soon as I’m at ease, DI flies at me with a hug, and she’s like, “WE’VE NEVER HAD A PICC WIN. NOT LAST, NOT LAST, NOT LAST. I’M SO PROUD, OH, MY GOD.”

I took a picture with past freshmen of the years. Apparently there was a curse that freshmen of the year would drop out of band the next year? The junior saxophone broke it, so there were three of us.

They made me promise not to drop out. As if I would.

And then it was off to the trails, finally.

Every keeps congratulating me on that--it’s weird

But hey, DI is happy

SL just wants to die

We get to the trail, and we hike up the mountain, and we get to the top as a band. It’s a fantastic view.

Along the way, many “’Cha Cha Slide’ off the mountain” jokes were made.

Pictures were taken

Piccs get naked happened (it was hot and a lot of us just took off our shirts and went around in sports bras)

Sliding to the right off the mountain was contemplated

DI took a good minute to complain about one of the piccs’ driving skills. Apparently it was brought up last night, and the drum major totally got into bashing it, and it was wild. DI got cut off early, though, because that picc player came up to us

It was the really nice DM who went off, I was surprised. But then again, they were all drunk.

Still, though, I agree. Her driving sucks.

then they had us all huddle up together. There were platforms, so they pushed the first-years back into the platform. Then, they had many seniors give us speeches.

These were, like, “hey, this is what band did for me,” speeches. Super emotional and all of that.

A picc went first, then another girl, and then DI went up with her friend.

This is when all the piccs lost it and started crying. The minute DI was crying, we were too.

Thighslaps for dad

Eventually SL was up there, and she just talked about how much she wanted to leave but never did ‘cause in the end it’s worth it. She forgot to state that part, but we knew it was there.

“I haven’t wanted to leave marching band this week, yet.” --SL (Us, later: “What do you mean--you’ve literally begged to leave all week. You said you wanted to leave earlier.” SL: “I didn’t mean it, though.”)

Thighslaps for mom

Finally, we all take a band oath, we sing the fight song and alma mater as the seniors cry, and then it’s picture time.

The piccs all thighslap/regular clap for the seniors, we took pictures (yes, one had gang sign), and then we hung around a little bit.

#YeetFor[Picc player]

I put it in the group chat. People repeated it. Picc player keeps trying to get us to stop. She had it coming. She knew it.

We hiked down, then. On the way, DI was like, “I feel like at some point someone’s gonna suffer through something and put it in the groupchat, and all of us are just gonna be like, ‘#thighclapsforso-and-so’”

Then the day was over and we drove back

It was a pretty crazy day

I have to say, though, my speech is gonna be thorough in four years. These posts will be easy to reference. (Future me, you auditioned last, got fifth chair, for detailed references. There are eight new piccs out of fourteen. There were fifteen. One switched to colour guard. She was a returning member.)

I’ll update the links eventually, but I gotta shower and e-mail my chem professor

[britneyreviewed-blog]

“Toxic”

Nipplegate and the Poisonous Purity-Policing of Pop Stars

Released: 1/24/2004 Directed by Joseph Kahn Rating: 5/5

I wasn’t sure if I should approach this blog in any kind of specific order in terms of the videos I review. I still haven’t quite decided, but I thought it’d be best to start with the video that inspired me to begin writing this blog in the first place (so I can keep my interest level up high enough to write at least one entry).

So I really did my research for this one. Read the Wiki article, watched the MTV “Making the Video” episode on it, read an NPR article. Toxic was directed by Joseph Kahn, who also directed Stronger. I immediately recognized the similarities, but I’ll get to that in a future review. The video premiered January 24, 2004 on MTV, and the song is from her 2003 album In The Zone. January 2004 is also when Britney got married in Vegas and then had the marriage annulled fifty five hours later. Apparently she was supposed to help Kahn with editing the video but then when the media scandal broke she went AWOL.

I didn’t realize how much Britney was involved in the making of her music videos—or at least this one anyway. From Wikipedia:

[She] first approached Kahn with a story sketch of a secret agent out for revenge against an ex-lover. … Her concept was almost fully formed and detailed, exemplifying the scene in which she drops water on the passenger's lap. Spears said she wanted to join the mile high club and be a stewardess that kissed a man in the bathroom. … Spears also told him about a scene in which she would be naked and covered in diamonds.

So it seems like she got pretty much everything she wanted! I don’t really know anything about the making of music videos, so I have no idea if this is standard or not, but I think it’s pretty awesome. Pop stars get a lot of shit for just being corporate puppets but Britney clearly had a lot of creativity and the pull and ambition to get it done.

Another pop culture event happening at this time was the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show controversy when Justin Timberlake inadvertently exposed Janet Jackson’s breast. As I read up on old articles about it to write this post, I remembered how pissed everyone was at Janet Jackson. I was about 10 years old at the time, and I didn’t give a fuck about football (I still don’t) so I never even saw the offending clip. Watching it now and reading about it, I’m like what the hell? It was totally Justin Timberlake’s fault! I remember my mother being really scandalized by it. And Janet Jackson got really shamed and humiliated. But if anyone should be it’s Justin Timberlake because wow! Also, who even gives a fuck because it’s just a boob. Damn.

The point of me bringing up so-called Nipplegate is that the scandal distressed the American public so much that this video and others like it were moved to nighttime programming in order to protect viewers. From MTV at the time: “Given the particular sensitivity in the culture right now, we're erring on the side of caution for the immediate future.” Is that not fucking wild?!?!?! Like the sensitivity in the culture TO BREASTS. Y’all I’m not saying I’m shocked or anything, but like you can’t even make this shit up, stranger than fiction, et cetera.

Anyway, onto the review.

In the “Making the Video” episode, Britney summarizes it as follows:

“This villain girl, she’ll do anything to get she wants. She goes through characters, she’s has all these different personalities, and she goes through all these different obstacles. … There’s three different characters: there’s the sly stewardess, then there’s the red-hair hot mama, and then there’s the bitchy black-haired girl. They’re all saucy in their own way. They all have crazy outfits. And there’s three guys I kind of manipulate and I kind of go through them to get what I need. And we kiss!”

Fucking excellent. This is actually a pretty comprehensive summary, but I’ll give you the blow-by-blow anyway.

Thanks to Wikipedia, I’m able to point out all the allusions to other films that Joseph Kahn put in. I know I said I’m a film studies minor, but I’m probably the worst film studies minor ever. I haven’t seen pretty much any movie I’m “supposed to” have seen. Like I’ve seen Hitchcock and Citizen Kane and shit but only because I was taking classes where I had to watch them.

So according to Wiki, the opening of the video is a visual reference to John Woo films. I’ve seen one Woo film in my life, in a film class. It was okay. Toxic’s opening shot is some doves flying by as the camera moves towards a plane. Woo often uses dove imagery in his own films, so that’s the reference. It’s actually a pretty cool shot, flying through the cockpit and out the peephole—one that was difficult to set up according to Kahn in “Making The Video.”

We’re introduced to Britney’s first persona, the Sly Stewardess. I guess now that I’ve done my research I know “disguise” is a better word, because she’s actually like a super villain who has all these different costumes according to Britney. The first time I watched the video, I definitely did not realize that not only are all of these women were supposed to be the same person, but that there’s actually a plot. You’ll see. 

Anyway, she does a bunch of dance moves that are riffing on what stewardesses do, which is a super cute concept and this is honestly my favorite section of the video. She sings into the phone that’s used to make announcements, dances with the drink cart, and my favorite part is when she and the other stewardesses turn the gestures they always do on planes when they’re talking about how to pull down oxygen masks or show you were the exits are into dance moves, while all the Businessmen on the plane nod their heads robotically to the beat.

There’s a hilarious moment where she puts a blanket on a child and pats their head. Even the look on her face afterwards is like “Why the fuck am I doing this?”

I guess I should also mention that we also see snippets of Diamond Britney.

She ends up in the bathroom making out with one of the nerdy looking Businessmen, who I learned was played by the casting director’s assistant (thanks Wiki). She pulls off his mask to reveal a Handsome Man beneath—I love that they committed to ripping off his face even though the special effects available in 2004 were nowhere near good enough.

I was surprised at the sexual shots they stuck in there, like when they zoom in on Sly Stewardness grinding on Handsome Man’s crotch, or when she spills the drink on the crotch of one of the Businessmen and uses a napkin to wipe it.

Abruptly, we’re transported to a dark city street (somehow Paris, given the Eiffel Tower in the background) and the Red-Hair Hot Mama appears riding on the back of a motorcycle with some rando. Kahn described the video as “retro-futuristic” and that’s most obvious in this sequence. The actor on the motorcycle is named Tyson and he was a huge Britney fan—he said he had her picture on his refrigerator. Cute. It was his birthday the day before the shoot and she got him a cake!

Wiki told me this sequence was a reference to Blade Runner (1987) and that Marilyn Monroe scene from The Seven Year Itch (1955) when she gets her dress blown up. While this is a great section of the video, I found myself missing the Sly Stewardess. The motorcycle sequence ends with a fantastically cringe-y green screen shot of Britney flipping around backwards off the bike.

The plot wavers a bit here. Red-Hair Mama FKA Sly Stewardess breaks into some kind of laboratory, but without any establishing shots, it’s hard to really get what’s happening. She pulls out a hairpin and throws it at the entrance of the building and it… explodes? 

Then she gets inside the lab itself using the pass she stole from Handsome Man while she’d distracted him with all that scintillating grinding. Cutesy shot where the video syncs with the lyrics—the laboratory is called Toxic Industries and there’s a shot of the doors to the lab with a sign that reads TOXIC as Britney sings “you’re toxic.” 

After grabbing the poison, she has to dance through a bunch of lasers to get out of the lab. Man, lasers were such a staple of 90s and early 2000s spy movies. I guess security systems have gotten more advanced. Diamond Britney continues to roll around in the bright white void.

It doesn’t serve any purpose other than to create a memorable image for the video—that’s how Kahn seemed to describe it. I’m into it.

Then, suddenly! There’s a shot of a shower head blasting water and you’re all like wha? And then you realize Britney’s Cheating Boyfriend is showering with another woman! He’s been having an affair! Or at least, that’s what Britney intended for you to realize, but the shot of her boyfriend and the Other Woman in the shower is so brief and again without any establishing shots, and it’s the first time you’re seeing either of these characters, so that went way over my head.

Never mind that, Britney’s final costume change is here: the Bitchy Black-Haired Girl! She uses suction cups (another spy movie staple) to climb up the side of his high-rise apartment building and front flips in through the… window? It’s hard to say. I am loving the ultra fast camera movements though.

There’s a weird moment where she appears to lift up her Cheating Boyfriend by his belt and throw him onto the floor, and then suddenly she’s teleported onto the couch… I can’t really follow what is going on anymore. 

As I went through the stills I took for this review, I noticed the Other Woman appears to still be in the shower. Wowee zowee!

She gets on top of him and pours the Toxic poison in his mouth and he’s dead. Cool!

Her running and jumping off the building only to land in the plane back in her Sly Stewardess disguise is a great shot and clever match-on-action despite how nonsensical the whole thing is. Love the wink accompanied with that ding you always hear on airplanes, and the “Thank you for flying with Toxic Air” announcement.

It’s funny that this was considered too much for sensitive audiences. I know it was almost fifteen years ago, blah blah blah, but you know. I read a review from 2004 of this video, it was by Nanda Lo for Popdirt.com. Here’s an excerpt:

I believe this video will receive a lot of criticism for it’s overrated sexual scenes, including scenes where Britney puts her hands near the crotch of two of the characters in the video. Britney said a while ago that she posing almost nude in magazines was something that went too far and that she was not going to do something in the likeness of that again. Once again, contradiction, but contradiction creates buzz.

Like I said before, I was 10 at the time this video came out, so I sort of missed out on the whole public discourse around Britney Spears and other pop stars going on. It’s all been said already I suppose, but obviously it’s fucked up that there was such intense pressure for her to maintain an “innocent” persona. The whole Janet Jackson thing shows just how much was at stake, even if it was an accident! The crotch grinding scene in the bathroom, while pretty campy by 2018 standards, actually seems kind of badass when you look at it in context. I’m interested in watching her other videos and looking for that pure/impure dichotomy imposed upon pop stars that I think Britney’s early career really exemplifies.

This video is fantastic. I don’t really have any legitimate rating system but I think it’s fair to say this one sets the bar so I’m giving it 5/5. The plot was totally lost on me but it was fun to watch. It was also an interesting twist to have Britney play the villain, in contrast with the lyrics of the song which set up her lover as the antagonist.

Thanks for reading!

Resources “Toxic” official music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOZuxwVk7TU ″Toxic” Wikpedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_(song) “Making The Video: Toxic”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxRntcnckqQ Nanda Lo’s 2004 review: http://popdirt.com/britney-spears-toxic-video-review/75830/ 2009 NPR article that talks about Nipplegate in connection to “Toxic”: https://www.npr.org/2009/11/13/120385043/the-decade-in-music-britney-spears-toxic-2004

[mst3kproject]

1105: The Beast of Hollow Mountain

I have a personal fucking grudge against this movie.  When I was… I dunno, maybe six or seven, I went to an event at the city zoo that featured a talk by paleontologist Robert Bakker (I still have the Ornithomimus he drew for me) and a screening of an absolutely, non-ironically fantastic movie about cowboys and dinosaurs in Mexico.  Since I was a child, I never bothered to remember the title of this film and so years later when I fondly remembered it, of course I couldn’t find it to watch it again. Until one day, flipping through banged-up VHS tapes at a flea market I happened across The Beast of Hollow Mountain… cowboys and dinosaurs in Mexico?  This had to be it!

I was wrong.  I was so, so wrong.  This movie has been on my Episodes that Never Were radar since the inception of this blog, and I was delighted that Season Eleven actually used it at the same time as being slightly annoyed that they used it first.  No matter.  It richly deserves everything Jonah and the bots threw at it.

There are these two guys, Jimmy and Felipe, who own a ranch. Jimmy keeps flirting with a woman named Sarita.  She’s supposed to be marrying this other guy called Enrique, who doesn’t like Jimmy and tries to undermine his ranching business so he’ll be forced to return to Texas, but of course Sarita secretly likes the smiling white guy better than the grumpy Latino. There’s also a comic relief drunk, Pancho, who might be funny if it weren’t for the fact that he’s a grieving widower raising a very young child, which kind of undercuts the joke.  We watch these people go about their lives for at least seventeen hours in which nothing much happens, and then suddenly holy shit motherfucking dinosaur out of nowhere.

The weird masked people in that one scene are chinelos dancers, which is interesting in that it gives us an exact location for this story: the little Mexican state of Morelos. This area is rather far south of the US-Mexico border and known more for its sugar cane than its cattle ranching, but it does appear to have mountains, so we’re on firmer geographical ground here than in Beginning of the End.  The masks and robes the dancers wear were originally designed to make fun of Europeans, so it’s kind of fitting that the whole display reduces Jonah, Kinga, and Max to terrified weeping.

If you only look at the first three quarters of the movie, The Beast of Hollow Mountain is an unremarkable, laid-back little western about an upstart rancher competing with the local cattle baron in both economics and love.  There are probably a lot of movies that have this as their only plot, and they do just fine for people who like westerns, I guess.  In this particular movie, however, it’s all just killing time. When I reviewed Avalanche a few weeks back I complained that all the effort getting us to invest in the characters is ultimately pointless because none of those stories will be resolved.  Beast of Hollow Mountain is slightly better, in that it does resolve the problems it has set up for the characters, but it does so via tyrannosaurus [r]ex machina.

The movie does make some attempt to hint at the existence of the dinosaur, but it’s pathetically ineffective.  There are superstitions that the mountain is haunted, and cattle are disappearing – but we see that Enrique is encouraging the rumors and possibly stealing the cows as he tries to force Jimmy to leave town.  Occam’s razor tells us that a jealous rival is a much more likely explanation than a dinosaur.  Actual evidence of the monster, such as footprints, cow bones in places cows could not possibly go, or never-believed eyewitness accounts from the local drunks, is completely lacking.

It’s pretty obvious that the reason the dinosaur never appears until the last few minutes of the film is because animation is expensive and that’s all they could afford.  That’s fine, but a lack of budget shouldn’t have gotten in the way of the foreshadowing!  You can make a respectable dinosaur footprint with a shovel and an eye for artistic detail.  Have a couple of prop guys drape a fake cow skeleton over a tree branch, and presto, instant mystery!  And if you need unlikely eyewitness accounts, you’ve already got a town drunk who could be laughed at for it, in the form of Pancho!   You could even do that stupid joke, as seen in god only knows how many other movies, where seeing the dinosaur makes him throw a bottle away and swear to never touch another drop!

It seems so obvious that a movie called The Beast of Hollow Mountain would want to include some clues to the nature of the titular beast before we actually see it, I can’t imagine why they didn’t.  Maybe they figured they were building suspense?  If so, all they actually accomplish is, as Jonah and the bots repeatedly note, making us doubt that there will be any beast in this movie at all.  By the time we get to its appearance, it seems completely wrong that there would suddenly be a dinosaur in what has so far been a story with no fantastical elements.

The other problem with only pulling the dinosaur out at the end of the movie is that, as I mentioned above, it’s a deus ex machina, an easy solution to the characters’ problems that doesn’t feel like part of the same world.  After we’ve watched the rivalry between Jimmy and Enrique for an hour, the satisfying way to end this story would be to have them resolve their differences, perhaps out of mutual love of Sarita and a desire to make her happy. You could even include the dinosaur in this, by having Enrique forgive Jimmy out of gratitude for saving his life. Instead, the dinosaur kills Enrique, leaving Jimmy free to do whatever he likes without having to address his own problems!  It’s as lazy as having him wake up at the end and discover that Enrique was only a bad dream.

When you refuse to foreshadow, you also leave the audience wondering why there is apparently one dinosaur wandering around in Mexico somewhere.  You can’t just pull one dinosaur out of the movie’s ass and not have some kind of explanation!  Eegah! had one caveman in the deserts outside Palm Springs but offered the backstory that he was the last of a clan whose lives had been greatly lengthened by the sulfur springs.  Other movies give us dinosaurs that come out of lost valleys or the centre of the earth or something.  Is that what ‘Hollow Mountain’ is supposed to be?  A portal to a lost land?  If so, I think that deserved at least a few seconds of screen time!

Outside of its lazy storytelling, I guess The Beast of Hollow Mountain really isn’t badly-made. The costumes, including those on the extras, are gorgeous, and between those and the chinelos dancers I suspect the film-makers just went to a town in Morelos and said, “who wants to be in a movie?”  The characters are all pretty one-note but the actors do their best. Mario Navarro as Panchito isn’t nearly as annoying as he was in The Black Scorpion, and Patricia Medina as Sarita does manage to seem like she’s struggling between her commitment to Enrique and her crush on Jimmy.  The worst performance in the movie is probably given by Jimmy himself, played by Guy Madison.  He does ‘smiling mellow cowpoke’ in every single scene, including those that really would have benefitted from some gravitas.

The dinosaur itself is… eh, it’s not that bad.  I feel like I’ve probably waited longer for worse dinosaurs (Lost Continent comes to mind).  I do like stop motion in general and I respect the effort that goes into creating it.  The problem in The Beast of Hollow Mountain isn’t so much the animation itself as what they chose to animate – why the emphasis on the dinosaur’s flailing tongue?  They also failed entirely to make it look as if the dinosaur is occupying the same space as the humans.  Either the puppet or the actors is always horribly out of focus, which might be an attempt to suggest depth.  If so, it doesn’t work.

Then for the closeups, they have dinosaur puppet arms and feet. These are simply terrible.  They don’t match the stop-motion creature in anatomy, movement, or implied size.

It’s pretty obvious what went wrong with this movie.  Somebody came up with a really cool idea for a popcorn flick – cowboys and dinosaurs, you guys!  Everybody else loved it, but as they tried to bring it to fruition, they realized it was also a really expensive idea, and tried to lower the cost by increasing the cowboy-to-dinosaur ratio.  By the time they got to something they could afford, there were only five minutes of dinosaur left.  As I observed in my review of Future War, sometimes movie-makers really need to just step back and say, “no, guys, this is just not gonna work.”

In this case, the ‘somebody’ with the great idea was stop motion pioneer Willis O’Brien, who wrote a script he called The Valley of Mists.  I’ve never read it but I know for a fact that The Beast of Hollow Mountain didn’t come anywhere near doing it justice – because thirteen years later, O’Brien’s protégé Ray Harryhausen did the animation for the remake, The Valley of Gwangi. You guessed it, that's the fucking awesome cowboys-and-dinosaurs movie I remembered from my youth!  If you were disappointed by The Beast of Hollow Mountain, I highly recommend giving The Valley of Gwangi a look.  It’s got action, adventure, romance, special effects so groundbreaking that the Jurassic Park franchise has actually paid homage to them more than once, and is the guaranteed cure for all your Beast-of-Hollow-Mountain-related blues!