John Carpenter's Christmas Carol

FIGHT EVIL
Sam Drog

Clown Versus Monkey! Check It Out Here!

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What is a Clown Vs Monkey?

Hello, Mutants!

Every now and then I like to throw out an update on the film, mainly so people who worked on it will know where it is and if it is going to eventually condense into a solid mass.

Well, I keep tinkering on it. Below is a screenshot of my progress spreadsheet, I know, I'm a romantic. So the black boxes are what has been done. The RED boxes are steps that get pretty complex and usually sprout new boxes within them. These individual steps can be total rabbit holes that I fall down and end up spending several days on. Some of them get so deep, that when I finish one I will walk away from the project for a while just so I don't go nuts. You can only ignore life so long, otherwise, you won't still have one when you come back up for air.

So the last red box was this need I had to see a monkey vomit blood, and instead of the blood just disappearing in the air, I wanted to see it splat on the floor. This monkey is vomiting a lot and is making a series of splats. It took longer than I had planned. Also, as all the stories build to a climax, the scenes need more and more action and effects and schmutz, so all that has to be figured out and fidgeted with. Lots of fidgeting and tinkering with this coo-coo clock.

The YELLOW boxes, take some artistic effort and tinker time, but nothing like the RED. The GREEN are "click here, stupid" and just take time to render and click. They are the administrative boxes that take no effort but can be time-consuming when Premiere decides it wants you to reassociate all your files for no reason.

So below, I present, my spreadsheet! When I need to motivate myself I open it up and count the colored boxes and steady my nerves for the next dive. 341 total steps to go, and then we will have the complete 8 episodes. Five are online already. I started this in 2009 and I hope to be done next year so I can say "10 Years in the Making!"

FIGHT EVIL
Sam Drog

Clown Versus Monkey! Check It Out Here!

Buy Satanic Killer Chicken Here!

Watch Short Films Here!

Splatterflix Road Trip Picture Roll

Hello Ghouls and Goblins,

I lost my mind and went to Durham, NC to a weekend-long film horror film festival held at their beautiful Carolina Theater. This is a big complex in the middle of downtown. A classy joint with a full staff of cheerful volunteers. A place you would expect to be hosting all-state orchestra concerts and city commerce conventions, not the putrid degradation and smut of 1980's exploitation cinema. Someone upstairs didn't read their emails and allowed this march of depravity.

But why the six-hour drive from Woodstock, GA? Number One, what's the point of being a grown up if we can't get to do something fun now and then? Number Two,  since I was six years old, I've had an itch unable to be scratched until now. In the summer of 1982, my television was invaded with the constant loop of the Friday the 13th Part 3 trailer that promised terror and horror that would leap out at you from the screen. The early 80s had a wave of cheap 3D genre movies. Parasite and Metalstorm were actual Charlie Band directed movies, released by his Empire label that actually played in theaters, back when there was place in the market for such things. The next year, I was allowed to see Jaws 3D in the theater, it being PG fair, and that was my first memory of seeing a movie and knowing that it was not very good. Plus the 3D gave me a headache. But the F13P3 trailer was my intro to that series, and my imagination was on fire with how scary and nightmarish this movie must be. I had the same feeling the previous year when The Thing trailer played over and over, and feeling crushed when Rated R flashed at the end. Life was cruel. But imagining what these movies would be like was so much better than the real thing, as I learned later once video stores popped up and my trips to see my Dad on the weekends did not come with a concern of what I rented. Finally I got to see what had been forbidden all these years, and for the most part, as we all discover, the movies were pretty bad. When they did live up to the movie you had in your head, like The Thing, it was a miracle.

That's a long ramble, but the point is, even after I taped F13P3 off channel 46, and messed with the color and contrast levels in an attempt to recreate the 3D effect by wearing the red and blue glasses I held on to from when another channel showed Gorilla At Large, I had never seen it in the native 3D. So what was I missing? This movie made A LOT of money back in 82. I really enjoyed it growing up, especially the face of Jason at the end, but because I had never seen it in 3D, in a theater, there was something missing in from my fan life. So when my newsfeed said they were showing an actual 35 mm print in the actual old-school 3D process, not a digitally projected BluRay. I had to go.

My wife covered all adult responsibilities for me for the next 48 hours and I drove to Durham, NC. I stopped only to get more iced coffee, and not ashamed to say, pumpkin lattes because it's Halloween, fool! I got there in 6 hours, checked into the hotel that was connected to the theater. I'm telling you, this arts complex is nice, and designed for legit community events. Charles Band never had it so good. After changing into my Romero Lives t-shirt and grabbing a sandwich, I wandered into a screening of Mr. Bands Parasite, also from 1982.

The movie Parasite, I had tried to watch it before. It is on Amazon Prime, but my first memory of it was seeing the oversized VHS box at Video USA in Jonesboro, GA. It was not until it showed up on Prime that I tried to watch it, getting 10 minutes in and being unable to continue.

Here's the thing, no movie gets the fair attention afforded to it by a theater screening when you digitally stream it at home.  Movies can take time to get their footing, to pull you in. I am guilty of turning on a movie and if the first shot does not show me some sort of deliberate hand in its design, I will flip to something else. That killed off Parasite on my first attempt. But being trapped in a theater, and hearing the 35 mm print going in the background, and the print being faded and pink, and the investment of $9.50 for the ticket, by God I was going to try and enjoy myself.

Parasite is pretty good. It's an Alien knock-off, ran through Mad Max and a Western. Instead of the big bad riding into town on a black horse, he is driving a black Lamborghini. We get no less than three chest burster scenes. The parasite looks like a giant tadpole with a facefull of fangs. The lead hero looks like William Finley of Phantom of the Paradise, not exactly the Brad Pitt of his day. Demi Moore shows up in her first movie role, and she is fine, shining in this one scene where she is coming out of shock after being attacked by the bad guy, but nothing to indicate she would go on to be a big star. More interesting is Cherie Currie from The Runaways plays a post-apocalyptic gang member who gets the parasite knawing on her leg. She is actually pretty good, not much of a part, but you believe she's actually being eaten by a hunk of rubber by her performance. Also of note is the parasite was designed by Stan Winston, a mere four years before winning an Oscar for Aliens. It shows you that with no time, and no money, all "geniuses" are Charles Band.  Parasite makes overall better use of the 3D effect than F13 (blasphemy!) by taking the time to design the shots to have a pronounced foreground, middle, and background. There are a lot of tables with jars of wooden spoons thrust in the foreground, and lots of generic futuristic garbage hanging from the ceiling to give the shots depth. I appreciated the effort and liked the compositions.

F13P3 was next. I barely had a chance to rest my eyes from the weird 3D process before this one started up. The process is better in some ways than the newfangled Avatar process but does create more eyestrain and when the movies really try to poke at you, I saw a double image. So that was no bueno, but in the standard shots, the effect is really neat. Maybe more interesting than the new effect, or maybe more effort was made in these movies to make use of the possibilities, as opposed to today's post-converted cash grabs.

Friday the 13th Part 3, how do I go about this. Movies like this, I have seen countless times. I'm a big F13 head. A big Fango kid. These movies were the ultimate subversion growing up. I don't want to speak badly of it. I can say seeing it in a theater, with a crowd, in 3D, was enough. The crowd enjoyed themselves. I enjoyed myself, but seeing it in this context, the film felt very cynical and unimaginative. Maybe I'm an old man, but the criticisms I used to hear and ignore kept popping up in my head and rang true. No story. No characters. No suspense. The scenes could be played in any order and it would not affect the movie. Things I noticed, Jason is still running in this movie. The locations suffer from moving from the east coast to the west coast. Crystal Lake looks like a mud hole and the forest around it is straggly and sandy, with scrub brushes blowing around.  It doesn't have that dark impenetrable forest from the first 3 movies. Two scenes of people having bowel movements, and in both scenes, they pull up their pants without using toilet paper. WHAT! They deserve to die after that. Jason obviously sexually assaulted the main character in a flashback which makes Jason more reprehensible and is along the lines of the character being a vicious mentally handicapped man in the forest, rather than an unstoppable silent killing machine we eventually got with part 6. People constantly speak out their thoughts in empty rooms, like, "Didn't I close this door?" and "Where is that coming from?" and "Who's out there?" This is the majority of the dialog. This type of writing was fine as a kid, and it is funny now, but as I don't understand my kids enjoying YouTube videos of people playing video games, I can understand how this type of movie may not be everyone's bag.

After the movies, I grabbed a burger (local, farm to table, college town fair), hit the hotel and typed until I passed out. around10pm. I know, I should slow down. Up early and headed home. Here is the roll I took off my phone.

Fear and Loathing at Splatterflix

Durham's Grindhouse

So sleazy!

The Den of Depravity

I used to have this on my wall.

Calling all wierdos!

One of the best words in the English language.

Toast POV.

My sandwich had broccoli on it.

Parasite, without the glasses.

35 mm baby!

There is some sort of prism splitter deviding the image.

The riveted crowd for F13.

The glasses were not the tinted sunglasses from 1982,  but mirrored future glasses!

I'm the one in black.

Post movie socialising. I'm hiding in the bushes.

Inside Bull City Burger, where all the cows are given a mani pedi before being bolted in the skull.

Not my actual car.

The legal document.

Next morning, a donut shop named Rise.

The Rise crowd. I bought everything for the drive home.

Apple Fritter! Durn good.

Proof that the metro Atlanta area is not true south anymore as this was the first place I saw pimento cheese as an option for everything. Even the burger place and the sandwich place had pimento cheese items. I remember my grandmother eating the stuff from the supermarket, and me not liking it. But this homemade stuff was awesome!

I also got this avocado thing, it was great.

Finally, at the NC/SC boarder, there is this creepy abandoned castle that was shut down ten years ago due to breaking the gambling laws. Very Carnival of Souls.

That's it! Hope you enjoyed reading!


FIGHT EVIL
Sam Drog

Clown Versus Monkey! Check It Out Here!

Buy Satanic Killer Chicken Here!

Watch Short Films Here!

Clown Versus Monkey: We Are Bonzo

A new scene from the ongoing project, Clown Versus Monkey!



FIGHT EVIL

Sam Drog



Clown Versus Monkey! Check It Out Here!



Buy Satanic Killer Chicken Here!



Watch Short Films Here!

Infect Your Kids With Movies Day

One of the biggest pains of being a movie nut with kids is that you really want to show them these important movies you grew up with, and more times than not, they are completely resistant to sitting and watching some old dusty science fiction movie with fakey special effects. They would much rather watch a 3 hour YouTube video of someone playing a video game.

I have found that if one of their YouTubers talks about one of my 80s classics, all of a sudden they will run up to me rearing to see something that in the past they had refused to even watch five minutes. This weekend the tide finally turned for Raiders of the Lost Ark! I had tried numerous time to show this to the boy and the elder girl, to no luck. The DVD slowly and sadly going back in the box as they run back to their precious Roblox videos.

So with Cameron's interest peaked, I wasted no time and put on the disk and cranked up the sound. The whole family piled in and we got through the whole thing and all had a great time. Sarah the elder did keep her phone out, peeking up occasionally, but that is expected. She at least came out of her room to participate.

It's been a while since I had watched it, and man I still love this movie. It holds up. It may be perfect, and it also brings to mind the dozens of rip-offs that it inspired that could not capture that same energy and imagination. The kid's reactions were great.

Abbie my youngest is a lot of fun to watch movies with because she gets so into them and is very vocal about her feelings. When Indy and Marion kiss on the ship, she sighs like it is the most romantic thing she has ever seen, until it goes on too long and then she's like, "Yuck!" There were some gory scenes I tried to cover her eyes on, like Marion getting covered in rotting cadavers in the Well of Souls scene, but she pulled my hand away and said: "That's not scary, that's dumb."

The big finally with the fire columns and the melting Nazi's, also showed no signs of trauma. The kids all braced themselves with my warning that things were about to get gross, but when the faces came running down off the bones, they snickered and said it looked like a crayon man. Cam at least was impressed. 

Cam's big reaction was at the end when the Ark meets its final resting place. The room was split on if that was the right ending. I love it to death, it's perfect. Cam was outraged! They went through all that for nothing!?! It blew his mind a bit. I laughed. Later I asked him if the movie was as good as he thought it would be, and he said that it was 1000 times better.

So this was a big win for Dad. With the original trilogy, Jurassic Park, and now Raiders in their minds, I think we have hit at least the most basic of bases that I would feel I had failed them if I had not shown them these while they were still impressionable.

On a side note, I did have my first spontaneous Star Wars geek conversation with Cam last night, over the prequels versus the sequels. I was telling him about the other Indy movies and said there is a fourth one that he can skip, that it is fine, but doesn't measure up to the first three. Kind of like the prequels. And Cam was shocked, said come on, the Pod Race in episode one was awesome. I agreed but said that was all the movie had going for it, besides the Darth Maul fight. He asked me if I like Rogue One.  I said it was okay. He laughed, "Ha, see you do like a prequel!"  I liked the ending battle and the Vader rampage, basically, until the last 40 minutes, I was bored. He loved the horizon lifting up and becoming a solid tidel wave of destruction. It was a great two-sided conversation.

These are little victories I bookmark with Cam, where I think if he can learn to be as calm and communicative with other people as he is with me, maybe he'll be fine out there in the world. Usually, in groups he is completely oblivious to other people his age, even if they try to speak with him and befriend him, he'll ignore and wander away. I remember being similar at his age. He's not concerned about it, so I try to follow his lead. He's been saddled with the most anti-social dad on the planet, so I get it.

FIGHT EVIL
Sam Drog

Clown Versus Monkey! Check It Out Here!

Buy Satanic Killer Chicken Here!

Watch Short Films Here!

5x5: No Small Parts

Note: 5x5 is a new thing, super short stories with a quick illustration, Five paragraphs with five sentences, written at 5 in the morning before work. Thanks! -SD

Opening night and my stomach cramping, my mind racing. Spinning. What is my line? When do I come in . 6 weeks of preparation, gone. Not that I had much to do. Act three. Last Line. “Who ordered the fish.” Or was it steak? Or was it shark?

Dress rehearsal, I did great! Well, didn’t forget my line at least. A sneezing fit did come over me, announcing my entrance a good three minutes before I stepped out. Finally, with my sinuses under control, I entered with my tray and prop entre. Who ordered the… and then, Ah Chew! Again. Rapid fire. Again and again. It took forever to get the fish out of my mouth.

Three hours, that’s how long the play runs, and I had nothing to do for those three hours but think. Stand in the back. Relax. Don’t think. And I didn’t,  but the more I didn’t, the more I did. My hands fidgeting, and when I fidget, I snap. My fingers. Just to dispel the energy. The play was rolling, the audience seated in the dark and Julie, who I loved, was on her fifth monologue, the second most sad one. Darryl, our stage manager, heard the clicky-clack coming from my dark corner and rushed over. “Knock it off!”, he whispered. So I poisoned him.

The syringe was between my teeth and it only took a second. No lights back here, and just as I  rehearsed, slid the needle in, right of the breastplate, and pushed down the plunger. The mixture of Drano of pet tranquilizer was more effective than I had imagined. Like magic. Now you see him breathing, now you don’t.

The night progressed as such. Actors stepping off stage, moving to the sides, where I would be, waiting with my needle. I had enough medicine for the entire theater, including the audience, but this was a modest production, I had modest ambitions. Even so, by act three it was Julie alone on stage, trying to finish the play with no one to answer her lines, finishing her own conversations. She never broke character and I never came out to deliver my line and signal the end of the play. Julie held her pose until the lights awkwardly dimmed to black.

FIGHT EVIL
Sam Drog

Clown Versus Monkey! Check It Out Here!

Buy Satanic Killer Chicken Here!

Watch Short Films Here!

Clown Versus Monkey - Part Five!

Yes! It is true! The experiment continues!







FIGHT EVIL

Sam Drog



Clown Versus Monkey! Check It Out Here!



Buy Satanic Killer Chicken Here!



Watch Short Films Here!

Clown Versus Monkey Update!

Yep, CvM keeps on getting chipped away at on nights and weekends. It is my version of a train set that some dad's fill the back room with. A little here, a little there. Life comes in and makes you pay attention to your environment, but you always have this little voice in the back of your head telling you to get back to the train set.

So below is the chart for Episode 5. Four little blocs to fill in on the spreadsheet and then I will push this out to the nets. A digital bottle thrown into the big information ocean, were it can bob around a few decades and then one day, maybe someone will click on it and say, "Wha?"

FIGHT EVIL
Sam Drog

Clown Versus Monkey! Check It Out Here!

Buy Satanic Killer Chicken Here!

Watch Short Films Here!