Turn Out the Lights

I'm going to take a page from Michael Offutt's playbook and close my blog down for the end of the year starting after this post.  I really don't have any new idea for posts and at the moment I don't care.  There just enough people making me angry I guess.  You know the best posts come when someone like Andrew Leon or Jay Greenstein annoys me.  Or someone writes a stupid article and I feel the need to say how stupid they are.

Plus in November everyone's all gushing over NaNoWriMo and then there are the holidays, so it doesn't seem like much point in blogging.

There are a couple of final thoughts.  First, what's the deal with Ben Carson?  I keep hearing from right-wingers how "brilliant" he is and yet he says the stupidest shit like the Jews could have stopped the Holocaust if they'd had guns.  Or when he blamed Oregon school shooting victims for not rushing the gunman.  Which he would have done, except he admitted when someone was going to rob him at a Popeye's that he told the guy to rob the cashier instead.  Yeah, that sounds like the genius I want in charge of America.

In large part it's a good example of a stereotype that sounds positive.  It's like the stereotype that all Asians are good at math.  Only in this case it's that neurosurgeons must be smart at everything else.  The "logic" basically goes:

• Ben Carson is a neurosurgeon
• Neurosurgeons are smart
• Therefore Ben Carson is smart

And no matter what stupid shit he says, the comeback is:  He's a doctor!  Which obviously he knows something about surgery but that doesn't mean he knows or understands geopolitics.  I mean come on I graduated magna cum laude from college but does that mean I should run America?  No.

The other part of it is he's the Right's black friend.  You know how every racist when called on it will say, "I have black friends!"  Ben Carson is the black friend for all the Dittoheads so they can feel good about hating Obama for eight years.  Rupert Murdoch even called him the first "real" black president.  To which Bill Maher had the hilarious retort, "Yeah the problem for Republicans is Obama wasn't black enough."

Anyway, like Trump before him Carson is peaking too early.  The reason guys in the back of the pack are still trying to hold on is they're just waiting for their turn.  I suppose next it'll be Carly Fiorina's turn.  She'll be lauded for her business experience, despite that she was horrible at business.  There was a great article about how when she ran HP, Steve Jobs duped her into making knock-off iPods in exchange for putting iTunes on all HP computers.  The knock-off iPods flopped while iTunes grew bigger than ever.  If she can't handle Jobs, do you think she can handle Putin?

Maybe in a way this whole Republican fiasco is the public trolling the political world.  Since there's over a year for the election, why not kick the tires on Donald Trump?  Or Ben Carson.  Or Carly Fiorina.  Or Bernie Sanders on the Left.  Which as much as I like Bernie and his ideas, Hillary's overcoming the Benghazi "scandal" gives her almost a clear path.  She'll still probably lose New Hampshire as that's Bernie's home turf, but otherwise she'll win.  Which is disappointing as she's owned by corporate America like the rest of them and we'll only get more wishy-washy liberalism like her husband.

That's enough political analysis to last you until 2016, right?

As for Stuff I Watched, since it's October and I've seen the Halloween series and Friday the 13th series and no one has Nightmare on Elm Street free (the whole series anyway), I've been watching the Hellraiser series on Netflix.

The first movie has a convoluted plot.  It's like this girl's evil uncle is in Hell but through a mysterious box (kind of an evil Rubik's Cube) he contacts the girl's stepmother and she brings him through a gateway to the real world, but like The Mummy (the Brendan Fraser one) he has to devour people to take their flesh and stuff.  And somehow the box also summons nasty fetish monsters known as Cenobites.  And confusing mayhem ensues.

If any of that stuff from the first movie made sense the second movie would be up your alley because it adds to the convolutedness.  The stepmother is brought back this time by an evil shrink who feeds her inmates from his asylum.  But then the shrink becomes a Cenobite with snake fingers who kills the other Cenobites, even "Pinhead"--the guy with the nails all over his head.  But with the help of a catatonic girl who knows puzzles, the girl from the first movie somehow stops him and kills the stepmother and stuff.  The most interesting thing about the movie to me is that dialogue from it was sampled into the Queensrhyche song "Silent Lucidity," which I have on my MP3 player.  You have to listen for where a guy says, "How's....better?"  And where a woman says, "Help me." 

The funny thing with this franchise is it's like Friday the 13th where Jason wasn't the original focus.  Apparently the stepmother was supposed to be the focus, but everyone liked Pinhead the most, so from the 3rd movie on he's like the head Cenobite and kind of ambassador of Hell.  The third movie explores his origin a little more while there's also a female reporter who finds the evil box and is going to use it to stop Pinhead from...whatever.

The fourth one is sort of literary in its scope.  It tells three generations of the Merchant family.  Back in 18th Century France a toymaker named LaMerchand or whatever builds the evil puzzle box for sort of a Marquis de Sade guy, whose son (Adam Scott of Parks & Recreation) somehow uses the box's power to live to 1996, when his evil girlfriend tries to steal it and get the current Merchant guy to build an even bigger one.  Finally it jumps to like the 22nd Century where the Merchant guy of that century designs a space station that's like a floating version of the box that is supposed to kill Pinhead.

The fifth and sixth ones are largely the same.  In the fifth one there's a detective trying to find a killer who cuts off the finger of a child to leave at each crime scene.  The detective is a really bad cop and what we find out is that the killer is himself and really when he found the box at a murder scene he was sucked into his own private hell.  I liked this one probably the best because it reminded me of a story I wrote in 2004 called "Tartarus" where an assassin's hell is to live the day his family died over and over again, each time his family dying no matter what he does differently.  The sixth one features another guy who crashed his car off a bridge and killed his fiancee.  He has a lot of memory problems and hallucinations while a police detective comes ever closer to bringing him in for murder.  He's not in Hell.  If you paid more attention than I did, you'd have realized his fiancee is the girl from the first two movies, only an adult now.  She doesn't die but to get off the hook with Pinhead, she kills 5 people--including her jerk fiance.  Which seems like a WTF ending to me.  I mean if she killed all these people, isn't she going to Hell anyway?  I don't think St. Peter would say, "It's cool that you killed those 5 people.  They were all bad.  And you had a deal with Pinhead, so come on in!" It was kind of a lame M Night Shymalan way to end it.

The 7th one starts out OK.  Again there's a female reporter who finds "the box" while investigating a cult in Bucharest.  This weird cult has the members kill themselves and then their leader brings them back to life somehow.  It gets increasingly convoluted, bringing back the largely nonsensical feeling of the original movies.  It kind of spoiled what was to that point an OK movie.

With the 8th one Dimension Films does what they did with Halloween Resurrection, which is to add a dose of Scream-esque meta content to the franchise.  There's a Hellraiser RPG game online and this group of college kids play it and get invited to a party at a spooky house hosted by Lance Henriksen.  One of the kids is the current Superman, Henry Cavill, who dies like a bitch.  While it's OK it's basically just a slasher movie with the dumb kids being killed one after another until only a couple are left.  Even the identity of the real killer is pretty easy to figure out.  (Lance Henriksen is the father of a boy who died playing the RPG game and created the whole party scam to kill his kid's friends.  The whole "parent after revenge thing" is the premise of numerous horror movies like the original Friday the 13th, Friday the 13th V, and Scream 2 for starters.)  As convoluted and nonsensical as a lot of these movies are, at least they had their own format.  at the very end there is a little of that when Lance Henriksen opens the box and Pinhead shows up to kill him.

While the 8th one used the slasher template, the 9th (and final) one uses the found footage trope.  Two college kids go to Tijuana and buy the box off some dude and mayhem ensues.  It's kind of lame.  Not just the story but the acting and the production values.  It's also the only one not to feature Doug Bradley as Pinhead.  I guess the idea was for a reboot, but like almost every other horror movie reboot it sucked.

No final post for the year would be complete without shameless plugs!  Tomorrow's Halloween and last year I wrote one gender swap story, Transformed for Halloween. 

Five wives, tired of their husbands' behavior, hire a witch to put a curse on them. At midnight on Halloween, the men are transformed into their wives' costumes: a little girl, a schoolgirl, a whore, a Goth girl, and a cheerleader. Now they have to spend all of Halloween in these bodies, under the control of their wives.

This year I wrote two!  First there's Transformed for Halloween Too:

In every neighborhood there's a house no one wants to visit. On Waukegan Street it's the house of Old Lady Montgomery. On Halloween night Gabriel Tobman goes up to the front door of the house to play a trick on the old woman. Instead, she's the one dishing out the tricks by turning him into a girl. Now every hour he's getting four years older. The only way to end the curse and get his life back is to have thirteen orgasms by dawn. Can he make it or is he destined to become the new old lady of Waukegan Street?

My Amazon nemesis "John Daniels" of course had to write a bad review, complaining about the "abrupt ending."  Which makes no sense.  I mean this is a ticking clock plot.  Gabe has until sunup to win the game.  So the story ends shortly after sunup when the game is over.  It's like, WTF, dude?  How is that "abrupt?"  Maybe he's the kind of idiot who thinks these should end Happily Ever After when most of these (especially a Halloween one) are horror stories in my mind.  He said the same shit about another story where I did kind of a Back to the Future thing, where someone altered the past and then jumped back to the future.  That one actually did end Happily Ever After and he still bitched about it!  Again I can't help shaking my head and wondering why the fuck the guy keeps buying these books when he only complains about them?  Maybe the fifth time will be the charm, right?  Moron.

And then from another pseudonym is Trick or Treat:

As easy as stealing candy from a baby.  For Billy Knutsen this is more difficult than he thought.  After he steals Halloween candy from some kids, he and his best friend are turned into little princesses who have to fill their treat bags or be stuck as girls forever.

So there you go, if you want something creepy to read for tomorrow, you got plenty of options.

And that's it, I'm out.  See you in 2016.