Category Archives: Non-fiction

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Netflix 2022, review. (Mostly Spoiler Free)

INTRODUCTION: Ok, I make it not secret that I cannot stand the Texas Chainsaw Massacre film series. Yes, as a horror fan, I know this piece of shit is sacrosanct, but I could never find a way to like it. I went into this with lower than average expectations, even lower than I have with politicians, which is saying a lot, so was good?

STORY: Douche-bag Youtubers buy shit ghost town, accidentally kill leatherface’s mamma and how they’re fucked. Very Original/sarcasm

DIALOGUE: Mostly good, minus two cringe moment, one about death following one chick to this shitty town and the other about the wanna be Laurie Strode not being remembered by Micheal…er, leatherface.

SFX: Standard, but good.

VISUALS: Very good looking town, realistic for what is probably just stand ups as opposed to actual full sets. Sadly the shitting yellow lighting of a good portion of the movie to remind us the original was set in the 70s, was annoying.

KILLS: Decent, but not amazing. At one moment, what could of been a great massacre on par with Darth Vader in Rouge One, is plagued by “humor”.

SUBTEXT: Seriously? Consider the source material.

CONCLUSION: For a movie that is just a rip off of Halloween (2018), it is still the “best” this “series” has to offer and sadly way too late to be really worth your wild. When I say rip off, it is nearly point for point in the structure. Ignore all but the original movie? Check! Have actors that aren’t the most photogenic? Check! Have the original villain be smarter than he was in previous versions? Check! Original, albeit recast, character making a comeback for a show down? Check! Cliche ending? Check! This movie wins the 2018 horror movie bingo. Sadly, it is still just a mediocre horror movie at it’s core.

3 stars out of 5 for a normal horror movie.

4 out of 5 stars for a Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie.

Horror, Romance from a Male Perspective.

“Just because it’s a love story doesn’t mean it can’t have a decapitation or two.”

Robert Englund, Wes Cravens’ New Nightmare

Horror movies. Love them or hate them you most likely have a hardline opinion on them. Few have apathy for the genre. Some love gore, some love to be scared and some find those things to be damning to the soul and would much rather see these movies never be made again. Can we find a universal redeeming quality for one of my favorite genres? Maybe and that is what we’re going to look at. I believe Horror movies are really romances at heart, from the male point of view.

Obviously, what we’re seeing onscreen is “real” in terms of the world these characters are living in, So we’re dealing with this from the point of subtext and not a literal interpretation.

The typical killer in these movies are normally male and pretty masculine. They’re representative of the id and all the primitive instincts that make it up. Sexuality, Aggression and instincts. There is no ego or super ego to keep them in check, they couldn’t care less. Their driving force is satiety.

The typical survivor girl is almost always female, hence the term, and more akin of the ego and superego. They’re the ones struggling to keep control against the ID. This is why they’re often virtuous and innocent in the beginning.

Now that we set the tone for what I’m arguing, we can start to examine the micro aspects of the genre, like the weapon almost always being subtext for a phallus. Normally it is a blade of some sort, be it a sword, knife or machete. Why? Because at some point the survivor girl is going to be penetrated by the knife or cut somehow and this is subtext for sexual penetration. Masculinity and femininity combined as one, occasionally resulting in the monster themselves being impaled later on by their own weapon, in role reversal. I’ll elude more to this below.  

The friends or other victims are almost always shallow and that’s because the ID isn’t friendly to what it wants. I know a lot of us critics will point out that these characters need development and while I stand by that, the killer’s perspective couldn’t care less. When they’re men, they represent competition for what the ID wants and need to be dispatched and when they’re woman, they’re just “sexual” fodder, due to not satiating the unbridled carnality.

The endings usually see the survival girl “kill” off the monster, which is subtext for the lust being quenched by the object of desire and as stated above, the monster being penetrated, normally in the heart area, as subtext of falling in love, which juxtaposes with the females often being stabbed in the uterus area, as if being impregnated.

So why monsters as analogy, vs aggressive men? Men are often vilified for their desires and what they would do to achieve those ends. This is the enteral plight of the individuals fight with the ego, albeit not exhibited onscreen, but rather in how the villain is perceiving themselves and showing us who they feel as if they are.

Horror and romances even have similar plot points within the story structure. Meetcutes for instance, when the future couple meets for the first time. Halloween where Michael is standing behind the bush is an example of this.

While not exhaustive, when you examine these main points, all of this makes the horror-slasher genre really a love story from the point of the male libido.

The Wrong Missy, David Spade Revival Theater

INTRODUCTION

Well, it seems Netflix decided what the world needed after nearly two decades of absence was another David Spade flick. Oh joy!

CHARACTERS:
Shit! All the same BS these movies are known for, simple archetypes, if you can call them that.

ACTING:
None have ever been horrible actors, so, unlike this flick, its tolerable.

VISUALS:
Fantastic, which is more than I can say for the rest of the movie.

WRITING:
Shit! Fuckin’ stupid premise, horrible jokes, terrible story overall.

DIALOGUE:
Same as above

MUSIC:
None that I noticed.

SUBTEXT:
Devoid of it

CONCLUSION:
They couldn’t be bothered to make a movie, I can’t be bothered to do much of a review as I have said before. This piece of shit is unfunny. Happy Gilmore is nothing but a group of aging boomers that never grew up and the subject matter shows in this movie. I would say they are attempt to recapture their “glory years” but you would have to have had glory years for that to be true. It’s sad and pathetic group of people that are now stealing money from companies like Netflix, whom will see no fucking return, just to keep their dipshit friends employed within Hollywood. They’re not actors, they’re over glorified welfare recipients. David Spade sent his career to finally visit Chris Farley and after this outing, maybe he should consider doing the same.

0 out of 5 stars.

Cancel CULTure and You: An overview of an undying trend.

Introduction
Cancel culture has been a buzz word for near a decade now and it hasn’t shown any signs of slowing. As of this writing, the newest member of the cancel wars is Bryan Adams. Why? Getting upset that he couldn’t have any concerts and saying this,

“….thanks to some f—ing bat eating, wet market animal selling, virus making greedy bastards, the whole world is now on hold….”

This type of tweet falls under the category of “Racism” by the people who jumped on the hashtag for canceling the Bruce of the north.

Why though, does all this stuff happen? It comes down to perspective for the most part. You see, humans are social. We work on cost/benefit ratio if you have ever read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. Within, you learn about monkeys, of which we share a majority of our DNA with. The animal groupings have at least two types. Reciprocal and Cheats. Reciprocal animals are prosocial, which is to say, they do things that benefit the tribe and are considered what would constitute a normal functioning human. Cheats are psychopathic animals, which get a net benefit from a fellow animal and do not reciprocate. Within the book Dawkins points out grooming, literal and not pedophilic, to remove tics and fleas from a fellow monkey to keep them healthy from disease, in turn, that monkey would do it for another. There are penalties for this antisocial behavior. In the US, for instance, we have prisons and rule of law to deal with this type of behavior. Everything follows from this and all is stepped in the primitive side of the brain. Cancel Culture is also an extension of this. So, the short answer is that yes, you’re a fuckin’ Nazi, but not for the reasons you think you’re a fuckin Nazi.

Perspective

I spoke about how people Tribalize within Pre-Crime, I mentioned the MBTI and how it functions. Beyond that, humans have two types of perspective. Global and local. Bill Hicks, legendary comedian, sums up the global perspective in this quote, excellently.

“Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Heres Tom with the Weather.”

Notice the quote does not leave out anyone, it, to borrow again from Bill, sees us all as one. Humanism is globalism and liberal perspective is also globalism. Local perspective is tribal and limited to only people like you. Hence, you’re genuinely a fuckin’ Nazi, since the Nazi were concerned with helping only Germanic whites. Other whites were not white and considered tainted by the Jew. Hitler was basically a cheat. When it came down to it, Nazi Germany flourished and all other white majority nations suffered during the depression an absolute catalyst for the Second World War. His lack of global perspective cost him, otherwise Nazi Germany might still exist had he form alliances with the United States and the United Kingdom whilst sharing his resources with them as both had done with Germany, as Hitler was ascending towards prominence, before everything went kaput.

Given those two perspectives, cancel culture comes more into focus as to why it happens and how to predict when, where, why and how it will strike next.

Internet Tribes

It’s no secret that humans are hyper-tribalized more than ever. Back in the 1940’s, you had states and nation. When local cities competed, it was school football and not relevant, most cities did not try to destroy one another. Now, that is all gone, instead we have generational cohorts, we have personality types, we have genetics, we have superficial visuals, we have music, movies, television and more that has turned human tribes into the equivalent an reductio ad absurdum argument. Internet tribes are no different from outside peer groupings in most cases, albeit, some slight differences. You can be both a winner and a loser. Online you can have 100k Instagram followers, but most of those losers still work at McDonald’s as not everyone is making enough to live on. Us writers know the value of a day job, whereas the internet porn star can make enough to not have a day job. We’re just going to focus on the internet version of you, not the real world version of you. Now to be fair, a person’s perspective can be influenced by a lot of things, you have to keep their perspective in mind. It’s no secret that I use social media for experimenting and have kept track of how people engage me on social media and I will be using myself as an example and go between perspective and reality.

Reality when it comes to me:
I’m from Salem, Mass.

I was born in 1986.

Technically, I fall into the category of neither Gen-X nor Millennial, but possess a tad bit of traits from each, now referred to as Xennial.
I MBTI type as INTJ often, but I have a J mother and a P father, so I possess traits of both of them as well, so the occasional person whom thinks I’m a INTP is perfectly reasonable.

Both my parents are young boomers, aka Generation Jones or the early 60’s boomers.

Straight

Cis

White

Atheist

Liberal upbringing

I consider myself fiscally conservative and socially liberal. By that, I mean, I like Gays, but like saving money.

I’m a writer, among other things, but this is one thing I’m currently doing, so we’re using this, regardless of other projects.

Now here is some perspective of me:

Most people think I’m purely a Gen-X kid, most of these people. Often people tell me I “Feel older”. Now a days, I am occasionally confused for a Gen Z kid, which is overly generous of most people.

Normally they consider me an INTJ or a very queer P type. I’m a consummate outsider, which is fine by me, because it allows for objective perspective. The phrase “You’re not like me” is said to me quite often and they mean it. I don’t disagree with these people that do not see me as being like them, because we’re often, very dissimilar.

Due to my perceived age, I don’t think people truly believe I am an atheist.
I’m considered Liberal

So, now that we have some traits out of the way, but it is in no way an exhaustive list, we can look at some of my past experiences on Twitter.
Recently, for the first time in years, I had a trigger fest. Not enough to cancel me, but what I refer to as WWE Heel Heat. I said, The Beetles suck. Yes, I went there and they triggered and it was pretty funny. How is this not “Pro-social” behavior? It isn’t, which is why I wasn’t cancelled, but considered queer by my perceived generational discrepancy. The problem here is more excessive fandom in one angle and immaturity on the other. Also, in some cases, that is pro-social behavior, such as slut shaming, which I mention in my essay “An Aside on the Ménage Et Toi” I see this more violently in Millennials than older generations, since when one becomes a full adult, one is supposed to have a more lax attitude towards differences like these, since connecting on more intricate levels is adulthood and something stupid like music is often how children engage each other.

Other things in this category include a Youtube video attacking religion, which got WWE heel heat about a decade ago.

Still, I have not been canceled, except from where I currently live, but that’s because the town is filled with idiots.

Plenty of my prosocial tweets get likes.

CONCLUSION
Now this brings me here, which is that the things people cancel each other over are clearly anti-social behavior, or psychopathy. One need look no further than to the homosexual man who is anti-gay marriage that is essentially cheating out his fellow homosexuals from what they desire. Cancel culture doesn’t look at intellectual arguments, it looks at behavior. If you do not believe that, in is one more way to tell, and that is Twitter doesn’t allow you to tattle on your own team mates. Why? It would be anti-social in their mind, when the reality is different. Now, I do not have a team, I am on no one’s side in the political spectrum. I’m a registered Libertarian only in that it encompasses my desire for maximum freedom. All sides are the same bull-shitters in my view and I don’t want anything to do with them. I independently hit both sides of the spectrum with thoughts and evidence. Neither side has a corner stone on thinking, yet they wouldn’t bother to register the reports. I can only report people not on my perceived team. I can see why Dorsey was never liked by his generation, he is very psychopathic. We’ll eventually get to him and one other famous social media figure, in regards to this similar topic, but in closing Thanks for choosing my team for me, Dorsey, when I never did. May you choke to death the next time you eat Chic’Fliet.

Fashionably Late Book Reviews: Being Logical by D.Q. McInerny.

INTRODUCTION: I first read Being Logical when I was in my early 20’s. I absolutely loved it then, because it was a short and concise introduction to formal logic, which is sadly, no longer taught at the college level and hadn’t been for years by the time I was old enough to attend. This is the exact book that I thought was going to be a huge game changer if you could get enough people to read it. Sadly, I was unaware back then, that a majority of the United States was highly illiterate. So sadly, upon further inspection recently, I do not think as highly of this book, given this new data, as it would be closer to a collegiate textbook for the average American than I would hope, even though it was hugely inspired by Strunk&White Elements of Style, falls way short of that book and even invokes errors that the book would of warned against. So lets look at this book through a modern lens and see who the audience is and if it is worthwhile.

PROSE: The prose is fine, albeit a tad bit too complex for the average American reader. You can tell it is also heavily influenced by Aristole’s Oragaon, as McInerny’s expression of a quantification of a thing is nearly identical to Aristole’s. In fact, it was nearly verbatim. This is extremely confusing to the most readers who wouldn’t be able to discern such and why would they? If it was an attempt is to be a cheap collegiate text for those of us whom are autodidactic than it would be fantastic, but it was meant for the normal reader as an introductory text to formal logic and it fails miserably in that respect.

FORM: Book form is fantastic! It has a section on the formal fallacies, including their original Latin names and makes for a fantastic glossary. I’ve been using it for years, along with The Philosopher’s Toolkit as glossaries to look things up, should something slip my mind. I think the average reader is going to roll their eyes at the Latin and think of this as boring though and that is a negative for the book. Albeit, I and others of my ilk will find this to be a fantastic aspect, the intended audience would not concur with us.

CONCLUSION:
This book, which should be for everyone, falls short of the mark. I’ve been pitching it for years and well, few seem to care about formal logic and thinking correctly. Typical human hubris that makes them think they’re thinking correctly, because as well all know with stupid people, they’re always correct and perfect. So, even though the audience this was intended for, would have very little use for it, it makes one hell of an introduction to Logic for everyone else. I would highly recommend this book to someone creating a high school or adult ed course on Logic and if Universities ever bring formal logic courses back, this would be a great 101 text. The average American is most likely not going to put much thought into this and probably toss it before they finished chapter one and that is a downright crime. On the textbook merits, I give it 5 out of 5 stars, even if it is a tad bit stuffy for some people. For the average American, though, I have to give it a paltry 3 out of 5. At least he tried to bring logic to Americans, and that would be commended. Thank you for such a fantastic book, even if it isn’t as appreciated as it could be.

Kageoween:Horror Collections, Scare Street Horror book four

INTRODUCTION: It’s that time of year, again, and my favorite time of year. That is right, it is Kageoween and I am kicking off one of my favorite months with this short horror collection. I’m not sure when I picked this Kindle e-book up but it was probably for Halloween and it was either cheap or free. I decided to read the first few stories in it, because it only has a few and wow! I managed to make my way through five of 10 of the stories in this collection and skipped the “bonus novel” which, if that is anything like the 5 stories I read is ironically named. (Turned out, you had to e-mail for the bonus novel, still a pass).

CHARACTERS:
The stories were filled with shallow characters. The first one alone was a clear Stephen King homage and boy did it miss the mark on both characters and homage. The woman draws a nine millimeter on a homeless person, without much hesitation. What a horrible character! How do we know the homeless character is what the author tells us “she” is without build? She was shallower than my character in Happy Acres, which isn’t my finest of hour when it comes to writing, so I’m an expert on this. All of them in the first five are highly forgettable.

PROSE: Telling, telling and more telling. The first one had one decent part of showing, which was the old woman’s hands which you can see for yourself and compare it to the excerpt down below.

The fingers, Wendy noticed, were exceptionally thin, the forefingers longer than the middles. And each finger was tipped with a long, dull gray nail, the edges of which looked wickedly sharp.-Going for a Walk by Ron Ripley.

Who the hell was the curator and editor on this thing, Stevie Wonder? Rubbish is an understatement!

DIALOGUE: Oh good god! It has more cringe than an autistic or a YouTube if you want to get technical, trying to be cool. This excerpt is from the second story within the book:

My hand appears to have some kind of bracelet around it, most likely a hospital admittance bracelet; the kind with name and DOB.- Story Two, The Doctor’s Questions, Eric Whittle.

Never mind the face a comma would have sufficed and there was no need for a semicolon, but no shit Sherlock? What other type of bracelet would it has been?
How about this little piece of cringe from the first story

From the chain’s sagging center, a faded sign reading “No Trespassing” hung limply. There was no breeze to move it.-Going for a Walk by Ron Ripley.

This simple sentence could have read “The sign hung still, dangling from a single rusted chain. The faded and chipped white sign had bold red lettering, reading “No trespassing.”

Instead we get his shitty take on the sentence. I’m not saying mine is the end all be all of writing, but it is a step in the right direction.

SUBTEXT: None, unless, how to shill shit counts as subtext.

CONCLUSION: For a book that was most likely free, it is still, somehow, too much of a cost for the “pleasure” of read this short story collection. If you’re looking for something to read this Halloween, I highly advise to steer clear.

1 out of 5 stars.