Wednesday, November 29, 2017

"Man of Florida: Please Don't Eat My Face 2!" by Phony McFakename

This is it. The epic sequel you've been impatiently, angrily waiting for. That's right. Here it comes...

An epic masterpiece of literary tour de force majeure...

It's Man of Florida!!!

The insanely-long-awaited sequel to Please Don't Eat My Face!!!

Here's the wind-up, and the pitch:

Miami is going down! 

Not by natural disaster, but by an army of citizens under the influence of bath salts. 

Our hapless hero, a formerly respectable cocaine dealer, is probably to blame for this mess. But he just wants to get back home to Food Crime City.

Will he make it? Will he fall under the spell of the Beach Party to End All Beach Parties? Will he finally take responsibility for this metropolitan apocalypse and fix things?

Probably not, but let's have some grim laughs along the way.

Read and be happy!


-Phony McFakename


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I exist on Twitter and Facebook and InstagramAnd my books are on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.

Wednesday, November 22, 2017

Cinemasterworks: "Video Demons Do Psychotown"

I came here to, ostensibly, review Video Demons Do Psychotown. But this requires some context.

This is a Troma film. Only it is not.

Troma is a gonzo independent production company rooted in late-70s idiot comedies before transitioning to mid-80s idiot horror. Following this, they expanded their repertoire to a wide variety of externally-produced distribution product.

Some of it was pretty great (Cannibal! The Musical, Monster in the Closet, Redneck Zombies, Combat Shock) and some of it was pretty darned bad (Rabid Grannies, Surf Nazis Must Die!, Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell).
Video Demons Do Psychotown is one such externally-produced film. File it under “pretty darned bad.”

I first discovered Troma in 1991 when USA network’s “Up All Night” late-night movie series (hosted by Rhonda Shear) did regular marathons of their flagship Toxic Avenger films. Even heavily edited for basic cable, I found a pleasantly demented spirit in these cinematic abominations. I subsequently grabbed up every Troma film I could find at my local video stores.

Class of Nuke ‘em High didn’t disappoint. Its sequel did. Troma’s War was insane and so incredibly not right (one of its bad guys attacked people by giving them AIDS). Sgt. Kabukiman, N.Y.P.D. impressed me with its gumption. Finally seeing the Toxic Avenger films uncut was jarringly intense. They had some far-beyond-deranged X-rated violence. But nothing that would upset a demented adolescent such as myself at the time. (Trying to re-watch them as an adult is a challenge; they’re pretty nasty. It's funny how kids can handle stuff that adults can't, yet we're always trying to protect them from "dangerous" imagery. We're dumb.)

Around the same time, in a bin in the back of a grimy, decaying comic shop, I found this musty old issue of a short-lived magazine called Toxic Horror. One issue had a lengthy interview with Troma founder Lloyd Kaufman. Dude was funny! A really old-school hammy/charismatic raconteur/showman. And all the Troma movie stills and posters and titles really captured my imagination. I wanted to see them all. (Especially Video Demons Do Psychotown.)

I finally discovered a fine, upstanding local haunt named Video Vault a couple years later. This place had a Troma SECTION in their “Cult” video room up on the third floor. I was in Heaven.

But their collection had some holes. No Evil Clutch or Video Demons. Bah!

And that brings us to today, a wonderful world of infinite online entertainment options, in which Video Demons Do Psychotown just popped up on Amazon Prime. (So did Evil Clutch, which was likewise a lame-o disappointment with a few cool scenes.)

I will say this for the movie: Great title!

That is the last nice thing I’ll say about it.

Kidding. Kind of.

It’s very dull and the dialogue is hilariously inane. It's about two teens who wander around a weird town because they heard it had some spooky things happen there. There's some kind of cult at work there, weird things pop up on the videos the students shoot there, it's a mess.

But in all fairness, check out these gems of screenwriting:

“This place reeks of death and negative vibrations, and yet you walk around is if nothing had happened!”

“You’re asking me to forget everything I ever knew about physics! I’m not ready to do that!”

All in all, a more accurate title would be: Video Production Students Visit Psychic Town. There's no demons, just some mild paranormal phenomena.

It's garbage. But garbage can have a pleasant, familiar flavor that tickles the taste buds like nothing else.

(Just looked it up out of curiosity and yes, Troma is still in business. Over 40 years of producing and distributing the "finest" cinema around.) 


-Phony McFakename


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I exist on Twitter and Facebook and InstagramAnd my books are on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.

Tuesday, November 14, 2017

"The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious" by Sigmund Freud

Okay, let me sum this one up for you: Jokes reflect the desires of your unconscious mind.

Also you want to have sex with your mom.

There, I just saved you 230 pages (plus 42 pages of introductory material.)

Speaking of that introductory material, they did such a good job explaining the material that followed, I felt perfectly comfortable skimming most of it. Don't feel like I missed much.

However, these passages jumped out at me as I went and they're worth a share:
“We stress that the activity of joking cannot be said to have no aim or purpose, for it has set itself the unmistakable aim of arousing pleasure in the listener.”

“The most powerful stimulus to the joke-work is the presence of strong tendencies, reaching into the unconscious, which represent a special aptitude for producing jokes and may explain why the subjective conditions for making jokes are so frequently fulfilled in neurotic persons.”

“There are other ways of regaining nonsense and deriving pleasure from it; caricature, exaggeration, parody, and travesty make use of it, and in this way create ‘comic nonsense.’”

I would be perfectly happy with someone dismissing my literary work as "comic nonsense." Though I prefer to think of it as mostly "extreme whimsy in a skewed reality."

Oh, one other big point worth knowing: jokes don't age well. It's hard to tell whether they're translation errors, or just that early 20th century humor is no match for 21st century sensibilities.

Example:
“A wife is like an umbrella. After all, before long one takes a cab.” 

Nah.

Be honest: do you even understand that joke? No Googling. Stone cold: do you get it?

Follow-up: if you do, is it funny? And why?

If you take Freud seriously, then consciously or unconsciously: The joke's on you.


-Phony McFakename

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I exist on Twitter and Facebook and InstagramAnd my books are on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.

Wednesday, November 8, 2017

Favorite Quotes: November 2017



“If Hamlet hadn’t pretended to be crazy, he would have actually gone crazy.”
-William Peter Blatty, The Ninth Configuration

“You know the best way to survive a plane crash?”
“No.”
“Don’t be in it.”
-Justified

“People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States...One bombing now and everyone gets excited. In 1972? It was every day. Buildings getting bombed, policemen getting killed. It was commonplace.”
-Max Noel, quoted in Days of Rage by Bryan Burrough

"What you are about to see is based upon true accounts and conjecture and is a delineation of actual events which transpired at an indeterminate time to persons of less than genuinely equivocal authenticity."
-Opening Title Screen, Cannibal Campout

“There's a unique strain of blind rage simmering in white men who've failed to fully capitalize on their privilege.”
-Dan Ewan

“Corn dogs," the exorcist said, "are all the proof I need that God exists.”

“Abby and Gretchen still kept up, but it was phone calls and letters, then postcards and voicemail, and finally emails and Facebook likes. There was no falling-out, no great tragedy, just a hundred thousand trivial moments they didn’t share, each one an inch of distance between them, and eventually those inches added up to miles.”
-Grady Hendrix, My Best Friend’s Exorcism

“Kind of galling when you realize that nutbags with cardboard signs had it right the whole time.”
-2012

“He had come here to research a series of articles and had found terror - terror he had, until now, believed existed only in fiction.”
-Gregg Loomis, Voodoo Fury

“If you stare too long it becomes a blur and it’s easy to forget who we really are.”
-Strung Out

“The hours drifted by, the remaining pizza slices turned cold and dead-mozzarella ugly.”
-Randall Boyll, Shocker (novelization)

“In the end, we all get caught.”
-Stephen King, 1922 


-Phony McFakename



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I exist on Twitter and Facebook and InstagramAnd my books are on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.