COMICS YOU SHOULD READ: “Squadron Supreme” (1985)

Oh, so that’s what it would’ve been like if Watchmen was written by F.A. von Hayek

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B-MOVIE REVIEW: “Inbred Rednecks” (1998)

A LONG overdue homage to one of the greatest hicksploitation films of all-time!

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Five Obscure Super Nintendo Horror Games

A handful of off-the-beaten path cartridges that'll definitely get you in a Halloween mood in a hurry.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo__X

When it comes to 16-bit horror games, the group consensus is that the Sega Genesis beat the Super Nintendo silly. This is hardly debatable, seeing as how the Genny was absolutely inundated with console exclusive monster mashes like Splatterhouse 2 and 3, The Ooze and Haunting Starring Polterguy, plus iterations of Castlevania, Zombies Ate My Neighbors and Ghouls ‘N Ghosts that, in the eyes of many, totally eclipsed their analogues on the SNES.

That said, if you looked hard enough - and didn't mind finding ways to reverse engineer your North American unit to play PAL and Japan-only releases - you would have found quite a few decent to really, really good to almost great horror offerings on the console Super Metroid and Earthbound likewise called home. To help ring in the Halloween season, I decided to peruse the SNES and Super Famicom libraries for a couple of less discussed horror-themed video games - while the inherent quality of the five games below fluctuate, one thing is for sure: if you're looking to get into the All Hallows' Eve spirit, any of the offerings below ought to get you feeling the holy ghost of Samhain in no time at all...

Clock Tower

(Human Entertainment, 1995)

Yes, before the vaunted survival horror series made the great migration to the Playstation, it first appeared on the Super Famicom in 1995. In terms of sheer atmosphere, this has to be the best "pure" horror game on the system. This is a game tailor-made to scare the dog shit out of you, with an especially effective emphasis on strategically timed scares. For the most part an adventure game, you use your D-pad to steer the main character across a huge mansion. A mini-triumph of minimal game design, you really only have to use two face buttons - a context-sensitive "action" button that opens doors, turns on lights and opens boxes and another one that forces your character to run like hell (yeah, you'll be using this one, a lot.) While some may be put off by the deliberately slow pace, hardcore horror fans will absolutely LOVE the game mechanics, which allow you to hide, outsmart and outmaneuver the pinking shears-wielding antagonist by locking yourself in bathrooms, concealing yourself under beds and taking advantage of all sorts of impromptu weapons liberally sprinkled around the abode. There's a lot of backtracking, but since the game features randomly-generated room layouts, no two playthroughs of the game ought to unfurl the same way. The controls and tempo take a while to get used to, but if you've ever fancied yourself a fan of the oeuvre of Mario Bava or Dario Argento, this is a game you owe it to yourself to play.

Laplace no Ma

(Vic Tokai, 1995)

From the same fine folks who gave us Clock Tower (as well as the outstanding Fire Pro Wrestling series) comes Laplace no Ma, a traditional JRPG-dungeon crawler that, in some respects, is quite similar to the Famicom masterpiece Sweet Home. While I don't think Laplace is anywhere near is innovative or awesome as that 8-bit classic, I do think this is a fairly solid role playing game, if only noteworthy for its strong horror overtones. Set in a small New England community, you get to run around a sleepy hamlet, where in the 1920s, some really freaky shit went down at this one mansion. Of course, this being a video game and all, your avatar can't help but amble on in and try to solve the decades-old mystery, which - naturally - also entails killing the living shit out of all sorts of monsters and rabid monsters lurking all over the place. Granted, the combat system is pretty straight forward, the story isn't going to win any awards for creativity and the backdrops are practically interchangeable no matter where you go, but it's pretty hard to hate on any game that lets you stab werewolves and miniature Cthulus with silver daggers. And man, you have gots to love that strangely life-affirming, quasi-philosophical ending!

Musya: The Classic Japanese Tale of Horror

(Seta USA, 1992)

Musya is one of those games that has some pros, but ultimately, a lot more cons (you know, sort of like the constituency of the Minnesota Vikings ... zing!) First, the good: the visuals are really nice, there are a shit ton of monsters everywhere (and there's a pretty good mix of the undead, too, and not just three or four enemy types that keep getting recycled) and your protagonist has a downright awesome spinning javelin attack that is easily one of the 10 funnest "spam" moves in the history of 16-bit gaming. Furthermore, it's a pretty long game for its genre, and the bosses - for the most part - are fairly inventive. And as for the bad? Well, there's really no delicate way to put it: the controls in this game absolutely suck, with jumping mechanics so floaty it might as well be considered a totally broken component of the gameplay. And if that wasn't bad enough? The slowdown in this game is absolutely absurd, with some of the worst flickering I've seen in any game on any console ever. To be fair, there are certainly some neat things to be found in Musya, but to be frank, the amount of patience required to experience that handful of cool stuff clearly outweighs whatever short-lived fun you're likely to wrench out of the cartridge. Tis a pity, too: the whole Ghosts N Goblins meets Ninja Gaiden gameplay had plenty of promise - and had publisher Seta actually taken the time to polish the game and overhaul its controls, it probably could have been a miniature cult classic. 

Majyuo

(KSS, 1995)

Ahh, shit, this game rules. Imagine, if you will, what would happen if one evening, Castlevania and Contra got rip-roaring drunk and made sweet, Satanic love all night. Well, nine months later, I'd imagine the horrid abomination crawling forth from the womb to resemble something like Majyuo (the name roughly translates into "king of the demons"), a run and gun platformer that has so many awesome little touches that, at times, you almost want to pause the game so you can soak up all the kooky awesomeness. Initially playing a dude who looks like Rambo cosplaying as Hank Hill, eventually the side scrolling shooter takes an unexpected turn into Altered Beast territory, with your avatar turning into - among other things - a laser blasting insect warrior who can teleport underground and emerge in a blaze of enemy-destroying hellfire, a winged peacock dude who can shoot mind boomerangs and do capoeira rolls and, my personal favorite, a purple dragon with a beer bully whose fully charged special attack appears to be the ability to barf full-screen sized wolf ghost heads at people. This game has to have some of the most inspired backdrops of any SNES game (really, they are so trippy, they make Yoshi's Island look like an Excel spreadsheet) and the boss fights - while hard as fucking shit - are nonetheless a hoot to churn through. The steep difficulty curve may turn off most gamers, but if you have a thing for weird-ass (and hard-ass) action platformers, Majyuo is DEFINITELY a game you need to go out of your way to experience.

Nosferatu

(SETA Corporation, 1995)

OK, so basically, Nosferatu is a blatant Prince of Persia clone. Still, it's a Prince of Persia clone that allows you to punch the heads off zombies and run face first into a solid stone surface and sell it like it was Three Stooges eye poke, and that's mighty fine with me. Taking a page out of the Out of This World/Flashback: The Quest For Identity playbook, the gameplay is largely anchored around single screen, labyrinthine puzzles, which - of course - are littered with all sorts of death traps. What makes Nosferatu stand out a little is its combat system, which, all things taken into consideration, really isn't that bad for an action-platformer (and trust me, you really can't say you've truly lived into you've spin kicked a virtual orangutan in this game.) While the controls are pretty solid and the animations are downright tremendous, the game does have its fair share of flaws. For one thing, the puzzling elements get real repetitive, real fast and really, there's not a whole lot of variation - structurally or aesthetically - from one castle to the next. On top of that, the boss fights are usually pretty unimpressive, and the final showdown with Nosferatu himself - whom, by the way, looks nothing like the iconic silent movie creation played by Max Shreck - is a big letdown. Still, there are more positives than negatives here (especially the music, which is a nearly perfect combination of creepy and corny) and if there's any time of year where trial and error gameplay is most tolerable, it's definitely at 3 a.m. during a rainy October morn. 

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Double Review: "Warcraft" and "The BFG"

 A BOGO-special taking a look at two of the summer's most CGI-bloated box office duds!

By: Jimbo X

JimboXAmerican@gmail.com

@Jimbo__X

While Warcraft and The BFG obviously have their dissimilarities, the two thematically divergent films are kindred spirits in at least one regard: they are without question two of the biggest financial flops of the 2016 summer movie parade.

Having cost a colossal $160 million to make, Warcraft only managed to gross a paltry $46 million at the domestic box office. While the film did go on to make a shit ton of money overseas (somehow, the flick made a good $220 million off Chinese moviegoers alone), the film is still expected to be tallied up as a $15 million loss for upstart Legendary Pictures. Meanwhile, Steve Spielberg's The BFG utterly tanked at U.S. cineplexes, taking in barely $47 million as of mid-July; factoring in the even more abysmal international box office take, the film's weak $64 million global gross makes the Roald Dahl adaptation a disastrous $80 million production to profit loss for Disney. Factor in the capital squandered on advertising, marketing, licensing and other promotional expenditures and the House of Mouse's losings have to be in excess of $100 million, with the total revenue shortfall probably closer to $200 million. 

As to why the two films tanked with the U.S moviegoing throng, it's pretty damned obvious. In a cinematic universe ruled by Marvel superheroes and legacy Pixar and princess characters, it's pretty hard for even established properties (like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Independence Day and Ghostbusters) to gain a foothold in the virtually Disney-monopolized market. Sure, some original I.P.'s like Zootopia and The Secret Life of Pets have had their fair share of success at the cineplex, but by and large, today's theater-goers are only interested in tried and true spectacles. With so much digital entertainment, effectively for free, within our palms at all times, you have REALLY got to promise us some quality bang and boom to get us drop $20 on a movie ticket. And yeah, asking people to shell out a $50 bill to watch a gigantic British pedophile stuff a whiny third grader inside fictitious vegetables and\or PlayStation3-quality animated trolls and orcs throw each other around in front of a generic CGI matte painting for two hours ain't exactly going to get kids, tweets and teens clamoring to head out to the movie houses.  

As such, I feel as if it is my civic duty to watch these underperforming films that American society soundly rejected, so future generations can know why we, as a collective body, just didn't give a shit. Pour yourself a tall glass of Pitch Black Mountain Dew for low culture refreshment and put on some Steve Reich to drown out the white static of modernity - it's time to observe and dissect the biggest movie misfires of the summer...

Warcraft

Director: Duncan Jones

First things first, I don’t know anything about World of Warcraft. I’ve never played it and I’ve never watched anybody play it. My girlfriend, however, was really hardcore into it when she was in college, though, and one time we went into a GameStop and she ran into one of her old WoW friends and they spent a good 20 minutes talking about expansion packs and saying things about “boomkins” and I had no idea what the hell they were talking about. They might as well have been speaking about quadratic equations in Cantonese. Backwards.

So, yes, I’ve no clue what a World of Warcraft movie is supposed to be like, although from the first 10 minutes alone, I felt as if this flick could technically be an adaptation of at least a dozen or so other video games that drew their inspiration from the first three Lord of the Rings movies, too. Something tells me they could have just as easily called this one The Elder Scrolls: The Movie or Golden Axe: The Motion Picture, and nobody would’ve been the wiser.

As for the core story, it begins with this cave troll laughing about stuff with his pregnant cave troll wife. But you see, the master cave troll is all evil and stuff and wants to invade an alternate reality planet for – well, whatever evil cave trolls need, I suppose – so he opens up this glowing green interdimensional portal and a whole platoon of cave trolls drop down in the middle of a generic high fantasy kingdom where white people and like, two actors who are kinda' tan are locked in a forever war against a bunch of green-skinned goblins or something along those lines. From there, we are introduced to a million bajillion subplots involving a million bajillion characters (including some guys who LITERALLY look like hipsters plucked out of a Renaissance Faire) and eventually the humans learn to coexist with the cave trolls and they team up to fight the green goblins. Oh, and in between, there’s a lot of PG-13 Game of Thrones-style political intrigue and this one half human/half cave troll woman who looks just like Zoe Saldana in Guardians of the Galaxy who becomes a divinely chosen warrior or something and there’s another subplot about a baby cave troll being sent down a river like Moses and oh yeah, about 15 or 20 scenes where there are a whole bunch of really, really unconvincing CGI fireballs flying around everywhere. Whoops, I almost left out the part where the dwarves with handlebar mustaches show up. Well, uh, that happens, too, I guess.

I know that description sounds really rushed and predictable and anticlimactic, but that’s how the movie actually plays out. If you’ve seen any kind of fantasy movie over the last 20 years, trust me, you’ve already seen Warcraft. There isn’t a single original idea or fresh take on anything; I mean, at least GOT tries to mix up the pot a little with a lot of gratuitous gore and people having sex with their own brothers.

If you thought The Hobbit movies were watered-down, completely needless, CGI-laden messes, Warcraft makes ‘em look like wildly innovative New Hollywood-era artistic triumphs. I wouldn’t say Warcraft is Uwe Boll quality – although the Bollster has indeed made a few movies I actually enjoyed, it perhaps should be noted – but it feels just as flavorless as utter crap like In the Name of the King. I swear, I’ve seen this movie before, as if the entire film is nothing more than slight variations of sequences copied and pasted from other features. And in virtually ever instance, executed far, far less effectively, too.

Really, Warcraft is the absolute worst kind of bad movie. Unlike something like Batman v. Superman, the Robocop remake or Pixels, Warcraft is a film that never gives you any glimmers of hope before the disappointment kicks in. And unlike the last two Twilight movies or that atrocious Evil Dead remake, you can’t marvel at how it manages to get increasingly terrible. Rather, Warcraft is a movie that you KNOW is going to suck a few seconds in, and it maintains that general suckiness throughout its runtime. It never gets any better, it never gets any worse, it just sucks in a horribly static vacuum until the end credits roll.

In fact, this is a film SO formulaic you pretty much have to invent your own secretive meaning to the movie to avoid falling asleep. Personally, I tried to read the thing as a furtive allegory about the current state of U.S. race relations, with the cave trolls representing marginalized blacks, the green goblins representing Islamofascists and the white people representing … well, take a guess. And even then, I had to pluck a couple of nose hairs out from falling into an involuntary nap.

That ought to give you a clue as to how “entertaining” the movie is on the whole, folks - whatever yo do, don’t say I didn’t warn ‘ya.

My Score:

One and a Half Tofu Dogs out of Four.

The BFG

Director: Steven Spielberg

We’ve already mulled the possibility that Big Steve is actually a paedo, and The BFG doesn’t do him any favors in refuting the hearsay. Folks, I am not making this up: the whole premise of the movie is that a gigantic elderly creepy dude kidnaps an orphan in a burlap sack and whisks her away to be his child bride in the remote environs of northern England. Of course, they don’t come right out and say that she’s a child bride, but I think we can all pick up on the horrible, horrible subtext therein.

Yeah, I know that The BFG is a heartbroken father’s paean to his deceased daughter, but the execution here is just all sorts of unnerving. Throughout the film, our Lilliputian antagonist – who, hey, already lost both her birth parents! – is threatened, taunted, tortured and put in so much general peril that one has to wonder if she’s literally an Abrahamic scapegoat or something. Sorry, but I’m not entirely sure how much “wonder” and “whimsy” I’m supposed to cull from a movie in which a 20 foot tall Limey almost chews a third grader to death, or a young girl risks severe concussions – if not long-term brain damage – while being used as a football in a pick-up rugby game between a gaggle of three story tall ruffians.

Whereas the cinematic adaptations of Roald’s Willy Wonka merely implied a dark underbelly, Steve’s CGI-strewn spectacle makes the unpleasantness front and center for the audience. While the titular character, by and large, is posited as neutral, his older brothers – strangely, they never speak of their mother, and there appears to be no female giants anywhere – are horror incarnate. Imagine the absolute nastiest old person you’ve ever encountered – the kind of salty, snarling senior sort whose lawn you wouldn’t dare think of setting foot on – and make him 30-feet-tall. Oh, and make his diet consist primarily of the blood and bones of children. Well, there’s a good half dozen beings JUST LIKE them included in the movie. Like I said, sheer whimsy, no?

Of course, you can’t have a Spielberg movie – yes, even ones about soldiers having their intestines scrambled on Omaha Beach or concentration camp children having to hide in dookie buckets from S.S. officers – without that signature “Spielbergian glow,” and here it comes in the form of this really, really abstract subplot about the BFG bottling “dreams” for the young 'uns. Naturally, this entails a voyage to some faraway metaphysical realm with a bunch of nondescript flashing lights everywhere. Did I mention the film was made with 3D firmly in mind, so the glowing junk keeps flying out at you to give the illusion that stuff’s happening on screen that isn’t just an excuse to employ the faux-dimensional gimmick? Well … that’s the truth, Ruth

The last quarter of the film just goes flying completely off the rails. OK, so up until then, we have this really awkward yarn about a humongous kid-stealing country bumpkin and his child slave he won’t let go and he’s taken it upon himself to stuff her inside these nasty-looking vegetables that you can just tell smell like turds so she won’t get eaten by his hardhearted, cannibalistic brethren. Not exactly your most routine plot in children's cinema, to be sure, but believe it or not, that’s the relatively staid part of the movie. From there, the BFG manages to infiltrate the dreams of the Queen of England, Freddy Krueger-style, so she becomes aware of just how mean and evil and dangerous his brothers are. And yes, this does entail a cameo from Prince Charles and Princess Diana, even though they don’t look anything like their real world counterparts. Oh, and there’s a joke about Reagan being senile, too, but you’ll miss it if you aren’t paying real close attention.

Which brings us to one of the weirdest moments I’ve ever had inside a movie theater (yes, even weirder than that one time when I went out with this fat goth chick I met at Denny’s and she started jerking me off during G-Force) – a nearly 10-minute long sequence in which the giant, the Queen and her pet corgis drink a magical elixir that makes them cut atomic farts on one another. For 10 minutes, people. No, it actually happens. I swear, for once, I don’t have to make anything up – what’s on the screen is WAY weirder than anything I could’ve dreamed up in jest.

And from there, we conclude with the British army (surely, under the decree of Margaret Thatcher) leading an all-out assault on the other giants, whom are promptly captured in nets and swooped off to a remote island  (the Falklands, perhaps?) with only a couple of turd plant seeds to subsist on until they die. And everybody – the kidnapped orphan, the giant who just killed literally his entire species and the monarchy as a whole – lived happily ever after.

…yeah, I have no clue why the positive word of mouth didn’t spread like wildfire, either. It’s certainly a better movie than Warcraft, but it’s still one of the most perplexingly underwhelming (and unpleasant) kid-targeted wannabe blockbusters to come along in quite some time. It may not be Spielberg’s worst, and it may not be the worst of the summer, but it should be clear as day to everybody why this one turned out to be such a colossal financial failure. Sorry, Hollywood, but there are some ideas – even when the biggest of big names are attached to them – that are just too out there for anyone to find palatable … especially when you’re trying to sell turd plants and pedophilia to elementary schoolers.

My Score:

Two Tofu Dogs out of Four.

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B-MOVIE REVIEW: "Night of the Demons 2" (1994)

It's one of the best straight-to-video horror offerings of the 1990s. And no, that isn't a backhanded compliment. Well, not a major one, at least. 

The 1990s are often considered one of the worst decades for horror flicks. While most surface-level cinemaphiles see Silence of the Lambs, Scream, The Blair Witch and a whole bunch of dreck in-between, I contest that the '90s were, in many ways, a far better (and certainly, more nuanced) decade for the genre than the '80s. Sure, the Reagan era gave us all-time classic stuff like The Evil Dead, The Beyond and Tenebrae, but a lot of the old guard works -- your Elm Streets, your Friday the 13ths and what have you -- have unquestionably lost a lot of their luster since the heyday of Max Headroom and Pepsi Free. Alas, with offerings such as The Exorcist III, Man Bites Dog, Nekromantik 2 and Audition -- not to mention transgressive stuff like Happiness, Gummo and I Stand Alone that were really far more horrific than most "standard" horror flicks -- there is certainly no shortage of high-quality, above-grade genre works from the decade that brought us Bill Clinton and the Sega 32X. 

Of course, the 1990s will forever be embodied by the "straight-to-video" horror film. If you grew up in the decade, the VHS box-art for stuff like Dead Alive, The Ice Cream Man and any of those goddamn Leprechaun sequels likely remain scorched into your retina -- especially those bitchin' leniticular covers from the latter half of the era. While the overall quality of stuff like The Mangler and Little Witches are suspect at best, you at least have to give the medium some credit for allowing B-grade works to survive in the post-grindhouse, post-drive-in, and really post-cable-television epoch. Had it not been for the glory of those little video cassettes, it's highly unlikely a whole host of great 1980s franchises would have been able to continue. And few series benefit as much from the great video store migration as Night of the Demons. 

Angela's right: when it comes to 1990s B-horror cheese, few
movies are as scrumptious as Night of the Demons 2. 

The original NOTD was a very, very good late '80s horror flick that was something of a supernatural Sleepaway Camp-style horror-satire. Looking back on it now, i's a downright fantastic encapsulation of 1980s culture, from the White Rain slicked hairdos to its convenience stores props to its copious use of decidedly un-P.C. humor (none of which would be permitted even in politically-conscious genre films these days, of course.) The effects were great, the acting was a bit better than the genre norm and the script, while necessarily cliched, was also quite energetic and well-paced. It has since become something of a mini genre-classic, thanks in no small part to a great VHS campaign that included, to the best of my knowledge, anyway, the first electronic cardboard in-house advertising display. 

The 1994 sequel Night of the Demons 2 is very similar in nature, only updated to reflect the quirks and absurdities of the 1990s. Gone are the wannabe punkers and skanky goths with their towering coifs, and in came the pseudo-Beverly Hills 90210 Gap-Tommy Hilfiger mall-display prepsters and the grunge rock dingleberries clad in plaid, leather and so much scalp grease they sort of resemble Sideshow Bob from The Simpsons. Although the producers seemingly tried to give the film a more "timeless" feel by setting it at a Catholic school (where the wardrobe probably won't be changing anytime soon, I take it), it is nonetheless steeped in painfully 1990s aesthetics ... and without really trying, the film does a marvelous job mocking the inanity and vapidity of the Gen X ethos.

So, what is this Night of the Demons 2 all about, you may be pondering? Well, I am glad you asked, seeing as how I wrote an entire article about it and whatnot.  

...and all of a sudden, I am expecting my Google referral queues for the
term "bareback demon sex" to increase three or four-fold overnight. 

The film begins with two Jehovah's Witness reps ambling into the old Hull House -- the site of some weird ritualistic murders turned mausoleum which, wouldn't you know it, just so happened to serve as the central location in the first Night of the Demons flick. At that point, our  (g)hostess with the mostest Angela -- a suburban Goth chick from the first film who was transformed into a soul-munching succubus via a lesbian liplock from scream queen Linena Quigley - rears her at-this-point-not-all-that-ugly head and offers the male/female pair a slice of mildewed cake (which she oh-so-hilariously describes as "devil's food" with the saccharine gusto of a demonic Rachel Ray.) Of course, things take a turn for the worse when Angela picks up a butcher knife, and decides to start slicing up everything EXCEPT for that damn cake. 

Following the opening credits, we're introduced to the student body (in more ways than one) at St. Rita's Catholic School, as a bunch of pervy male students peep/creep on some girls disrobing across the street. Following some deliciously 90s dialogue (my personal favorite has to be an exchange in which one character chides another for, and I quote, "spanking your monkey") we hop into an extended slumber party sequence, in which the gals recount the backstory of the Hull House (which, rather conveniently, also serves as a synopsis for the first movie.) The spooky yarn is interrupted, however, by Sister Gloria, who runs around swinging her yard stick like Buford Puser and his baseball bat. (That's a reference to Walking Tall, you damn whippersnappers.)

As fate would have it, Mouse, the most nebbish and nerdy girl in school, just so happens to be the younger sister of Angela, the Bauhaus-loving sex-ghoul from part uno. Following a nightmare sequence in which her older sis yanks her face off, Gloria and Father Bob (essentially, the academy's principal, for those of you not up to speed on your Catholic school administrative hierarchy) talk about the upcoming Halloween dance, and we learn that Angela and Mouse's parents commit suicide shortly after the events of the 1988 original (although it is never explained why, it is sort of implied it had something to do with some kind of supernatural hokum, as you'd expect.)

Sure, it may seem like cheap pandering, but this girl-on-girl action is
actually integral to the plot. Sorta. 

Up next, Sister Gloria criticizes a young couple for making out ("Save a little room for the Holy Ghost," she tells them) and she responds to a student's inquiry as to whether swapping spit is ungodly with the succinct retort "kissing is a sin if it is an upper persuasion for a lower invasion." Following a lame jake about fellatio, we're introduced to a super nerdy kid who is all about demonology, and one of his fellow student brags about his "king snake," which a female coed curtly describes as "an inchworm." Following an intergender tussle at a tennis court that takes a turn for the sexual, Sister Gloria decides to ban a whole heck of a lot of kids from attending the upcoming Samhain shindig. The demonology kid does some sort of abstruse Satanic rite, which causes Angela to briefly leap out of a mirror, but this being a horror movie and all, nobody believe him and the reverend gets pissed a plenty. (Remember kids: if you attend a Catholic school and unwittingly unleash the forces of hell, it's a warning. Get caught with weed or wear your skirt too low, and you're on the fast track to expulsion.)

With nowhere to get their groove on, a dozen or so kids decide to throw their own Halloween hootenanny off-campus, but what do you know, they end up taking the wrong route and wind up at the old Hull House. Despite the place being more dilapidated than most of Detroit's downtown infrastructure, they say "what the heck!" and decide to party hard, regardless. After a few atmosphere shots of cobwebs and peeling wallpaper (an oblique nod to the work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, mayhap?), a blatant Evil Dead cam rip-off zooms through the house, accompanied by this weird burping-growling-gurgling death metal scream. While the mean girl and her neo-greaser boyfriend contemplate sacrificing a feline to the dark spirits (but, uh, not these kinds of dark spirits) another girl walks into a bathroom and retrieves a tube of old lipstick from the medicine cabinet ... because who wouldn't feel comfortable rubbing stuff they found in an abandoned house all over the face? Of course, pending you've seen the first flick, you already know that ain't exactly any old brand of Maybelline, however...

We cut to two kids making out in the abandoned mortuary, with the female kissee stating the episode is "romantic." The alpha bee-otch and her grunger boyfriend decide to forego sacrificing the kitty cat to the devil, and instead offer Mouse as a "virgin sacrifice" to Old Scratch. Strangely, enough, none of the other kids think it is a bit much when they tie down the geeky teen and threaten to plunge a knife into her sternum ... which, of course, was one of those collapsible dummy knifes. Aw man, nothing says "delightful seasonal prank" quite like restraining someone against their will and making them fear for their own mortality? Wait ... you mean to tell me that's actually a serious felony and not quaint, juvenile fun? LET KIDS BE KIDS, I SAY.

How about that; a second base session in which the woman is
all hands!

One character comments on the nasty scents emanating from the basement, remarking the building smells like, and I quote, "Godzilla's butthole." One of the no-goodniks gets freaked out by the old demon-face-in-the-commode routine, while another delinquent gets tongue kissed and subsequently RAPED by Angela while she's in gruesome demoness form. 

The rest of the partygoers get bored and decide to leave, but not before one of them brings up something about demons not being able to cross bodies of water, and what do you know, there just happens to be an underground river encircling the Hull House. When Gloria learns the kids snuck out, she blows a proverbial gasket and Father Bob later admonishes her, stating "there is a fine line between vigilance and paranoia." Meanwhile, at the official St. Rita dance, the students are dancing as typical white people do, which is very awkwardly. One of the girls runs to the toilet to freshen up, and she pulls out the same souvenir lipstick from the Hull House ... only to get raped by some sort of weird demon tentacle that emerges from it. Once she has that gooey eel thing resting safely in her womb, Angela pops out of the tube, I Drema of Jennie style, and proceeds to give her victim a soul-possessing sapphic smooch.

In a weird homage to the classic Stigmata Martyr interpretive dance sequence in the first film, Angela decides to do another artsy-fartsy-skank-shake, only this time, she's cutting a rug and dumping punch on her boobies to the dulcimer tones of Morbid Angel. So she disappears right before Sister Gloria can whack her with a three-foot-long ruler, and the girl Angela evil ho-ified in the bathroom decides to flash her ta-tas at her boyfriend, but when he reaches in for a feel HER BREASTS TURN INTO KILLER HANDS THAT SECRETE ACID. Thoroughly melting her boyfriend like a wax candle with her sulfuric aerolas, the nun protectorate weapons up with some rosaries and holy water-filled balloons. After that, a dude receives a hand job from a severed limb, a basketball player has his head knocked clean off his shoulders and, just because, we have some extra lesbian kissin'. Oh, and one of the chicks trading chapstick is none other than Christine Taylor ... aka, Mrs. Ben Stiller, aka Marcia from the 1990s Brady Bunch movies and, if you are SUPER old, Melody freakin' Hanson from the old Nickelodeon program Hey Dude. 

Angela's final form? Apparently, it's an enchilada.

Angela (complete with a set of chompers that look like candy corn super-glued to a wad of chewed bubble gum) tries to convince Mouse to turn all evil with her, but then some kids show up with holy water filled Super Soakers and spoil all of the fun. Interestingly, the holy water doesn't just kill the demons, it allows the possessed to return to human form ... well, pending they maintained MOST of their limbs before being possessed, anyway. 

So, our protagonists return to the Hull House to do Angela in once and for all. A priest is stabbed and the producers try to trick us into thinking that footage of Angela floating down the halls from the first movie AREN'T being recycled here. There's a great gag with the beheaded basketball player from early shooting some hoops with his own detached noggin, and then Father Bob gets done in by a ghoul lugging around a spiked baseball bat. Before he croaks, he tells the kids to remember the story of Abraham, for some reason. 

A zombie threatens to rape our final girl with his snake dong (it even hisses!) but here comes "Stone Cold" Sister Gloria to dish out some wooden justice of her own, 36 inches at a time. Gloria convinces Angela to swap her for her sister in some virgin sacrifice deal, but instead of stabbing the nun, Mouse takes the blade to her older sister instead. After Angela is melted via a squirt gun, she comes back in her final for, which is some stringy-haired serpent woman. Anyway, the kids kick open a window and the corresponding sunlight creates a crucifix beam which makes Angela explode. The survivors return to the Catholic School, where they act shockingly calm considering all the death, destruction and havoc they were all subjected to just a few hours earlier. And the film wraps up with some random girl opening another tube of lipstick, only to have a computer generated snake demon leap out at us in (not-really) 3D!

No one in their right mind is going to consider NOTD2 something on par with Schindler's List or Goodfellas, but for what it is (and isn't), it's a damned enjoyable little exploitation sleazer that embodies everything that was so great about trash pop culture in the Dunkaroos decade. Forget all of the socially conscious, politically-minded claptrap, this one is all about gross-out special effects, gratuitous T&A and lots and lots of corny sex-humor gags ... meaning, essentially, that it's what happens when The Evil Dead has a one-night-stand with Porky's. The original cheese-fest may have a more palpable air of nostalgia to it, but overall, I consider this one a superior horror offering in just about every way, from the moderately improved latex prosthesis to the slightly better acting and definitely the more innovative, outlandish kills. Even main baddie Angela looks way hotter than she does in either the first or third film in the trilogy ... you know, when her face doesn't look indistinguishable from the puss of the frontman from GWAR, of course. 

The film was directed by a guy named Brian Trenchard-Smith, which just sounds like the ultimate 1990s dude name. He's an Aussie who's probably best known for directing the super obscure cult classic Dead End Drive-In, and helming the third and fourth Leprechaun movies. And weirdly enough, this guy is allegedly masterminding yet another "Shaft" flick, per the IMDB. The writer was Joe Augustyn, who also scripted the first NOTD, as well as that crappy succubus flick Night Angel (I'm telling you, by the time the 2020s roll around, we're going to have damn near every obscure sex-horror-comedy of the late 1980s documented and dissected here at The Internet Is In America.) There really isn't much to say about the cast: outside of Christine Taylor, the only person in the cast anyone normal has maybe heard of is Zoe Trilling, who had a few appearances on Married...with Children and starred in a whole host of late 1980s-early 1990s schlockaramas, including IIIA fave Dr. Giggles. Oh, and Amelia Kinkade, the actress who plays the demonic bride antagonist? She stopped acting altogether in the late 1990s and is now one of America's premiere pet psychics. No, I am not making that up, either. 

The NOTD franchise did indeed chug along after this one. A Canadian-made sequel came out in 1997 (long story short? it sucks) and a moderately big-budget (And suprisingly enjoyable) straight to DVD remake starring Shannon Elizabeth and Edward Furlong was released in 2010. There hasn't been a whole lot of news about the series since then, but it's unlikely the franchise will remain dormant for too long -- and let's face it, it's only a matter of damn time before this movie, like every other freaking horror flick being made nowadays, gets "re-booted" as a god-damn found footage movie. 

Alas, there is no denying that NOTD2 isn't good-old fashioned, trashy, cheesy, instantly disposable fun. Not only is it the highlight of a largely-above-average B-movie franchise, it is indeed one of the better made straight-to-video productions, within any genre, from the 1990s. It's not too easy to find on the YouTubes and the DailyMotions and the Grindrs (that is a video streaming service, right?) but I highly suggest watching this one the way God intended -- in a dimly-light room, with only the humble glow of a cathode ray tube television screen and the blinking LCD integers of the VCR frontage distancing you from the gory, glorious magnetic tape contents therein. 

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MOVIES THAT MAY NOT HAVE SUCKED: “Robocop 2” (1990)

It may not have been the hyper-violent, anti-consumerist classic the first film was, but it most certainly doesn’t deserve it’s lackluster reputation, either. 

As we are all aware of, “Robocop” isn’t just one of the greatest action movies ever made, it’s also the greatest anti-capitalist screed of all-time. But the film isn’t just amazing because of its critique of the free market, it’s also an utterly exceptional criticism of the totality of American culture. Within the toxic waste-soaked bad guys and baby food target practice and scenes of Red Foreman getting his jugular sliced open with a robotic phallus, there’s a greater commentary on U.S. media than in “Network” and more profound insight into the ills of privatization than anything penned by leftist dinks like Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn.

It was simply preposterous to think that ANY sequel to the film could replicate the smashing success of the original, especially without director Paul Verhoeven at the helm. Still, the formula for a decent follow-up was already there -- all you need is blood, guts, a whole lot of bullets, a metric ton of wry commentary on United States sociopolitics and at least one scene of stop-motion animation cyborgs slaying an entire board room meeting and we are all set. Sure, we may not have ended up with an “Aliens” or “Spider-Man 2” type-flick that surpassed the original, but there’s no reason why we couldn’t have gotten our hands on a way above average, as-good-as-they-could-have-made-it sequel a’la the second “Rocky” and “Halloween” films.

While “Robocop 2” is not a film without its fair share of faults and flaws, at the end of the day, I think it’s a fairly underrated little movie, and had it been a stand-alone flick sans the “Robocop” albatross, we’d probably be looking back on it as an unsung mini-classic from the early 1990s.

Structurally, the overall vibe of the film follows the original quite closely. As they were at the end of the first movie, the Detroit police department are on strike and OCP is moving in on purchasing the city. With the gang responsible for Alex Murphy’s death now all deader than Elvis, Robocop finds himself staring down a different kind of war, this time against the manufacturers of a highly potent, society-eroding street drug called Nuke. (Not to be confused with the ill-advised children's film "Nukie," of course.)

The main bad guy this time around is a weird clan of criminals consisting of Cain, a hippie-dippie cult-leader who likes to slice open the chest cavities of cops, his Rae Dawn Chong-flavored moll and an 11-year-old kid in a business suit who likes to swear a lot. While hot on their trail, Robocop seems to experience pangs for his past life, at one point driving by his wife’s house to just stare at his son like some kind of metalloid creeper.

The suits at Omni Consumer Products are as unscrupulous as ever, hard at work on a replacement Robocop unit -- if only the could find the perfect central nervous system to plunk down inside the gears and wires of the Iron Man suit. After Robocop is effectively “stripped” by the bad guys -- ingeniously, they capture him with a giant magnetic and jackhammer his limbs off -- he’s reprogrammed to think and act like a complete and total jack-ass, giving hammy lectures to juvenile delinquents and choosing to shut off overflowing fire hydrants while meth runners have tank battles in the middle of a playground. Eventually, he decides to fry himself all over again, and this time, all of his prime directives are wiped clean so now he’s a revenge seeking mother-fucker unhindered by all of that nonsense about not killing people.

After Cain is apprehended, he’s selected to be the grey matter for the “Robocop 2” prototype. Apparently, the suits at OCP figured a drug-addicted mass killer would be easier to control SINCE he’s a substance abuser, which makes me really, really glad the guys at Enron and Lehman Brothers never got into the private security business. In a money laundering deal gone bad between Cain’s surviving cronies and the nearly bankrupt (both financially and morally) Detroit City Council, OCP sends “Robocop 2” in to kill half the cast, including the film’s middle-school antagonist. With Detroit defaulting on a loan, OCP unveils its model for Delta City, complete with a guest appearance by, you guessed it, the same drug-addicted psycho-killer mech from earlier. Unsurprisingly, the robotic abomination goes plum crazy, and its up to the original Robo to save the Motor City from destruction -- and cue our twenty-minute-long cyborg kung-fu paint-the-town-red apocalypse-bonanza, complete with an up-close scene of Peter Weller smashing a dude’s exposed brains into a pothole twice.

Yeah, yeah, the movie doesn’t have the charm of the original, and while its violence is just a smidge toned down from the original, I still reckon this is a mighty damn fine example of good, old-fashioned degenerate Hollywood filmmaking. Yeah, there are some pathos thrown in there, but audiences heading into a movie called “Robocop 2” want action, action and more action, not drawn out, lingering shots of a dude dressed up like a washing machine looking wistful up against a rain-slicked window seal.

Of course, the film isn’t in the same league as the first flick. That’s a given. That said, the film at least TRIES to be its own picture, even if some of the carry-over tricks from the first film -- the upbeat newscast pastiches and mocking television advertisements, primarily -- aren’t as whip-smart as in pelicula numero uno.

You really can’t talk about the movie without first talking about the script. The original screenplay was penned by Frank Miller -- who actually has a cameo in the film as Cain’s main drug chemist -- but apparently, it was a goddamn mess that didn’t work as a nine-part comic series, let alone a big budget feature film. So, veteran scriptwriter Walon Green was brought in by Orion to polish up Miller’s turd, and the end result -- in my humblest ‘o opinions -- ain’t bad at all. Virtually everybody who wasn’t in a body bag at the end of the first movie returned for this one, and the acting, I think, is pretty much on par with the first one.

Ultimately, I think the big problem with “Robocop 2” is the atmosphere. There was this sense of pained, pitiable stoicism that Murphy exhibited in the first film that we really don’t see in this picture, and that really detracts from its impact.

Overall, this just feels like a much cleaner, more sanitized film than the first movie. Everything is brighter and more vibrant, and the blood explosions are nowhere near as massive as they were the first go-around. The movie really doesn’t have that supreme gross-out moment like the part where Emil gets eviscerated on the hood of the SUX 9000, or even a stand-up-and-cheer communal bloodlust scene like when Dick Jones gets defenestrated. It’s not as cerebral and biting as the first film, but at the same time, it just doesn’t provide the same satisfying, extra-large bucket of popcorn movie-going experience, either.

As I was saying earlier, however, if you can manage to stop comparing every single frame of the film to the original, you come to appreciate “Robocop 2” for what it is and isn’t. OK, so it’s not the social satire masterpiece the first film was, but it’s not exactly a Joel Schumacher, light-and-fluffy bastardization, either. It’s certainly more comical than the original, but it definitely has its moments of bleakness -- I mean, shit, there’s a part where Robocop has to read the last rites to a junior high school kid bleeding to death, for crying aloud. Of course, it’s in the same movie which features a robot man smashing a dude’s head into a “Midnight Resistance” arcade machine, but I digress.

Some have argued that Cain and his posse aren’t as interesting as the clique of cretins in the first film. That, I agree with -- in hindsight, I really wished the filmmakers would have stuck to Miller’s original character, which was a religious fundamentalist psycho with a Jesus complex. Conversely, Peter Weller’s performance doesn’t have quite the emotional impact it did in part one, even if his performance here is much more varied. The OCP goons aren’t as engrossing, and the rest of the cast -- namely, Officer Lewis and the mayor -- just feel like they don’t have that much to do except gnaw on the scenery.

A lot of people took offense to the subplot about Robocop being reprogrammed to a PG-13-worthy pussified version of himself, but I thought it was nonetheless a nice dig at all of the executive meetings that surely had to have happened during pre-development. It’s clear that the suits at Orion wanted the sequel to be a little bit more kid-friendly than the first, but at the end of the day, they wisely decided to keep this one an R-rated bloodbath extravaganza.

The sociopolitical commentary isn’t as deftly handled this time around, but I actually kind of liked the subplot about OCP trying to force Detroit into a default -- a thematic made all the more hilarious when the city ACTUALLY did end up filing for bankruptcy a good 23 years down the road. Although I would have liked to have seen a more humanistic portrayal of the main character (the scene between Murphy and his wife, I thought, could have lent to some superb, above-the-grade-and-above-the-genre sequences,) the more grizzled, vigilante-esque version of Robo we get later on in the movie is pretty satisfying, too. I mean, the dude is willing to jack another guy’s motorcycle solely for the sake of running headlong into the windshield of the film’s primary bad guy -- had the producers of part 3 went with a similar hard-R bent, it probably would’ve turned into a similarly better-than-it-had-any-right-to be sequel.

Alas, I think it’s a solid little movie. It’s no “Hardware” or “The Running Man,” but for what it is, it’s quite respectable. It’s a fun, dumb, high-energy motion picture that’s long on style, short on substance and filled with unrepentant slam-bang-pow-wow school-shooter influencing mayhem -- in short, it’s precisely the kind of Bush the First-era, post Reaganomics cinematic madness that made the post Genesis, pre-SNES years such a wonderful time to be alive.

And as far as I am concerned? It’s far and away the best movie ever directed by Irvin Kershner, and it’s not even close…

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Six Horrible Bands That Shouldn’t Have Survived the ‘90s

…and another half dozen who should’ve ruled the freaking world.

The 1990s were a great time for music, it being the era that gave us Cynic, Nada Surf, Wu-Tang, Anal Cunt, Merzbow, good Johnny Cash and of course, the Wesley Willis Fiasco. While most bands from the era have long since dissolved or turned into calcified husks of what they once were, quite a few bands from the era have remained quite popular ever since.

Today, we’re going to be taking a look at a dozen bands who, after becoming popular in the ‘90s, have had extended careers into the aughties and beyond. To be different though, we’ll largely be looking at six bands that have proven extraordinarily popular beyond the Sega Genesis era, who in my humblest of opinions, never deserved their success to begin with. Serving as palette cleaners, we’ll then bring up a band that SHOULD have had the post-Clinton success that the overrated artist did.

Odds are, this one will probably irk some fan boys, but that’s not exactly territory we here at the Internet Is In America is even remotely afraid to get into. Get ready, folks, it’s time to chow down on some supremely overrated sacred cow…

OVERRATED BAND NUMBER ONE:

Tool

Tool, and their fans, are people who overstate their own intelligence. They think tunes like “Prison Sex” and “Schism” are profound and intellectual and probing, but no -- they’re actually pretty fucking stupid, pointless and meandering to the point of being indecipherable.

Tool is pretty much Pink Floyd for people who might shoot up a school building some day. You HAVE to be high to listen to their music, because anyone with even the remotest sense of pitch and tune would hear three seconds of “Stink Fist” and probably mistake it for air conditioning static. The H.R. Giger claymation videos and lenticular album covers of Vitruvian Man and dudes blowing themselves pretty much tell you all you need to know about the band as an act -- they’re boring, they have nothing to say, and they have to be inauthentically “shocking” and grandiose to even be worth mentioning. At least Marilyn Manson and his followers know how stupid his shtick is -- Tool is a band glibly unaware just how painfully mundane they truly are.

Tool is the worst kind of band, the kind of band who thinks their music is better than what it really is. Ultimately, they’re just a shitty industrial band -- probably worse than Ministry or Prong -- who think they can overcome their drabness by filling their music with creepy stalker poetry and Bill Hicks references. You know why Tool songs often drone on for more than ten minutes? Because it gives you ample time to get up and find something better to do with your life, that’s why.

Who Should Have Been Popular Instead? 

DEATH

Far and away the best death metal band of all-time, and pretty much the act responsible for turning the genre from a goofy thrash offshoot into arguably the most intellectual and technically demanding genre out there. Truly intelligent people listen to “Human” and “Symbolic” -- mush heads keep waiting for Maynard James Keenan to write another song about egg recipes.

OVERRATED BAND NUMBER TWO:

Nine Inch Nails

And speaking of shitty industrial acts, hey ya’ll its Trent Reznor and pals!

Really, NIN shouldn’t have had a career after “Pretty Hate Machine.” “Head Like a Hole” should’ve made them a one-hit-wonder, and they should’ve faded away into obscurity by the time the mid 1990s arrived. But somehow, they managed to become goth-rock-Prozac heroes with “The Downward Spiral,” the techno-metal-emo magnum opus that’s probably been the soundtrack to more teen suicides than any other album in history.

Magazines like Spin and Rolling Stone praised NIN for being “emotional” and “innovative,” which is codeword for “playing like shit, but since its arty, we want to sound enlightened too, so we like it.” With a rock world tired of “woe-is-me” mopey  flannel shirt shit-grunge, Reznor had the business sense to cook up some “woe-is-me” mopey black fingernail polish electro-shit-emo to fill the lucrative void created by Kurt Cobain’s doped up corpse. Like a turd that won’t flush, they float up to the top of the commode every four or five years, with another boring-ass album that sounds just like the last one, but rest assured, the NPR crowd will eat it up, anyway. They say all you need to make it in show-business is talent, hard work and a hell of a marketing campaign. Thanks to NIN, we know now you only need one of those to thrive in the recording industry.

Who Should Have Been Popular Instead? 

MONSTER MAGNET

Quite possibly the best pure rock and roll band on the planet, and a group that’s been releasing consistently great dope smoke rock since the early 1990s. With a lead singer who looks just like the dude from “American Movie,” Monster Magnet is the kind of old school rock act that knows how to rip it up and get groovy at the same time. Whereas NIN is overproduced, computerized drabness, Monster Magnet is raw, mechanical sexualized fury -- in short, everything that makes actual rock and roll fucking awesome.

OVERRATED BAND NUMBER THREE:

AFI

AFI was -- and still is -- the Backstreet Boys of goth music. 98 percent of their fan base are prepubescent teen girls (who may be in their late 30s by now), who dream of being seduced by some 120 pound weakling with a lip ring while “Invader Zim” romantically plays in the background. AFI is a pseudo-band who makes pseudo-music, and they’ve undoubtedly made a lot of money courting the Hot Topics crowd like Jerry Lewis serenading kids to the gas chamber.

AFI was NEVER a real punk band. Even their ‘90s stuff was more “Green Day” than “Suicide Machines,” and their post “Girl’s Not Grey” stuff might as well be considered Top 40 pop. Their dark-romantic-Victorian-kinda-emo-straight-edge hook is one of the most noticeably formulaic in all of music -- their songs seem structured to sell iTunes downloads to fat punk chicks who would recoil in disgust at G.G. Allin’s mere visage.

There’s not much of a difference between AFI and the All-American Rejects or Fallout Boy, except maybe the clothing is darker. It’s major record label, niche target youth-baiting claptrap all the same, made worse because AFI and their fans actually think they’re a real band. Show me someone who enjoys AFI’s music, and I’ll show you someone with about as much depth as a drained kiddy pool.

Who Should Have Been Popular Instead? 

GWAR

Yes, GWAR, the group of Virginia art school students who dressed up like outer space bacon monsters and did stage shows filled with fake amputation and gallons of synthetic blood. To the untrained eye, it was all goofy showmanship, until you actually paid heed to the band’s lyrics, which were among the most subversively intelligent political satire of the last two decades. AFI are a bunch of rich pretty boys in eyeliner, whereas GWAR were a bunch of ugly motherfuckers who knew what TRUE art looked, sounded and sometimes smelled like. They were true audiovisual entertainment, not the commodified, Super Target discount bin-ready corp-pop that AFI has been for at least the last ten years.

OVERRATED BAND NUMBER FOUR:

Tori Amos

I don’t know which I detest more: Tori Amos, or Tori Amos fans. Let’s pick apart both, why don’t we?

Despite all of the accolades she receives,  Tori Amos is really nothing more than the female equivalent of Ben Folds. Except Ben Folds has dexterity, and he has the good sense to not make super-long paens to rape and domestic abuse staples of his catalog. EVERY goddamn Tori Amos song sounds the same -- breathless, absurdly forced egocentrically emotional pornography. “Look at me, I’m a woman, men are bad, I’ve been through bad stuff, women are good.” That’s pretty much the lyrical range to the entire Amos discography. PJ Harvey more or less had the same gimmick, but at least she has a decent voice -- Amos usually sounds like a raspy-throated Disney on Ice singer who stopped giving a shit a long time ago.

And goddamn, are Tori fans the most annoying throng of wannabe intellectual artistes this side of the Animal Collective fan club. They’re all so emotionally distraught over the most menial wrongs that have occurred to them. The aggregate Amos fan isn’t some chronically abused outsider, but some suburban mall rat whose worst day ever was the time she got the wrong coffee at Starbucks and what’s-his-name from geometry class never accepted her friend request. Liz Phair beats the shit out of Tori Amos any day of the week -- I’d rather listen to a scratched disc version of “Exile on Guyville” than ANYTHING this overrated ginger has crapped out.

Who Should Have Been Popular Instead?

MATTHEW SWEET

Matthew Sweet is the single most underrated artist of the 1990s, and under complete obscurity, he’s released nearly thirty years worth of the best guitar-driven power pop in the history of recorded music. If you want overblown, self-righteous sentimentalism, Amos is your girl; when you’re ready for no-frills, old-school emotional rock and roll, Matthew Sweet is waiting for you.

OVERRATED BAND NUMBER FIVE:

Radiohead

In a just world, Radiohead would have gone the way of Wax, Greta and Quicksand. “Creep” would have been a popular contemporary hit, their follow-up albums would have sold like crap and with enough luck, Thom Yorke would’ve died of a heroin overdose sometime in 1998. Alas, the winds of fate have blown the other direction, and as a global society, we’ve all had to suffer.

There’s no way around it: Radiohead is the pussiest band in history. They make Morrissey sound like Slayer and The Cure sound like Deicide in their prime. You MIGHT be able to give their guitarist credit, but that still leaves three-fourths a shitty band to deal with. And then, there’s the discography as a whole.

“OK Computer” is the most overrated album of the 1990s, and its not even close. From “Kid A” to “In Rainbows,” they’re discography hasn’t gotten any better, with their subdued, low-key high production value-low-fi sound becoming the aural template for countless Euro and US suck-core acts such as The Killers and Coldplay. More than any band of the last 30 years, Radiohead has been the most responsible for popularizing wuss-rock, the effeminate, absurdly morose wannabe art house genre that more or less represents rock and roll music as a whole today. For that alone, Radiohead deserves the world’s collective scorn. And they probably deserve even more than that for simply being Radiohead.

Who Should Have Been Popular Instead?

LOCAL H

Most folks only know Local H for their minor 1996 hit “Bound for the Floor,” and that’s a real shame. Unbeknownst to 99 percent of humanity, the Chicago post-grunge act has gone on to release outstanding album after outstanding album ever since, producing super-smart alternative rock that puts all of those egghead college rock groups to shame. Radiohead is music people listen to because they think it makes them look hip and intellectual; Local H is the kind of music people listen to because hot damn, does it ever rock.

OVERRATED BAND NUMBER SIX:

Neutral Milk Hotel

Without hyperbole, “In the Aeroplane over the Sea” is the single worst thing I’ve ever heard in my life, and I once heard the death scream of a kitten before. I’m not trying to sound acerbically humorous when I state that I have no earthly idea how anyone could find this type of “music” pleasurable. It’s so pretentious, and inauthentic and insincere -- authentically shitty music, I can handle, but disingenuous shit like this? It’s the absolute worst of the worst.

Neutral Milk Hotel isn’t a band. I’m convinced of it. It’s actually some kind of far-reaching, longitudinal MK Ultra experiment on mimetic desirability or something. The masterminds at DARPA used algorithms to create the absolute shittiest kind of music possible, and via media engineering, have convinced all of the pop music barons that it’s actually great, and since kids today are a bunch of mush heads who can’t think for themselves, they too, have convinced themselves that NMH is, and I definitely quote here, “good music.”

Between Jeff Mangum’s make-believe hillbilly yelp, the band’s inability to find a rhythm of any sort and the group’s sickeningly avant-garde for the sake of being avant-garde shtick (hey, let’s make an alt-country concept album about Anne Frank!), Neutral Milk Hotel is -- without question -- the single worst alt rock act to achieve critical or financial success in the 1990s. They may not have recorded any music since 1999, but they made enough shit from 1992 onward to forever leave their undeniable streak mark on the industry. I can be flexible on most things, but if you’re into Neutral Milk Hotel, I automatically hate you. It’s something much worse than having bad taste -- it’s a sign you, as an individual, have absolutely zero ability to think beyond what shitrags such as Pitchfork tell you to. To summarize: fuck Neutral Milk Hotel, and everyone on planet Earth who likes them.

Who Should Have Been Popular Instead? 

VIC CHESNUTT

If you want REAL alt country, it doesn’t get any better than Vic Chesnutt, the Athens, Ga. singer-songwriter who is probably best known for being the guy in the wheelchair in “Sling Blade.” With soulful, haunting songs about faith, disease and depression, Chesnutt was an artist who really made music that connected with you. As insincere as Neutral Milk Hotel is, Vic Chesnutt is every bit the real deal; as much as you owe it to yourself to avoid Jeff Mangum, you definitely owe it to yourself to give Chesnutt a thorough listening.

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