An Ode To Spirit Halloween!

Because what better way to commemorate Oct. 31 than a photographic essay reliving the wonder and the whimsy of a 15-minute shopping trip I took in late August? 

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Comic Review: 'Jason vs. Leatherface' (1995)

In the mid-1990s, there was a comic book series in which the stars of Friday the 13th and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre became friends. Nope - for real, and here's the demonstrable evidence.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

Nearly ten years before Freddy vs. Jason hit multiplexes, Topps Comics (yep, published by the same people who make all those baseball cards) released a three-issue limited series that gave us an entirely different crossover slasher throwdown - one that pitted the Crystal Lake boogeyman against none other than the entire hillbilly cannibal clan from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies. 

And here's the really weird part - the whole thing was written by a woman. Yep, the scribe behind the three ish run was a chick named Nancy A. Collins, who in addition to penning a few Swamp Thing and Vampirella stories, also churned out a whole hell of a lot of vampire novels, so I guess you could call her a poor woman's Anne Rice. Even weirder, the primary artist was a guy named Jeff Butler, who did a whole buncha' movie tie-ins like Godzilla and Jurassic Park, although he's most famous for his Dungeons & Dragons artwork. He also co-created The Badger, but yeah - maybe you can see why he left that off his official resume. And rounding out the trifecta of weirdness, the cover art was drawn up by Simon Bisley, the guy who is most regarded for his work on Lobo and ABC Warriors. And you can tell from the very first issue - which features weird, abstract depictions of Jason and Leatherface as musclebound reptilian zombies fightin' in the swamp on the cover, with the tagline "the next Texas Chainsaw Massacre is on Friday the 13th!" posited in the corner - that this thing's going to be wackier than fuck.

Issue one, obviously, gives us all the key background stuff. Crystal Lake's been shut down and replaced by this thing called the Linhart Amalgamated factory. The splash page shows Jason stuck in the bottom of the polluted lake, with the narrator letting us know "has has his hate to keep him warm." Apparently, the EPA is clamping down hard on Linhart, so the CEO proposes moving the factory to Mexico, dredging Crystal Lake and building a new corporate headquarters right atop Jason's old stomping grounds. So the suits strike a deal with this dude to illegally dump some toxic waste, and naturally, this old coot shows up at the dock and says Jason's going to kill them all and they all laugh at him and call him crazy.

So Jason hops aboard a train and hacks off a hobo's hand and head, then he bifurcates his pet dog for biting his leg (which, as we all know, is something Kane Hodder would never allow HIS Jason to do.) I mean, killing harmless old dudes is one thing, but puppy murdering is taking it TOO FAR. Jason, of course, makes his way to the front of the train, literally slaps a dude's head 180 degrees around and machetes a motherfucker. This leads to a massive derailment and explosion, so who knows how many people just got killed. By the way, the design for Jason in this thing is weird as hell. He has this huge, pronounced, ultra-bumpy, chewed bubble gum head, which makes him look like one of those big-brained aliens from This Island Earth.

No, I can't explain why Jason looks like he's from Mars
Attacks! either.

Sure enough, Jason emerges from the wreckage without a scratch and now he's in Sawyerville, Texas, where he immediately runs into a guy being chased down by the Leatherface clan. Oddly enough, Leatherface's compatriots are all original characters, with one of them sorta' working as a composite of Chop Top from Part 2 and the psycho hitchhiker from the original movie (although he ultimately looks more like Tom Petty's character from King of the Hill on mescaline than anything else.) Anyhoo, he goads Leatherface into battling Jason by saying "git that sumbitch!" and there's a one page fight where Jason knocks the saw out of Leatherface's hand and machetes up the guy they were going to eat real good. Then Jason - going completely against type - gives Leathface his chainsaw back and the clan INVITES Jason to dinner because they reckon he's their kind of people. 

The narrator lets us know why Jason isn't killing everything that moves. "He could have killed them both. But he didn't. The emotions that fill Jason right now are alien to him as they are not hate or anger. He is uncertain how he should act." So he goes back the Sawyer farmhouse and we're introduced to a quasi father-figure named "The Cook" who is impressed by Jason's head severing abilities. Then Leatherface's aforementioned brother (who is simply called "The Hitchhiker") makes fun of him so he goes up stairs and cries in his bedroom, which is filled with all sorts of weird horror knickknacks, like Frankenstein heads, everywhere. Then the narrator lets us know Jason actually feels an AFFINITY toward Leatherface 'cause he reminds him so much of himself and he marches up stairs and tells him to come down with him (well, more like he just points at the door, but you get the idea) and we meet the rest of the cast. There's Grandpa, and Aunt Amelia, a zombie retard with a Barney the Dinosaur mug. They ask Jason what his name is so he dips his finger in Kool-Aid and writes "Jason" on the wall and that's what they figured was good enough for a cliffhanger heading into issue two. But before that, the comic concludes with an essay on slasher movies written by C. Dean Andersson titled "Halloween Chainsaw Hockey" that somehow connects the 1958 Richard Fleischer movie The Vikings to Halloween and Friday the 13th and ends with a recommendation that everybody read Robin Morgan's The Demon Lover when they get the freetime. You kn0w, this C. Dean Andersson guy seems like just my kinda' company. 

Alright, and now we segue to issue two, which begins with Jason having a nightmare about drowning. He's invited downstairs for breakfast (it's fried brains, in case you were wondering) but since he won't touch his plate, one of the Sawyer goons ask him if he's a vegetarian. Watching Leatherface's brothers bully him triggers a flashback for Jason, in which he recollects his father(?) abusing him as a youngster. The Cook shows Jason the deep freeze and tells him about his dream of opening a haute cuisine restaurant in Austin or Shreveport so he can buy a nice double wide trailer and watch Wheel of Fortune all day.

Some lost travelers go to the Sawyer-owned gas station and Hitchhiker fucks up their car so he and Jason can lay a trap for 'em down the road. All the while, Hitchhiker extols the joys of making his female victims "squawk" - especially the pregnant ones.

Shit, now we need to find a way to wedge in Sardu and
Ralphus from Bloodsucking Freaks and Henry and Ottis
from Portrait of a Serial Killer, don't we?

Hitchhiker shows Jason his Ed Gein-inspired workshop, complete with a stuffed Santa corpse and rocking chairs made out of human bones. Naturally, Leatherface shows up shortly thereafter and fucks up his sibling's latest project so he starts beating the shit out of him. This makes Jason think back to his daddy beating the hell out of him as a kid and how his mama - now named Doris, for whatever reason - put a stop to all that by greasing his brain with a meat cleaver. This sparks a near fight between Jason and Hitchhiker, but Leatherface stops right before Mr. Voorhees can drive a sharp bone through his bro's skull. Jason goes up stairs and the narrator lets us know he has conflicting thoughts. He never hesitates to kill anybody at Crystal Lake, but here in Texas, something is making him a little more wishy-washy. And before we formally wrap up the ish, we get another essay, this 'un penned by a guy named Ric Meyers who talks about Frankenstein being emblematic of the fear of death and Dracula being emblematic of the fear of sex. Then he talks about everybody in the 1950s living in an age of atomic bomb paranoia and communists taking over the government, before saying Psycho ushered in the age of "the human being as monster," which he suggests could be a metaphor for our fear of truly living. Aye, deep thoughts, Senor Meyers. Deep thoughts, indeed. 

And now we come to the third and final installment of the saga. They've been building up the big dinner scene for three issues now and we're finally getting it. The cook says he he hopes "everybody's ready for soul food, he's making some cooter pie," tonight, which I REALLY hope isn't what I THINK it is, so it probably is. So Hitchhiker gets into a fight with Leatherface for getting thumbprints all over his comics and he stabs Jason with a dinner knife and then it's an all out donnybrook. Jason decapitates the zombie retard aunt and the Cook buries a meat cleaver in Jason's back, but of course, he no sells it (and LOL at the Sawyers repeatedly calling Jason "a Yankee.") The clan hides out in the freezer and Jason bursts in. Now here comes Leatherface with his baby buzz saw to make the save. The narrator explains how Jason is jealous of Leatherface for having a family, even a fucked up one, and this makes him go psycho. Eventually the cook bashes Jason's brains out (literally) with a mallet and the gang wonders if they should eat him, but they decide not because they figure he'd taste too gamy.

So they bury him in a nearby lake instead. Of course, Jason is revived by the sense of deja vu, but instead of going back to the house and killing everybody, he decides to return home. And the final page shows him walking back to Camp Crystal Lake - which a billboards says is in Vermont, not New Jersey. Well, that's some weird ass shit, for sure.

And to think - a one-off comic series from 1995 would
give us the best explanation for Jason's bloodlust to date.

Well, not that you really need me to tell you this, but that thing was strange as shit. I suppose there aren't really any logical reasons why Jason and Leatherface would ever hypothetically go toe-to-toe, but the folks who drew this one up were really grasping for straws. It's kinda' weird how that whole Crystal Lake chemical plant thing got dropped - I mean, you'd at least figure Jason would want to show up at the tail end of the series and lay siege to the factory or something. Indeed, that whole plot dynamic was just iffy as hell. Is it supposed to be some sort of pro environmental metaphor, with Jason representing a symbolic ecological champion? And why were rich ass businessmen reduced to taking Amtrak, anyway? Mutant hillbilly cannibals and zombie retard mass murderers making friends, I can sorta believe, but that C-level industrial tycoons wouldn't have better personal transportation options demands I suspend my disbelief way too high.

Speaking of which, so Jason's on a train to kill some mofos that accidentally resurrected him from the dead, but he takes, what, 10 or 12 hours to do it? New Jersey to Texas takes fucking forever, so what did he do off-panel to kill the time? I know, I know, that's the kind of stuff that makes me half retarded for even wondering, but still - plot holes like that really gets my goose. 

Of course, the characterization of Jason as a more HESITANT psycho killer in this book might miff some fans, but shit, that's pretty much the only way you could've gotten more than three pages out of the concept, let alone a full three issues. If anything, the depiction of Leatherface ought to be what irks hardcore horror fans the most - I mean, the dude is reduced to a crying little pussy for half the series. We're supposed to think this blubbering baby is a credible threat to Jason friggin' Voorhees, even if he is going through his slightly emo phase? Get out of here with that noise. 

That said, I really liked the supporting cast, and the weird rockabilly-like aesthetics were a hoot and a half. There's practically no plot getting in the way of the  story here, and there's absolutely nothing political or socially-cognizant about the book you have to cogitate on. It's pretty much a trashy, pulpy, read-once-and-discard series, but it nonetheless makes for an entertaining seasonally appropriate read. And in my humble opinion, it's vastly superior to those Freddy vs. Ash vs. Jason comics that came down the line a few years back - which, I know, ain't exactly winning Olympic gold, but you know what I'm trying to get at here.

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Comic Review: 'Evil Ernie vs. The Movie Monsters!' (1997)

You want "random ass Halloween-themed nonsense," you've got it! Presenting a sucky one-shot comic from the late 1990s starring a whole host of unlicensed cinematic creatures getting done in by a ripoff of the Iron Maiden mascot!

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

By the time 1997 rolled around, I was pretty much through with comics. I was an avid collector (but not really an avid reader) of all the hot titles of the polybagged era, but once I was in middle school I just stopped giving a damn. Oh, I would pick up the occasional issue of Wizard and maybe scoop up an old back issue or two of The Untold Tales of Spider-Man, but my adolescent love affair with funny books was rapidly nearing its terminus - primarily, because I required more time to focus on other geeky (but slightly less culturally-maligned) bullshit, like pro rasslin' and PlayStation 1 games. Besides, next to being seen wandering the action figure aisle at the local Walmart, there was no quicker way to lose your coolness at my school than being caught reading a comic book, even if it was some weird, indie goth shit like Johnny the Homicidal Maniac; sorry, but eschewing the old four panel adventures was a necessary undertaking if I ever wanted to catch a whiff of what high school was like (which, yeah, involved way less sex and way more vomiting than the movies had led me to believe.) 

But with stuff like Evil Ernie representing the bulk of what was going out there in the world of comics at the time, maybe I picked the best time possible to exit the hobby. EVERYBODY these days likes to shit all over 1990s comics as being nothing but grimdark, convoluted, hyper-gimmicky bullshit with everything looking like Rob Liefeld drew it and everything reading like Todd McFarland wrote it, but there was certainly plenty of good stuff out there, pending you knew where to look. Even Marvel and D.C., at quite possibly their respective nadirs as publishers, were still pushing out relatively fantastic stuff like Major Bummer, The Infinity Gauntlet, Hitman and Skull Kill Krew, and of course you had all the indies out there flooding the market with top tier tomfoolery a'la Milk and Cheese and Give Me Liberty, so - for the most part - the ceaseless comic book nerd antipathy of the decade remains largely displaced and unwarranted.

But then you remember just how popular shit like the Chaos! Comics oeuvre was back then, and you just want to ball up your fist and punch the nearest windowpane right off its fuckin' frame. For those of you in need of some exposition, Chaos! was one of those fly-by-night comic imprints that (momentarily) hit it back during the "bad girl" era with its flagship wank-rag Lady Death. Alas, they just HAD to expand their universe beyond sordid tales of some white haired chick with humongous boobs fighting the devil, and lo and behold Evil Ernie was born (and yes, before you autists start sending me angry letters, I know Evil Ernie debuted before Lady Death, so go on ahead and just cram it.)

Next to Orbitz soda and NAFTA, nothing reeks of desperate 1990s-ness more than Evil Ernie. I mean, goddamn, that character was such a creation of its times - a zombified psycho killer with a haircut like Howard Stern who talked like Bart Simpson and was apparently modeled after the iconic Iron Maiden mascot Eddie. This thing was tailor-made for the 14-year-old, aspiring school-shooter set that listened to White Zombie but couldn't buy their CDs at Tower Records because that meant making eye contact with the 16-year-old blonde behind the cash register while simultaneously holding in their chubs. Evil Ernie is pretty much the comic book equivalent of Saved By the Bell: The College Years - hokey, cheesy, and so utterly cemented in its own cultural zeitgeist that today it's virtually impossible to ingest it as anything other than an unintentional self-parody. Some relics of yesteryear produce nostalgia, but Evil Ernie produces what I like to call nost-nausea ... the sudden recollection of just how vapid, empty and utterly pointless most bygone things actually where. And if you thought the mainline Evil Ernie series was nost-nauseous, just wait until you get a hold of its 1997 Halloween special!

Eh ... I still like it better than just calling him The Gill Man.

The title Evil Ernie vs. the Movie Monsters pretty much tells you everything you need to know, don't it? It's a one-shot special guest starring a whole bunch of parodies of classic horror stock characters, all of whom are given high-larious roman a clef names like Teddy Leugar and Jensen Vorhead. So basically it's nothing more than a gigantic unlicensed monster movie bash, so how in the world could it possibly suck, right? Well ... you'll see, and I'll just leave it at that. 

OK, so the Evil Ernie backstory. He was this one kid who was constantly abused by his uptight parents so one day he started killing people and he got caught and these scientists hooked him up to some sort of experimental dream-monitoring device and somehow he got astral projected to the netherworld and he made a pact with the living embodiment of death (who, naturally, had Dolly Parton-sized jugs) and he died in the real world only to come back as an unkillable lord of the dead who can resurrect corpses and command them to do his bidding. Oh, and he's trying to literally kill everybody on the planet because when he does, he can finally have sex with Lady Death. Wait, did I leave the part out about Smiley, his talking jacket lapel button? Well, he has one of those, too, and it's annoying as fuck.

So with that out of the way, I suppose the coast is clear to hop smackdab into the middle of this 'un. We begin the comic with Ernie playing golf at Cosmic Studios in Florida, where he recounts his abusive childhood while knocking balls into the hollowed out eye sockets of severed heads. After awhile Ernie gets bored, even though Smiley tries to motivate him to keep playing by telling him Iggy Pop is an avid golfer.

So he walks around the theme park, making fun of the rides based on the My Lai Massacre and Dirty Harry, then he thinks about the time his parents wouldn't let him go see "Exterminator 2"(*) because it was too violent and eroded their Quayle-ian family values (cue flashbacks to his parents making him watch National Velvet and The Sound of Music while taped in a chair with his eyeball lids pried open, A Clockwork Orange-style, and lamenting never getting to see all the old Hammer horror movies until he was institutionalized ... long story.) 

(*) Oddly enough, there is indeed a real movie called Exterminator 2, but methinks the writers were trying to make an oblique homage to T2 here. [THNX, MGMT.]

So, uh, I take it the writer had no idea two REAL Saturday the 14th movies actually got made?

Ernie takes a ride on the Ghost Train attraction and he's attacked by Dracula and the Wolfman (with Smiley, naturally, taking a chunk out of the Wolfman's hide.) Then a Jason wannabe whacks the head off Evil Ernie's cameraman (just like a reality TV star, he has a big entourage running around filming all of his nefarious activities) and then Ernie gets attacked by a mummy that apparently has Robocop's chassis underneath all that gauze.

Meanwhile, one of Ernie's zombie chums is captured by a rotund (and, presumably, mad) scientist. Ernie's fisticuffs with Dracula resume and the former tosses a giant candle holder through the latter's heart. Then Ernie throws Frankenstein into an electrical grid (ironic - that's what gave him life, and that's what gave him death) and encounters the Creature from the Black Lagoon ... who, for copyright reasons, is referred to as "the Gill Beast from the Haunted Lagoon." It isn't long before old Gill turns on Dracula, allowing Ernie to slam a giant tree through Drac's sternum, presumably killing him. 

Then the cast of Them! attacks and Ernie kills the oversized ants by blow torching 'em with hairspray (that was one of his favorite pastimes as a kid, you see.) Then a turd-shaped alien called What the Unconquerable (I have no idea what this guy is supposed to be a parody of - readers, do send me a line if I'm missing something here) shows up and puts Ernie to sleep with some kinda' mind control ray. He wakes up in the mad scientist's lair and he tells Ernie he needs his "green energy" - I guess it's an offhanded reference to the elixir in Re-Animator, maybe? - to turn his pet lizard into a giant Godzilla pastiche. Smiley the button escapes (complete with a "to infinity and beyond" quip), and frees Ernie, who immediately kills the scientist by tossing acid in his face. 

Speaking of acid-spewing no good-niks, some hive creatures (coughCOUGHthexenomorphsfromAliencoughCOUGH) arive and Ernie picks up a pulse rifle that was conveniently just laying there and blows them all to kingdom come. And that's a segue to our all-slasher donnybrook, as expies of Freddy, Jason and Micheal (this one, not this one) rear their collective ugly heads. "Buncha' losers," Smiley comments as Ernie easily dispatches (and dismembers) them, "shoulda' stayed in the '80s!" An aside, but I love how in a comic featuring insane amounts of hardcore, NC-17 level graphic violence, they still elected to replace all the fucks and shits with random, self-censoring symbols a'la #$!%. 

Somehow, that lizard from earlier has indeed grown into a full-sized Godzilla pastiche. Jason - err, Jensen - returns and the Godzilla-wannabe immediately squashed him underneath his toes. Ernie and Smiley shoot the shit for a while and then Ernie suddenly realizes that since all of these monsters are officially dead now, he can resurrect and control them, effectively making him the true "king of the monsters." Then the fine folks at Chaos! let us know the proceeding was a non-canonical Elseworlds/What If style affair and if you want to read a real Evil Ernie comic, they've got this new one out called Destroyer you can pick up. And barely 30 pages in, we are over and out, kids!

That is easily the best non-licensed appearance by Godzilla in anything other than an early Sega Genesis game.

Well, folks, there ain't much to say after that, is there? There just ain't a whole lot of meat to this one, and even as a one-off larf it leaves much to be desired. Nobody really went into an Evil Ernie comic expecting much beyond the usual juvenile instant gratification, but with a premise that at least had the potential for something interesting, I reckon it's safe to say Chaos! royally screwed the pooch here. 

I'd like to say there's some kind of halfway decent Evil Ernie or Lady Death book out there you can pick up for some light seasonal reading, but like fuck I know anything about the Chaos! bibliography (except that they made a couple of comics based on The Undertaker, which in hindsight, I prolly shoulda reviewed instead.) Wait a minute, I just checked out their Wikipedia page - did you know these motherfuckers did comics about Halloween and the Insane Clown Posse, too? Goddamn, those people got around.

So, as much as I hate to say it, this Evil Ernie one-shot (even as brief as it is) probably isn't worth your time or effort. If you're looking for some solid Halloween comic readin' fun, there's a ton of stuff out there - the whole Marvel Zombies line, that one mini-series where Ash, Jason and Freddy K. all fight one another, etc. - that are vastly superior to this totally irrelevant slice of late '90s nos-nausea. Hell, I think you'd be better off sticking with those old Kool-Aid Man comics from the 1980s - after all, unlike this Evil Ernie dud, at least those things had some pretty amusing activity pages.

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How To Make Your Own Jason Voorhees Burgers!

Oh, these things are killer, all right...

By: Jimbo X

JimboXAmerican@gmail.com

@Jimbo__X

Folks, this is a project I've wanted to embark upon since I was 9-years-old. 

Picture it: the year of our Lord 1993. Yes, the same year that gave us, among other pop cultural contributions, Jurassic Park, Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and the first wave of Crystal Pepsi. Lost in that fog of nostalgic commercial overload is Jason Goes To Hell, which - at the time - was touted as being the last Friday the 13th movie ever, like, seriously, we mean it for real this time, guys. 

Now, in hindsight, I know it's pretty absurd to think that this throwaway genre film is any way worthy of the kind of retroactive remembrance that, say, the Waco siege or the L.A. riots or even other pop culture offerings like Schindler's List commands. But me being a second grader at the time, you don't care about really big, sociocultural matters of the sort. Rather, you want to focus on all of the sleazy entertainment your parents don't like, and next to Mortal Kombat, there was no bigger lunch room topic that fall than Jason Goes To Hell. Of course, us being the polite souls we were, we never could bring ourselves to state the full title of the movie. Believe it or not, even "hell" was considered an unutterable swear back then, so many a cafeteria conversations - in part to ward off the leering ears of overzealous teachers - revolved around the great cinematic foray "Jason Goes To Heck." 

Of course, it being an R-rated movie, none of us saw it in theaters. Thankfully, it was a lot easier to catch restricted fare once it hit video stores, and there was certainly no greater VHS target come early '94 than that magical embossed cassette box featuring what appeared to be intestines popping out of Jason's eye holes. Although I had opportunities to see it, being the scaredy cat I was, I didn't actually get around to screening it until a year later - and by then, everyone else at school had given me a rundown of the spoilers, including the infamous "Freddy glove" grand finale. 

While today considered one of, if not the absolute worst, entries in the Friday canon, I've always had a guilty admiration of the movie. Sure, a lot of Jason purists are still mighty pissed about the body hopping motif, but when it came to creepy crawly guts and gore, the movie did not disappoint. I mean, within the first ten minutes of the flick, we've already got Jason being blown to smithereens by an FBI task force and a coroner eating his still-beating heart, not to mention sequences later on where an old woman has her teeth literally knocked down her throat, a woman gets skewered with a metal post while riding her man cowgirl style and a dude melts into a puddle of bloody goop after French kissing a turd-looking snake demon into another man's mouth. But as memorable as those scenes were, every time I've thought about the movie over the last 20 years, my mind dwells to one thing, and one thing only ...

Yep, that's right, in a movie featuring both a dude being killed by vat of French fry grease and a scene where a guy manages to back flip his way out of a pair of handcuffs (I still say that shit is physically impossible), the thing that I most vividly recall about the film are those hamburgers. There was just something so perfect about Jason-shaped hamburger patties, and I absolutely LOVED the design. I especially loved how oval the facsimile of the mask was - really, a few more strategic pokes here and there and you could easily turn this sumbitch into a meaty representation of a grey alien's skull. The first time I saw those damn things on my cathode ray tube television, I just knew that, one day, I just had to make my own Jason burgers. 

Well folks, that day - despite only taking a good 20-plus years - finally arrived. Now, for a food project like this, you just can't waltz on in to the kitchen and start cobbling shit together. Oh, no sir, you actually have to map out a detailed "call to action plan," and follow your blueprint to a tee. We ain't making your routine Betty Crocker Halloween treats here - we're making Jason Goddamn Voorhees: The Sandwich and as such, we better take the task at hand deathly serious. 

Now, my first executive call involved the type of protein I'd be working with. Granted, it probably would have been easier to just go out and buy a pound of ground beef and mold the pink slime into a barely recognizable facsimile of Jason Voorhees' iconic mask like Play-Doh, but you know what kind of niche subgroup who enjoys themselves seem dainty, seasonally-appropriate gimmick edibles never get enough attention from comedy food bloggers out there like myself? That's right, the vegetarians, so I decided from the get-go that I would be using those frozen veggie-patties you find at Walmart right next to the ice cream dog treats that are pushed up against the usual Mayfield stuff so you're not even entirely sure the comestible isn't meant for consumption by people. But to balance out the universe/be a contrarian dick, I also chose to include mini-pepperonis in the design, as well. But hey: if you can find gluten-free, whole-range, organic, fair-trade faux tofu pepperoni out there, I say add it to whatever you damn well please. 

The rest of our ingredient set list - ironically, not unlike the general premise of the Friday the 13th films - is fairly predictable. But before we hop into the step-by-step Jason burger manufacturing process, let's take a closer gander at what we're working with, why don't we? 

• Boca Veggie Protein Burger Patties - Although, as stated above, feel free to use real dead cow if it suits you. 
• Hormel Pepperoni Minis - Because their smaller circumference will help us out plenty when it comes time to decorate our patties. 
• Great Value Deli Style Sliced Non-Smoked Provolone Cheese - Vouch for the more expensive brand name stuff if you like, but whatever you do, make sure your cheese comes in a prefab circular mold and is at least as white as your average Bernie Sanders supporter. (Also, this is extraordinarily symbolic, seeing as how our burgers - not unlike Jason's cinematic forays - need to be quite cheesy.)
• Wonder Bread Classic Hamburger Buns - Initially, I thought about opting for one of the ritzier, more expensive hamburger bun varieties - you know, the really fancy ones with sesame seeds and shit all over them. But then, I started thinking: "Wait a minute, the Jason movies aren't ritzy or fancy, they're super formulaic and tasteless as shit," and with that in mind, how could I vouch for anything other than Wonder Bread? 
• Kraft Sweet Brown Sugar Barbecue Sauce - Because how can anything involving Jason not entail lots of copious red goo all over the place? 
• GEM Extra Virgin Olive Oil - On one hand, you need it to keep your patties from sticking to the pan, and furthermore, it gives your burger a really nice, smoky taste and texture. But also, it's canonical: after all, it's the virginal girl who always puts Jason down for the count, right? 

And now, howza'bout we start turning those ingredients into action, folks?

STEP ONE:

Coat your pan with the extra-virgin olive oil and dump in your patties

Well, this one is pretty cut-and-dry. Obviously, you're going to need a spatula, a fork or some other non-meltable flipping implement. I recommend pan-frying two burgers at a time, but if you want to cook up half a dozen at once and you feel as if you have the culinary chops to micro-manage six faux-burgers simultaneously, I say go for it. As far as additional spices or ingredients, I suppose it wouldn't kill you if you sauteed some onions or mushrooms in the mix or added a pinch of curry or red pepper, but staying true to the roots of the Friday the 13th franchise, I'd recommend keeping your burgers as bland and formulaic as possible. Now, you may have noticed a really big butcher knife in the animated GIF. above. Wondering what role that plays in our Jason burger-building process? Well, I'm glad you asked...

STEP TWO:

"Decorate" your cheese slices

This one takes some artistry, no doubts about it. If you and a buddy are tag-teaming this recipe, I'd strongly advise that one of you works wholly on eyeing the burgers so they don't get too crispy while the other breaks out the cutting implement and goes to town on the dairy products. Still, if you fancy yourself a renaissance man of the kitchen, feel free to engage in both activities at the same time. While it's not technically hard making the Jason cheese masks (really, all you have to do is make a series of strategic pokings here and there), it nonetheless takes some pretty focused manual dexterity in order to get the mask carvings just right. As you can see from the images above, the one on the left - which I took my sweet time with - came out looking pretty respectable, with the one on the right - which I rushed through because my patties were starting to stick - ended up looking about as FUBARed as Jason in the toxic waste bath at the end of Friday the 13th Part XIII. 

STEP THREE:

Toast your buns, hon.

It just dawned on me: by making a Jason burger, you pretty much are engaged in the same hyper-violent behaviors as The Man Behind the Mask himself - cutting stuff, boiling shit in hot fluids, and now - electrifying the hell out of things. If you haven't figured out how a toaster works by now, I'm not entirely sure what I can do to help you ... about anything in this world, really. Alas, if you live in a part of the world where such consumer goods remain scant or unaffordable, I suppose you can also lightly toast your buns in a regular oven, or failing that, leaving them out in the sun for a couple of hours. 

STEP FOUR:

Carefully assemble your final burger.

Time, to a certain extent, is definitely working against you here. You really only have a couple of minutes to piece together your creation before the cheese circles completely melt atop the patty, so before you slap that sliver of dairy product atop your veggie patty, I'd strongly advise you to have your mini-pepperonis prepped and ready to go. There's no wrong way, I suppose, to decorate your creation, although I've always been fond of the old three point "triangle" mask design. Feel free to get more creative if you want (shit, why not give Jason horrible pepperoni acne, if you're a fan of Italian meats) but I am not bullshitting you about the cheese - seriously, give it 120 seconds and the thing has practically molecularly bonded to the patty, Eddie Brock-and-Venom-costume-style. 

And voila, here's the COMPLETED project! All in all, I am quite happy with the way the final burger came out. I mean, at first glance you're not entirely sure it's supposed to be an edible representation of Jason Voorhees, but as soon as the suggestion creeps into your brain you're not able to unsee the resemblance. But you know, for a facsimile of Jason Voorhees, it sure does look conspicuously devoid of spatter, don't it? Aye, that means there is one last thing we have to do before chowing down...

Of course, this being an ode to the Friday the 13th mythos, can we really call it a proper Jason tribute without spraying a whole bunch of red stuff everywhere? Sure, you could splash some ketchup all over the dish and call it good, but this is a tribute to Jason, man. You've got to do something different, and what's a more fitting comestible to adorn our creation than some sweet, succulent BBQ sauce? The smoky and spicy stuff works well enough, I suppose, but I'd recommend a sauce containing brown sugar - you know, something that gives the burger a tart, super sticky, ultra-filling kick. Really, it's the perfect way to top off your Voorhees-Burger; it's gooey and it drips all over the place and the starchy corn-syrup flavor kind of overwhelms everything else, just like the inherently corny atmosphere in every Jason movie. And as for the overall gustatory quality of the dish before us? Well - not unlike the original Friday the 13th series - it's greasy, it's a little slimy, there are big old pustules of red stuff everywhere and frankly, you kind of have to wonder about the health defects if you keep consuming it on a regular basis. But also like the beloved Jason filmography? As crappy as this burger may be, it's also undeniably delicious and extraordinarily satisfying, even though you want to believe your palate is more refined. 

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Five MORE Creepy Music Videos Better Than "Thriller!"

Looking for something to get you in the mood for Halloween? Here are a couple of old-school vids that will have you feeling the All Hallows Eve spirit in no time flat...

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo__X

Around this time last year, I did a post highlighting five somewhat-forgotten music videos that, in my humblest of opinions, were superior horror-themed offerings to Michael Jackson's "Thriller." With the Halloween season in full swing, I reckon now is a pretty good time to do an update for 2015; and frankly, I think this one beats the pants off the already awesome set-list from last year. 

Alice Cooper - "He's Back (The Man Behind the Mask)" (1986)

We're just hitting total 1980s horror cheese shock rock awesomeness critical mass with this one. As quite possibly the only musician in history who could release a full album containing nothing but great songs from shitty movies (lest we forget Mr. Cooper's contributions to such iconic works as "Monster Dog" and "The Class of 1984"), this track chiseled off the "Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives" soundtrack has it all. There's a very Twisted Sister-like, anti-dad farcical comedy intro, which immediately segues to horrible matte painting backgrounds, goofy stereotypes rocking out in a neon-hued movie theater, plenty of live concert shots of Alice and -- of course -- tons of clips of Jason Voorhees doing what he does best. Throw in a really half-assed, super anti-climactic post-video joke, and you have yourselves one of the greatest masterpieces of crap ever shown on Music Television. And hey, speaking of hair metal converging with slasher movie icons...

Dokken - "Dream Warriors" (1987)

Dokken is definitely one of the more underappreciated hair-metal titans of the Reagan and crack cocaine years. I mean, just listen to "All Alone" -- how can that not get your hands curling up into devil horns (voluntarily or involuntarily?) "Dream Warriors," no doubt, is Dokken's zenith, not only because it's a great, atmospheric little song, but also because it -- as the name implies -- ties directly into the best "Elm Street" movie of 'em all. Oh, you get plenty of Freddy in this one, along with quite a bit of Patricia Arquette (damn, I love how the band members themselves are oh-so-carelessly wedged into the film scenes.) With an outstanding post-video Easter egg, this one just SCREAMS "required Halloween viewing" like a deranged mental patient dancing underneath a full moon.

Geto Boys - "Mind Playing Tricks on Me" (1991)

Forget the Halloween qualifiers, this is unquestionably one of my 10 all-time favorite music videos ever -- even now, on the offhand chance the song comes on the radio, I just have to bump the hell out of it. For the uninitiated, the Geto Boys were a pioneering Houston rap group that, at the time of "Mind Playing Tricks on Me," consisted of Scarface, Willie D., DJ Ready Red and, of course, the greatest suicidal rapping midget of all time, the incomparable Bushwick Bill. Eschewing the goofy movie-tie-in horror of the early '80s, this ultra-low-budget video instead focuses on the dual real world terrors of mental illness and having to live in the ghetto, complete with exposed boobies, a spooky proto-Candyman and a scene where Bushwick Bill, dressed like a pirate, runs around stealing Halloween candy from little kids. If there's a more perfect recipe for Samhain viewing than that, I'm not quite sure human eyes are ready for it. 

Ozzy Osbourne - "Back on Earth" (1997)

Ozzy has made a ton of videos that could qualify as essential Halloween viewing -- who could forget him turning into the world's crappiest looking werewolf in "Bark at the Moon," or demonic possession cheese-fest that was "Shot in the Dark?" -- but I ended up selecting this one for its uniqueness. Released in that weird dead zone between "Mama I'm Coming Home" and The Osbournes reality TV show, the video for "Back on Earth" is a throwback to the old expressionistic German horror works, like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu. The sepia-tone imagery definitely made it stand out for its time, and you have to give the Ozz-Man credit for repping F.W. goddamn Murnau at a time when Hanson and the Spice Girls were still considered en vogue. That it's arguably the last truly great song the former Black Sabbath frontman ever performed probably doesn't hurt it, either. 

Reggie and the Full Effect - "J Train" (2008)

By the time this knee-deep-in-the-Recession offering was released, YouTube had already eclipsed MTV as the premier source for music videos. Tis' a pity this one never made the national rounds, as it's a great homage to a litany of texts, ranging from the old school Universal monster movies to The Monster Squad. The premise is simple; Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman, the Mummy and the Bride of Frankenstein all amble into a strip club ... and yeah, that's about it. Featuring a cameo by MySpace wash-up Tila Tequila, this thing is so emblematic of its time; it's corny and unsure of itself and just kind of thrown together without rhyme or reason, but at the same time? It's fun as hell and you can't help but smile at the goofiness therein. So, yeah, it's essentially the spirit of Halloween epitomized. 

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Ten Spooky Old School Commercials!

A celebration of the TV advertisements from way back when that almost made us pee ourselves…

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo__X 

By design, television commercials are meant to be appealing. They hit us with fantastic visuals, catchy jingles and a whole host of claims that are almost certainly bullshit -- regardless if the product is a routine household cleaning product or a luxury vehicle.

There is an entire sub-domain of psychology that focuses on the nuts and bolts of manipulative marketing, where things as seemingly insignificant as colors and selective use of articles like "a" and "the" are endlessly tweaked and refined so as to achieve maximum cognitive impact. Over time, the ad industry (the multi-billion dollar a year behemoth it is) seems to have transitioned from a philosophy of building brand recognition via commercials to a philosophy of garnering long-term association with commercial content, independent of the brand being promoted. In the day and age of Google and YouTube, the goal is to make the commercial memorable, to get it to stand out from the hundreds and hundreds of advertisements the average American views every 24 hours. You can always look up whatever the hell the thing being sold is later online, anyway -- the key first step, however, is getting that audiovisual content to resonate with the consumer, and keep it in his or head for more than a few minutes.

There’s a reason why we STILL know what Mentos and Ricola are today, despite having little-to-no culturally relevancy as brands anymore. The nonstop bombardment of their corporate iconography -- coupled with a deviously simplistic “dog whistle” auditory trademark -- was forever etched in our minds as youngsters, and their inescapable catchiness has remained locked inside our neurological cortical matter ever since. If I say “Skip-It,” odds are, you start hearing that goddamn commercial jingle automatically. THAT is the hallmark of an advertising job well done -- you retain an associative identifier connected to a brand, and that identifier STAYS tethered to said brand 20 freaking years later.

Which brings us to something called “negativity bias.” As a general rule, humans are primed to recall things that adversely impact them more than things that positively impact them -- if you want the hardcore, meat-and-potatoes neurological science on why that’s the case, here’s some homework for you. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, marketers actually have a pretty good incentive to make you form negative thoughts about a particular advertisement, as you are cognitively hard-wired to think about something you hate for longer periods of time than something you like. That in mind (literally), what better way could marketers make an impact on an impressionable, fledgling consumer audience than by scaring the wits out of them?

In honor of the Halloween season, I hit up the YouTubes for some of the most memorable, brain-scarring commercials from my youth (that’s everything from pre-school to eighth grade, in case you are keen on specifics.) Just to make things more diverse, I disqualified commercials for horror movies and TV tie-in content, and tried to bring you a broad range of material from the late 1980s all the way up the early ‘00s. All in all, it’s a pretty healthy mixture of things that scared the hell out of me as a kiddo -- and a damned fine way to get your All Hallow’s Eve season rolling on a terrifyingly nostalgic note.

If you drink and drive, you will literally turn into skeleton people

The Ad Council, 1983

You really can’t do a countdown of scary commercials without including at least one piss-inducing public service announcement, and no PSA has rattled me as much as this anti-drunk driving ad. It starts off like your basic 1980s beer commercial (complete with a Michael Jackson soundtrack), but as soon as the would-be intoxicated driver sticks his key in the ignition, KA-BLAMMO! Demonic lightning strikes, the environs turn pitch black and everybody in the fucking car has their skin, organs and muscle tissue removed from their bodies. It’s rather disturbing stuff, no doubt, especially since I didn’t know what “drinking and driving” entailed as a wee one. Completely missing out on the whole alcohol component, I thought the PSA was condemning drinking ANY liquid in a car -- needless to say, my mom was quite confused when she reached for a mid-drive Sprite after I first saw this commercial, and I started screaming like a madman that she was about to turn me into a sentient pile of bones.

The Orkin Man is real, he looks like an ED-209 from “Robocop” and he might just kill your entire family

Orkin Pest Control, 1990 

As a kid, I loved stuff like “Aliens” and “Robocop,” so of course, I was going to have a fascination with any and all things cybernetic. Alas, that android fetish didn’t prevent me from being scared shitless by this old school Orkin ad, in which a half-man, half-robot cyborg breaks his way into a home and uses high-tech weaponry to target and eliminate cockroaches. Maybe it was the creepy lighting or the amalgamation of transhumanism with up-close photos of bug faces, but this thing really gave me the heebie-jeebies. I guess my big worry was that since robots can’t be reasoned with, what would stop the Orkin Man from confusing me for a termite and pumping my lungs full of poison, or possibly lasering off my face? There were no hard guarantees there, and you just knew those motherfucking robot exterminators took the company mantra, "One Call, That's All" very, VERY seriously.

With that sad piano music, you don’t even need proper context to realize Charter is fucking spooky

Charter Ridge Behavioral Health System, late ‘80s/early ‘90s?

For those not in the know, Charter was/is the name of a rehab facility chain, whose motto, “If you can’t get help at Charter, please get help somewhere,” was pretty damned inescapable during Bush the First’s presidency. I’m not sure how widespread the chain’s media presence is throughout the rest of the America, but in the early 1990s at least, they had quite the penetration in the southeastern United States. Whereas most commercials on this list use the fantastical to creep you out, this one instead nails you with raw human misery, as it features a strangely unemotional dad tending to a visibly frightened child while enigmatically discussing some debilitating illness that has taken over dear old mom. I had no idea what depression or addiction really was back then, so the “mysterious” ailment that afflicted the off-screen mom just confounded me to no end. Would that disease, whatever it is, infect my mom and make her act shitty and stuff, too? Growing up in a single-parent household, that thought was especially terrifying, as I had no weirdly unsympathetic father of my own to tell me things would be all right. Context-wise, I didn’t grasp a damn thing about the commercial, but with that music, I KNEW it had to have been talking about something mighty bad.

ITT Tech introduces elementary school America to technocratic horror

ITT Technical Institute, 1989

Even now, I really can’t put a finger on what it is that makes this ad so frightening -- it just is. Maybe it has something to do with the sharp metallic shrieks and the hyper-speed jump-cuts of robot arms, computer monitors and what appears to be a man holding a tampon wrapped around an ink pen. Or it could be that weird, almost-industrial cyber-gunk beat, which feels more at home in a bad “Galaga” ripoff than a for-profit education ad. And then, there’s the gravel-throated announcer, who sounds just like fucking Magneto when he utters “thousands of them.” Whenever this commercial interrupted my afternoon "Ninja Turtles" and "Tiny Toons" ritual (why the fuck would they be advertising technical schools during cartoons anyway?), it always made me a bit more apprehensive for the rest of the evening -- like, maybe all of the household electronics would go "Maximum Overdrive" all of a sudden and I'd have a toaster trying to strangle me and shit. Strangely, this commercial got play WELL into the late 1990s, as I vividly recall that damn introductory shriek piercing the 2 a.m. air during many a late night "Monstervision" commercial break.

Not grasping what Boys Town was supposed to be leads to some terrifying assumptions

Boys Town National Hotline, early to mid ‘90s?

I couldn’t find the exact commercial that messed me up so much as a kid, but I did find this ad, which is almost as good. Basically, the ad depicts a bunch of teenage actors and actresses who are really, really sad and upset about ... something. One girl talks about feeling lost all the time, while another talks about feeling as if she has nowhere to turn to for help. Another boy talks about feeling so damned angry all the time, he might just lose his mind, up in here, up in here, just as DMX prophesied. Of course, its all punctuated by the most 1990s visuals you can imagine, like really bad green screen close-up of eyeballs opening, before concluding with an image of a fiery orange sun and some mystical sounding music accompanied by an announcer promising redemption if you called a toll-free number. As a kid, no one really explained to me what the intent of Boys Town actually was, so throughout elementary school, I thought it was a physical no-man's land they sent disobedient children to a'la "No Escape." Of course, all of the kids in these ads HAD to have been so worried about all of the bad shit they were doing, because that meant a one way ticket to B-Town, which presumably, had to have been an adult-less hellhole ... which, as it turns out, wasn't terribly far from the hyper-troubling reality, unfortunately.

Man, this sure is a rousing episode of Tiny Toon Adventures and … oh shit, it’s Freddy Krueger!

1-900 Hot Line, early 1990s?

Now here's some shit that's going to be real hard to explain to all of you whippersnappers growing up with iPads and iPhones and iWatches. WAY back in the day -- before Xbox and Pokemon and the viability of a black man ever becoming President -- we had these things called "landlines." Basically, they were phones, except they didn't connect to the Internet. Oh, and you couldn't text on them, either. In fact, they didn't even have a touchscreen -- all they had were a couple of buttons you had to press in sequence to -- get this -- talk to other people, using your actual voice and stuff. Since there was somebody out there at the phone company who was manually connecting your line to another line, most phone calls out of your ZIP code cost extra. In the 1980s and early 1990s, some really nefarious business people got the great idea to open up these things called "hotlines" -- basically, these pre-recorded automated messages you could listen to on your phone, for some outlandish per-minute fee. For the most part, the biggest offenders here were psychics and sex lines, but there actually were a lot of lines targeting the young uns, like the official WCW pro wrestling news line and this one here that connected you to the, uh, Easter Bunny? Well, I had to tell you all that shit so I could tell you this shit. One of the hotline gimmicks that riled me up the most was this one, which gave you the black magic necessary to chit-chat with famed child-abusing mass killer Freddy Krueger, who most certainly would not sex crime you over the phone like he does most of his victims in the "Elm Street" movies. Obviously, the mere visage of Freddy K terrified me, so seeing this ad late at night would've made me poo buckets. Weirdly enough, I used to see this damn commercial ALL THE TIME during weekday afternoon cartoon blocks, which in hindsight, makes me wonder if the switchboard operator at WATL-36 during the early 1990s really, really hated children. 

Kids ‘R Us forgets that not scaring the shit out your target audience is probably the smart thing to do, business-wise

Kids R' Us, mid-1990s?

To the untrained eye, this one seems like a much more innocuous ad than some of the others on the list. I mean, who would have expected Kids R' Us to bring the disturbing in spades -- shit, they have the word "kids" in their official D.B.A., it's pretty much against the law for 'em to run anything creepy, right? Well, think again, fellas, as this mid-to-late 1990s ad features a.) a very creepy Bela Lugosi imitator announcer, b.) a scene in which Satanic lightning transforms a happy family into glow-in-the-dark skeletons and c.) a concluding "Phantom of the Opera" organ tune that turns the upbeat Kids' R Us theme into something the sounds more at home in a "Castlevania" game. I guess its not as scary as it is mildly unexpected, but don't pretend you feel a little weirded out watching Kids R' Us transformed into a Transylvanian consumer utopia, either. 

FUCK THOSE DURACELL ROBOT PEOPLE. 

Duracell, mid-1990s?

Thanks to both juice sucking devices such as the Sega Game Gear and the industry's unwillingness to adapt to lithium-ion technology, odds are, you went through a shit-ton of batteries in the 1990s. The two biggest players, of course, were Energizer and Duracell. When it came to mascots, Energizer had been set for quite a while, as their iconic "Bunny" was far and away one of the most popular commercial creations of the 1980s. Feeling that they, too, needed a recognizable consumer mascot, Duracell unveiled an entire family of rubber-skinned android people sometime in the mid 1990s, and they were unsettling as fuck. Really, you could pick any commercial featuring the characters and be royally creeped out, but this one -- featuring a super-charged granny robot who looks like something Charles Manson sees in his nightmares -- was especially disturbing. Coincidentally, I hear Energizer's market share inexplicably shot up sometime around 1996 ... I wonder why that was the case? 

Snorting glue will result in a fantasy-horror death a million times worse than any Freddy Krueger nightmare

The Council for a Drug-Free America, 1995

I've both never really considered huffing -- the act of sucking on aerosol cans to get momentarily high -- to be that big of a social problem in these United States. Alas, I made damn sure I never, EVER paced my nostrils anywhere near a can of Carbona after watching this super spooky PSA, which equates snorting pressurized gasses to drowning to death in your bedroom. Since some sort of obscure FCC mandate requires TV stations to air a certain number of public service announcements per week, this ad seemed to ALWAYS get shown ad nausem on late weekend nights. Alas, it's hard to downplay its effectiveness -- as late as the mid 2000s, this thing was still getting regular play in my neck of the woods.  

Nike produces the greatest “Friday the 13th” movie never made

Nike, 2000

Leave it to a shoe company to create arguably the greatest and most terrifying slasher movie parody ever. This early 2000s ad does such a great job of imitating the old Jason flicks that I originally mistook it for "Jason Goes to Hell" the first time I saw it. Of course, by the time the chainsaw-wielding Michael Myers wannabe shows up on camera, you know you're dealing with something else entirely. As an ad, its very effective, because up until the last few seconds, you don't even know what they're trying to hawk to you. When its revealed to be a commercial for sneakers, it's the cherry on top of a delicious, pop-cultural skewering mini-movie. Alas, the ad was a bit too much for pre 9/11 America, and before long, the commercial got yanked due to allegations of misogyny ... and, of course, the fact that it scared the living dog shit out of children across the country.

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