Scarecrow's Blog From the Darkside

Serling introduces Static This year they kick off their New Year's marathon at 10 (central time here) with "Static". I plan to write about a few episodes I'm able to watch, just for fun. Considering I'll be working on New Year's Eve (booooooo!!!!) and hanging out at my mother's, I'd try to get in as many as I could this year. I had mentioned elsewhere that "Static" (with a curmudgeonly Dean Jagger--I just recently watched him in "White Christmas") was about longing for the past, what used to be and has gone, certainly not forgotten. An old radio found in the apartment where Ed lives, when he hits it just right and signal comes through (if even just briefly), provides music directly from the past. Despite being a temperamental jerk, Jagger does get the lady in the end...thanks in no small part to the radio. I get the point of the radio being a nostalgic link to the past, considering Jagger just despises modern appliances that seem

This... This is what I'm talking about. This is what I mean when I'm talkin' about time, and death, and futility. All right, there are broader ideas at work, mainly what is owed between us as a society for our mutual illusions. Fourteen straight hours of staring at DB's, these are the things ya think of. You ever done that? You look in their eyes, even in a picture, doesn't matter if they're dead or alive, you can still read 'em. You know what you see? They welcomed it... Not at first, but... right there in the last instant. It's an unmistakable relief. See, cause they were afraid, and now they saw for the very first time how easy it was to just... let go. Yeah, they saw, in that last nanosecond, they saw... what they were. You, yourself, this whole big drama, it was never more than a jerry-rig of presumption and dumb will, and you could just let go. To finally know that you didn't have to hold on so tight. To realize that all your life - you kno

I finished up “Flight of the Phoenix”, “Pegasus”, and “Resurrection Ship Parts 1 & 2”, and the question that actually should be asked and is to Gaius from the abuse victim, Cylon Gina (Tricia Helfer). When the Sunshine Boys (the military scum that were pretty much given carte blanche to do as they felt against Gina because, as Fisk so doles out to Helo and Tyrol, “You can’t rape a machine”) assault Helo and Tyrol with towel-wrapped soap, certain to probably kill them if their commanding officer, Fisk, didn’t intervene, and Commander Adama grapples with his assassination order for Starbuck to shoot Admiral Cain in the head (she has provided her own assassination order for Fisk to use his marines to take out Adama). President Roslin “negotiates a truce” between Adama and Cain, but it is under false pretenses…when Roslin tells Adama he has no choice but to kill her, his response of surprise makes sense. And this all stems ultimately from the Cylon Sharon being protected from ab

“Think of the hubris it must take to yank a soul out of nonexistence into this... meat. To force a life into this... thresher… …So my daughter, she spared me the sin of being a father “ “Sometimes I think I'm just not good for people, that it's not good for them to be around me. I wear 'em down. They... they get unhappy.” – Rust Cohle What really hits home with me as I watch the first season of True Detective is McConaughey’s wear and tear, especially during the interviews with Detectives Maynard Gilbough (Michael Potts) and Thomas Papania (Tory Kittles) in 2012. Seeing the years of drug use, self-destruction, alcoholism, and bleak worldview, McConaughey’s Rust Cohle looks as if he bottomed out, admittedly living in a room in a bar. The dead daughter, difficult marriage that dissolved into divorce, descent into “narco duty” (where he cops to killing drug scum, redacted by the “Feds”) and drug abuse, trip to a psychiatric hospital in Lubbock, and tran

Christmas themed content has never been a page-view lure for this blog. Last year was an exception, as I sprinkled all kinds of content in miscellaneous blog posts, but this year I wisely took a break from writing about the same ole/same ole, just sort of covering a few films but not a lot. I think trying to top the successful 2017 wasn't necessary. I didn't even watch Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) this year, opting for the sequel with Eric Freeman, notorious (and popular) for his heightened expressionistic "performance art". The over-emoting and wretched dialogue Freeman is saddled with (as well as the hilarious violence, such as the infamous "death by umbrella" and a special thank-you from a near-rape victim when Ricky runs over her nasty beau repeatedly with his jeep) give the sequel an over-the-top boost despite its excessive use of footage from the first film. This has all been covered ad-nauseum. I have written about both films, quite frankly, as e

* * * * * / * * * * * Often overshadowed by the renowned "Night of the Meek", the wonderful "Changing of the Guard" was also set during Christmastime, with Donald Pleasence (in one of his best roles, in my opinion) as a poetry professor told by the headmaster of his college that he must retire, the contract with the school not renewed for another semester after 51 years. Essentially told he was antiquated and young blood would need to replace him, Professor Ellis Fowler doesn't respond well emotionally to such news. Learning of this at Christmastime doesn't exactly help matters. A gun in his desk drawer at home on campus, pulled from its sheath, could very well be the answer to Fowler's agony...unless certain specters from the past encourage him to realize that his entire career, his life up to this point, has worth and value, leaving an impression and imprint on the students in previous years. This Twilight Zone episode does feature Serling's penc

I meant to pass on a comment about Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out (1989) Wednesday evening after I watched it, but I covered it rather significantly just a few years ago. I will say that Robert Culp just rescues the film from the doldrums for me. It does have this weird atmosphere that continues to be another salvageable reason I don't totally denounce it, and its opening nightmare for the blind "heroine" does involve a killer Santa one last time (although a visiting drunk in Santa costume gets killed by Ricky as well). The obviously mentioned plentifully Lynch connections I won't bother with here, but Moseley fans will no doubt be disappointed. He's literally robotic, a walking Catatonic with a violent streak to the color red as he searches for the young woman who psychically linked with him thanks to her doc. Culp's detective, a humorous and wise-cracking sort who tries to keep a good attitude despite Ricky's murder spree, often debates w