The more candidate Trump in 2016 trolled the Clinton campaign (e.g., “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press”), the more the irate left bought into hysterical conspiracy theories.

Finally, the left became completely unhinged after the 2016 victory. An Obama-era Pentagon lawyer published an essay exploring the chance for a military coup. Retired lieutenant colonels called for a Pentagon intervention. Retired four-stars could not decide whether he was Hitler-like, Mussolini, or the architect of Auschwitz. Celebrities competed to find the most savage image of eliminating Trump—whether by combustion, incineration, decapitation, lethal shooting, or stabbing.

Since then, the press has run with lurid stories about Trump, from having syphilis sores on his hands to “proof” of him beating up Melania. But amid the unhinged hatred, nothing has quite reached the absurdity of the Russia! Russia! obsessions.

In 2016, the country went through crackpot leftist charges of Russian collusion that helped to destroy the lives of innocents like Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, Carter Page, and George Papadopoulos. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s lawyers (gushed over by pundits as the “dream team/all-stars/hunter-killer team”), despite all the pre-investigational hype and hagiography, spent 22 months and $40 million to find no evidence that the Russians swung the election to Trump.

But in that sordid process, we learned the following: that a felonious FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith was convicted of doctoring a court document to mislead a FISA court in efforts to surveille an innocent man; that the FBI director James Comey recorded and leaked via a third party to the New York Times a private, confidential, and likely classified conversation with the President and lied to the president that he was not the subject of a federal investigation; and that he preposterously claimed amnesia or ignorance on 245 occasions under oath to a congressional committee about the various skullduggery of the FBI under his watch.

Comey was outdone by special counsel Robert Mueller. He claimed under oath that he knew almost nothing about Fusion GPS or the Steele dossier, the twin catalysts that had led to his very appointment.

We learned in addition that Christopher Steele was hired by Hillary Clinton (whose campaign was fined $113,000 for federal campaign finance violations), albeit behind three stealthy paywalls (the DNC, Perkins Coie law firm, and Fusion GPS) to disguise her role.

The British ex-spy Steele’s mission was to find dirt on her presidential opponent, Trump. He did so by compiling a “dossier” of fakery and smears. Ironically, many of the most scurrilous charges might have reached Steele through Russian sources.

Yet the left and cable anchors cited as gospel the dossier chapter and verse—until they didn’t, once the weight of its ridiculousness finally crushed their assertions. Steele, remember, was at one time a paid FBI informant, and as a foreign national, was supposed to be barred by statute from being hired by a presidential campaign.

In one of the notable political scandals in recent history, the present National Security Advisor and former Clintonite campaign operative, Jake Sullivan, used various surrogates to promote the lie that there was some sort of secret “backchannel” electronic “ping” communications between the Russian Alfa Bank and the Trump campaign and Trump Organization. The concocted myth was considered useful in advancing the “collusion” lie throughout the media, until even MSNBC and CNN quietly dropped the accusation.

Note “Russian collusion” destroyed the careers of three former FBI chiefs and a host of others. The amnesiac Mueller was discredited to the point of embarrassment in his congressional testimony. James Comey’s machinations finally entrapped him in a web of deceit and partisanship. Andrew McCabe committed career suicide by lying on at least three occasions to federal officials and allegedly co-dreaming up the ridiculous “wire” caper with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to secretly tape the President of the United States in efforts to prove him unhinged and thus to remove him via the 25th Amendment.

FBI counsel James Baker was instrumental in trying to seed the fake dossier with the media before resigning and being hired by Twitter for a multimillion-dollar salary as deputy general counsel. Twitter, remember, was contracted in 2020 by the FBI to help suppress news accounts deemed unfavorable to the Biden project. Adam Schiff’s House Intelligence Committee’s “minority report” on collusion is now regarded as one of utter fantasy, despite being treated at its release as the final word on collusion.

Disinformation about Disinformation

Given the sordid Russia! Russia! conduct of 2016, one would have thought the left would have dropped the “collusion” caper. But instead, like an addict, they resumed their fixation again in 2020—as “collusion” now transmogrified into “disinformation.” When Hunter Biden abandoned his Biden-incriminating laptop at a repair shop and its contents reached the media, despite the best efforts of the FBI to suppress it, the administrative state went into action with another Russia! Russia! hoax.

Another member of the current Biden national security team (is there a pattern here?), current Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, called up former acting CIA Director Michael Morrell to round up more than 50 former senior intelligence officials and “authorities” to sign and release on October 19—just three days before the final Biden-Trump debate and less than three weeks before Election Day—a collective letter. In it, the signed “experts” claimed that the released emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop (it was then currently in FBI possession and the agency knew it was genuine) had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

Only it had none....................

That was a demonstrable lie and soon proved to be—but only conveniently after the election. Note that no one in the FBI challenged that accusation despite, again, being in possession of the contents of the laptop. The laptop farce enabled Joe Biden three days later to assert in the debate:

“There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant. They have said that this has all the … five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except him and his good friend, Rudy Giuliani.”

Biden failed to remind Trump that his own campaign flack, Blinken, had helped to cook up the entire scheme to arm Biden in the debate.

Two years later, in August 2022, the Technometrica Institute of Policy and Politics polled 1,335 adults and found that almost four out of five Americans who reported that they followed the elected felt that an honest reporting of the laptop scandal would have altered the result of the 2020 presidential election.

Seventy-four percent of those polled felt that the FBI had deliberately misled the public when it falsely claimed that the laptop was part of Russian “disinformation.” Note that the FBI went further still, enlisting Twitter and other social media platforms before the election to censor any news account that accurately stated the laptop was authentic.

Note also that Hunter and his lawyers, in surreal fashion, are currently suing the repairman for “invasion of privacy” violations—without admitting that Hunter’s laptop is Hunter’s laptop. Hunter, in interviews, has not denied it was his, only that he was unsure. Yet he would never deny his ownership under oath, since he knows it is demonstrably his laptop, along with the contents inside it. So exposing his own abandoned laptop is an “invasion of privacy,” but Hunter does not claim the laptop is or is not his?

No “authority” who signed the letter—not John Brennan, not James Clapper, not Leon Panetta—has ever apologized for spreading disinformation on the eve of a debate and election to alter the results.

For a party that lectures ad nauseam about saving democracy and “election interference,” it is hard to imagine greater interference than a campaign rounding up sympathetic intelligence authorities to mislead the country to warp an election, even as the FBI and social media were doing the same work through censoring news accounts.

What was Russian Reset?

But who exactly did go soft on Putin’s dictatorship?

On March 6, 2009, in Geneva, to great fanfare, Hillary Clinton, the U.S. Secretary of State, gave Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov a red plastic button with the word “reset” in English and, sort of, in Russian, to mark a supposed new partnership. The Obama administration subtext was that the prior militarist, President George W. Bush, had reacted too strongly to the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia over territorial disputes in Ossetia. Indeed, for years after, Hillary Clinton characterized the appeasement of Putin that followed as a “brilliant stroke.”

Yet the story of reset for the next five years was serial U.S. concessions to Putin coupled with naïve expectations of Russian reform. Five years later, Vice President Joe Biden admitted that ‘reset’ was an utter failure, given the 2014 Russian invasions of the Donbass and the Crimea, serial Russian hacking of American institutions, and Russian buzzing of American planes and ships. Vladimir Putin had adjudicated the Obama/Biden naivete as frailty to be manipulated rather than an olive branch to be reciprocated.

Or, as Biden put it:

“All of us, we all invested in a type of Russia we hoped—and still hope—will emerge one day: a Russia integrated into the world economy; more prosperous, more invested in the international order.”

Recall the now-infamous Obama hot mic exchange in Seoul, South Korea, in March 2012, an election year, with then-Russian President Dmitri Medvedev. The latter is now known mostly in the West as Putin’s obsequious megaphone, who routinely threatens Ukraine, Europe, and the United States with nuclear retaliation. Obama, in his message to Putin, seemed to assume reset still constituted quid pro quo understandings, as the transcript of the hoc mic exchange demonstrates:

Obama: “On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved, but it’s important for him to give me space.”

Medvedev: “Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you…”

Obama: “This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.”

Medvedev: “I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.”

Despite all the “fact checker” denials, what is often missed is that the proposed bargain was more than met: Obama continued to dismantle plans for Eastern European-American cooperation to protect from long- and short-range missiles, and so was more than “flexible” on killing a project that might well have given the Europeans some peace of mind after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In exchange, Putin cooperated by giving Obama “space” during his “last election” by not humiliating his foreign policy failures by invading yet another one of Russia’s neighbors. But after Obama was reelected and after missile defense was cancelled, Putin felt unbound again and invaded both Crimea and the Donbass in 2014, correctly expecting no retaliation at all.

Obama-Biden versus Trump on Russia

Amid all the narratives of Trump’s “collusion” and collaboration with Putin, there remains one truth that not even the postmodern media can erase. Putin invaded his neighbors in 2008, 2014, and 2022, or in three out of the last four administrations, but, notably, not during the Trump years of 2017-21.

Trump had killed more Russian combatants—perhaps 300 of the Wagner group mercenaries in Syria—than at any time during the Cold War. In August 2019, Trump withdrew American participation from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty on grounds—supported by the Europeans—that Russians had repeatedly violated the agreements without serious American objections.

Trump sanctioned the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and warned the Germans that their dependency on Russian natural gas was self-defeating and undermined NATO solidarity. Such sanctions were overturned quickly once Biden entered office.

Trump sold offensive weapons—javelins included—to Ukraine, weapons systems previously tabled by Obama. In 2021, Biden froze $100 million in military aid to Ukraine, including offensive weaponry, after falling for Putin’s feints and lies that he was drawing down Russian troops from the Ukrainian border.

Biden, remember, asked Putin not to hack American humanitarian institutions. He said his reaction to a Putin invasion would hinge on whether it was a major or minor one, and offered to fly Ukrainian President Zelensky out of Kyiv when the Russians attacked.

Trump’s ‘drill baby, drill’ policy of flooding markets with cheap petroleum crashed the world price and cut deeply into Russian export income. In 2018, Trump hit more Russian officials, oligarchs, and companies with new sanctions.

One might conclude that Putin enjoys trash-talking and sermonizing American presidents who are careful never to confront him, while he is more wary of unpredictable presidents who say occasional nice things about him, even while they make his agendas impossible to implement.

2024..............................

As this year’s election nears, expect the Russia! Russia! fantasies to heat up again to mask a failing administration and its indefensible record of a lethally open border, inflation, crime waves, foreign policy implosions, crackpot energy agendas, the weaponization of our institutions, and deteriorating race relations.

Russia Russia Russia.....Marsha, Marsha, Marsha!!!

George + Jerry, “The art of not being an idiot is extremely challenging for me.”

I've been hoarding this ask in my inbox for God knows how long I'm so sorry anon. Then I wrote like three quarters of it and posted about that and was immediately hit with writer's block. Here's my attempt at trying to write more seinfeld content for you <3

[Ao3 Link] [Full Series]

It’s early on a Saturday and Monk’s diner bustles with its usual crowd of regulars. George and Jerry are sitting across from each other in a booth by the window; George with a strawberry pastry and hot coffee and Jerry working on his third consecutive double espresso.

Sun pours in and blankets their table with warm early morning light. It’s intimate; in the way that drinking coffee every day with your oldest friend is intimate once it's a routine.

“So do you think that’s funny?” Jerry is asking, doting over a notebook of incomprehensible scribbles, “Are people allowed to laugh at that sort of thing these days or would it be considered a mood killer?”

Jerry is pretty sure that the audience wouldn’t throw tomatoes at him like he’s in a bad Shakespearian play, but stranger things have happened.

George half shrugs, “I don’t know. How would I know?”

“Well, I assumed as a fellow human being you’d have an opinion.”

“Comedy is subjective.” George says waving him off, “Just improvise or something.”

“Surprisingly harder than you think.”

The last time Jerry tried to improvise on stage the only person in the audience laughing was Elaine. And technically she was laughing more at his expense than she was at the joke. Cue the metaphorical tomato throwing. Jerry stares at his notepad and pouts. Why is it so difficult to figure out if his joke is funny or not? Kramer laughed, but perhaps that’s a bad sign.

A moment passes and when he looks back up from his notepad George is about five shades paler. Jerry recognizes the look immediately. It’s the ghostly expression of a man doomed to come face to face with the consequences of his own actions. Never a good sign for George.

“What’s wrong?” Jerry asks. Despite the courtesy of asking the question, he doesn’t seem too concerned by George’s sudden change in demeanor. He’s used to George’s sudden waves of panic. It’s like his default.

“Does that look like Lindsay to you?” George’s voice cracks.

“Psycho sadist Lindsay?” Jerry looks around the diner theatrically, “The one who thinks you got wacked by the mob? Where?”

“In our booth by the door.”

From where they’re sitting, Jerry can only see the side of her head, but it’s definitely Lindsay. She seems a lot happier than he remembers. Back when she was with George, she always had the face of someone who’s just accidently bitten into a lemon. Kramer even called her lemon face once, which was an awful moment for everyone involved.

“That’s her alright.” Jerry confirms, “What do you think she’s doing here?”

“I have absolutely no idea!” George shrinks down in the booth to hide from her, “She knows I get the diner in the breakup. It’s part of our pre-breakup agreement!”

“Ah, the pre-breakup agreement. The prenup of the dating world.” Jerry nods understandingly, “While I’d usually agree with you on that, I think faking your own death gives her a loophole.”

“I died while we were together!” George counters, whisper yelling. He looks awfully frazzled and generally insane, “She’s basically my widow. How does she think you feel having to see my widow at your favorite diner? It’s outrageous!”

Jerry considers this. Ever since the infamous incident with the fancy plates, he’s instinctively crossed to the other side of the street when he’s seen her in public. He’s not sure he’d be able to hold it together if she asked him about his best friend and said best friend’s terrible fate at the hands of the mob. Cracking a grin would probably not be an acceptable response.

And George is technically right. If he was actually dead, Jerry wouldn’t want to see Lindsay at the diner. It would undoubtedly cause a chain of events starting with him thinking about George and moping around about it (Jerry’s not sure he’s capable of moping, but he’s too afraid to find out) and ending with him being all sad and ruining his comedy routine. How are you supposed to be funny when you’re busy thinking about your dead friend?

Jerry relents, “Well, I can’t argue with that logic.”

“What do I do?” George panics, shrinking further down in the booth, “She’s going to kill me, Jerry!”

“I think you’re overreacting. So what if psycho Lindsay sees you? It’s the nineties. Is a dead man not allowed to have a strawberry pastry without persecution?”

George deflates, “You’re not taking this seriously. Lindsay is going to kill me and you’re making your little jokes about it. Great. Thanks a lot.”

“Hey, it’s not like you didn’t bring this on yourself. Even Elaine said she knew this would come back to haunt you eventually. It’s about time you face the music.”

George doesn’t think that sounds appealing at all. He’s gone his whole life avoiding the music. Why should he face it now! In fact, only people who have given up in life subject themselves to the music. If you’re still alive and breathing then it’s your God given right to avoid the music.

“How does Elaine know about the fancy plates?”

“Kramer told her.”

“How did Kramer know?!”

“I told Kramer.”

And of course. Of course, everyone in filled in and up to date on George’s suffering. He shoots Jerry a scathing look and Jerry returns it with a lopsided teasing grin.

Jerry glances down at his empty cup of espresso and frowns. The whole lemon faced Lindsay debacle has distracted him from what’s most important. Caffeine. He’s sure that the waitress is avoiding him because George is causing a scene. Or maybe Jerry is being cut off like he’s a drunk at a bar. Are they allowed to cut you off from caffeine? Is there an unspoken caffeine limit that only waitresses and baristas know about? He decides to investigate further.

Just as he's about to signal for the waitress, Jerry makes eye contact with Lindsay. Her face drops and suddenly she has that lemon faced expression about her again. Uh oh. Lindsay says something to her friend and gets up from her seat, making her way across the diner and towards them.

Jerry gives an enthusiastic wave, the type of wave that you’d give an old friend you’re seeing for the first time in a while. After all, Lindsay was always friendly to him. And she was one of George's most humor-inclined girlfriends! Maybe she'd be able to tell him if the joke was funny or not.

George stares at him in horror, “What? What’s happening?”

“Buck up, buddy, looks like she’s coming over.”

George makes a face like he’s been hit by a bus, but he defeatedly slides back up in his seat. Suddenly Lindsay is beside their booth, arms crossed.

“So, I’m guessing this is a Weekend at Bernie’s situation?” She asks. Jerry appreciates her humor. She seems pretty chill for someone who just found out that her boyfriend has risen from the dead.

“Good guess.” Jerry says conversationally, “Actually, George was getting too cramped in his coffin. He doesn’t do well in small spaces and decided to call the whole death thing off. Good idea if you ask me, the whole funeral thing is always a bit too theatric in my opinion. Like we get it. You're dead. Move on."

“Real classy.” Lindsay shoots back, but Jerry can tell that she liked the joke, “By the way George, I knew it wasn’t real when I called your parents to offer my condolences and your dad laughed at me. Anything to say about that?”

George shrugs, the gig is up as they say, “Admittedly, the art of not being an idiot is extremely challenging for me.”

Lindsay rolls her eyes, "You know what, I don't care." She heads back over to her friend and doesn't look back.

“Huh. She took that pretty well.” Jerry says when Lindsay is out of ear shot, “The way you talk about her I assumed her reaction would’ve been far more deranged.”

“Trust me,” George says seriously, “If you weren’t here she would’ve unhinged her jaw and swallowed me whole like a snake.”

“Too bad. I would’ve liked to see that.”

Finally, the waitress comes back over and Jerry orders another espresso. He considers his joke again.

“Should I ask Lindsay if she thinks the joke’s funny?” Jerry asks seriously. Lindsay is still sitting across the diner with her friend, “I need a woman’s perspective.”

George shrugs, “Jerry, I’m telling you right now, just improvise. Or do the lifeguard bit again. It’s your best.”

Top 10 Horror Movies, like, EVER (reissued)

10.  THE MIST

In 2007, writer/director Frank Darabont once again proved he does his best work when adapting master of literary horror Stephen King (after The Green Mile and solid gold masterpiece The Shawshank Redemption), this time turning to pure horror with one of the author’s lesser-known early novellas.  The result is another tour-de-force cinematic blueprint, a taut, harrowing tale of humanity pushed far beyond the brink by unexplained supernatural events and the monstrous lengths normal people will go to to stay alive, as a small-town New England supermarket is cut off from the outside world by a mysterious, monster-filled mist.  The Expanse’s Thomas Jane proves a complex hero, beefy yet vulnerable as local artist David Drayton, leading a high-calibre cast of Stephen King-movie/TV regulars – Jeffrey DeMunn (The Green Mile), Andre Braugher (Salem’s Lot), William Sadler (The Shawshank Redemption) and Frances Sternhagen (Misery) – and “newcomers” – Laurie Holden (who must have really impressed Darabont, since he subsequently cast her alongside DeMunn in The Walking Dead), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’s Toby Jones (as one of the most unorthodox action heroes in cinematic history) and Miller’s Crossing’s Marcia Gay Harden, pretty much stealing the film as deeply unhinged Bible-basher Mrs Carmody, who goes from unsavoury town nut to fervent cult leader as the situation grows increasingly desperate.  Darabont once again proves what an exceptional screen storyteller he can be, effortlessly weaving an atmosphere of mounting dread and knife-edge tension, as well as delivering some nightmarish set-pieces featuring magnificent Lovecraft-inspired beasties designed by The Walking Dead’s creature effects master Greg Nicotero.  When cinematic horror was becoming increasingly saturated with “gorno” Saw-derivatives, this was a welcome return to old-fashioned monster movie thrills (Darabont himself was heavily inspired by the monochrome scary movies of his childhood, and longed to make the film in black-and-white – indeed, this is definitely worth watching at least once in the “director’s cut” B&W version he included on the special edition DVD release), and not only proved one of the best examples of King on screen to date, but also one of THE key horror movies of the “Noughties”. Not least thanks to that ending, one of the greatest sucker punch twists of all time – reputedly King was most envious of Darabont on seeing it for the first time, wishing he’d thought it up himself. Coming from the King of Horror, that’s high praise indeed.

9.  30 DAYS OF NIGHT

When Steve Niles, the undisputable master of post-modern horror comics, originally came up with the concept for his definitive work, it was intended for the big screen, but he ultimately wound up committing it to print because he just couldn’t get anyone to produce it.  Interesting, then, that the comic’s runaway success led to its optioning by Sam Raimi and his production company Ghost House Pictures, Niles adapting the first volume alongside Stuart Beattie and Brian Nelson, with Hard Candy director David Slade at the helm. Of course, the concept was always a killer – for one month every year, the sun never rises over the Alaskan town of Barrow, a fact that a coven of hungry vampires have decided to exploit in a midwinter free-for-all feeding frenzy.  Josh Hartnett manfully crumbles in what remains his best role as town sheriff Eben Olemaun, ably supported by Melissa George as his estranged fire-marshal wife Stella, Memento/Batman Begins’ Mark Boone Junior as hard-as-nails town loner Bo, Ben Foster (one of my very favourite actors) as a mysterious drifter with a dark agenda, and Danny Huston, who created one of the best ever screen vampires with nihilistic pack leader Marlow. It’s ironic that David Slade should have followed this with Twilight film Eclipse (although he was an inspired choice – after all, it’s the one that DOESN’T suck) – this is about as far removed from the toothless, blood-lite young adult series as you can get, an unrelenting, gore-drenched exercise in relentless carnage and ice-cold terror.  These vamps wouldn’t be caught (ahem) dead sparkling – they’re man-shaped mako sharks, all dead black eyes and jagged teeth, gleefully revelling in slaughter and playing sadistic games of cat and mouse with the isolated townsfolk.  This is definitely not a movie for the faint of heart, and it takes itself deadly seriously right through the unapologetically bleak ending, but it is nonetheless an endlessly rewarding thrill ride for the faithful, paying respect to all the great conventions of the genre while simultaneously ripping them to shreds.  Brutal, bloody and brilliant, this is BAR NONE the best vampire movie of the post-Interview age, and very nearly my all-time favourite EVER ...

8. POLTERGEIST

1982 saw the release of TWO of my all-time fave horror movies, and the lesser (but no less awesome) of the two is what I personally consider to be THE DEFINITIVE haunted house movie.  Tobe Hooper, director of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, pretty much reinvented ghosts on the big screen with this thrilling tale of a small-town-American family, the Freelings, whose seemingly perfect home comes under the influence of a powerful supernatural force.  At first the effects are harmless – moving furniture and the like – until a night-time thunderstorm signals a terrifying escalation and younger daughter Carol-Anne (Heather O’Rourke) is sucked through a portal into the spirit world.  Long before he was the dad in The Incredibles, Craig T. Nelson had already become a pretty definitive cuddly American screen father as Steven Freeling, while JoBeth Williams is a lioness defending her cubs as mother Diane; then-newcomer Heather O’Rourke, meanwhile, is a naturalistic revelation as Carol-Anne, her innocent delivery of “They’re here!” becoming a genuine geek phenomenon all on its own, but the film’s real runaway performance comes from Zelda Rubinstein as diminutive Southern belle psychic medium Tangina Barrons, whose every screen moment is a quirky joy.  As you’d expect, Hooper’s scares are flawlessly executed, the atmospheric tension ratcheted with consummate skill, even if the director’s characteristic gore is kept to a PG-13-friendly minimum ... then again, this was a summer offering from Back to the Future producers Frank Marshall and Steven Spielberg himself, who was also the main screenwriter. Indeed, his influence is keenly felt throughout – the suburban world the Freelings inhabit is very much in keeping with Spielberg classics like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. – and there have been consistent rumours that he was all but the de-facto director on set.  The film (along with its sequels) has also gained a reputation for being cursed, with no less than FOUR cast members dying not long after (most notably Dominique Dunne, who played elder Freeling daughter Dana, who was murdered by her boyfriend just five months after the film’s release).  Whatever the truth behind these rumours, there’s no denying this is a cracking film – taut, atmospheric and consistently terrifying while also displaying a playful, quirky sense of humour and lots of heart, it remains one of the most rewarding and entertaining screen ghost stories around.

7.  BUBBA HO-TEP

Bruce Campbell is Elvis Presley!  He really is!  Although maybe he isn’t ... all right, TECHNICALLY he’s Sebastian Haff, a washed-up, long-retired Elvis impersonator languishing in a retirement home who claims he really IS the King (apparently he swapped places with the REAL Haff because he’d grown tired of fame).  Meanwhile one of his fellow residents is an old black man who claims he’s the real JFK, maintaining that President Lyndon Johnson had him dyed black and secreted in anonymity with a bag of sand sewn into the gap in his brain ... confused yet? Well hold on, cuz there’s more – the retirement home in question has been invaded by the malevolent spirit of a cursed soul-sucking mummy, and only these two fallen heroes can save the day ... yup, writer/director Don (Phantasm and John Dies At the End) Coscarelli’s initially criminally overlooked but deservedly seriously cult adaptation of Joe R. Lansdale’s novel is as typically oddball as the rest of his filmography.  It’s also his most moving and spiritual work to date – behind all the supernatural weirdness and quirky, offbeat humour this is a deeply-affecting meditation on the pains of growing old and losing your place in the world.  Bruce Campbell’s Elvis/Haff is a tragic hero, regretting his current lot and pining for former glories, but he still has the odd little twinkle of his former charm and bravado (particularly during his interactions with his nurse, played with spiky gutsiness by Ella Joyce), while screen legend Ossie Davis is stately and charismatic as “the former President Kennedy”, even when he sounds REALLY crazy.  Meanwhile the creature, “Bubba Ho-Tep” himself (Bob Ivy), is a fantastically weird creation, Coscarelli’s skilful use of atmospherics elevating him far above the “guy-in-a-suit” effects – he’s mean, cranky, and just as strong a character as his flesh-and-blood counterparts.  Coscarelli really let rip on this one – it’s chock-full of his characteristic leftfield comic-scariness (Elvis/Haff’s early encounter with one of the mummy’s scarab familiars is a particular zany gem), visually inventive and frequently laugh-out-loud hilarious, but in the end plays out on such a heartfelt, genuinely powerful and moving denouement that you can’t help getting a lump in your throat, even while it is one of those movies that leaves you with a big dumb goofy grin on your face.  It’d be pretty sweet if Coscarelli and his mate Paul Giamatti ever get their long-gestating “prequel” Bubba Nosferatu: Curse of the She-Vampires off the ground, but this is one that you can’t help loving all on its own.  See this if you’re a Coscarelli fan – it’s his best work to date – see this if you love quirky, unusual and original horror ... hell, see this if you love MOVIES. This is a true GEM, not to be missed.

6.  DOG SOLDIERS

My favourite werewolf movie is also easily one of the most offbeat – think The Howling meets Assault On Precinct 13 and you’re pretty close to the mark.  Before visionary British horror director Neil Marshall had his big break with masterpiece The Descent, he made an impressive cult splash with his feature debut, a fiendish comedy horror in which a six-man British Army unit on training manoeuvres in the wilds of Scotland stumbles upon a pack of hungry werewolves and are forced to take shelter in an isolated cottage.  With their ammo dwindling and their weapons largely ineffective against the monsters (not a silver bullet between them, of course), it doesn’t look likely that ANY of will survive the night ... setting the humour dial for JET BLACK, Marshall keeps the atmosphere tense and the substantial gore flying (I was amazed when I saw this in the cinema that it was only a 15 – even just ten years earlier stuff like this was GUARANTEED a solid 18 certificate), while the squaddies are a likeably foul-mouthed bunch with a winning, sometimes enjoyably geeky line in spiky banter (Marshall makes frequent references to everything from Star Trek and The Evil Dead to The Matrix and, in one of my favourite nods, Zulu).  Trainspotting’s Kevin McKidd is brawny but enjoyably self-deprecating as nominal hero Cooper, Sean (son of Doctor Who Jon) Pertwee gives great earthy-shoutiness as Sgt. Wells, Darren Morfitt consistently steals the film as mouthy little bugger “Spoon” (short for Witherspoon), and Game Of Thrones star Liam Cunningham injects a strong dose of dark and dangerous as Captain Ryan, the special forces operative with a sinister plan, while Emma Cleasby is far from just a token female as zoologist Megan, who came to Scotland in search of the legend and seems to have found a whole lot more than she bargained for – she’s smart, tough and flat-out refuses to be a love interest, and definitely proved a good trial run for Marshall’s all-female cast in The Descent.  It’s impressively paced – after an initial character-driven set-up so we can get to know the lads (including a fun little scare-on-top-of-a-laugh moment), the action kicks in fast and rarely lets up for the rest of the film’s tightly-packed 105 minute running time.  The set pieces are thrilling and frequently fun (particularly Spoon’s ballsy little distraction technique), and the werewolves are impressively brought to life through physical animatronics created by Image FX (the Hellraiser effects team!) and a talented troupe of stilt-walking stunt performers – no cheesy CGI here!  Altogether it marked a blinding debut for a singular, visionary sci-fi/horror talent who’s still making his presence felt – Doomsday was a delightfully old-school slice of super violent sci-fi in the John Carpenter vein, while tight, gruesome little Roman-era suspense thriller Centurion proved that a historical epic doesn’t have to be 2+ hours long with a big budget to impress, and Marshall continues to garner real acclaim through his extensive TV work on the likes of Game of Thrones. That said, I can’t wait for him to return to the big screen, preferably with more dark, edgy, blood-soaked fun like this ...

5. TREMORS

I’ve always had something of a bias towards horror movies that are also comedies, or at least that have a strong sense of humour throughout, and when it comes to funny horror movies, this brilliant throwback to cheesy 1950s monster movies is KING, baby!  While it snuck in under the radar on its 1990 release, director Ron Underwood’s sleeper universally wowed critics, word of mouth helping it to become an impressive cult smash once it hit home video ... which meant I saw it at JUST the right time, the film quickly becoming a firm fixture in my favourites lists and a major milestone in my own geek development.  The premise is simplicity itself – giant underground worms with tentacles in their mouths terrorise an isolated desert community – but underneath the goofy concept is a surprisingly sophisticated movie that continues to influence filmmakers today.  Kevin Bacon was in a bit of a career slump at the time (Footloose had been SO LONG before), but this gave him both the shot in the arm he needed and one of his most memorable roles ever – odd-jobbing slacker Val McKee, who has to get off his arse and think big to beat the beasties; Fred Ward is the perfect foil as Val’s crotchety “business” partner Earl Basset, while Finn Carter is thoroughly lovable as scientist Rhonda LeBeck, a no-nonsense smart girl who can go toe-to-toe with the boys (and manages to lose her pants WITHOUT losing her credibility), but the film is consistently stolen by Family Ties star Michael Gross as tightly wound survivalist Burt Gummer – this might be Bacon’s movie, but Gross is the real star, deservedly becoming the driving force of the film’s various sequels AND the spinoff TV series.  The film opens with a killer of a funny line, starting as it means to go on – frequently hilarious and smart as a whip, consistently defying character and genre tropes and wrong-footing the viewer almost a decade before Joss Whedon started doing the same with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, all the while balancing the belly laughs with some genuinely scary set pieces.  The worms themselves (or “Graboids”, if you want to get specific) are spectacular creations, some of the most original movie monsters out there, and they still stand up well today, just like the rest of the film.  A cornerstone of the genre that wins over new fans with each generation, this is one of those films that deserves to be remembered for a very long time, and looks set to do just that. 

4.  EVIL DEAD 2: DEAD BY DAWN

Nobody does screen chaos like Sam Raimi, particularly when it comes to his horror offerings – still his first and purest love. His original debut feature The Evil Dead is rightly considered the DEFINITIVE indie horror, and to this day remains the standard blueprint for all young, aspiring directors starting out in the genre ... it’s also a work of pure, unadulterated MADNESS once it gets going.  Raimi upped the ante with this part-remake, part-sequel, the increased budget and proper studio resources meaning he could REALLY let his imagination run riot, and the results are a cavalcade of tongue-clean-THROUGH-cheek, jet black comedic insanity that STILL has yet to be equalled.  Bruce Campbell returns as unlikely “hero” Ash Williams, thoroughly out of his depth and failing miserably to hold it together as the ancient tome of evil itself, the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis (“Book of the Dead”), unleashes a horde of undead demons on the isolated forest cabin he’s brought his girlfriend to.  Wildly expanding on the supernatural back-story of his original, Raimi and co-writer Scott Spiegel also ramped up the humour, playing the horror on the blackest edge they can, albeit cut with a hefty dose of Tex Avery – Ash’s battle with his own possessed, eventually severed hand is like some demented skit out of The Three Stooges, while the absolute comedic highlight is the ridiculously over-the-top “laughing room” sequence, in which the seemingly inanimate objects in the cabin suddenly come to life and begin to taunt Ash; add in the great wealth of re-view-friendly visual in-jokes scattered throughout and this remains Raimi’s FUNNIEST film to date. Campbell clearly had a ball, throwing himself into the action with everything he had, and he’s ably supported by a meaty (ahem) cast that includes a very pre-Slither Dan Hicks as a seriously scuzzy redneck and Raimi’s own brother Ted, virtually unrecognisable as one of the maniacal Deadites (“I’ll swallow your soul!”).  The creature effects from the great Greg Nicotero still stand up spectacularly well today (they remain some of his very best work), from hideous gurning beasts to insane fountains of blood, while Raimi’s direction is pitch-perfect, playing the humour beautifully while still (sometimes simultaneously) building up a near-unbearable atmosphere of unholy dread, and the climax is ingenious, beautifully setting things up for the enjoyably madcap trilogy-closer Army of Darkness: the Medievil Dead.  Raimi has finally brought the trilogy the follow-up fans had been waiting decades for with the fantastically bonkers Ash Vs. the Evil Dead series, but this delirious masterpiece remains the franchise’s zenith.  Groovy ...

3.  JAWS

It may be the oldest film on this list (released in 1975, it’s THREE YEARS OLDER than I am!), but Steven Spielberg’s breakthrough feature has aged incredibly well.  Indeed, it almost single-handedly changed the face of big budget cinema, establishing the idea of tent-pole summer blockbusters and blanket-bombardment advertising campaigns (in particularly it was one of the first to make heavy use of television to drum up excitement and interest), ultimately taking over $400,000,000 on its original release (the equivalent of multi-billion big earners like Avatar today) and paving the way for Star Wars two years later.  Not to mention the film’s famous negative effect on beach-going for years after ... but under all that there’s a magnificent, masterfully-crafted film, still (rightly) considered one of the director’s best.  The plot may be ridiculously simple – New England beach-community Amity Island is terrorised by a man-eating Great White shark – but there’s a stealthily subversive story here, taking old genre conventions and twisting them in new, unexpected directions (which would, ironically, form a template for a great many later horror movies); while the first hour is a slow-burn thriller, the second is more like a light-hearted nautical action adventure with added scares. The French Connection’s Roy Scheider virtually CREATED the everyman-out-of-his-depth hero with his portrayal of Amity police chief Martin Brody, a former New York cop who’s terrified of the water, Richard Dreyfuss is lovable comedic gold as rich kid marine biologist Matt Hooper, Lorraine Gary did a lot with very little as Brody’s wife Ellen, and Robert Shaw effortlessly steals the film as shark hunter Quint, a ferocious, scenery-chewing force of nature in the mould of Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab.  The film is immensely rich in great character moments, from Hooper’s rib-tickling arrival on the island and the dialogue-free moment Brody shares with his younger son Sean, to the undeniable high point of the film, where a humorous comparison of scars (which has itself become a popular homage-magnet in film and TV) leads to Quint chilling account of his wartime experience onboard the U.S.S. Indianapolis (the ship transporting the Hiroshima atomic bomb which was torpedoed in the Pacific, leading to over a thousand stranded sailors being eaten alive by sharks); indeed, this is one of Spielberg’s most well-written films, sitcom writer Carl (The Odd Couple) Gottlieb’s polish of author Peter Benchley’s adaptation of his own original novel still zipping and zinging today, although some of the best dialogue was derived from the actors’ own on-set improvisations (most famously Scheider’s now-legendary “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”).  It’s also one of his most well-directed, with near-hypnotic tricks in editing and bold, adventurous choices in atmosphere-building, often a result of the shoot’s infamous difficulties – the animatronic shark (affectionately named “Bruce” by the director, and “the Great White Turd” by the crew) created by Bob Mattley (the guy who did the giant squid in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) was impressive when it worked, but this was so rarely that the director had to devise several means of creating maximum tension WITHOUT showing the shark, which ultimately ADDS to the effectiveness of those scenes, particularly the “barrel-chasing” in the second half.  None of these tricks, however, work better than the score from Spielberg’s most faithful collaborator, John Williams, based around a deceptively simple four-note melody that evolves into something spectacularly evocative, which has rightly become the film’s most iconic element.  Humorous, intriguing, intense and still thoroughly terrifying when it wants to be, this is, bar-none, the finest man-versus-nature horror EVER MADE, and surely always will be.

2.  NEAR DARK

I’m a fool for vampires (much like I’m a fool for redheads, but that’s a whole other conversation), so bloodsucker horror is one of my very favourite sub-genres.  I’m also a big fan of Kathryn Bigelow – two of her most recent features, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, both pinged VERY LOUDLY on my radar (the former is my favourite war movie of the current decade), while her collaboration with then husband James Cameron, Strange Days (he wrote, she directed), rates high on my list of criminally underrated screen gems.  So what do you think happened when she made a vampire movie?  The results SHOULD have become one of the most celebrated and legendary features in the genre ... except that it came out in October 1987, two months after the admittedly cool and fun but far more glossy and dumb The Lost Boys.  Needless to say in the wake of that, Bigelow’s film got kind of lost in the back chatter, nearly flopping at the box office and all but vanishing into obscurity ... until its subsequent release on video (quite rightly) earned it an impressive cult following.  Myself included, because this movie is RIGHT UP my dark and dangerous alley.  Collaborating with The Hitcher’s screenwriter Eric Red, Bigelow crafted a (largely) deadly serious modern day supernatural “western”, in which cocky farm-boy Caleb Colton (Heroes’ Adrian Pasdar) hits on cute drifter Mae (Jenny Wright, probably best known for her supporting turn in Young Guns 2), only to get WAY more than he bargained for when her kiss leaves him with a crippling hunger and one serious tanning problem.  Pasdar’s all-knowing youthful swagger disintegrates as he tumbles further down the vampiric rabbit hole, while Wright’s fragile beauty compliments her character’s deep, soulful melancholy – the pair make for a compelling, tragic romantic centre anchoring the horrors that unfold as Caleb begins to lose himself to his burgeoning nature; even so, the true dark and twisted soul of the film lies with Mae’s predatory nomad “family” – Lance Henriksen is the definitive “dark father” as nihilistic pack leader Jesse Hooker, while his Aliens co-star Jenette Goldstein is his perfect mate as punk rock femme fatale Diamondback, and Joshua John Miller excels as Homer, the bitter old man trapped in a child’s body ... meanwhile Bill Paxton consistently steals the film as mad dog Severen, chewing the scenery to splinters with gleeful, feral aplomb and stealing all the best lines.  It’s a potent, heady ride, taking itself pretty seriously throughout but deriving a subtle, inky black sense of gallows humour from the situation, and the set-pieces are intense and thrilling (particularly the shootout in a roadside motel at dawn, where shafts of sunlight become as lethal as bullets).  At times it’s also powerful, soulful and bleakly beautiful, Bigelow’s heavily stylised visuals brilliantly augmented by the spiky electronic score from Tangerine Dream. It also subverts the classic vampire conventions with great skill and originality, with nary a cross, coffin or even fang in sight.  Like 30 Days of Night, this is the perfect antidote for anyone suffering from Twilight-overload – the monster can be quite interesting when he’s the hero, but he’s just so much more fun when he’s the bad guy ...

1.  JOHN CARPENTER’S THE THING

While I’m sure many will think I’m mad for preferring this over Carpenter’s other seminal horror classic Halloween, this one’s much more my speed, a perfect exercise in sustained tension, paranoia and white-knuckle terror. Critically mauled and under-performing on its release (it was labelled by many as a sort of “anti-E.T.: the Extraterrestrial”, which came out two weeks earlier ... and interestingly this opened the same day as Blade Runner!), it nonetheless became a massive cult hit now rightly considered one of the true DEFINITIVE horror movies.  Faithfully adapting John Campbell, Jr.’s novella Who Goes There? (certainly more so than Howard Hawks’ admittedly entertaining but ultimately very kitsch The Thing From Another World), it revolves around the all-male crew of U.S. research station 4, Outpost 31, in Antarctica, who come under threat from a body-snatching alien entity that can perfectly imitate its victims after investigating the mysterious destruction of a neighbouring Norwegian facility.  Carpenter regular Kurt Russell (Escape From New York, Big Trouble In Little China) is at his gruff best as helicopter pilot R.J. MacReady, the taciturn blue-collar Joe called upon to play “hero”, Keith David (Pitch Black, Carpenter’s They Live) angrily flexes his acting and physical muscles as hot-tempered researcher Childs, Donald Moffat crumbles as ineffectual station commander Garry, and screen legend Wilford Brimley effortlessly makes the exposition compelling as tightly-wound biologist Blair.  The freezing Antarctic atmosphere perfectly complements the razor-edged suspense, the idea that ANYONE could be the creature lending every scene a palpable sense of implied threat, while the science of the fiction is thankfully largely put on the back-burner in favour of the story and scares; meanwhile there’s a cheeky edge of jet black humour throughout, from the scuttling disembodied head to Garry’s explosive reaction to MacReady’s improvised humanity-test.  Rob (The Howling, Robocop, Fight Club) Bottin’s fantastically nightmarish creature effects are a magnificent achievement, still looking as good today as they did back in 1982, while master composer Ennio Morricone’s subtle, atmospheric score is a triumph of creepy, insidious subliminal effect.  For me, this film is the definition of fear – the idea that the threat could be literally ANYONE, that you could even become that yourself, be taken over completely, body and soul, is absolutely terrifying, and Carpenter executes this potential reality with surgical precision from the intriguing, icy start to the bleak, desolate ending.  Perfect.

Can you be more specific on why you like Arya and Sansa? So many people like Arya for being strong and fierce, but for some reasons so many hate Sansa for what she was like in the earlier seasons. Can you give specific instances why you like both of them? And why not Daenerys? Thanks! (I'm just really curious, please indulge me :) )

I’m going to talk about Dany first (and I’m sticking to the show here, though I have read the books, but they’re never getting finished, let’s be real), and then I'll put my thoughts on Sansa and Arya in another post (hey, you asked, so I’m delivering) because otherwise this will go on forever and it’s cleaner this way. Putting a ‘read more’ here because this is long (lol I’m at work I should be working)

To preface, I would not dislike Daenerys as much as I do if she didn’t want to be queen. I’ll touch on this when I talk about Arya, but I appreciate characters who have the self-awareness required to know who and what they are. Since Daenerys does want to rule Westeros, I have so many issues.

I also think the eighth season is going to see her turning on most of the people she’s currently allied with and I think the catalyst for that is the discovery that Jon is the legitimate child of Rhaegar and Lyanna, and therefore his claim to the throne supersedes hers. I’ll gladly admit that I’m wrong if I am, but right now I don’t think I am. Here’s why.

1) She is an ineffective ruler

After Dany liberated the slave cities of Astapor, Yunkai and Meereen, she stayed to rule and did a terrible job of it. Nobody in particular was better off, the majority of the slaves she freed were homeless and scraping for food in mess halls, and she killed elders who had spoken out against slavery without even listening to what any of them had to say. She has the mind for conquering, not for ruling.

(side note: why does she even want to be queen? It’s something she just seemed to jump on in season two without ever reasoning it out, and from there on in it’s like an obsession that has grown inside her. Now she says she wants to make the world a better place but she hasn’t the skills to do it. It should be enough for her to liberate oppressed societies and allow somebody qualified to fix them. But it’s not.)

The truth is, Meereen saw no real improvement until after Dany skipped town on Drogon, because Tyrion had the idea to replace the slave trade with actual trade. He made changes that impacted the city’s economy and allowed its residents to start supporting themselves, so of course, the slavers attacked just as Dany came back, at which point her bright idea was to decimate an entire armada when she needed ships. Tyrion had to talk her out of it. Which brings me to her next point.

2) She requires constant babysitting

It’s ironic to me that Tyrion told Cersei that “the difference” between Cersei and Daenerys is that Dany knows herself well enough to hire advisors who tell her not to do dumb, impulsive things, firstly because that is such a low bar, Tyrion! There are people out there (Sansa) who do not require that kind of monitoring! Secondly because Cersei is far more self-aware than Dany.

Cersei knows that the things she does are bad and does them anyway because fuck it, she knows she wants power for power’s sake. Dany has such a narrow view of justice that actually thinks she’s being righteous when she burns people to death (more on that later) and that is the most dangerous mindset a leader can have. Compare that, if you will, to Sansa, who quite sensibly told Arya that chopping off heads might feel good but that’s not the way to make people work together. Jorah, Tyrion and Jon have all had to speak out against Dany’s more violent predilections and she’s fast running out of people she wants to listen to. She and Tyrion are certainly hanging on by a thread. Which brings me to my next point.

3) She mistreats her own Hand

The relationship between Dany and Tyrion absolutely reeks of Aerys and Tywin, their respective fathers, who were the best of friends until Aerys’ jealousy and paranoia forced them to opposite sides of a bloody war. Dany is all too happy to take credit for Tyrion’s best ideas when they work (and he is happy to let her) but as soon as one of his plans go wrong she whirls on him and berates him like he’s a piece of trash. Everything’s his fault when a plan goes wrong.

When he brought up the matter of the succession she accused him of plotting her death with his brother, which not only is batshit insane but proves that Daenerys gives far less of a shit about the future of Westeros than she claims to, because if she cared that much, she’d care about planning to carry on the legacy she wants to build. She can’t seem to forgive Tyrion for the heinous crime of…loving his siblings? Trying to broker the most peaceful end to the war? Not wanting his brother to die?

Honestly, her treatment of Tyrion is one of the most telling aspects of her character and I am aghast that nobody seems to be talking about it.

4) Like all of the maddest Targaryens before her, she gets off on burning people

This one isn’t subtle at all. Sorry to drop the intellectual veneer for a moment but she fucking loves that shit. It doesn’t bother her a whit to watch people scream as they’re being burned alive. She takes pleasure in burning people, you can see the satisfaction on her face, and a good leader should never take pleasure in something like that.

(FYI people like to mention how Sansa smiled when Ramsay’s dogs ate him when I make this point and to that I blow a raspberry. That was her personal moment of justice against her rapist and abuser, not the lord of some house who wouldn’t submit to her, there is no fair comparison)

Dany was smiling like a satisfied cat when she burned down the temple of the Dosh Khaleen and killed everybody inside it, which was something she did to seize power, by the way. She didn’t do it to stick it to a bunch of misogynists, though I’m sure that was an added bonus. She did the exact same thing Cersei did to the Sept of Baelor and for the exact same reasons, yet only one of them is painted as a villain by the viewing public even though you can argue that Cersei was also sticking it to misogynists when she killed the High Sparrow. The only reason for that is that Dany was given humble origins while the narrative told us that Cersei was bad from the very beginning.

Theon is still beating himself up for killing and burning those two farm boys — as he should. Stannis burned his daughter and everyone was horrified. Jon was so repulsed to watch Mance Rayder burn that he defied Stannis and shot him in the heart. How many times is the show going to have to tell us that burning people alive is a terrible act of evil before people stop cheering Dany on for it? When Ned Stark was Lord of Winterfell, he understood and felt the weight of executing a man. Jon feels the weight of it, too, as we’ve seen on a couple of occasions. Sansa clearly thought long and hard about executing Petyr — that’s what her moment of reflection on the battlements was meant to show us. Dany just… doesn’t care. I think she cared a bit when she had Daario execute Mossador, but I can’t think of any other occasion where she has been directly responsible for a death and been remotely bothered by it.

So. yes.

I think the reason a lot of people – and in particular a lot of women – support Daenerys is because she has a girl power narrative. She does have a girl power narrative, it’s true, but that is not a good enough reason to support a character who on so many occasions has proven herself to be unqualified for the job she wants, not to mention bordering on dangerously unhinged and increasingly paranoid. In that sense I think her season 1 narrative was genius, because her origins and the way in which she started to gain power (as well as her gender) has granted her a kind of automatic forgiveness for behaviours that several male characters – and Cersei, most importantly, because she also has a girl power narrative (and she and Dany are two peas in a pod) but the show told us she was a baddie from episode one – would be dragged through the mud for. And I’m sorry, but it’s not good enough for me. I’m not going to support a powerful female character just because she’s a powerful female character who did some good things once. Powerful women can be good or bad.

Some other points re: Daenerys

The dragons are weapons of mass destruction and need to be killed. They’re nukes with wings. She’s burned her own people with those monsters because fire doesn’t fucking differentiate. Sorry not sorry.

The Targaryens are literally GRRM’s interpretation of the Aryan race. It’s practically in their name.

“I have tried to make it explicit in the novels that the dragons are destructive forces, and Dany has found that out as the tried to rule the city of Meereen and be queen there. She has the power to destroy, she can wipe out entire cities, and we certainly see that in Fire and Blood, we see the dragons wiping out entire armies, wiping out towns and cities, destroying them, but that doesn’t necessarily enable you to rule – it just enables you to destroy.” – George R R Martin, folks.

One of the show’s directors, Jack Bender, made a reference to Hitler when talking about her. He said we should be “horrified” by her. No shit, Jack. No shit.

“Do you wonder if the gods ever get lonely?” Just… this line. Get a grip, woman.

Conservatives Are Furious Biden Delivered a Non-Insane Presidential Speech                                  Jonathan Chait

The American presidency offers numerous opportunities for a chief executive to make use of his symbolic role as head of state in a way that advances the national interest while simultaneously benefiting his own political standing. Donald Trump usually forfeited these opportunities, either because he was unable to pretend to care about people who didn’t vote for him or because he couldn’t adapt his free-form insult-comic rants to a teleprompter format.

Joe Biden has reaped the normal rewards that come from behaving like a normal president — perhaps benefitting more than most due to the contrast with his unhinged predecessor. This has naturally infuriated Republicans, who see Biden’s strategy of reaping positive coverage by acting normal as a form of cheating.

The party’s agony in responding to this was best exemplified by Tucker Carlson, who covered Biden’s speech by adding a small box of his scowling face in the corner of the screen so that Fox News viewers could share his disdain and sit through the speech with the promise of a scalding rebuttal.

Carlson turned out to be angry that Biden promoted vaccines. “The military will give you that shot, and if you take that shot, things potentially could get back to normal,” he sneered. “No mention at all of the people who might not want to take the shot.” That is true! Likewise, Ronald Reagan’s Berlin Wall speech made no mention of people who support Soviet communism, and George W. Bush’s Ground Zero speech snubbed Americans who support plane hijacking. Presidents take positions in speeches, and the current president no longer caters to the dangerous ignorance of vaccine skeptics.

Carlson likewise interpreted Biden’s goal that the virus will be largely sidelined by Independence Day as some kind of threat: “This is a free people. This is a free country. How dare you tell us who we can spend the Fourth of July with?” Of course, public-health restrictions are set by governors, not the president. And in any case, Biden was suggesting people who are currently afraid to gather with friends will be able to do so without risk, not actually threatening to withhold legal permission to do so.

One could rightfully push back that Biden is underpromising by leaving almost four months until normalcy returns, when current vaccination trends suggest the virus might be vanquished earlier. But the idea that he is threatening to have jackbooted thugs come to snatch away your hot dog is pure fantasy.

Other Republican commentators seized on the strange notion that Biden was threatening the public in the guise of promising an end to the pandemic. He “threatens to take away the cookie if the little children don’t behave,” complained Laura Ingraham.

Yet in their scramble to find a party line, some of the conservative commentators seemed unable to decide if Biden was a terrifying authoritarian menace or a pathetic, feeble old man. Ingraham — immediately before complaining about Biden’s (imaginary) threat to cancel the Fourth of July — described his speech as “funereal.”

Conservative publisher and pardoned criminal Conrad Black develops this line of thinking further. Black describes Biden’s speech as a “complete and total failure.” And to show that he really means “complete and total,” he includes Biden’s lack of girth. “Nor is the president’s appearance reassuring,” he complains. “He has a sickly pallor, is underweight, and quavers at times. … Trump, who looks like Tarzan in comparison …”

Yes, not so long ago, we had a strong, healthy president capable of staying up to the wee hours watching Fox News and still waking up fresh enough to hop into his golf cart in the morning.

You can see in these responses a sublimated rage that Trump set the bar so low; Biden needs only to step over it to seem triumphant. What they can’t seem to grasp is exactly who is responsible for this.

My Top Ten Favourite Horror Movies

10.  THE MIST – in 2007, writer/director Frank Darabont once again proved he does his best work when adapting master of literary horror Stephen King (after The Green Mile and solid gold masterpiece The Shawshank Redemption), this time turning to pure horror with one of the author’s lesser-known early novellas.  The result is another tour-de-force cinematic blueprint, a taut, harrowing tale of humanity pushed far beyond the brink by unexplained supernatural events and the monstrous lengths normal people will go to to stay alive, as a small-town New England supermarket is cut off from the outside world by a mysterious, monster-filled mist.  The Expanse’s Thomas Jane proves a complex hero, beefy yet vulnerable as local artist David Drayton, leading a high-calibre cast of Stephen King-movie/TV regulars – Jeffrey DeMunn (The Green Mile), Andre Braugher (Salem’s Lot), William Sadler (The Shawshank Redemption) and Frances Sternhagen (Misery) – and “newcomers” – Laurie Holden (who must have really impressed Darabont, since he subsequently cast her alongside DeMunn in The Walking Dead), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’s Toby Jones (as one of the most unorthodox action heroes in cinematic history) and Miller’s Crossing’s Marcia Gay Harden, pretty much stealing the film as deeply unhinged Bible-basher Mrs Carmody, who goes from unsavoury town nut to fervent cult leader as the situation grows increasingly desperate.  Darabont once again proves what an exceptional screen storyteller he can be, effortlessly weaving an atmosphere of mounting dread and knife-edge tension, as well as delivering some nightmarish set-pieces featuring magnificent Lovecraft-inspired beasties designed by The Walking Dead’s creature effects master Greg Nicotero.  When cinematic horror was becoming increasingly saturated with “gorno” Saw-derivatives, this was a welcome return to old-fashioned monster movie thrills (Darabont himself was heavily inspired by the monochrome scary movies of his childhood, and longed to make the film in black-and-white – indeed, this is definitely worth watching at least once in the “director’s cut” B&W version he included on the special edition DVD release), and not only proved one of the best examples of King on screen to date, but also one of THE key horror movies of the “Noughties”. Not least thanks to that ending, one of the greatest sucker punch twists of all time – reputedly King was most envious of Darabont on seeing it for the first time, wishing he’d thought it up himself. Coming from the King of Horror, that’s high praise indeed.

9.  30 DAYS OF NIGHT – when Steve Niles, the undisputable master of post-modern horror comics, originally came up with the concept for his definitive work, it was intended for the big screen, but he ultimately wound up committing it to print because he just couldn’t get anyone to produce it.  Interesting, then, that the comic’s runaway success led to its optioning by Sam Raimi and his production company Ghost House Pictures, Niles adapting the first volume alongside Stuart Beattie and Brian Nelson, with Hard Candy director David Slade at the helm.  Of course, the concept was always a killer – for one month every year, the sun never rises over the Alaskan town of Barrow, a fact that a coven of hungry vampires have decided to exploit in a midwinter free-for-all feeding frenzy.  Josh Hartnett manfully crumbles in what remains his best role as town sheriff Eben Olemaun, ably supported by Melissa George as his estranged fire-marshal wife Stella, Memento/Batman Begins’ Mark Boone Junior as hard-as-nails town loner Bo, Ben Foster (one of my very favourite actors) as a mysterious drifter with a dark agenda, and Danny Huston, who created one of the best ever screen vampires with nihilistic pack leader Marlow. It’s ironic that David Slade should have followed this with Twilight film Eclipse (although he was an inspired choice – after all, it’s the one that DOESN’T suck) – this is about as far removed from the toothless, blood-lite young adult series as you can get, an unrelenting, gore-drenched exercise in relentless carnage and ice-cold terror.  These vamps wouldn’t be caught (ahem) dead sparkling – they’re man-shaped mako sharks, all dead black eyes and jagged teeth, gleefully revelling in slaughter and playing sadistic games of cat and mouse with the isolated townsfolk.  This is definitely not a movie for the faint of heart, and it takes itself deadly seriously right through the unapologetically bleak ending, but it is nonetheless an endlessly rewarding thrill ride for the faithful, paying respect to all the great conventions of the genre while simultaneously ripping them to shreds.  Brutal, bloody and brilliant, this is BAR NONE the best vampire movie of the post-Interview age, and very nearly my all-time favourite EVER ...

8.  POLTERGEIST – 1982 saw the release of TWO of my all-time fave horror movies, and the lesser (but no less awesome) of the two is what I personally consider to be THE DEFINITIVE haunted house movie.  Tobe Hooper, director of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, pretty much reinvented ghosts on the big screen with this thrilling tale of a small-town-American family, the Freelings, whose seemingly perfect home comes under the influence of a powerful supernatural force.  At first the effects are harmless – moving furniture and the like – until a night-time thunderstorm signals a terrifying escalation and younger daughter Carol-Anne (Heather O’Rourke) is sucked through a portal into the spirit world.  Long before he was the dad in The Incredibles, Craig T. Nelson had already become a pretty definitive cuddly American screen father as Steven Freeling, while JoBeth Williams is a lioness defending her cubs as mother Diane; then-newcomer Heather O’Rourke, meanwhile, is a naturalistic revelation as Carol-Anne, her innocent delivery of “They’re here!” becoming a genuine geek phenomenon all on its own, but the film’s real runaway performance comes from Zelda Rubinstein as diminutive Southern belle psychic medium Tangina Barrons, whose every screen moment is a quirky joy.  As you’d expect, Hooper’s scares are flawlessly executed, the atmospheric tension ratcheted with consummate skill, even if the director’s characteristic gore is kept to a PG-13-friendly minimum ... then again, this was a summer offering from Back to the Future producers Frank Marshall and Steven Spielberg himself, who was also the main screenwriter. Indeed, his influence is keenly felt throughout – the suburban world the Freelings inhabit is very much in keeping with Spielberg classics like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. – and there have been consistent rumours that he was all but the de-facto director on set.  The film (along with its sequels) has also gained a reputation for being cursed, with no less than FOUR cast members dying not long after (most notably Dominique Dunne, who played elder Freeling daughter Dana, who was murdered by her boyfriend just five months after the film’s release).  Whatever the truth behind these rumours, there’s no denying this is a cracking film – taut, atmospheric and consistently terrifying while also displaying a playful, quirky sense of humour and lots of heart, it remains one of the most rewarding and entertaining screen ghost stories around.

7.  BUBBA HO-TEP – Bruce Campbell is Elvis Presley!  He really is!  Although maybe he isn’t ... all right, TECHNICALLY he’s Sebastian Haff, a washed-up, long-retired Elvis impersonator languishing in a retirement home who claims he really IS the King (apparently he swapped places with the REAL Haff because he’d grown tired of fame).  Meanwhile one of his fellow residents is an old black man who claims he’s the real JFK, maintaining that President Lyndon Johnson had him dyed black and secreted in anonymity with a bag of sand sewn into the gap in his brain ... confused yet? Well hold on, cuz there’s more – the retirement home in question has been invaded by the malevolent spirit of a cursed soul-sucking mummy, and only these two fallen heroes can save the day ... yup, writer/director Don (Phantasm and John Dies At the End) Coscarelli’s initially criminally overlooked but deservedly seriously cult adaptation of Joe R. Lansdale’s novel is as typically oddball as the rest of his filmography.  It’s also his most moving and spiritual work to date – behind all the supernatural weirdness and quirky, offbeat humour this is a deeply-affecting meditation on the pains of growing old and losing your place in the world.  Bruce Campbell’s Elvis/Haff is a tragic hero, regretting his current lot and pining for former glories, but he still has the odd little twinkle of his former charm and bravado (particularly during his interactions with his nurse, played with spiky gutsiness by Ella Joyce), while screen legend Ossie Davis is stately and charismatic as “the former President Kennedy”, even when he sounds REALLY crazy.  Meanwhile the creature, “Bubba Ho-Tep” himself (Bob Ivy), is a fantastically weird creation, Coscarelli’s skilful use of atmospherics elevating him far above the “guy-in-a-suit” effects – he’s mean, cranky, and just as strong a character as his flesh-and-blood counterparts.  Coscarelli really let rip on this one – it’s chock-full of his characteristic leftfield comic-scariness (Elvis/Haff’s early encounter with one of the mummy’s scarab familiars is a particular zany gem), visually inventive and frequently laugh-out-loud hilarious, but in the end plays out on such a heartfelt, genuinely powerful and moving denouement that you can’t help getting a lump in your throat, even while it is one of those movies that leaves you with a big dumb goofy grin on your face.  It’d be pretty sweet if Coscarelli and his mate Paul Giamatti ever get their long-gestating “prequel” Bubba Nosferatu: Curse of the She-Vampires off the ground, but this is one that you can’t help loving all on its own.  See this if you’re a Coscarelli fan – it’s his best work to date – see this if you love quirky, unusual and original horror ... hell, see this if you love MOVIES. This is a true GEM, not to be missed.

6.  DOG SOLDIERS – my favourite werewolf movie is also easily one of the most offbeat – think The Howling meets Assault On Precinct 13 and you’re pretty close to the mark. Before visionary British horror director Neil Marshall had his big break with masterpiece The Descent, he made an impressive cult splash with his feature debut, a fiendish comedy horror in which a six-man British Army unit on training manoeuvres in the wilds of Scotland stumbles upon a pack of hungry werewolves and are forced to take shelter in an isolated cottage.  With their ammo dwindling and their weapons largely ineffective against the monsters (not a silver bullet between them, of course), it doesn’t look likely that ANY of will survive the night ... setting the humour dial for JET BLACK, Marshall keeps the atmosphere tense and the substantial gore flying (I was amazed when I saw this in the cinema that it was only a 15 – even just ten years earlier stuff like this was GUARANTEED a solid 18 certificate), while the squaddies are a likeably foul-mouthed bunch with a winning, sometimes enjoyably geeky line in spiky banter (Marshall makes frequent references to everything from Star Trek and The Evil Dead to The Matrix and, in one of my favourite nods, Zulu).  Trainspotting’s Kevin McKidd is brawny but enjoyably self-deprecating as nominal hero Cooper, Sean (son of Doctor Who Jon) Pertwee gives great earthy-shoutiness as Sgt. Wells, Darren Morfitt consistently steals the film as mouthy little bugger “Spoon” (short for Witherspoon), and Game Of Thrones star Liam Cunningham injects a strong dose of dark and dangerous as Captain Ryan, the special forces operative with a sinister plan, while Emma Cleasby is far from just a token female as zoologist Megan, who came to Scotland in search of the legend and seems to have found a whole lot more than she bargained for – she’s smart, tough and flat-out refuses to be a love interest, and definitely proved a good trial run for Marshall’s all-female cast in The Descent.  It’s impressively paced – after an initial character-driven set-up so we can get to know the lads (including a fun little scare-on-top-of-a-laugh moment), the action kicks in fast and rarely lets up for the rest of the film’s tightly-packed 105 minute running time.  The set pieces are thrilling and frequently fun (particularly Spoon’s ballsy little distraction technique), and the werewolves are impressively brought to life through physical animatronics created by Image FX (the Hellraiser effects team!) and a talented troupe of stilt-walking stunt performers – no cheesy CGI here!  Altogether it marked a blinding debut for a singular, visionary sci-fi/horror talent who’s still making his presence felt – Doomsday was a delightfully old-school slice of super violent sci-fi in the John Carpenter vein, while tight, gruesome little Roman-era suspense thriller Centurion proved that a historical epic doesn’t have to be 2+ hours long with a big budget to impress, and Marshall continues to garner real acclaim through his extensive TV work on the likes of Game of Thrones. That said, I can’t wait for him to return to the big screen, preferably with more dark, edgy, blood-soaked fun like this ...

5.  TREMORS – I’ve always had something of a bias towards horror movies that are also comedies, or at least that have a strong sense of humour throughout, and when it comes to funny horror movies, this brilliant throwback to cheesy 1950s monster movies is KING, baby! While it snuck in under the radar on its 1990 release, director Ron Underwood’s sleeper universally wowed critics, word of mouth helping it to become an impressive cult smash once it hit home video ... which meant I saw it at JUST the right time, the film quickly becoming a firm fixture in my favourites lists and a major milestone in my own geek development.  The premise is simplicity itself – giant underground worms with tentacles in their mouths terrorise an isolated desert community – but underneath the goofy concept is a surprisingly sophisticated movie that continues to influence filmmakers today.  Kevin Bacon was in a bit of a career slump at the time (Footloose had been SO LONG before), but this gave him both the shot in the arm he needed and one of his most memorable roles ever – odd-jobbing slacker Val McKee, who has to get off his arse and think big to beat the beasties; Fred Ward is the perfect foil as Val’s crotchety “business” partner Earl Basset, while Finn Carter is thoroughly lovable as scientist Rhonda LeBeck, a no-nonsense smart girl who can go toe-to-toe with the boys (and manages to lose her pants WITHOUT losing her credibility), but the film is consistently stolen by Family Ties star Michael Gross as tightly wound survivalist Burt Gummer – this might be Bacon’s movie, but Gross is the real star, deservedly becoming the driving force of the film’s various sequels AND the spinoff TV series.  The film opens with a killer of a funny line, starting as it means to go on – frequently hilarious and smart as a whip, consistently defying character and genre tropes and wrong-footing the viewer almost a decade before Joss Whedon started doing the same with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, all the while balancing the belly laughs with some genuinely scary set pieces.  The worms themselves (or “Graboids”, if you want to get specific) are spectacular creations, some of the most original movie monsters out there, and they still stand up well today, just like the rest of the film.  A cornerstone of the genre that wins over new fans with each generation, this is one of those films that deserves to be remembered for a very long time, and looks set to do just that.

4.  EVIL DEAD 2: DEAD BY DAWN – nobody does screen chaos like Sam Raimi, particularly when it comes to his horror offerings – still his first and purest love.  His original debut feature The Evil Dead is rightly considered the DEFINITIVE indie horror, and to this day remains the standard blueprint for all young, aspiring directors starting out in the genre ... it’s also a work of pure, unadulterated MADNESS once it gets going. Raimi upped the ante with this part-remake, part-sequel, the increased budget and proper studio resources meaning he could REALLY let his imagination run riot, and the results are a cavalcade of tongue-clean-THROUGH-cheek, jet black comedic insanity that STILL has yet to be equalled.  Bruce Campbell returns as unlikely “hero” Ash Williams, thoroughly out of his depth and failing miserably to hold it together as the ancient tome of evil itself, the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis (“Book of the Dead”), unleashes a horde of undead demons on the isolated forest cabin he’s brought his girlfriend to.  Wildly expanding on the supernatural back-story of his original, Raimi and co-writer Scott Spiegel also ramped up the humour, playing the horror on the blackest edge they can, albeit cut with a hefty dose of Tex Avery – Ash’s battle with his own possessed, eventually severed hand is like some demented skit out of The Three Stooges, while the absolute comedic highlight is the ridiculously over-the-top “laughing room” sequence, in which the seemingly inanimate objects in the cabin suddenly come to life and begin to taunt Ash; add in the great wealth of re-view-friendly visual in-jokes scattered throughout and this remains Raimi’s FUNNIEST film to date.  Campbell clearly had a ball, throwing himself into the action with everything he had, and he’s ably supported by a meaty (ahem) cast that includes a very pre-Slither Dan Hicks as a seriously scuzzy redneck and Raimi’s own brother Ted, virtually unrecognisable as one of the maniacal Deadites (“I’ll swallow your soul!”).  The creature effects from the great Greg Nicotero still stand up spectacularly well today (they remain some of his very best work), from hideous gurning beasts to insane fountains of blood, while Raimi’s direction is pitch-perfect, playing the humour beautifully while still (sometimes simultaneously) building up a near-unbearable atmosphere of unholy dread, and the climax is ingenious, beautifully setting things up for the enjoyably madcap trilogy-closer Army of Darkness: the Medievil Dead. Raimi has finally brought the trilogy the follow-up fans had been waiting decades for with the fantastically bonkers Ash Vs. the Evil Dead series, but this delirious masterpiece remains the franchise’s zenith.  Groovy ...

3.  JAWS – it may be the oldest film on this list (released in 1975, it’s THREE YEARS OLDER than I am!), but Steven Spielberg’s breakthrough feature has aged incredibly well.  Indeed, it almost single-handedly changed the face of big budget cinema, establishing the idea of tent-pole summer blockbusters and blanket-bombardment advertising campaigns (in particularly it was one of the first to make heavy use of television to drum up excitement and interest), ultimately taking over $400,000,000 on its original release (the equivalent of multi-billion big earners like Avatar today) and paving the way for Star Wars two years later.  Not to mention the film’s famous negative effect on beach-going for years after ... but under all that there’s a magnificent, masterfully-crafted film, still (rightly) considered one of the director’s best.  The plot may be ridiculously simple – New England beach-community Amity Island is terrorised by a man-eating Great White shark – but there’s a stealthily subversive story here, taking old genre conventions and twisting them in new, unexpected directions (which would, ironically, form a template for a great many later horror movies); while the first hour is a slow-burn thriller, the second is more like a light-hearted nautical action adventure with added scares.  The French Connection’s Roy Scheider virtually CREATED the everyman-out-of-his-depth hero with his portrayal of Amity police chief Martin Brody, a former New York cop who’s terrified of the water, Richard Dreyfuss is lovable comedic gold as rich kid marine biologist Matt Hooper, Lorraine Gary did a lot with very little as Brody’s wife Ellen, and Robert Shaw effortlessly steals the film as shark hunter Quint, a ferocious, scenery-chewing force of nature in the mould of Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab.  The film is immensely rich in great character moments, from Hooper’s rib-tickling arrival on the island and the dialogue-free moment Brody shares with his younger son Sean, to the undeniable high point of the film, where a humorous comparison of scars (which has itself become a popular homage-magnet in film and TV) leads to Quint chilling account of his wartime experience onboard the U.S.S. Indianapolis (the ship transporting the Hiroshima atomic bomb which was torpedoed in the Pacific, leading to over a thousand stranded sailors being eaten alive by sharks); indeed, this is one of Spielberg’s most well-written films, sitcom writer Carl (The Odd Couple) Gottlieb’s polish of author Peter Benchley’s adaptation of his own original novel still zipping and zinging today, although some of the best dialogue was derived from the actors’ own on-set improvisations (most famously Scheider’s now-legendary “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”).  It’s also one of his most well-directed, with near-hypnotic tricks in editing and bold, adventurous choices in atmosphere-building, often a result of the shoot’s infamous difficulties – the animatronic shark (affectionately named “Bruce” by the director, and “the Great White Turd” by the crew) created by Bob Mattley (the guy who did the giant squid in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) was impressive when it worked, but this was so rarely that the director had to devise several means of creating maximum tension WITHOUT showing the shark, which ultimately ADDS to the effectiveness of those scenes, particularly the “barrel-chasing” in the second half.  None of these tricks, however, work better than the score from Spielberg’s most faithful collaborator, John Williams, based around a deceptively simple four-note melody that evolves into something spectacularly evocative, which has rightly become the film’s most iconic element.  Humorous, intriguing, intense and still thoroughly terrifying when it wants to be, this is, bar-none, the finest man-versus-nature horror EVER MADE, and surely always will be.

2.  NEAR DARK – I’m a fool for vampires (much like I’m a fool for redheads, but that’s a whole other conversation), so bloodsucker horror is one of my very favourite sub-genres.  I’m also a big fan of Kathryn Bigelow – two of her most recent features, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, both pinged VERY LOUDLY on my radar (the former is my favourite war movie of the current decade), while her collaboration with then husband James Cameron, Strange Days (he wrote, she directed), rates high on my list of criminally underrated screen gems.  So what do you think happened when she made a vampire movie?  The results SHOULD have become one of the most celebrated and legendary features in the genre ... except that it came out in October 1987, two months after the admittedly cool and fun but far more glossy and dumb The Lost Boys.  Needless to say in the wake of that, Bigelow’s film got kind of lost in the back chatter, nearly flopping at the box office and all but vanishing into obscurity ... until its subsequent release on video (quite rightly) earned it an impressive cult following.  Myself included, because this movie is RIGHT UP my dark and dangerous alley.  Collaborating with The Hitcher’s screenwriter Eric Red, Bigelow crafted a (largely) deadly serious modern day supernatural “western”, in which cocky farm-boy Caleb Colton (Heroes’ Adrian Pasdar) hits on cute drifter Mae (Jenny Wright, probably best known for her supporting turn in Young Guns 2), only to get WAY more than he bargained for when her kiss leaves him with a crippling hunger and one serious tanning problem.  Pasdar’s all-knowing youthful swagger disintegrates as he tumbles further down the vampiric rabbit hole, while Wright’s fragile beauty compliments her character’s deep, soulful melancholy – the pair make for a compelling, tragic romantic centre anchoring the horrors that unfold as Caleb begins to lose himself to his burgeoning nature; even so, the true dark and twisted soul of the film lies with Mae’s predatory nomad “family” – Lance Henriksen is the definitive “dark father” as nihilistic pack leader Jesse Hooker, while his Aliens co-star Jenette Goldstein is his perfect mate as punk rock femme fatale Diamondback, and Joshua John Miller excels as Homer, the bitter old man trapped in a child’s body ... meanwhile Bill Paxton consistently steals the film as mad dog Severen, chewing the scenery to splinters with gleeful, feral aplomb and stealing all the best lines. It’s a potent, heady ride, taking itself pretty seriously throughout but deriving a subtle, inky black sense of gallows humour from the situation, and the set-pieces are intense and thrilling (particularly the shootout in a roadside motel at dawn, where shafts of sunlight become as lethal as bullets).  At times it’s also powerful, soulful and bleakly beautiful, Bigelow’s heavily stylised visuals brilliantly augmented by the spiky electronic score from Tangerine Dream.  It also subverts the classic vampire conventions with great skill and originality, with nary a cross, coffin or even fang in sight.  Like 30 Days of Night, this is the perfect antidote for anyone suffering from Twilight-overload – the monster can be quite interesting when he’s the hero, but he’s just so much more fun when he’s the bad guy ...

1.  JOHN CARPENTER’S THE THING – while I’m sure many will think I’m mad for preferring this over Carpenter’s other seminal horror classic Halloween, this one’s much more my speed, a perfect exercise in sustained tension, paranoia and white-knuckle terror.  Critically mauled and underperforming on its release (it was labelled by many as a sort of “anti-E.T.: the Extraterrestrial”, which came out two weeks earlier ... and interestingly this opened the same day as Blade Runner!), it nonetheless became a massive cult hit now rightly considered one of the true DEFINITIVE horror movies.  Faithfully adapting John Campbell, Jr.’s novella Who Goes There? (certainly more so than Howard Hawks’ admittedly entertaining but ultimately very kitsch The Thing From Another World), it revolves around the all-male crew of U.S. research station 4, Outpost 31, in Antarctica, who come under threat from a body-snatching alien entity that can perfectly imitate its victims after investigating the mysterious destruction of a neighbouring Norwegian facility. Carpenter regular Kurt Russell (Escape From New York, Big Trouble In Little China) is at his gruff best as helicopter pilot R.J. MacReady, the taciturn blue-collar Joe called upon to play “hero”, Keith David (Pitch Black, Carpenter’s They Live) angrily flexes his acting and physical muscles as hot-tempered researcher Childs, Donald Moffat crumbles as ineffectual station commander Garry, and screen legend Wilford Brimley effortlessly makes the exposition compelling as tightly-wound biologist Blair.  The freezing Antarctic atmosphere perfectly complements the razor-edged suspense, the idea that ANYONE could be the creature lending every scene a palpable sense of implied threat, while the science of the fiction is thankfully largely put on the back-burner in favour of the story and scares; meanwhile there’s a cheeky edge of jet black humour throughout, from the scuttling disembodied head to Garry’s explosive reaction to MacReady’s improvised humanity-test. Rob (The Howling, Robocop, Fight Club) Bottin’s fantastically nightmarish creature effects are a magnificent achievement, still looking as good today as they did back in 1982, while master composer Ennio Morricone’s subtle, atmospheric score is a triumph of creepy, insidious subliminal effect.  For me, this film is the definition of fear – the idea that the threat could be literally ANYONE, that you could even become that yourself, be taken over completely, body and soul, is absolutely terrifying, and Carpenter executes this potential reality with surgical precision from the intriguing, icy start to the bleak, desolate ending.  Perfect.

Detective Zil and the Case of the Allorea Pollen

Zil stood in front of the infamous Meats & More, draining the soap out of her bubble-pipe against the red brick outlining the window of what looked to be your average butcher’s shop. It was all a front though, for the most notorious speak-easy in Troutbeck. Zil knew the secrets it held, though not from personal experience. 

As a rule of thumb she tried not to commit more crimes than she solved. As of the last two months she hadn’t solved any. She made by though, just stalking the doll of some jealous gent. Taking notes on where they go and who they were seeing. Not that she was completely honest with the guys who hired her. She’d only tell them if they were cheating on them. She neglected to tell Mr. Aki about his wife’s gambling addiction or how George Patterson’s girl was doing opium every Friday afternoon when she was supposed to be taking piano lessons. It was Zil’s opinion that the patriarchy was tiring and if this was how those women let off some steam, who was she to stop them? So she hadn’t step in a speak-easy in a while now.

She was only here today due to a job. As she opened the door to the shop, a bell’s chime marked her entrance. 

“Who goes there?” said a bodiless voice. “What do you want?” It spoke again. It was a few seconds before Zil saw the source of the questions. What looked like a kid, but turned out to be a small lady was climbing her way up a tall, for her anyway, wooden stool. She was wearing trousers and a white tee, her hair wrapped up in a pink scarf. “Hows can I help you?” asked the little lady, as she struck the knife she had been holding into the counter top. She was way more intimidating than she should’ve been.  Her blue eyes striking fear into Zil’s heart. 

“I’m here for some meat, I heard that you got something called the bibbity beep special going on?” replied Zil not missing a beat. 

“How do I know you ain’t cop?” The pink scarfed lady looking Zil dead in the eyes. 

“How do I know you ain’t some kid’s toy come to life?”

The little lady laughed. “You is all right kid. My name is Phoebe, by the way, but my friends all call me Pip.” She hopped down the stool and went over to the counter, unhinging the divided between the store front and back. “Come on now, before someone important sees you.” She was gesturing her hands for Zil to follow her. 

As Zil followed Pip through to the ice room in the back, she looked in awe of the cuts of meat that hung. She couldn’t decide what was more impressive the whole owlbear, or the tangle of winged snakes that were suspended from metal hooks on the ceiling.

“Don’t mind the product; we still gotta keep up appearances for tax purposes of course. That’s how they get you, taxes.” Pip spoke with the confidence of someone much older than her. She squatted down a bit to unlatch a trapdoor, revealing a ladder down to the basement, along with the soft sound of jazz floating up from the darkness below. “Come on now, I don’t have all day.”

Zil took the advice and started her way down the rungs. Above her in a perfectly lit square, Pip’s face could be seen. “Bibbity beep go eat some meat,” whispered Pip as she shut the trapdoor, forcing Zil into a unconsented darkness. 

As Zil’s foot hit solid grounding she found herself in the soft glow of torchlight. The ladder led to a small 5 by 5 foot square that contained a torch and a single wooden door. The soft jazz she heard from above even louder now, the source surely behind the door. She reached for the handle, she was half expecting it to be locked, but easily enough it turned.

To show a lavish, more than what seemed humanly possible, night club within the hidden basement. An entire area lined up with tables in front of a beautiful wooden bar. The wall behind lined with every type of liquor you could imagine, from scotch to whiskey, to old hillbilly moonshine. The most impressive feature though was the stage to the left of the dining area. The body of the stage was about four feet high off the ground and extended about another five feet out, with a small section protruding from the middle for the performer to get closer to her audience if she or he so desired, felt curtains blocking out the back. 

Zil made her way to the bar. There she was greeted by a tall drink of a woman, whose height was only matched by her muscles. A single amethyst crystal dominated the space above her cleavage and be assured that it was hard to dominate that much cleavage. Zil blushed at the amount of open skin she saw.

“Welcome. My name is Kai, and what’s your poison?” Kai asked Zil. She was washing out the inside of a whiskey glass with a rag, not even making eye contact with Zil. Her eyes were drawn to the stage, looking over the band performing in the corner of it. 

“What do you recommend?” asked Zil, letting other’s lead the conversation made it easier to fit in. 

“My boss made this new drink called the Goblirita, this the only place in town to try one. So I would say start with that.” 

“That will do,” replied Zil.

As Kai made Zil’s drink, Zil looked over the club trying to see if she recognized anyone here. A few faces seemed familiar; maybe the commuted the same way each morning, Zil’s office is nearby. No one really stood out, until another tall woman made her way onto the stage. Geesh, how big do they make them down here thought Zil. 

“HELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO , everyone” she shouted from the top of her lungs. Even if she was short, this woman would stand out. She had on body tight black dress that split at her upper thigh revealing a pair of green stockings them ending in shiny black 5-inch heels. On her chest was a pinned an extravagant show of wealth, a gold star the size of Zil’s fist. “My name is Grianna, and I’m the owner of this butchery. I have just one question for ya’ll, is everyone having a good time?” She asked the audience.

Everyone cheered, but one guy who seemed like he had a bit too much to drink. 

“This club sucks,” shouted the louse. 

“Well lets get you outta here then,” replied Grianna with that and a snap of her fingers two tall men appeared from the shadows against the wall and started to escort the drunk man out. “Cause if you’re gonna be here you’re gonna have a great time!” She laughed as if she told the funniest joke, the audience joined in despite no joke really being told. As if they were all afraid of being the next one to be kicked out. “I want everyone to thank the band before we continue. Say thank you Cam and the Bop.”

“Thank you Cam and the Bop!” cheered the audience.

“That was great, so great that I am gonna give you guys a special treat,” spoke Grianna.

“What is it?” asked the audience. 

“It’s me!” replied Grianna. “I’m gonna perform for you, isn’t that nice,” and without taking a breath she broke out into a song, something about going to side to side. 

Zil stopped listening as she remembered that she was here on a job. She turned back to the bartender who has just placed down her Goblirita. She took a sip and was surprised that it tasted so well. She made a note that if nothing went wrong she might stop back at this club. 

“So,” said Zil, but before she could say anything else Kai interrupted her. 

“Ain’t she beautiful?” 

“Who?”

“My boss, Grianna,” replied Kai. Her eyes fully focused on Grianna’s performance. “You know I’m gonna be up there someday, been working on this act. I can’t say much, but it involves me and a lot of purple silk. Grianna has been helping me with it. Says it’s not ready yet, I thought it was, but yeah she told me it wasn’t polished enough. Glad I got her looking out for me. She really is the best boss.” 

“She sure umm… seems like it,” responded Zil, her eyes darting back to the stage seeing Grianna now on top of a stationary bicycle. “You’ve been working on this act long?”

“Oh yeah for about the last two years, or so,” replied Kai, her eyes still focused on stage. 

“Two years and it ain’t ready?”

“That’s what I thought too, but I trust Grianna when she says it ain’t ready.” 

“So you’ve been working here that long then?”

“No, longer than that, for about the last four years, even before the prohibition, I used to help Grianna with the butchery upstairs. I was her right hand man, helped her along after half her parent’s died.” 

“That must have been rough.”

“Yeah Grianna was a bit sad, but she still visits them when she gets the chance.”

“So since you’ve been working here this long, you must know a lot of things.” 

Kai’s eyes finally left the stage. “Depends on what, I know a few things.”

“Like let’s say hypothetically if someone I dunno, wanted to get their hands on some Allorea pollen, how would they do that?”

“That’s some hard stuff for a little lady like yourself.”

“Not for me, but thanks for looking out. I got a guy who wants me to find him some, he will pay me real nice once I do and maybe just maybe some of that sweet sweet pay with make its way to you,” Zil finishing off her sentence with some finger guns. “Phew Phew.”

“The only way you going to get some Allorea Pollen is from the Don Mae’s gang. They got the market cornered here in Troutbeck.” 

As if speaking her name summoned her, the door to club swung open revealing Katie Mae, the meanest Don of all time. Behind her followed her three lackeys, Molly, Sydney, and Liz. Zil knew them all too well. Most of the crime’s she solved had been ones done by Mae’s gang. Yet despite being paid and the clients thanking her for her help, the police hadn’t ever even shown up at Mae’s place. 

Zil knew then and there that Mae owned this town. Here she was a goddess free from consequence.  Mae had gestured to the bar; her lackey Liz had ran up and ordered four gobliritas. 

After Liz order she looked over to Zil and noticed who exactly was sitting beside her. “Hello sis, what brings you to a sketchy place like this?”

To be continued…

@dungeons-dice

Trump Is Starting to Panic

Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today, Trump’s tantrums, the Times’ revelations about Facebook, and the First Lady’s campaign to get a West Wing staffer fired.

Since the Democrats made gains in last week’s election — and, in some places, may continue to make more still — Donald Trump has retreated into what the Los Angeles Times calls “a cocoon of bitterness and resentment,” canceling travel plans, lashing out at allies and adversaries, meddling in the remaining undecided races and, apparently, sitting for hours of meetings with his personal lawyers. Should we take his tantrums as an early indicator of additional bad news?

I will make the reckless prediction that “Donald Trump” and “good news” are not fated to appear in the same sentence unless the good news happens to be that his presidency is ending. Everything about his behavior since the midterms suggests that even he has figured this out. It has belatedly dawned on him that (a) he lost the election he thought he won; (b) the Robert Mueller investigation has moved faster than his efforts to thwart it; (c) any of his legislative fantasies, notably the funding of his border wall, are doomed; and (d) and his pouting in Paris elevated his international image as a buffoon to a whole new level of notoriety. Remember when Republicans attacked Barack Obama (falsely) for allegedly barring Winston Churchill’s bust from the White House? Now the GOP’s hero is a president whom Churchill’s own grandson, the Conservative member of Parliament Nicholas Soames, has labeled “pathetic,” “inadequate,” and “not fit to represent this great country” after Trump failed to show up at the French cemetery rites honoring the fallen of World War I.

That all this makes Trump panic at some gut level is visible not merely in his widely reported spells of rage and bitterness and in his increasingly empty official schedule. He is also stepping up his already impressive efforts to discredit and destroy those democratic institutions that might prevent him from escaping criminal jeopardy. And so he has returned to ridiculing the very lifeblood of America, the electoral process, by declaring elections that don’t go his way a fraud; he has escalated his assault on a free press by barring a CNN reporter and trying to frame him as a fellow misogynistic bully with a deceptively edited video; and, last but not least, he has appointed an acting attorney general, Matthew Whitaker, who has ridiculed the judicial system, been on the board of a fly-by-night company that practiced Trump University–style consumer frauds, and publicly attacked the Mueller probe in Trump’s own language.

This is bunker behavior. Only a desperate man would try to derail Mueller by installing this transparent reprobate at the Department of Justice. Even more revealing is how Trump has become more and more unhinged since making his Whitaker move. The growing fury, most manifest in his latest anti-Mueller tweetstorm this week, suggests that he already realizes that the ploy has backfired. It seems to be finally sinking in, perhaps under the frantic tutelage of his lawyers, that his fate and the fates of his son and son-in-law, among others in his immediate orbit, are tied to the fates of Roger Stone, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, and all the other president’s men whose comprehensive narrative Mueller is bound to tell America no matter what Trump and his stooge at Justice do to try to foil or decapitate him.

According to the New York Times, Facebook knew about Russian election interference earlier (and in more detail) than Mark Zuckerberg has let on, but rather than sound an alarm the company went as far as enlisting a Republican opposition-research firm to cast protesters as puppets of George Soros. The revelations come among growing calls to regulate the social-media giant — is this the end of Facebook as we know it?

Facebook has managed to infuriate both Democrats and Republicans in Washington. Employee morale is crumbling along with its stock price. The company is now likely to be reshaped by both market forces and government regulation. But that’s not what interests me most about this extraordinary piece of Times investigative reporting. Equally important is the story the paper tells of how powerful liberal Democrats, one at the pinnacle of Facebook (Sheryl Sandberg) and another at the pinnacle of the Senate (Chuck Schumer), shielded the company from critics to preserve its fat bottom line. And in the process proved to be useful idiots for the Russians. Had Sandberg and Schumer not protected Facebook, it would have been harder for Russians to manipulate the 2016 election with impunity on its platform, and the presidential candidate Sandberg and Schumer supported, Hillary Clinton, conceivably might have averted narrow defeat.

It was Sandberg, who served under the Treasury Secretary Larry Summers in Bill Clinton’s administration and was a strong Hillary supporter, who hired the Republican lobbyist Joel Kaplan, the key figure in covering up the extent of Russian meddling at Facebook for a full year. (Kaplan is most recently notorious for being caught on camera lending prominent support to Brett Kavanaugh as he denied Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary committee.) And it was Sandberg who looked the other way as other Republican operatives hired by Facebook targeted Soros, falsely portraying him as a prime mover in an anti-Facebook cabal. This Facebook-generated libel inexorably contributed to the proliferation of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Soros that would boil over in the final weeks of the 2018 campaign and arguably cost Democrats some votes in this year’s election as well. Sadly, it turns out that powerful Jewish executives like Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg offer no more protection against dark anti-Semitic corporate tactics at Facebook than Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump do against anti-Semitic political tactics at the White House.

As for Schumer, his water-carrying for Facebook, as documented by the Times, is mortifying: He even tried to shut down a fellow Democratic senator, Mark Warner, who dared question the company. (It will surprise no one that Facebook’s employees contribute more to Schumer, the Democrats’ Senate leader, than any other member of Congress.) It’s a cruel irony, I guess, that prominent Clinton supporters like Sandberg and Schumer in the end contributed to Trump’s victory by allowing Russian interference to play out unchecked at Facebook for much of 2016. But it is not a fresh irony. As I wrote in my New York piece on Trump and Roy Cohn this spring, “From the mid-1970s to the turn of the century, well before Trump debuted on The Apprentice or flirted more than glancingly with politics, he gained power and consolidated it with the help of allies among the elites of New York’s often nominally Democratic and liberal Establishment — some of them literally the same allies who boosted Cohn.” Those powerful Democrats’ priority, I posited, “was raw personal power that could be leveraged for their own enrichment, privilege, and celebrity.” And so the story of Sandberg, Schumer, Facebook, and Trump’s 2016 victory, as told by the Times, is yet another chapter in that same sordid narrative.

After Melania Trump publicly called for the ouster of Mira Ricardel, John Bolton’s deputy, earlier this week, Ricardel is gone from the White House. Was Melania justified in taking her case public?

It’s really hard to know whom to root for in this rollicking tale. For starters, it is utterly preposterous that a First Lady would have her press secretary release a statement announcing that a high national security official “no longer deserves the honor of serving in this White House.” When Nancy Reagan put the shiv in Donald Regan, at least she had the good political sense to do so in the East Wing shadows rather than appear to wield power over a part of the government in which she has no official role or expertise. To quote David Rothkopf’s must-read tweet thread on this incident, Melania Trump is by contrast “just another member of the thug mob that has corrupted our White House.”

But this farce doesn’t end there. We’ve since learned that Melania Trump has never met the woman she banished. In the Washington Post’s account, Ricardel angered the First Lady with a bureaucratic gambit: She threatened to pull National Security Council policy advisers from the First Lady’s trip to Africa in retaliation for being denied a seat on her plane and having to travel on another flight instead. This much is clear: The last thing anyone involved in this episode was thinking about was Africa, the ostensible point of Trump’s trip.

The Post also reported that Ricardel is so widely despised that the White House couldn’t even find her a soft landing in the Commerce Department, presided over by Wilbur Ross, a world-class grifter even by the standards of a Trump Cabinet that now includes Whitaker. If there’s one bit of good news in this whole saga, it’s that John Bolton tried strenuously to save Ricardel’s job and failed. We can only hope that the First Lady will soon declare the malevolent Bolton unworthy of the “honor” of serving in her husband’s crime syndicate and send him back to Fox News.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/11/frank-rich-trump-is-starting-to-panic.html

SCARE SLAM

Presented by Blackshaw Theatre The Old Red Lion Theatre 18th – 19th October – Old Red Lion ‘enjoyable, scary and memorable’ Part of the London Horror Festival 2017 Blackshaw Theatre hosted a Scare Slam. Bringing together their network of writers, directors and actors they put on an evening of poems and performances that ranged from the comically dark, to the genuinely creepy. 1. The Scratch Written and performed by Chris Lincé Lincé’s piece about a woman who wakes up one day to find a seemingly innocuous scratch on her arm, only to ultimately unravel in both a metaphorical and it seems physical sense, set the tone for the evening. Lincé has the perfect voice for horror: unassuming, melodic, gentle even. And it provides a fascinating and disconcerting friction against the story he told. The idea of a woman unhinging and evaporating out of existence, partly due to the abuse of her boss at work, was powerful and elevated the piece beyond a simple horror story to something that prompted questions concerning wider society. 2. The Fateberg of Whitechapel Written and performed by Reece Connolly ‘Sewage never forgets’; the haunting motif from Connolly’s poem, written from the perspective of a fatberg travelling through the sewers under London, planning it’s revolution. In equal parts funny and grotesque, Connolly clearly has a talent for the gross. This ‘clot in the arteries of London’ tells us in a jovial tone how he plans to accomplish complete world domination; it’s insatiable hunger for more, it’s drive for consumption is potent and truly quite vile. Reminiscent of the famous 1958 film ‘The Blob’, this piece was funny, but certainly left you feeling a bit dirty, and wary of toilets and man hole covers. 3. Murder of Crows Presented by Stack 10 Theatre Written and performed by Ed Hartland ‘Murder of Crows’ was certainly one of the highlights of the evening. This story is about a man who in his youth kicked a crow to death and is now facing the crow’s vendetta. Hartland delivers a fantastic performance; damaged, frightened and very disturbing. His story telling was spot on, and he pulled the audience deeper and deeper into his own anxiety and horror. It’s easy to imagine this piece as a radio play, Hartland’s voice certainly has the power to compel. It seems this piece could easily be the next incarnation of Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’. 4. The Watching Eye Written by Dan Weatherer Performed by Ellie Pitkin ‘The Watching Eye’ tells the story of a couple who find themselves in a desperately creepy, remote cottage. In classical horror story style, strange things begin to happen and the wife is persuaded by the mirror to dispatch her husband, as an offering to the thing that lies buried beneath the foundations of the cottage. This felt like the most traditional of the pieces. Employing well known horror tropes, but it was certainly not clichéd. It reminded me of a mix between an old folklore and something H. G. Wells might’ve written. This piece had a reach to it; the re-burying of the evil thing under the house and the refusal to ever discuss what went on that night when the wife killed her husband with the fire poker and dismembered him gave the story an unfinished feel. I say unfinished in a good way, as if the story’s not over yet, there’s more horror to come. These things never stay buried for long after all. 5. Big Eyes Written by Liam Steward George Performed by Jessica Brindle ‘Big Eyes’ utilizes a classic fairytale and brings it screaming into modernity; a modern, horror version of Little Red Riding Hood. We follow the narrator over one evening as she encounters an unsavory suitor in a bar. Full of twists and turns, it’s hard to pin down the narrator character until very near the end when all becomes painfully clear that she was never in any danger of being the victim in this story. It was very enjoyable to see a character from classic folklore who is usually the prey, and is rescued by a man with an axe, become the hunter, the dominant evil force in the story. Performed with an almost saccharine charm by Jessica Brindle, it was funny, exciting and refreshing. 6. The Watcher Written and Performed by Joseph Willis The final piece of the evening, ‘The Watcher’ was a brilliant way to end the show. Decidedly unsettling and upsetting, this piece was delivered in an interview/interrogation style. The main character telling the story of how his family came to be haunted by a mysterious man and how it destroyed their lives forever. Willis’ has a heartbreaking sincerity to him and you can’t help but feel for him in his distress. The piece was written with a realism to it that made it all the more believable and therefore uncomfortable. It brought the night to a close with a powerful, dark ending. It was a good evening, with a nice mix of stories. Praise must be given to Ellie Pitkin for MC-ing with oodles of charm and humour. I would like to have seen more of a physical input into the performances. There were times when the words were very compelling but the lack of any physical action meant my eyes and mind sometimes wandered. But it was enjoyable, scary and memorable. Follow them on twitter to stay updated – @BlackshawUpdate Verity Williams is a poet, actor, playwright, dog enthusiast and committed gin drinker (not necessarily in that order). Born and raised in Dorset, Verity has a BA in English and Drama from Royal Holloway, an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa and an MA in Acting from East 15. @Verity_W_

Op-Ed Columnist: Mark Cuban’s Not Done Trolling Donald Trump

New Post has been published on https://usnewsaggregator.com/op-ed-columnist-mark-cubans-not-done-trolling-donald-trump/

Op-Ed Columnist: Mark Cuban’s Not Done Trolling Donald Trump

A few weeks after Trump took office, The New York Post reported that Steve Bannon had identified Cuban as the No. 1 threat for 2020 because he could appeal to Republicans and independents.

“Bannon is a smart man,” smiles Cuban, who has huddled with the strategist.

I met the voluble owner of the Dallas Mavericks at Jean-Georges in the Trump hotel at Columbus Circle, where he keeps an apartment. It seemed a bit dicey to be discussing a possible coup at the same elegant eatery where the president-elect tortured Mitt Romney by dangling the secretary of state job over sautéed frogs’ legs.

But Cuban is nothing if not brazen. He ambles into the three-star Michelin restaurant in his usual jeans and Adidas kicks, wearing a T-shirt someone had sent him that read “Stronger Than Lions.”

When I ask if he would run as an independent, he replies: “Probably, or a Republican. I’m registered as an independent. I mean, I’d rather do it as an independent.” But running as an independent has not proved successful in modern times. You just become a spoiler like Ross Perot. (Who is Cuban’s neighbor in Dallas, along with W.)

Cuban epitomizes a tantalizing question: Will Trump’s election open the floodgates to celebrities who are thinking, “Wow, if that dude can do it…,” and who can titillate the media by delivering what Cuban calls “headline porn,” or will it send voters scurrying back to more traditional pols?

The 59-year-old, who got rich with one of the first online streaming companies, has been described as “Trump without the crazy.” He calls Trump batty but has also written that it’s good to have “the edge,” when “people think you’re crazy and they are right, but you don’t care what they think.”

He gives free rein to his goofball side. He once bought a six-month supply of toilet paper at a store in Dallas to hedge against inflation. “I order 36 tubes of Theodent toothpaste at a time and they just stack up,” he says. “When I buy razor blades, I buy a load of them because it doesn’t take much space and they’re expensive.”

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He also confesses to having been naked in front of his computer, hitting the refresh button, waiting for his stock price to reach the point where he was a billionaire — a moment recreated by Cuban’s mentally unhinged doppelgänger on HBO’s “Silicon Valley,” Russ Hanneman.

“Look, there are people who are saying we don’t need another business person,” he says, sipping iced tea. “But it’s about what you do with it, what you learn, what you can contribute and what value you can add. I’d want to come in with proof of an agenda, ‘Here’s a health care solution and I’ve already paid my own money to have it scored.’

“They always say that people vote against what they didn’t like about the previous president, right? And I think he’s so ineffective, people will look for somebody who can get something done who’s not a politician. If that’s a celebrity, that’s just an easier platform to work from. The best example is tax reform, right?”

He says he would call the top 5,000 profitable companies and say: If I’m going to give you a 20 percent corporate tax rate, I’m going to need a commitment from you that you’re going to increase the wages of your lowest-paid workers.

“If you did that,” he says, “you’d be a hero.”

Asked if he would send the Mavericks’ former player Dennis Rodman to negotiate with Little Rocket Man, he replies, “Why not?”

Trump and Cuban are testosterone twins in some ways. Both savor poking elites and flouting convention. Both have owned sports teams and love making movie and TV cameos. Both say the government has conspired against them, Trump with the Deep State and Cuban when he fended off insider-trading charges filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2008.

But Cuban is more charitable. He recently lent his jet to the Mavericks’ point guard J. J. Barea to take emergency supplies to Puerto Rico. He is also fairer in business. Forbes said that on “Shark Tank,” Cuban had the best record of following through with the terms of a deal.

He is more reflective than Trump. In a 2012 blog post, he wrote that he regretted cracking a gay joke in an interview: “I think being the person I want to be includes not blurting out throwaway jokes about sexuality, race, ethnicity, size, disability or other things people have no say in about themselves.”

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In 2014 he came under pressure for a comment perceived as racially insensitive, saying while discussing bigotry, “If I see a black kid in a hoodie and it’s late at night, I’m walking to the other side of the street,” and if he sees a white guy who “has tattoos all over his face,” he’d do the same. He apologized to the family of Trayvon Martin.

But Cuban can empathize with Trump. “If you just put on the eyes of a sales guy and an entrepreneur who struggled a lot, that’s Donald Trump,” Cuban says. “He’s overselling all the time. Most people when they sell, they try to solve problems. Donald Trump is not a problem solver. Never was. Never will be. To Donald Trump, people are fungible. Where’s the list of entrepreneurs who say, ‘He mentored me, he helped me, he invested in me’?”

I note that Trump has trolled us both on Twitter, calling me a “neurotic dope” and Cuban an “arrogant, crude, dope” who is “not smart enough to run for president.”

“There are three Donald Trumps,” he says. “Donald Trump, the president. Donald Trump, the salesperson. Donald Trump, the troll. Trolls are going to troll.” Trump’s Twitter personality, Cuban says, is just like a guy “screaming at a sporting event.” (He himself has paid the N.B.A. hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines for screaming courtside.)

Cuban said during the primaries that he would accept a position as Hillary’s running mate or Trump’s. “I wasn’t a Hillary fan, by the way,” he says, but he was less of a Donald fan, so he campaigned for her and sat in the front row for the first debate.

Cuban likes to say whining is underrated, but what did he think of Hillary blaming Comey, Sanders, Obama, Biden, Putin?

“They didn’t see it coming at all,” he says of the arrogant Clinton camp. “I remember right before the election, they invited me to the party in Brooklyn. I’m like, are you kidding me? You do not plan the parade before you win the championship.

“In sports, matchups matter, right? Hillary was prepared to have a policy-against-policy matchup against a politician. She was not prepared to have a matchup against a movement.”

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He scoffs: “The Russians had no effect on the election. Look, if you spotted Donald Trump two pieces of bread and behind him was a refrigerator full of ham, he couldn’t collude with the Russians to make a ham sandwich. Right?”

Since both he and Trump had shows produced by Mark Burnett, I wonder if Cuban had ever pressed the producer to hand over that alleged compilation tape from “The Apprentice” with Trump’s sexist and racist comments. Yes, Cuban says, but Burnett told him he didn’t have such a tape.

His friendly relations with Trump frayed amid the campaign trolling. “Last time I talked to him was via email when he asked me why I went negative on him,” Cuban says. “And I sent him an email back saying, ‘At some point, you have to learn the issues.’ Does he really understand the ins and outs of health care? No, he mixes health insurance up with life insurance, right?” He sent Trump a congratulations email after he got elected, but has had no further contact.

Still, he says he would serve as a tech adviser to the White House if asked. “If China and Russia are able to advance their A.I. further than ours,” he says, “they’re going to kick our ass.”

Cuban always says he’s lucky and his anthem is Joe Walsh’s “Life’s Been Good.” He lives in a Dallas mansion with five wet bars, three kids and his wife, Tiffany, whom he describes as a “smart, funny and beautiful” and “a badass.” His wife lets him live like Tom Hanks in “Big.” “We’ve got a basketball dribble machine and there is a basketball court in the ballroom,” he says.

He did well, I say, with his samba to the “I Dream of Jeannie” theme on “Dancing With the Stars,” especially given that he had just had hip replacement surgery.

“I told my wife,” he says, “I don’t want to look back and say I would’ve, could’ve, should’ve.”

Maybe that’s what Cuban is thinking about 2020.

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This Tub, a 1923 Ford Model T Touring, Has Been in the Hynes Family Since Tom Hynes Built it After WWII

Brother.

When Tom “Red” Hynes went into the Navy in 1943, he was tooling around Los Angeles in what his son Rod calls a “bitchin’” ’29 Model A roadster. He served his country as a machinist’s mate on a destroyer escort; and when he mustered out, “the hot rod thing was hitting big-time,” Rod recounts. In that postwar hop-up frenzy, someone offered Tom $40 for his Ford’s body alone. “In those days, $50 could get you a complete, running A-bone out of a junkyard,” Rod says. Of course, Tom took the money, but then he found himself in need of new wheels—or, more specifically, a new body for the wheels he was left with.

Rather than build another roadster, though, Tom went in a very different direction, spending $15 on a ’23 Model T Touring body he found at a junkyard.

The first definition for the word value in our Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary refers to “a fair return or equivalent in goods, services, or money for something exchanged.” The fact that Rod Hynes is still bombing around in that same Tub—a term Rod spells in all uppercase letters as if shouting its name with pride—70-some years later tells us Tom got a helluva lot of value for his 15 bucks.

Especially since he was able to use much of his Model A in the T’s build. Tom narrowed the A framerails to accommodate the T body, and the Tub has “always had” the ’29’s rearend and a ’38 Ford industrial three-speed Top Loader transmission, says Rod. Up front Tom hung a filled and dropped axle in the stock location; it would later move out, suicide-style, after Tom started running the Tub at the lakes.

Tom’s initial plan was to build the car to compete with the “Roaring Roadsters” in the dirt bullrings of the California Roadster Association. He welded the Tub’s doors shut and stripped it for competition but soon realized the Tub would need to serve as daily transportation, “and he couldn’t have it both ways,” Rod says. So he put his CRA plans on the back burner and instead got his speed fix at the dry lakes on weekends, running with the Mojave Timing Association, SCTA, and Russetta as a member of the Road Dusters club.

Single-Stick Miller

The Tub has had a number of four- and eight-cylinder engines under its yellow hood. (And, yes, it’s always been yellow, or some shade of yellow, through three repaints over the years, Rod says.) Tom’s first engine was a Model B block stroked with a Model C crank and fitted with a single-cam Miller overhead conversion and two Winfield side-draft carburetors. It was with this motor that Tom hit 101 mph, his fastest speed on the lakes.

This is also the engine that was in the car when Tom Medley photographed the Tub for its July 1950 HOT ROD feature story, despite the March 1950 cover blurb calling out its “V-8 power plant.” Yes, you read that right. “Wally goofed,” Rod says. HRM Editor Parks meant to run the cover and feature story together, even commissioning a Rex Burnett cutaway illustration of the T, but they wound up separated with an issue in between.

And while the Tub was banger powered in Medley’s film, by the time the magazines came out, the blurb was true. In late 1949, the Tub received its first flathead, a V8/60 “that was one of Louie Senter’s Midget engines,” Rod says. At the time, Louie, co-founder of Ansen Automotive, was switching his Midgets to Offenhauser engines. His shop foreman, Bob Morton, tipped off Tom as to the engine’s availability. (In the small world of post-war hot rodding, Bob was a partner with George Rubio, whose ’29 roadster was the first highboy to break the 150-mph mark at the lakes. George, it turns out, was a cousin of Tom’s.)

The V8/60 was followed by a 296-inch Merc flathead that met its demise at the hands of one of Tom’s neighbors. “Dad didn’t mind letting people borrow it to have an evening of fun,” Rod remembers. “The neighbor brought it back with the rods hanging out of the motor. I guess he just decided it was ‘race time.’”

Tom’s reaction? “My dad was one of the coolest people I’ve ever known,” Rod says. “He had no enemies. Never heard anybody talk bad about him. Just too nice a guy, for the most part. So he didn’t react, didn’t come unhinged. He just got it home, started pulling it apart, and then figured out what motor’s going in it next. He was a racer. Shit happens. You do what you gotta do.”

Tom had a bone-stock, 265-inch Chevy small-block in the garage, though Rod doesn’t know why. “My dad was a four-banger and flathead man.” The SBC was just a short-timer, quickly replaced by a Pontiac Tempest four-cylinder.

The ex-Senter V8/60 has been in the Tub three times, Rod says, and that’s what’s in the car now. Rod’s younger brother Martin restored the Tub 25 years ago and rebuilt the 60 at that time. Rod figures the motor is due for another rebuild, having seen some 60,000 miles since the resto. “I need to put a new rope main seal in it. At 3,000 rpm on the freeway, I can’t keep oil in it. It goes through a quart every 300 miles.”

Passing of the Tub

An electrician by trade, Tom Hynes used the Tub as his daily transportation—unless it was garaged for an engine swap—between 1947 and 1965. “We lived in San Fernando, and he drove it to work every day to the Boylston Street Water and Power plant,” Rod says. “The only reason my brother and I wound up with it is because Dad couldn’t drive it anymore.” The cancer that would eventually claim Tom in 1987 made it increasingly difficult for him to drive the Tub, so he passed it to his sons in 1970, the year Rod graduated from high school.

As you would imagine, Rod’s memories of the Tub go back as far as he can recall. It was such an important part of his life, in fact, that he considers the Tub his “older brother.” He remembers bundling up for freezing-cold drives over The Grapevine on the way to the March Meet and dusty trips to El Mirage. For a time when he was getting his own Fuel Altered drag racing career off the ground (Rod’s well-known rides included the Coors Light Altered and its Quadzilla incarnation), he lived in a shop—with the Tub. “I had pulled it down to rebuild the Tempest engine, and not much happened with it for about three and a half years. I got the Tempest going, and then it became a thing for me to find dirt tracks to fool around in.”

Like his dad before him, Rod has long wanted to race a Sprint Car. And now, at 65, he’s hoping to put together a car to race in the dirt. “It’s an addiction/affliction, the racing, the four-wheeled monsters out there,” he admits. “Some people can just walk away, but I can’t do that. Been at it since I was born.”

He talks about his latest project, a ’27 roadster body he wants to put on a four-bar Sprint Car chassis and power with two Tempest bangers mounted in line. “It’ll be a 389, but as a straight-eight. I have three Tempest motors, the one from the Tub and two more. I just wanted to do something different.”

But the Tub will always be there, too. Its roots are deep. Rod clearly remembers a night back in 1960 when he realized even at a very young age how close the bonds were between him and this T: “My dad used to take the Tub over to Don Brown’s to let him make some laps in the dirt field near his house in Chatsworth. Don was a Sprint Car racer, an Indy racer, was an incredible sheetmetal man. He worked for A.J. Watson building Indy roadsters. I guess taking laps in the dirt in the Tub was a way he relieved stress.

“Anyway, in 1960 the Tub still had the big Merc in it. I was riding with Dad to Don’s house and we got pulled over by a cop at Laurel Canyon and San Fernando Mission Road. Dad was thinking he was going to get a ticket, but the cop said, ‘No, no, don’t worry about it. I just want to check out your car.’

“Dad opened the hood and the cop asked, ‘How much do you want for it?’ And my dad points to me and says, ‘It’s not mine, it’s his.’ It was at that moment that I realized this car would be mine someday.

“So the cop says to me, ‘How much?’ And I said, ‘$10,000.’ Well, the cop laughed and said, ‘That’s almost as much as we paid for our house. That’s obviously out of the question.’ And that’s when I knew how much the car meant to me.”

This ’23 T Tub has been in the Hynes family since Tom Hynes built it in 1946-1947. It’s still on the road and still being driven, now by Tom’s son, Rod.

Shortly after Tom Hynes came home from the Navy, he was offered $40 for the body on his hot rod Model A roadster—a lot of money for Henry’s tin in those days. In this photo from late 1946, he’s taking apart the car prior to delivering the body.

Tom built the first motor for the Tub using a Model B block that was bored, stroked, and fitted with a single-cam Miller OHV conversion and Winfield carbs.

In this 1947 photo, the chassis for the Tub is almost finished. Tom narrowed his Model A’s frame to fit the Model T body. The ’38 Ford Top Loader transmission and ’29 Model A rearend “have always been there,” Rod says.

Tom runs through the lights at El Mirage during a Mojave Timing Association meet on September 19, 1948. His best speed that day was 98 mph.

Here’s “Tommy” tuning the Miller banger at El Mirage, April 30, 1950. The car was good for 95 mph that day. His best speed with the Miller was 101.

George Essig’s photo of Tom (in the hat) and the Tub made the March 1950 HOT ROD cover, though the Tom-Medley-photographed feature wouldn’t run until the July 1950 issue. “Wally goofed,” Rod says. Whoever wrote the cover blurb also goofed, as the car was still banger powered when the picture was taken.

When the story “T Touring Transformed” finally ran, Medley’s photos were accompanied by this Rex Burnett cutaway illustration. It was reproduced again with “Heir-Vroom,” Gray Baskerville’s story on the Tub in the March 2000 HRM.

Gray also ran this photo of the finished Miller overhead in his March 2000 story. The “single-stick Miller” utilized an “SOHC/F-head conversion…a 4-inch bore, Robbins pistons, stroked Model C (4-5/8-inch) crank and two Winfield Model S sidedraft carbs,” he wrote.

In 1951, Tom and his wife, Margaret Louise (“Terry”), posed in the Tub on Bellevue Street in Los Angeles, near the family’s first home.

The first flathead to go into the Tub was the V8/60 Tom got from Louie Senter. It was replaced by this one, a 296-inch Merc that a neighbor blew up a couple years later.

There are no photos of the small-block Chevy that replaced the blown-up Merc, says Rod, partly because it wasn’t in the Tub for very long, and partly because his dad was a “four-banger and flathead man.” The SBC was soon swapped for this four-cylinder Tempest motor. (Photo: Steve Straw)

At the HRM 65th Anniversary show in Pomona, Tom Medley bumped into Rod and his brother Martin and told them this story about the Tub: “Tom, Wally [Parks], and my dad were all friends. Dad was good about ‘sharing’ the Tub with his friends, and on one particular evening he let Tom drive the Tub to an SCTA club meeting. One of the passengers was Wally, who was seated in the back passenger area. It was not really a soft ride back there, as there has always been only a piece of plywood over the rear spring perch. Tom was driving down one of the streets in the Silver Lake/Glendale/Los Angeles area and they hit a bump in the road. Said ‘bump’ was big enough that Wally was pitched out of the car onto the street, suffering a little road rash. This photo from Bonneville in 1955, with Wally leaning on the car talking with my dad, and whoever else is in the car with him, made me think of this story. Wally was probably reminiscing about the road rash incident he suffered while a passenger with Tom Medley.”

Tom shot this photo of Rod driving the Tub in 1981 on a 3/8-mile dirt oval at a Western Racing Association event at Indian Dunes. “I ran with vintage Sprint Cars and Midgets,” Rod says. “Dad kept waiting for me to tip it over as he thought the wire wheels would give up as hard as I was pitching it into a corner.”

Rod still likes sliding the Tub through the dirt, more than 35 years later. “I was in the dirt with it every chance I got,” he says. “That’s the most fun I can have.”

The Tub still wears the yellow Imron paint sprayed by Martin when he and Rod restored the hot rod 25 years ago. “It was the closest we could come to the shade Dad painted it,” Rod says.

It’s been rebuilt and massaged over the years, but this is the same ex-Louie Senter V8/60 Tom Hynes put in the Tub decades ago. It now wears Edmunds racing heads and a three-pot Electric & Carburetor Engineering intake mounting Stromberg 81s.

Tom originally mounted the dropped and filled front axle in the standard location but moved it out in front of the crossmember, suicide style, after running the Tub at the lakes.

Juice brakes have always been on the Tub. Tom installed hydraulic binders from a Studebaker; Rod swapped them “quite a long time ago” for ’40 Ford components, he says. “They’re easier to get.”

While the shift lever and handbrake are leftover items from Tom’s Model A, he replaced the Ford steering with an assembly from a ’40 Willys.

The dash is home to a motley assortment of meters, including a Kong gas pressure gauge and a Ford amp gauge.

Rod ran into Gray Baskerville at the Goodguys drag race in Pomona in 1999, and the two got to talking about the Tub and how it had been in the Hynes family since 1947. That was the impetus for Gray’s March 2000 piece about the car, 50 years after it appeared on HRM’s cover. Fathers figure so prominently in this story that the button on Rod’s hat, a tribute to our ol’ dad, is truly fitting.

The post This Tub, a 1923 Ford Model T Touring, Has Been in the Hynes Family Since Tom Hynes Built it After WWII appeared first on Hot Rod Network.

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