Tag Archives: Comedy

color me skeptical.

I’m seriously concerned about the long term financial health of our country. Still, I suspect that the movie this trailer is advertising is a bit one sided. (For one thing it looks like there hasn’t been a  Republican president since Reagan. I seem to remember two with three terms between them.)

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Sunday Night Movie:Rustlers’ Rhapsody

Many people know that I am not a big fan of the Western. If you look through my 240 plus DVD and Blu-ray collection the list of Westerns is as Elrond might put it, ‘thin.’ I have just a few in my library. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (subject of a previous Sunday Night Movie), High Noon, and Unforgiven. Given such a limited interest in Westerns it would be surprising to most to find Rustlers’ Rhapsody in my collection.

This film from 1985 is a wonderful send-up of the Western genre. While I am not a big fan of the genre I am enough of a movie buff to know it’s conventions, tropes, and cliches. Rustlers’ Rhapsody plays on these perfectly.

The film starts Tom Berenger as Rex O’Herlihan, The Singing Cowboy. Rex rides from town to town, fighting to bad guys, saving the good guys, and always, always winning. He’s an upright, straight-shooting, hand-shooting no killing kind of hero. Befriended by Peter, the town drunk of Oakridge, Rex sets about his karma of saving the poor — and foul-smelling — sheep herders from the evil cattle baron, played with more than just a swish by Andy Griffith. Rex proves more than a match for the villains as he knows all their tricks. You see, it’s the same cliched attack that happened in every western town to every hero that stands up for the good guys. This time is different though. The Bad guys have found an evilly ingenious way to foil the good guy, one that Rex  — or any western good guy — has faced before.

This film did not find an audience in 1985 and was released just this one time on DVD, but if you are a fan of the silly zany comedies that came out of the 80s and love a good poke at cliches and overused tropes, give this a Netflix spin.

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Sunday Night Movie:I Sell The Dead

So this week’s movie was a bit of a gamble for me as it was something I had never seen and further more was something I had heard little about.

I started the Sunday Night Movie habit as a way of utilizing my movie collection. I had realized one day that I rarely watched so many movies in my collection and when I did I tended to watch the same ones over and over. I started Sunday Night Movie as a regular event to enjoy those movies that I love but so rarely watched.

This is not one of those movies.

I Sell The Dead is a story about two men in the resurrection business in what I presume is the 17th or 18th century. Arthur Blake (Dominic Monaghan) is partner and former apprentice to Willie Grimes in the resurrection business. That is they steal corpses and sell them to doctors. Their lives take a dramatic turn down a path of bump in the night events when they discover that digging up some corpses leads to a much more active product than the pair is accustomed to finding.  They have a number of serious threats in their wretched lives, There Dr. Quint (Angus Scrimm, Best know as the Tall Man in Phantasm.) who is extorting their services without compensation by threats of the law. Then there’s the House Of Murphy a rival gang of resurrectionists with a tendency for murder and mayhem, and of course there’s the very active undead who are always ungrateful for being dug up or unboxed.

This movie is supposed to be a comedy and as such one is expected to give it more leeway that a traditional horror film or dramatic feature for suspension of disbelief, however this film had too many flaws for me to do that. There are endless anachronisms, historical errors, and a general failure to understand just what it was that resurrection men did. (They did not sell bodies to doctors for their general practice, they sold them to schools and teaching doctors for study, instruction, and research.) In the end this movie was simply too much of a mess with too little plot and too much gag to work as a film.

I recommend pass if someone offers a viewing to you.

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Political Monsters

So, off the top of my head here are some correlations between select politicians and the D&D monster that best represent. This is list is for from exhaustive.

Bill Clinton: Come on this was a gimme, a Satyr. Nothign else fits this horny old goat.

Hillary Clinton: A harpy.

Sarah Palin: No doubt about it in my eyes, a Succubus. All charm and deception while she bleed you dry.

Barack Obama: A Rakshasa The shaping changing tiger that is smart, charming, and deadly. You never know exactly who he is cause he’s never in he real form.

Joe Biden: His’s the Gnome.

more when I think of them.

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