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Monthly Archives: April 2014

Can Sarah Palin revive the Friday the 13th series? You Betcha!

29 Tuesday Apr 2014

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WARNING:  If you’ve never seen the original 1980 Friday the 13th film, this post contains spoilers.

Pumpkin Person previously blogged about my idea for continuing the Friday the 13th series, but now there’s word that a Friday the 13th reboot is being planned.  In other words, they’re not planning on continuing from the original Friday the 13th series or even from the 2009 reboot by Marcus Nispel, but instead are planning on starting over a second time.  One of the problems with the 2009 remake in my opinion is that unlike the very first Friday the 13th film in 1980, the 2009 reboot did not include much of  Mrs. Voorhees (Jason’s mother), the woman who started it all.   The film makers assumed that Friday fans just wanted more Jason, and we do, but if you’re going to start all over, you have to honor the genius of the original film.

What made the original 1980 Friday the 13th so brilliantly ironic was that the most graphic, brutal, and creative murders that most American audiences had ever seen at the time were being committed by an apple pie baking all American mom (Mrs. Voorhees) played brilliantly by Betsy Palmer.   The fact that her son would go on to become one of the most prolific and brutal killers in the history of fiction, only added to her legend.

No one could ever replace Palmer in that iconic role, but a good remake is not about recreating what’s already been done, but creating an alternative version.  The new Mrs. Voorhees should be similar in some ways, but also bring something new to the table.

Enter Sarah Palin.  Who better to play the mother of the hockey masked forest dwelling Jason than the self-described Pit Bull-like hockey mom from woodsy Alaska.  Like Mrs. Voorhees who wanted Camp Crystal lake closed because of the poor supervision of her disabled son, Palin is also an advocate for special needs children, and like the ax wielding bow and arrow shooting Mrs. Voorhees, the outdoor hunting and fishing enthusiast, and rugged bootstrapping conservative Palin, looks like she could find her way around a campground, hunting socially liberal pot smoking sexually active teenagers who lack Republican family values.

This may sound like a joke but I’m deadly serious.  Palin, with her trademark Alaska folksiness,  against a dark forest lit only by full moon, could be horror gold.  They may need to put her in a couple padded sweaters and high heel boots to make her look more intimidating, but she could be perfect in the role, and casting the most admired conservative woman in America as a homicidal maniac would create buzz for the franchise, not to mention bring Palin a whole new non-political fan base.  But if Palin’s not interested, I suspect lookalikes Tina Fey and Julianne Moore might be.  

 

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Media engages in dark speculation as Lindsay Lohan ends dark docuseries with bombshell

22 Tuesday Apr 2014

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On Sunday Lindsay Lohan ended the first (and possibly last) season of her deliciously dark docuseries on OWN with a bombshell.  She stated that the reason she had behaved so unreliably on the show (sleeping in until the afternoon, being late for scheduled events) was because she had a miscarriage, and was in such physical and emotional pain, she often couldn’t move.  As Pumpkin Person watched her tell the story, I had an ominous feeling, worried that the haters, skeptics and evil vultures would accuse her of lying to excuse away her bad behavior and trying to get sympathy and publicity in the process.  It’s no surprise that anonymous internet message board posters would talk trash, but my  darkest fears came to fruition when even mainstream media figures like  Sharron Osbourne of CBS’s The Talk said  “she’s making it up” adding “she probably had diarrhea or something.”    TMZ also piled on, claiming that Lindsay had lied so much over the years that it was reasonable to question the story.

As the media world continues to fragment into hundreds of TV channels and zillions of blogs, media figures must get more and more outrageous and extreme to stay relevant in such a competitive landscape.  Although there have always been skeptics and cynics, and Lohan has certainly earned a lot of the skepticism she attracts, in the past people would have been more circumspect about  expressing their skepticism about such a sensetive issue.  But that era is long dead.  These are dark days in media land and it’s a very scary time to be famous.

Pumpkin Person loved Lindsay’s docuseries and I admire her for allowing such an unsanitized look at her life, completely surrendering the editing process.   Most celebrities control their image so aggressively that it was very refreshing to see a celebrity actually allow such a raw look at her life, showing the good, the bad, and the oh so ugly, and the show’s haunting atmosphere and dark tone was the icing on the cake.  But instead of praising her for her courage in offering such an unfiltered look at her life, so many are trying to tear her apart.

Pay no attention to the haters Lindsay.  As your mentor Oprah preaches, what you focus on expands.  Constructive criticism is great, but the haters will overwhelm your psyche, contaminating your very soul.  Instead focus on the new movie you are trying to make, Inconceivable.  Hopefully it will have a dark theme so Pumpkin Person can blog about it.    

 

The Dark Hours (2005). The best Canadian horror film?

19 Saturday Apr 2014

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Directed by Paul Fox, The Dark Hours is a haunting tour de force.  It’s the type of film you watch while curled up all alone on the couch with a thick cup of hot chocolate on a cold Canadian night.  It’s a film you just get lost in, hypnotized by the slow pace, atmospheric score, and eerie, original, non-linear storytelling.  The film oozes with atmosphere and is superbly well cast and acted.

The story revolves around forensic psychiatrist Samantha Goodman (Kate Greenhouse) and her troubled relationships with her low income husband, parasitic sister, very stupid party crasher (Dov Tiefenbach) and her terrifying patient, Harlan Payne (Aidan Devine), a tall bearded epileptic charismatic gay ax murderer.  Greenhouse is uncannily believable in the part, reminding me of every hyper-educated woman I have ever known.  There’s a familiarity about all of the characters.  We learn just enough about each of them to know the type and recognize them as people we’ve fleetingly known.  Dov Tiefenbach (who Friday the 13th fans will remember from Jason X) gives one of the most fascinating performances I have ever witnessed.

Slasher fans may be disappointed by the film’s slow pace and artsy ambiguous narrative structure and some viewers feel confused or even cheated by the time it ends.  Aside from one gratuitously disgusting scene involving a finger, and a stylishly bloody scene involving a nail, the film is much more a psychological thriller than a splatter film, and unfolds like a group therapy session.

But there is evil in this movie.  Not of the demonic otherworldly variety, but the darkness of human nature. 

Rob Zombie’s Michael Myers probably had an IQ around 80

17 Thursday Apr 2014

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I previously blogged about how Rob Zombie’s Michael Myers was largely inspired by Henry Lee Lucas and to a lesser extent Otis Toole.  It’s interesting to note that Lucas had an IQ of 87 and Toole had an IQ of 75.  Averaging the IQ’s of the two men who inspired the character gives an IQ of roughly 80, which sounds believable.  An IQ of 80 implies Myers was brighter than about 10% of Americans, but duller than 90%.  Historically IQ was measured in children by dividing one’s mental age by one’s chronological age and then multiplying by 100 to remove the decimal point.  So an IQ of 80 implies that 10 year old Myers had the mental ability of an 8 year old (8/10 = 0.8 * 100 = 80).  Nothing 10 year old Myers did seemed beyond the mental capacity of an average 8 year old.

Now it’s likely that he got older his IQ deteriorated because schizophrenia is known to cause acute drops in IQ.  Rob Zombie said this about the mental state of Myers in RZ Halloween II:

I love the fact that he’s carrying this mask around; this mask is significant to him because he’s had it since he was a little kid. And it’s deteriorating. And in a way, we can literally make the connection between the mask and his state of mind. As the mask deteriorates, so does he. His brain is rotting away and in the sequel he’s becoming more and more insane.

 

Despite his deteriorating mental state, it’s unlikely that Myers’ IQ ever sunk too low, because he hallucinates his mother telling him that his psychiatrist (who wrote a book about him), got rich off of their pain.  It takes a certain amount of intelligence to know when you’re being exploited and Myers, even at his most demented, still exceeded that threshold.  As Zombie explained in the director’s commentary of part 2, that scene showed Myers was not quite as dumb as he appeared.

Evil media vultures coming for Lindsay Lohan

17 Thursday Apr 2014

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This beautiful image belongs to http://www.dmitrimarkine.com/  I found it here.

According to the book The Wisdom of Psychopaths by Kevin Dutton, the media is one of the three most psychopathic professions, with only CEOS and lawyers ranking higher.  Without getting too technical, “psychopath” is basically the scientific term for people who are born evil.  The term is sometimes used interchangeably with “sociopath”  but should not be confused with “psychotic”, which refers to people who are severely delusional.

Despite the fact that Lindsay Lohan is an addict in a very vulnerable emotional state, the media (including the blogosphere) is flooding the public with every negative story they can dream up.  Headlines abound about her docuseries on OWN being cancelled (not true, the network is running all 8 episodes it ordered and there were never any plans to produce more) and about her tanking ratings.  While the ratings have been disappointing, most episodes have been above what OWN used to achieve in that time slot,  They are even trying to claim her recent guest appearance on Two Broke Girls was a ratings disaster.  Instead of gushing about the fact that Lindsay’s docuseries is OWN’s highest rated docuseries among the coveted young women demographic, they are cooking up any headline they can to portray her as a loser.  Even though there’s some truth to these stories, the media spins it in a way that amplifies the negative even though they know she’s a vulnerable addict who can relapse at anytime and has probably already done so.

This demonstrates that the media is full of psychopaths.  Even though they are intelligent enough to know that all this negative press is potentially devastating to Lindsay’s recovery, they continue to unleash it because negative stories about Lindsay Lohan drive traffic to their websites and they feel no remorse for the harm they are doing to a human being.  Such cold blooded opportunism is the defining trait of psychopathy.  As Oprah told Lindsay in the docuseries, the vultures are waiting to pick your bones, and if I were you, I wouldn’t let them have my bones.

Oprah knows of what she speaks.  The same vultures came for Oprah when she started her network a few years ago.  Eager to see the world’s most successful woman fall flat on her face, the public was bombarded with headlines about OWN’s disastrous ratings, but instead of letting the vultures have her bones, Oprah pulled herself up by her bootstraps and turned OWN into a success.  I hope Lindsay can find the fortitude to do the same with her own life.  That’s why when Lindsay publicly claimed Oprah has become a great mentor to her, I think there’s some truth to that. Hopefully Oprah has advised Lindsay not to read the negative press.  For if there is one ideology Oprah has preached for years, it’s that what you focus on expands.

Rosie O’Donnell makes dark comments about Lindsay Lohan’s dark docuseries on OWN

16 Wednesday Apr 2014

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See also: respectable ratings for Lindsay Lohan’s dark docuseries on OWN

Rosie O’Donnell went on twitter yesterday to say “The Lindsay Lohan show is a tragedy – on every level.  I hope one day she gets sober for real and watches these episodes – n sees what we all do.”  Lindsay’s docuseries is television and its best and especially enjoyable for someone with my dark sensibilities, but Rosie O’Donnel is an extremely sensitive depression prone person who likely struggles to handle a show so raw.  Back in 1999 she was so traumatized by the Columbine school shooting that she transformed her wildly popular syndicated talk show into a polarizing anti-gun platform, alienating many conservative Americans and getting into a brutal televised confrontation with pro-gun actor Tom Sellek.

It’s interesting that Rosie did not attack Oprah in her comments about Lindsay’s docuseries.  As many will recall, Rosie O’Donnell also had a show on Oprah’s OWN network from 2011-2012.  The show was actually very good, especially once Rosie abandoned the comedy and engaged in deep conversations but it did poorly in the ratings.  This was mostly because back in early 2012, very few people were watching OWN (ratings are much higher today) and Rosie had a mediocre time slot (weeknights at 7 pm), but it was also because Rosie’s obsession with gay topics was uncomfortable, even for gay viewers, and especially for the older middle class women who so loved her syndicated show and were tuning in to the OWN show for the same wholesome family entertainment.  It seemed Rosie was trying to overcompensate for not being visibly gay in her syndicated talk show by being hyper-gay in the OWN talk show.  I also don’t think there’s a huge audience for the type of in-depth intelligent conversation that Rosie was so good at which is why you don’t see much of it on commercial television.

Sadly Rosie’s talk show on OWN had to be cancelled because the ratings were nowhere near high enough to justify the eight figure salary Rosie was receiving, especially for a new network that was struggling at the time.  In fact had Rosie’s talk show not been cancelled, the network would have likely collapsed.  After the cancellation, many were expecting Rosie to badmouth Oprah as she had badmouthed Barbara Walters (Rosie had a brief gig co-hosting the View back in 2006-2007) in Rosie’s dark memoir Celebrity Detox and other shows.  But so far that hasn’t happened, probably because Rosie’s show on OWN was cancelled for business reasons (low ratings) while Rosie quit The View for personal reasons, despite delivering the show record ratings and really putting it on the map as a cultural force. 

Another idea for continuing the Friday the 13th series

16 Wednesday Apr 2014

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Recently I blogged about how the Friday the 13th series could be continued. My idea was to ignore the 2009 remake and pick up the story after part 4, by having parts 5 through 11 be explained as dream or hallucination by Tommy Jarvis.  This would make sense because Tommy was clearly descending into madness at the end of part 4 so it makes sense that he would hallucinate, and the events of parts 5 through 11 were so incredible that they seem outside of the film’s reality.  Some fans told me they would be unhappy to see parts 5 through 11 dismissed, but I think they would get over it because the real glory days of the series were the early 1980s, before Jason became a zombified body-hopping caricature of himself.

So if parts 5 through 11 never happened, how do you realistically and credibly continue the story after Tommy so unequivocally killed Jason at the end of part 4?  I had suggested that Jason could have a secret son who emerges to take over, but was told that idea was cliched and unoriginal.

So here’s another idea: Jason never died.  At first this sounds ridiculous because we saw the machete sink deep into Jason’s head at the end of part 4, however what people forget is that Jason is a hydrocephalic which means that his cranium is enlarged by cerebrospinal fluid, not brain mass.  This makes it possible that the machete never impaled his brain and thus never killed him.

Instead Jason was taken to the hospital and after ten years in a coma, spent another ten or more years being treated by Ginny Field (played by Amy Steel), the psychology major and heroine of Friday the 13th part 2.  Ginny, now in her 50s, is a psychiatrist who also does part time therapy with Tommy Jarvis (now in his 40s) where they discuss his hallucinations and nightmares (parts 5 through 11).  Ginny concludes that the reason Tommy had visions and dreams of Jason becoming an body hopping zombie is because he psychologically needs to imagine Jason as a demon to overcome the guilt he has for so badly hurting Jason.

Yes, Tommy feels guilty for what he did to Jason because even though Jason is a homicidal maniac, Jason has always been mentally handicapped so he didn’t know any better and was only trying to avenge his mother’s death.  Ginny feels that Tommy can make it up to Jason by helping Jason integrate into society.  Ginny feels that after years of treatment, it’s now safe to let Jason out, as long as he stays away from the woods (an obvious trigger).  She arranges for Jason to move in with Tommy and work at a local grocery store pushing shopping carts.

Some of the teenagers at the grocery store figure out that their mentally disabled co-worker Jason is the infamous Camp Crystal lake mass-murderer from before they were born.  They are planning a camping trip on Friday the 13th and wouldn’t it be exciting to bring along Jason himself.  Jason gets into the van with the teenagers and they drive deep into the dark woods to find a remote place to set up a tent…the moon is full.  Can Tommy and Ginny find them before something bad happens?

The IQ’s of crime leaders

15 Tuesday Apr 2014

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In the book A Question of Intelligence, author Daniel Seligman notes that mob leader John Gotti had a tested IQ of 110.  Seligman found this figure to be quite plausible because criminals average IQ’s around 90, so an IQ of 110 was enough for Gotti to climb to the top of the crime world.  Similarly, Charles Manson had a tested IQ in the 109-121 range.  The people who killed for Manson probably had IQ’s around 90, but Manson being about 19-31 points higher, could easily manipulate them. 

The IQ’s of U.S. presidents

14 Monday Apr 2014

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According to the book A Question of Intelligence by Daniel Seligman, the IQ’s of Richard Nixon and JFK were both tested in school at 143 and 119, respectively.  The IQ of George W. Bush is not known, but he scored 1206 on his SAT back in the days when the test was much harder.  Since the reading and math skills measured by the SAT relate closely to intelligence,  psychologist Linda Gottfredson converted his SAT score  into an IQ equivalent of 125.  There’s some speculative information about Obama’s intelligence, but the IQ’s of Nixon, JFK, and GWB are the best established.  Based on this very small sample, U.S. presidents have an average IQ of about 130 with a standard deviation of about 12, compared to the general U.S. population that has an average IQ of about 100 with a standard deviation of about 15. So although presidents tend to be much smarter than Americans as a whole, their IQ’s are less variable.  In fact extrapolating from these statistics, one might expect that the smartest president in American history had an IQ of around 154 and the dullest had an IQ of around 106.

An average IQ of 130 is extremely high, putting one above nearly 98% of Americans.  To put this number in perspective, Harvard, the most prestigious university in the entire world, also has an average IQ of 130. Even the dullest president in U.S. history was likely smarter than two thirds of Americans of his era.  The high IQ’s of U.S. presidents demonstrates that America is meritocracy and that smart people get to the top.

Was Rob Zombie’s Michael Myers based on Henry Lee Lucas?

13 Sunday Apr 2014

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In an interview with Vanity Fair, Rob Zombie was asked who his favorite non-fictional serial killer was.  He replied:

I love ’em all. Not, you know, as people or anything, but they all make for great stories. I think Henry Lee Lucas is probably one of my favorites.

He added:

He and his buddy Ottis Toole were just a couple of deranged rednecks. But given his upbringing, y’know, it’s just not that surprising. Some of these guys, you think, “What would make a person do something like this?” And then you read about their upbringing and you’re like, “Oh, okay, well I guess that might do it.”

He also said:

 I’ve read so many books about these guys, I start confusing their backstories. But with Henry and Ottis, I remember it was pretty horrible. Stripper moms, alcoholic dads, I think they were both forced to dress up like girls at some point.  Henry killed his mom and raped her corpse, and Ottis had a thing for arson and cannibalism. They were into some really perverted stuff, like having sex with dead animals and that kinda thing.

So we can see several similarities between Zombie’s Michael Myers and Henry Lee Lucas.  In addition to both being serial killers, both were deranged rednecks with stripper moms and alcoholic father (figures) and both were emasculated by a parent figure.  Henry was made to dress like a girl by his mother and Michael’s mother’s boyfriend mocked Michael for seeming gay, predicting Michael would cut off his penis and change his name to “Michelle”.  It’s unclear if Michael ever had sex with a dead animal, but his sister joked about him having sexual relations with the pet rat he killed.

It is tempting to conclude that a terrible parenting causes one to become a serial killer, but it could be that the children of terrible parents become serial killers for genetic reasons.  If psychosis and psychopathy are genetic, then the parents of the criminally insane would be expected to manifest these same traits though to a much lesser degree, but the bad genes, and not the bad parenting, may be to blame for their kids becoming serial killers.

Although Zombie focuses a lot on Michael’s bad upbringing, he ultimately explains in the clip below that bad upbringing was not responsible for Michael’s cold, robotic, merciless nature.  Michael was just born that way as Lady Gaga would say. His brain was wired differently.