YouTube Finds :: Detonating a Nostalgia Bomb! All the Twisted, Mixed Up Hits of HRB's Goofy Gold (1978)

Video courtesy of DragonflyEnt.

I remember being mesmerized by this promo when it broke in 1978 on the old family Zenith, which soon led me and my mother (being led by me) to the Gibsons, where yours truly, plopped down $9.98 of my own money and purchased my very first album, Goofy Gold, an 8-track, and I wore that thing out. Wore. It. Out.

Complete track listing:

Monster Mash – Bobby Pickett
Purple People Eater – Sheb Wooley
Wooly Bully – Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs
Running Bear – Johnny Preston
Beep Beep – The Playmates

Battle of New Orleans – Johnny Horton
Charlie Brown – The Coasters
Pepino the Italian Mouse – Lou Monte
Big Bad John – Jimmy Dean
Yakety Yak – The Coasters

Alley Oop – Hollywood Argyles
Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor – Lonnie Donegan
Transfusion – Nervous Norvus
Mr. Custer – Larry Verne
Western Movies – The Olympics

Chantilly Lace – The Big Bopper
King Kong (Your Song) – Pickett and Ferrara
Hello Muddah! Hello Fadduh! – Allan Sherman
Ahab, The Arab – Ray Stevens
Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport – Rolf Harris

Goofy? You bet. But bad? Oh, HELL no. A novelty record put out by HRB Music, I hadn't thought about the album in years, which is sad, because it was kinda the soundtrack of my childhood for a spell -- and King Kong Your Song was my anthem. (I wish I had purchased the double album because the odds of its survival would have been more viable.) But after stumbling upon this vid in a YouTube hole, a nostalgia bomb detonated inside my brain and I've been feverishly trying to put it all back together ever since. And I'm happy to report that I did remember all the words to Lonnie Donegan'd ditty on bubblegum and bedposts, "My red corpuscles are in mass confusion" could quite possibly be the greatest song lyrics of ever, and I finally, FINALLY, deciphered the refrain from Western Movies, Wham! Bam! Shoot 'em up, Pow! Huzzah!

Mayhem and Mass Murder Most Satisfying :: A Beer-Gut Reaction to Mats Stenberg's Excellent Norwegian Slasher Film Sequel, Cold Prey II (2008)

Our sequel today kicks off almost exactly where the last film checked out, with the lone and nearly frozen-solid survivor of the Jotunheimen massacre being picked up by the authorities and taken to a hospital in the nearby town of Otta. Now, the hospital in question is on the cusp of being shutdown, which explains the minimal staff of one doctor, Herman (Såheim), one resident, Camilla (Rovik), and one nurse, Audhild (Mørck), and the grand total of (now) only three patients.

Here, the wrung-out but hyper-vigilant Jannicke (Berdal) recaps her tale of woe; how she and four friends went out snowboarding, and how one of them broke an ankle; and so, they sought refuge in a seemingly abandoned ski lodge, not knowing there was a homicidal Beardy McWeirdo (Melby) squatting in the basement, who quickly introduces himself, and his ice axe, to these stranded travelers and picks them off one by one, setting up a final showdown as he disposes the bodies in a deep glacier crevice, only to wind up being Final Girl’d most righteously and deposited into the chasm instead.

 
Chief Constable Einar (Schaanning) is a little dubious of this debriefing, but the patient was brought in covered in blood that obviously wasn’t hers, and she was found with one hand frozen to the killer’s ice axe, also drenched in blood; and so, he leads an expedition out onto the glacial ice where Jannicke’s gruesome account proves true when they recover all the bodies from the crevice, including the killer. And as Jannicke tries to make peace with what happened, with Camilla lending an extremely sympathetic ear, and while Einar tries to piece together the mystery of Beardy McWeirdo's origins (-- and pins several more missing persons cases on him), turns out the killer wasn’t as dead as everyone thought due to the extremely cold conditions, who is then completely resuscitated by the unwitting hospital staff – a decision everyone will soon come to regret.

Cold Prey a/k/a Fritt Vilt (2006) was a pleasant surprise when I unearthed it on Hulu several years ago. It’s not very often you find any kind of intelligence in a slasher movie, and even rarer still to find an actual intelligent slasher film; and leave it to the Scandinavians to go 2 for 2 on that front as Cold Prey II a/k/a Fritt Vilt II (2008) proved just as suspenseful, just as fun, just as intelligent and, in the end, just as entertaining as the first one.

American slasher movies and there tropes were an obvious influence, here, with huge nods to Friday the 13th (1980), The Prey (1984), and especially Halloween II (1981), what with the hospital setting and all. Cold Prey was directed by Roar Uthaug, who also directed the eco-disaster flick, The Wave (2015), and is currently helming the new Tomb Raider reboot due in 2017. Mats Stenberg took over for the sequel, marking his directorial debut, and while the film is a lot of fun once the blood starts hitting the fan after the killer is revived, I found myself actually enjoying the early stages of the sequel more as everyone dealt with the ramifications of the first massacre. I loved watching Jannicke deal with her fear and PTSD, and the procedural vibe of the discovery, clean-up, and initial autopsies and the evidence gathering on the victims from the first movie. It’s rare that we ever get to see such an in depth look at the aftermath of one of these cinematic mass-murders, but I found it utterly fascinating and would kinda love to see a whole slasher movie told from this after-action angle. 

Played on a razor’s edge of raw emotion with a psychotic twinge, Ingrid Bolsø Berdal’s Jannicke is probably one of the greatest, unheralded Final Girls of all time as she tries and fails to convince everyone of the danger they’re all in, and later, trying to keep as many of the others alive as she can and out of danger. (Hard to do when you’re doped to the gills and initially restrained to your hospital bed.) Which all leads to a final showdown between predator and prey that had me a bit nervous as the climax started to unravel but the ultimate resolution had me grinning from ear to ear in a fool me once, and you will never, ever fool me again, sense.

Since the first Cold Prey I had seen Berdal as one of the unfortunate tourists who falls prey to the horde of Toxic Crusaders in The Chernobyl Diaries (2012), and as Atalanta, an Amazonian warrior and one of Hercules’ posse in Hercules (2014), which was pretty great if you haven’t seen it yet, and where she teamed up with Uthaug again for the period piece, Escape (2012), where she plays the psychotic leader of a band of thieves. And while Berdal has commented that she enjoyed playing Jannicke, she has also stated she is done with the character. And while there is a Cold Prey III (2010), which I have not seen -- yet, my understanding is it’s a prequel to tell the origin story of Beardy McWeirdo, which is touched on a bit in this movie, and makes me very happy because the blunt finality of the ending of Cold Prey II is absolutely perfect and I hope they never, ever ruin it. 

Look, there’s only two kinds of slasher movies in this world: good ones, and bad ones. And those can be divided into two subcategories where we either root for the victims to survive or encourage the killers to put the gathered cannon fodder out of our collective cinematic misery. And while there are hundreds of examples of the latter, the former are really quite rare ever since the initial wave broke in the early 1980s (-- the Scream franchise a notable exception), which is why I found the Cold Prey films to be a breath of cool fresh air in an otherwise stagnating genre. These films are about the characters and the dire situation they find themselves in, not about how they die – in fact, you don’t want any of these people to die; a welcome relief for me anyways, in a genre that is usually double-stacked to the brim with irredeemable idiots, outright pricks, dudebros, hos, and skanky douche-nozzles, which kinda makes us root for the killers only by default. 

Thus, these Cold Prey films may test the patience of some viewers (-- the first kill in the sequel doesn’t occur until the film is nearly half over), but me, hell, I like an occasional change of pace when it comes to my body count pictures. As always, your spilled blood type may vary.

Cold Prey II (2008) Fantefilm :: Shout! Factory / EP: Magne Lyngner, Thomas Løberg, Martin Sundland / P: Kristian Sinkerud / AP: Roar Uthaug / D: Mats Stenberg / W: Thomas Moldestad, Martin Sundland, Roar Uthaug / C: Anders Flatland / E: Jon Endre Mørk / M: Magnus Beite / S: Ingrid Bolsø Berdal, Marthe Snorresdotter Rovik, Johanna Mørck, Fridtjov Såheim, Per Schaanning, Rune Melby

Twitter Me This, Boils and Ghouls! Also, Another Blogathon Alert.

It took me nearly four years to truly embrace it, but embrace it I finally have. Yeah, when I first got lured into the Twitterverse like some errant child chasing the promise of a puppy into a stranger's van, I found the whole experience to be a bit stalkery and too constrictive. But now. Now I get it. I think. Anyhoo, if you enjoy my ramblings and reviews here at the Brewery, I encourage you to also follow my Twitter account, found in one easy step by clicking here, as well. There, you will find update alerts on all our consortium of blogs, and running commentaries on whatever I'm watching, including pics and snap-vids to use as evidence to back up all outlandish claims and observations for things like Doctor Strange (1978), Jaws 3 (1983), and Thunderball (1963) plus a whole lot more with a whole lot more to come. 

And while we're on the subject of shameless plugs, I've also answered the call to participate in The Great Villain Blogathon for the fine folks at The Speakeasy, Silver Screenings, and Shadows and Satin. And while the film I chose is technically chock-full of villains, I will be focusing on George Kennedy's take on Red Leary in Michael Cimino's seminal rural crime caper, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974). Cannot wait to dig into it.

I'm participating. Are you? 

The Fine Art of Sequential Credits :: Scenes From a Mall in Amy Heckerling's Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)

 ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___

 "What are you, people? On dope?"

 ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ 

And the closing coda:

 
What John Landis and Animal House (1978) did for college comedy, cinematically speaking, Amy Heckerling did for high school shenanigans with Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), though the director claimed she was shooting for something more akin to American Graffiti (1973), a nostalgia bomb, so that "if you woke up and found yourself living in the movie, you'd be happy. I wanted that kind of feel." 

And on that front, capturing the zeitgeist of the early 1980s and mall culture, she most definitely succeeds, epitomized in those opening (and closing credits), to the driving beat of the Go-Gos (and later, Oingo Boingo), giving us a tour of the Sherman Oaks Galleria (-- alas, no longer with us after an earthquake in 1994), focusing on the food court and the arcade as the characters we are about to meet work or meander around.

The screenplay was written by Cameron Crowe, adapted from his book Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story (1981), where the freelance writer for Rolling Stone went undercover for a year at a San Diego high school and documented his experiences. At first, Crowe was going to make himself a character in the book, but instead shifted focus to a con-man (Damone), a nerd (Ratner), a surfer (Spicoli), a “sexual sophisticate” (Linda), and a brother and sister (Brad and Stacy), with details laid bare as he probed into the heart of adolescence, ranging from after school jobs, social cliques, to sexual encounters and the dire consequences of all of the above.

Before the book was even published it was optioned for a big screen adaptation by Universal. And though you would never have guessed it now, Fast Times at Ridgemont High faced all kinds of problems once filming was completed. First, it nearly got slapped with an X-Rating due to its sexual content; and to get an R a couple of explicit scenes had to go, namely some full frontal male nudity and the sequence where Linda instructs Stacy on how to perform oral sex with a carrot. A compromise was reached, and one scene was cut and the other re-shot to tone it down. 

Then, when the film was finally set for release, the studio wasn’t thrilled with the finished product and, feeling there was no audience for it, put next to no effort into any kind of marketing for the film and only did a limited regional release on the west coast, with no intention of any east coast showings before cutting their expected losses with a quick sell-off to cable. But once again proving studio execs no nothing about anything, the film quickly went from sleeper to bona fide hit, with a wide release thrown together a mere three weeks after its initial roll-out, officially launching the careers of Sean Penn, Phoebe Cates, Judge Reinhold, and Jennifer Jason Leigh, and was the first film exposure of Anthony Edwards, Nicolas Cage, Eric Stoltz and Forest Whitaker.

I thoroughly enjoyed my revisit to Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which I hadn’t seen since the glory days of VHS rentals, via Universal’s Collector’s Edition DVD, which also includes a making of documentary and a really good commentary by Heckerling and Crowe. It also had me digging out my old vinyl copy of the soundtrack and jam out to the hiss and pop for a while. 

I had seen it uncensored before, but I don’t think I had ever seen it in the proper aspect ratio. And it was finally nice to see this infamous scene without the normal glitch of crinkled magnetic tape from being pinched and paused five-gabillion times by other VHS renters, which, I’m sure, resulted in several drawers full of soiled socks – if you know what I mean and I think you do:

Actually, it’s the scene right before that which makes my knees buckle, in a non-comic-code-approved sense. 

That smile at the end, there, is kinda killing me right now. *sigh*

Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) Refugee Films :: Universal Pictures / EP: C.O. Erickson / P: Irving Azoff, Art Linson / D: Amy Heckerling / W: Cameron Crowe / C: Matthew F. Leonetti / E: Eric Jenkins / M: Bob Destocki / S: Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Judge Reinhold, Robert Romanus, Brian Backer,Phoebe Cates