Sometimes you need to cleanse the critical palate, and there’s no better way to do it than going back and watching some of the wonderful segments from the old At the Movies review show. Especially the wonderful segments about dreadful movies. Read more…
Who ever thought Lex Luthor bullying little Superman could be so joyous an occasion? – Action Comics #466
It’s really not okay to enjoy seeing a grown adult beating up a kid — in fact it’s terrible — but an exception might be made when the “kid” is actually a de-aged version of a superpowered being. Which is the case today in the lovely Neal Adams Action Comics cover above. And there could be an added note of pleasure stemming from the Wile E. Coyote/Road Runner factor. Who hasn’t felt bad for that emaciated desert denizen, pulling out every Acme trick in the book to finally kill that damn bird and have himself a decent meal for once?
So go ahead, Lex Luthor, have your moment! Punch Li’l Superman in the back of the head with your super-villain brass knuckles! Read more…
Power absolutely nothing with your miniature electric engine!
I had one of these as a kid, or at least something very similar. Rubber bands were one of the component parts. Lesson: if your engine contains rubber bands, it’s not worth a damn. Read more…
Sure, you could take your life-size Batman and Superman hang-ups (the Fatheads of their day) and position them in assorted heroic poses — or as close as you could get with their limited maneuverability. Read more…
Sunday Stupid: Mike Piazza and Ultra Pro get goofy!
Consider this a confluence of streams. October baseball fever continues from last week’s post on George Brett’s pants-crapping career, picks up a tributary of the Trading Card Set of the Week, and merges into Sunday Stupid. Welcome to Mike Piazza: The World’s Goofiest Baseball Card! Read more…
Engage in some ironic shopping by purchasing these worthless tchotchkes to house your coin collection!
Coin collecting is a hobby with many merits (including turning children into wide-eyed zombies who never age). But, like every other pastime, it has more than its share of junk. Take the above ad, which displays almost a Star Trek level of uselessness. Read more…
Trading Card Set of the Week – Starship Troopers (1997, Inkworks)
I have a very clear memory of viewing Starship Troopers for the first time, and said memory is imbued, suffused and saturated with nigh unspeakable disappointment. The movie came out in the fall of 1997, in my sophomore year of college, and I couldn’t wait to see it. After watching the trailer earlier that year (these were the days when watching movie trailers on your boxy desktop was still a thrilling novelty, kids), I was all geared up for some rousing, heavy-duty, hardcore military science fiction, with grizzled space-faring grunts squaring off against giant swarming insects. Because that’s what the trailer seemed to promise, and my naive young adult mind hadn’t yet assimilated the many small cruelties of existence. How could it go wrong? Read more…
Dracula Untold, in which the Count wears sinewy, meatish armor, opens this Friday. Lest we forget…
Dracula Untold presents us with yet another tale of the world’s greatest vampire, going old-timey and faux-historical and 300ish to bring Europe’s invasion by the Turks into the metaphysically sanguinary doings. It has all the things that studios love to market these days: “darkness,” an emo-looking star, British accents and an origin story that hopefully ignites a franchise. It’s as if the ads are grabbing us by the lapels, shaking and pleading He became a monster to save his family and people! How post-millennial anti-hero can you get?! Read more…
In proof that great minds think alike, just after I had readied the Dinosaurus! post from Monday, our friends over at Red Letter Media posted a dinosaur-centric edition of their delightfully dreadful bad movie series, Best of the Worst. Read more…
TAKE A GOOD LOOK, SONNY, IT’S GONNA HAPPEN AGAIN!
I realize I spent the better part of a post last week talking about how grateful I am that one of my treasured films has never been pissed all over by an underwhelming sequel, but damn. Hot damn. Read more…
Dinosaurs! Exclamation points! Cavemen throwing pies in people’s faces! – Dinosaurus!
Dinosaurs have been a major part of science-fiction adventures for a very long time. For as long as their bones have been dug up and pieced together, the one-time rulers of the Earth have fascinated their puny human successors. And long before Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg set the modern “dinosaurs in the present day” standard with their respective iterations of Jurassic Park, there have been sensational dinosaur stories that have crossed mediums. You have classics like The Lost World, a splendid non-Sherlock Holmes adventure from the pen of Arthur Conan Doyle, which was converted into celluloid form in 1925 in a silent film of the same name, itself a stop-motion trailblazer. (The Lost World has been re-adapted numerous times, but nothing quite equals its fresh buoyancy.)
And then you have Dinosaurus!. Yeah, Dinosaurus! wasn’t so great, exclamation point notwithstanding. Read more…
Sunday Stupid: George Brett craps his pants!
It’s October, the leaves are turning and falling, the air is crisp, and supermarket shelves are crammed with every pumpkin and apple product ever conceived by the puny mind of man. It’s also the time of year when the baseball playoffs have entered full swing, meaning now is the moment to post the above video, which stands at a pinnacle of both that sport and raconteurism in general. It’s the George Brett pants-crapping story, ladies and gentlemen! Read more…
George Barris and the iPatrol team to hawk odd bikes and foil mustachioed parade-haters
George Barris designed many an odd conveyance. From the surf hearse to the Munsters’ Dragula to a hot rod capped by a gigantic pickelhaube, his creations excited the fancy of odd-car enthusiasts and model kit aficionados. Read more…
It’s October, so here are some terrible old DC Comics Halloween costumes to get you in the mood
Who wouldn’t want to dress up as Batman or Superman for Halloween? But since when did Batman have “BATMAN” written across the bat-symbol? Read more…
Warning: This comic contains the most contrived contrivance in the history of contrivances – From Beyond the Unknown #2
Comic books have often gone to great lengths to achieve that singular selling quality: originality. That, after all, is what sells, especially when it comes to books that lack a strong, venerable central character. While readers can just as easily tire from reading Batman and Spider-Man if those heroes keep repeating the same thing over and over again, at least there’s that great hook of their larger than life personae. But what about anthology books of old? What was their angle? Why, improbable, silly, overcooked and nigh-unspeakably contrived plots, that’s what!
Before us today is the second issue of From Beyond the Unknown, a science-fiction anthology book from DC’s Silver Age. It has perhaps one of the oddest hoops ever jumped through in the history of the medium. It’s great and awful at the same time. Brace yourself. Read more…
Jared
blog into mystery 