Getting out of the house

As I mentioned before, I saw Bruce Campbell and his new movie, Man with the Screaming Brain, last week. Apart from that, I attended the APWBWGTTD meetup last week, the Braves/Padres game on Friday and Saturday I went to see MF Doom at the Loft, joined by local supervillain Scott S of Messages from the Ether.

Campbell's new movie, his directorial feature debut, is about what you'd expect from the guy who appeared a couple of years ago as an elderly Elvis in Bubba Ho-tep. Faint echoes of B to Z sci-fi artifacts like The Man Without a Body and The Thing with Two Heads are detectable, but its most charming feature is the utterly random plot driven as much by an inexplicably psychotic femme fatale gypsy (does anybody really need a reason to be psychotic?) as by Stacey Keach's mad scientist. It was shot in Bulgaria, as are many of the "made for Sci-Fi Channel" movies like this one. Campbell expressed some frustration with working in Bulgaria during the Q & A, which is a somewhat refreshing change of pace from Charles Band and the folks from Dimension who always rave about the Eastern European locations and crews they depend upon increasingly for cost control purposes.

The best moment of the evening, though, had to be Campbell's rant at the endless stream of dreck coming out of Hollywood in the form of pointless remakes, sequels, and PG-13 horror. The last observation especially hit a chord with the horror audience in attendance, and while there are good movies from the past and present that earn a PG-13 rating, I think Campbell's ire is best exemplified by the miserable product getting wide theatrical release like Boogeyman, Darkness Falls, and They.


I enjoyed the hell out of the MF Doom show, although I think many in the audience weren't used to the standard hip-hop show tradition of starting several hours late. The long delays in this show pushed the limit of that tradition, I must say. Doom himself didn't go on until about 2 AM, after several other guests had rounds including local talents Mobonix and DJ Kool Akiem. Most of the opening MCs were timewasters, but Akiem spun a bunch of real classics, mostly NYC. A lot of Wu Tang, Rakim, KRS, and DJ Premier. No problem there, although he seemed to want to run his set like a seminar, cutting out the track for a few seconds to see if the crowd were reciting along. Doom ripped it when he finally did come out, but I was disappointed that Doom didn't do anything from the forthcoming Dangerdoom album.