#and it just had the noggin joggin

[acaplaya-musings]

Voiceplay-adjacent Visuals: The Headless Horseman

As IF I, a certfied Geoff Castellucci Stan, wasn't going to talk about any of his solo cover videos! I'm not gonna talk about all of them (though I can be tempted into doing more if there are ones I skipped that you want me to talk about!), maybe only like 45% of them or so, including all four of his Halloween uploads - the first of which is what we're starting off with!

Geoff's cover of The Headless Horseman was uploaded on the 11th of October, 2020, and is actually only Geoff's third song cover uploaded on his channel (after Bare Necessities and Blackbird). The song is from the 1949 Disney film The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr Toad, which is actually two stories in one: the first being about Mr Toad (an animated adaptation of The Wind In The Willows), and the second being about Ichabod (an animated adaptation of The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow, a story which Geoff actually did a full narration of on his channel back in October last year), and the latter is of course the section that this song stems from. But enough background info for the time being; let's get into this!

Neat set design, very spooky! Apparently this was filmed at Geoff's parents' house, and this is what he had to say about it in the description: "I filmed this at my folks house... IS ANYONE ELSE TERRIFIED THAT THEY JUST HAD ALL THIS STUFF LYING AROUND?! I mean... i thought I knew those people. My life is a lie..." 😂😂

(Well I guess having a love for Halloween and spooky stuff is apparently a genetic trait for the Castelluccis! 😁)

*deep evil laughter*

(Geoff does evil/creepy laughter in a fair few videos across the two channels - he seems awfully comfortable doing it! 😝)

Also cool ghostly fade-in effect for "Lead Singer Geoff" here!

Geoff had fun with the visual effects for this one, as I shall further display in this post!

There are only 3 frames of motion blur between the two frames here, but it absolutely works. Just enough to make it look deliberate and as if he/his character actually moved from point A to point B super quickly.

"and some with fangs, about this size!"

(You would know a thing or two about long fangs, wouldn't ya, Geoff? 😉)

Won't post a screencap because I can't get a good one, but the little moment with floating pumpkin face thing is pretty neat (on the line "when he goes a joggin, 'cross the land, holding his noggin in his hand, demons take one look and groan, and hit the road for parts unknown")

"well that was unexpected"

(Frankly, a little bit of a mild reaction to three disembodied heads suddenly singing backup for you, but I guess it can't be much weirder than having them there in the first place! 😆)

(Also the Disembodied Geoff Heads having their hair be tied/pulled back made a lot more sense after I watched Golden Hour (which I say a little bit about in the post for that video as well).

Geoff assured people in the description that "no Geoff's had their hair cut for this performance" 😄

(Oh and I know I'm not meant to talk about vocals, but I feel like I'd be doing the video a disservice if I didn't mention the clever detail of how the Geoff Heads only sing in "head voice" for the song!)

Now this was a really cool/creative visual effect. No clue what it's called or how to describe it really, but it further makes him seem like a ghost/phantom/spirit in this video

Pfft, what're you reading there, Geoff? 😂

(Also I just spotted the necklace!)

Is it just me or does Geoff have a thing for making his eyes look different in videos, whether with contacts or post-production effects? 😄

(Quite frankly if there's any video that proves that Geoff's not actually human, it's this one /j 😝)

"You cannot reason, with aaaaaa h e e e a a d d l e e s s s s

m a a a a n n n n"

Amazing, fantastic, always such a fun cover to listen to, we stan forever!

In the movie, the song is sung by the character of Brom Bones, who is voiced by Bing Crosby (who also serves as the narrator for both stories in the movie), but the soundtrack/album version of the song was sung by a dude by the name of Thurl Ravenscroft, whom you might know as the original voice of Tony the Tiger (the Frosted Flakes mascot), as well as the original singer of the song "You're A Mean One, Mr Grinch". Thurl was a fairly notable bass singer back in the day and is one of Geoff's idols/inspirations, and honestly, I think Geoff did the guy proud. In fact I would even say that Geoff is the modern-day equivalent of Thurl Ravenscroft! And I just can't get enough <3

[cranialjam]

WRITING FOR VISUAL MEDIA PRACTICE 1.1

Prompt: "Write a description of a short scene from a TV series or a movie so that another production crew could recreate that same scene. Invent your own way or writing a one-page script."

Scene Source: Hardcore Henry

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Time: Afternoon]

[Setting: Moscow Bus]

[Henry rushes onto the crowded bus, in a blood-drenched grey tracksuit, and sits next to a few men. A some of the men move away while one watches Henry in disgust.]

[After a few moments, a homeless man covered in layers of jackets and hoodies begins wandering towards Henry.]

HOMELESS MAN [in Russian]: Do you know what's wrong with Mother Russia? Too goddamn hot.

[More people get off the bus and the men across from Henry leave immediately.]

[The homeless man sits across from Henry and offers a drink from his bottle. Henry waves to indicate disinterest.]

HOMELESS MAN [in Russian]: [shrugs] As you wish.

[The homeless man brings out a pair of pliers from his jacket.]

HOMELESS MAN [in Russian]: [mumbling] I used to be in charge of all this shit. And now...

[The homeless man looks directly into Henry’s eyes in sudden lucidity]

HOMELESS MAN [in English]: I’m gonna have to hurt you, Henry. It’s for your own good, mate. [begins pulling on Henry’s left arm] Just give me your arm…

[Henry begins fighting him off before the homeless man slaps Henry in the face. He pulls off his sunglasses to reveal that it’s Jimmy in disguise.]

JIMMY: It’s me! It’s Jimmy! We’ve only got a few moments before they run into us again.

[Jimmy firmly grabs Henry’s left arm, digging the pliers into Henry’s wrist. Blood begins to pour as he pulls out a small chip.]

JIMMY: This little fucker is how they’ve been tracking you [smashes it with his foot]. In a few moments your mechanical parts are going to start shutting down.

JIMMY [cont.]: Your friend Akan’s got an important Russian connection named “Slick Dmitri.” Slick handles all Akan’s cops, guns, real estate, and a lot of other shit.

[Jimmy pulls out a phone from his pocket]

JIMMY [cont.]: This helpful dot on the map is Slick’s place. All you’ll do is… break in there… kill him... open up his ribcage... take out his beating heart [motioning with his right hand a pulsing heart]… and fucking eat it.

[beat]

JIMMY [cont.]: [laughing] I’m kidding! [Henry throws his hands up in annoyance] I’m kidding! You don’t have to fuckin’ eat his heart. Under his heart is his charge pump, bring that to me. Use this [hands Henry the pliers] and use this [points to phone].

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Had a lot of fun with this practice, taught me that I've got a lot to learn with screenwriting lol. I know I should use more traditional scriptwriting format, but I like using transcripts. Once I learn that I NEED to, then I will.

If you wanna try these prompts too, check em out! I use them from. Anthony Friedmann's "Writing for Visual Media" 4th Edition. Good to get the noggin' joggin'.

I'll post the next prompt with my next completed version. I'll give a hint: Playwriting V. Screenwriting.

[girl-debord]

So I posted these two images that I made in a post together just shy of a year ago, and the post got 10,000+ notes. Today I saw a meme with a text convo of someone sending one of them to a military recruiter (which is extremely funny) and I thought “oh I should find that post again”

but when I went to find it, it had completely vanished. not just the original post, but even reblogs of it. I couldn’t even find screenshots anyone had taken of the original post. it wasn’t brought to my attention as a reported post, tumblr never even contacted me about deleting it, it just... disappeared

really gets the noggin joggin

[the-resurrection-3d]

How about EddTord? Now this is a ship I’m not familiar with so I wanna hear your pitch :3c

I feel like EddTord has the most emotional versatility out of any of the Main Boy ships -- viewing EddTord through both a pre-legacy and legacy lens (as opposed to many fans only watching legacy), you have the childhood friends trope, breakups, love fatalized by distance, failed reunions, friends to lovers to enemies... You can hop to basically any point in the timeline (much as Eddsworld can be said to have a”””timeline”””) and convincingly portray any emotional tone with them. Obviously you can theoretically do that with every other Main Boy ship, but it’s hilarious to find -- oh, I don’t know -- TomTord fics that outright steal characterization that only logically fits EddTord just for the purposes of supporting their ship. Really gets your noggin joggin. 

I also like the interplay between activity and passivity that I tried exploring back in EddTord Finale -- the canonical reason for Tord’s departure is that he’s too ambitious, which is confirmed in not only The End but in the 2005 Christmas special where it’s shown that Tord would have already conquered Norway had Edd not been around. Ironically the drive and ambitiousness that the real Edd Gould demonstrated through the making of Eddsworld didn’t translate onto Edd the character much at all. 

In some cases, this lack of ambition can actually be kind of healthy -- such as in ETF 1 / and everything you say gives me a real bad feeling, when a younger Edd tries to convince Tord not to throw his youth away on studying. And yet the canonless “everything resets” nature of Eddsworld also belies a comforting/stifling emotional conservatism that gets pushed towards an extreme in ETF 4 / show me your blood chapter 2, where a tyrannical Green Leader literally lives inside the World of Coke surrounded by childhood and pre-legacy references -- at the cost of multiple human rights violations. This also of course translates into a cowardice of communication that runs throughout the entire project, right up to the unpublished ETF 2 where Edd isn’t even man enough to explain to Tord that he’s putting him down Old Yeller style for his own good. 

Yes I did just jerk off my own shitty fanfics to explain what I like about this ship. I spent too long on that project not to. Any Eddsworld pairing is like 95% headcanon anyway lmao. 

[nattikay]

So I got the Magic game pack so Sim!Claire could be magical, and was playing around with it a bit last night. I went ahead and made Blinky magic as well cuz why not. I considered giving Jim magic...at first I was like “nah it’s not really his thing” but then I was like...gosh what if it’s genetic...if I made both Jim and Claire magic and then had them have another baby WOULD THE BABY BE MAGIC TOO??

Now I haven’t tried that yet...and if I were to guess as far as game mechanics go I would say probably not, idk if children can even have the special “life states” or if you have to be a teen/adult first...but nonetheless it got my noggin joggin’ and well...

Here’s some thoughts for a fourth Jlaire baby, who happens to be a bit magic haha oops

I’m a wee bit hesitant to “go through” with some of these ideas before we’ve seen Wizards, cuz much of it could be easily invalidated...that said these are just tentative concepts/ideas I’m playing with that may change later.

The new kid is a girl, who I named Laura because idk “Laura Lake” just sounds pretty lol. Unlike her siblings, whose appearances and even snippets of their personalities were influenced at least in part by the randomization aspect of their Sims counterparts, Laura’s design is wholly from my brain and she does not yet exist in the game.

Here’s a little doodly thing comparing the now-four siblings:

And yes I just used the same body four times because I just wanted to throw the concepts out there quickish :P

Anyways, I headcanon (until/unless Wizards proves otherwise) that magic is not necessarily genetic; anyone can technically learn it if they want to. This is not even necessarily limited to humans; there could hypothetically be troll wizards or even Akiridion wizards as well, if they wanted to learn. 

It appears in the Wizards poster that the white part of Claire’s hair has spread. Given that the first white part was caused by exposure to extreme magic via the giant portal, it’s reasonable to conclude (disclaimer: not guaranteed) that she has experimented more with magic since then, and particularly major forays are what affects her hair.

So hypothetically...what might happen if adult!Claire went experienced such an incident--intentionally or not--during pregnancy? Would it affect the baby, and if so, how?

This is what I imagined happened to Laura, and is the reason she’s the only one to “inherit” Claire’s hair streaks. It’s not genetic--she was simply touched by magic before birth in a way that the others weren’t. This early magical interference may also explain why she has the most trollish/“unnatural” skin color of her siblings. 

It is also why, while any of the kids could learn magic if they so desired, Laura has a natural affinity towards it, and can pick such things up a little more intuitively.

So uh...yeah, there’s some ideas. Like I said any of it could be easily invalidated based on what we learn in Wizards so it’s all pretty tentative. But still fun to speculate on.

@arcadia-trash​ look, babies lol

[thundahouse]

tbh now i got the old noggin joggin just bc there were tons of tf2 ideas i had that i just never did lol

[makebritaingreatagain]

War. War never changes.

Just started reading Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut.

The authors style is clumsy, rambling and disjointed. It reminds me allot of 'Remembrance Of Things Past' by Marcel Proust in that respect. But where Proust, as you might expect of a french aristocrat, is flowery in his prose, and talks of ladies fashions, the smell of a flower, the taste of a biscuit, Vonnegut is spartan in his prose, few details, more like George Orwell, never using a long or uncommon word where a short or common one will do, but almost to the point of being childlike in simplicity. I don't know if Kurt Vonnegut's other books are like this. It does make you think, and the author confirms that war makes you tough. It even makes the women who stay at home tough, as they learn to get on without men around to do the heavy lifting, and the dirty work; they get jobs in factories, as reporters, journalists, maybe even work in construction. It seems that war is a very emancipating thing for women. Maybe that's why they were so keen to hand goose feathers out to young men, encouraging them to run off to war and kill and die. Maybe that's why, even after women had been given the right to vote, we still had another world war, even though feminists told us that there would be no more wars if we let them vote. Gets the old noggin joggin.

I noticed this little gem on page 30: "Billy, after all, had contemplated torture and hideous wounds at the beginning and the end of nearly every day of his childhood. Billy had an extremely gruesome crucifix hanging on the wall of his little bedroom in Ilium. A military surgeon would have admired the the clinical fidelity of the artist's rendition of all Christ's woulds-the spear wound, the thorn wounds, the holes that were made by iron spikes."

Huh. Reminds me of Hagakure: "The Way of the Samurai is found in death. Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one's body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one's master. And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead. This is the substance of the way of the samurai" - 'Hagakure' by some random Japanese politician.

"Sell your shirt and buy a sword, for the end commeth, and right soon". - 'The Bible' by God. As true today as it was 2000 years ago.

Tradition is a funny old thing. Sometimes we forget the reason we started doing something.

I still haven’t read Slaughterhouse 1-4, but they are hard to come by.

[putchgoosit]

3, 10, 12, 15, 17, 18, 24, for tha valentine's asks 🤠

3. favorite love song?

jdkejejdjeje I've literally been listening to a lovey dovey playlist for the last few days but all my answers feel corny and embarrassing

I've been listening to mystery of love and dreaming of you non stop and while I'm taken with mr stevens dulcet tones I think its association to a film I don't care for is. whatever. dreaming of you is just good-ass ska baybeeeh anyway the answer is unchained melody. I was gonna scour thru my spotify to see what I listen to most but the answer is unchained melody. ooooh my looove

10. favorite milkshake flavor

STRAWBERRY !! oh man when I'm at mickey dees and I'm like sick of soda I'm like "hell yeah gimme a strawberry milkshake" and I gulp it down like that. I've never had a chocolate milkshake because strawberry is my one and only. vanilla is fine.

12. favorite flowers?

AAAAAH I feel like roses are such an easy answer but I really do love white and pink roses. orchids are really pretty too

15. what's your ideal first date?

OH MAN THIS GOT MY JOGGIN NOGGIN. I mean noggin joggin. anyway

"dinner somewhere romantic" is a very typical answer and also MAYBE it's more appropriate for like a second or third date but like honestly a bistro with like mood lighting and good food and maybe some wine? LIKE AGAIN this might be a second or third date idea but it's like........mood lighting and music is so romantic to me for some reason

if that answer disqualifies me I'm gonna say a walk somewhere that has pretty scenery like old buildings or mountains or something. tbh "a walk" is actually kind of a bad date idea in my mind since you're both focusing on walking and being exhausted but like.

okay the committee for good date idea answers are looking at me funny so I'm gonna say a museum. I just have to remember to pay attention to my date and not like, a plaque abt how europes sea levels looked 5k years ago

watching a movie or playing a video game is cool too ig. please lord I have to move on

17. what's the most attractive thing a person could wear?

UHHHHH most attractive??? this is gonna be a wierd answer but like you know a really good cardigan?? like it falls of the shoulders ever so slightly and there is like a tank top underneath and then the person is wearing really good pants or skirt + stockings?? I know this answer is very specific but like "a cardigan + good bottoms and shoes" is my wierd answer. short cut leather jackets + jeans are hot too. I plead the fifth (hahah get it? plead? plaid? is my adhd medication even working)

18. chocolate, vanilla or red velvet

okay im swedish so I don't have the cultural context but I think this is abt cake??? ive never had red velvet and while I like vanilla I think it's too sweet in cake?? so I'm gonna say chocolate. but literally all are good I just. haven't had many vanilla or red velvet cakes

24. what makes you blush?

KEKENFDJDJDJD a lot of things but like. spontaneous compliments that aren't like generic but abt something another person notices or likes abt me is like. without fail I blush every time 🥺🥺

[skelegun]

I just watched the film 'Ready Or Not" earlier today, a film which prior to today I had never heard of and only saw because I had 2 hours to kill, didn't feel like going home, and nothing else was playing. Now keep in mind I will be spoiling the film, but also keep in mind before seeing it all I knew of the plot was the little blurb on theatre's website and I was able to accurately guess most of the plot before the opening credits were over.

The film begins with two boys fleeing down a hallway in a mansion, a bloodied man in a tuxedo appears begging one of the boys for help, the boy however screams and betrays the man, and several masked figures in formal wear appear brandishing weapons and carry the injured man off, while a woman in a wedding dress cries and pleads with the masked assailants.

The story picks up 30 years later. Grace, the protagonist, is a woman of low birth and a troubled past about to marry into the Le Domas dynasty, which made it's fortune selling playing cards and boards games. There is only one stipulation... Ever since their family mysteriously struck it rich, anytime someone marries into the family they must play a randomly selected game at midnight on their wedding night... Or Else. Grace of course ends with the misfortune of drawing the only bad card, the one labeled "Hide And Seek". Now the rest of family must hunt her down and capture her alive before sun rise.

I'll get the bad out of the way first. Let me just say that my opinion of this movie is this, this is largely unremarkable movie that I had to look up the title to when I went to write this because I had already forgotten it. It's a horror comedy which is thankfully leans towards the horror side, because most of the jokes aren't funny. They aren't bad per say, it just feels like much of the humor was tacked on because the movie wasn't sure of what tone or direction it wanted to go. Also the acting ranges from forgettable to bad, I didnt recognize any of the actors and that is probably why.

Now for the good. There were two aspects of this movie I really liked, and this where the spoilers come in. The first is that this isn't really a "gleeful rich people hunting poor people for sport" movie which it has been billed as. The family hunts only end up happening every few decades, and these hunts have deep psychological toll on those who participate in them, and no one is even quite sure what will happen should they fail to deliver the sacrifice before sun rise. So as a result the various family members all have varying levels of enthusiasm, ranging from coked out over exuberance, to covert sabotagely the hunt. Overall the family is really incompetent at human hunting as would be expected of a bunch of decadent dilettantes.

The other aspect I really enjoyed was the reveal at towards end. Spoilers but it turns out they were Satanists. I predicted this during the opening credits when they imply that the company's wealth sprang from a Devil themed boardgame in the opening credits, what surprised me was how they followed through on it. Because predictably Grace survives the night, and the sun rises. At first nothing happens, and surviving members of the family just stand there befuddled. Was all that Satan stuff just bull shit? What do they do now that Grace is cornered and half the family is dead because of her? Well as one of the aunts prepares to attack Grace, she suddenly fucking explodes. Then another family member explodes. They all one by one explode in great fountains of gore.

That I was not expecting. I was fully expecting it to just be a cynical "these rich people are just dumb, hur during tradition is fake religion don't real" ending, but nope the rich people were in league with The Devil, and the only thing that could stop them was "Grace"! Christus Victor! The patriarch of the family also mentions at one point that there was another rich family that died and one of the family members says "I thought that was a house fire" and the dad implies that that was just a cover up. Hmm rich people in league with the Satan dying under mysterious circumstance that get covered up... Really gets the noggin joggin doesn't it, really activates the almonds huh, big think time here lads.

Anyways it was a fairly enjoyable movie that I liked the ending of but the rest was pretty forgettable. It is probably the best "evil rich people" movie I've seen in a long time. This film looks like Citizen Kane compared to The Purge 3: Election Day, that's for damn sure. However compared to Mid Sommar which was another "blonde woman with a troubled past and a shitty boyfriend gets involved with a weird cult" movie I saw recently this film pales in comparison.

[meathookcinema]

With the news that Female Trouble, John Waters’ meisterwerk and design for living is being shown, my noggin got a joggin’.

I started thinking about the films that I’ve been lucky enough to watch on the big screen and with an audience.

My favourite filmgoing experience has to be when I got to see a film that I never thought I’d ever see in a cinema AND in the format that it was intended to be seen in. That film is the brilliant Friday the 13th Part 3D. I had moved to London from York in 1994 to study film and had started to go to the amazing but very high-brow (although it can’t be that high-brow as they let me in…) National Film Theatre known as the NFT to London’s cineastes and skinny latte drinking set.

Shortly after graduating from Uni and getting a job (real life is worse than ANY horror film) I heard that the NFT were to show a season of 3D films which were to be actually shown in 3D using the vintage technology that was required. I then read that the third Friday the 13th film would be part of the season. I have never bought a cinema ticket faster in my fucking life!

Friday the 13th Part 3D starts with the end of Part 2 which isn’t in 3D. The NFT film snobs were sniggering at how corny this sequence was and were clearly thinking that their tastes in film were so much more elevated than this supposed generic slasher film they were watching on the screen.

But then, Part 3 started in earnest. If you haven’t seen the film, the 3D is brilliantly done. The makers of the movie really knew how they could make full effect of the 3D process and were willing to use it to blow audience’s minds.

The first glimpse of the 3D happens when the titles literally shoot out of the screen at the audience out of the decapitated head of Pamela Voorhees. But to really show how awesome the process was and how far it could be taken, the titles come forth but only part way before they come out even further so that they are right in front of the audience’s noses. It was a great piece of showmanship on the part of the filmmakers- ‘Here’s the 3D. Oh, hang on, we can do better than that! HERE’S the 3D!’

With that first 3D one-two punch by the film I have never heard such a scream of excitement emitted by a cinema audience (and it sounded like every single member of that audience squealed in delight) before or since. The film was so well crafted with so much thought placed on the 3D aspects and how the gimmick could be used in so many innovative ways. A movie that was primarily made for horror fiends had just demonstrated that it could also work on the snobbiest film audiences imaginable and completely enthral them. Now that’s genius.

The 3D was used for both comical purposes to make the audience chuckle ( these involve yo-yos, juggling, a joint being passed towards the audience) but more importantly it’s also used so that spectators can experience the sheer pain of Jason’s killings. There is one scene in which Mr Voorhees squeezes a bit too hard on a character’s head and one of his eyeballs shoots out of it’s socket and straight at the audience. In another we get an arrow shot from a harpoon that Jason has fired at another victim. This also shoots her in the eye (after wheezing towards us first). It’s almost like the filmmakers wanted to exploit the ‘eye injury’ angle with this being a 3D movie. They were making the movie as painful as possible for the audience. Hooray for 3D!

We even get Jason staggering towards us whilst he’s mid-battle with the film’s Final Girl with an axe sticking out of his hockey mask.

This screening was such a success with the NFT’s audience that there was even applause when it finished. The audience whooped, yelped and had a jolly good time. Job done.

I went to see Jaws 3D the following night. Even in 3D it’s dreadful and further testament to the innovative use of the format by Friday’s filmmakers.

Shortly after this screening I heard about a season of films showing at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (known as the ICA), another establishment of all things high culture and respectability. All of the films chosen were then (1998) still banned by the British Board of Film Classification (the BBFC- as you can tell we like our acronyms here in the United Kingdom or UK *haha*) and were all banned horror movies with some appearing on the infamous Video Nasties DDP List. Through some legal wrangling the ICA had asked the BBFC to let them be shown for one day only.

Thus, Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Driller Killer, Zombie Flesh Eaters, House by the Cemetary, Nightmares in a Damaged Brain and Zombie Holocaust were all shown whilst they were all still banned in the UK.

The thrill of seeing these forbidden fruits of the Video Nasties era when they were still banned was palpable. James Ferman was still the Director of the BBFC and was notoriously strict when it came to horror (it was under his regime that The Exorcist and Texas Chain Saw Massacre remained banned. He seemed inflexible when it came to art of any kind and clearly behind the times).

But things were about to change when it came to TCM. The movie was released in early 1999 in London when Camden Council were granted a license to show the film within it’s area boundaries only. For this release the film even had it’s own certificate of ‘C’ for Camden. Only people who were 18 and over would be able to watch the film in a cinema. I saw the film during this release.

I remember I had gone into London to browse the many film memorabilia shops that existed around the West End then (all sadly gone now unfortunately) and then to go onto the gay scene with it’s numerous bars that were close to the ABC Shaftesbury Avenue. As I exited the excellent Cinema Store I walked past the ABC Cinema on Shaftesbury Avenue and saw that TCM was showing. I didn’t know about this release until I saw the poster outside the cinema.

This was also my first visit to this particular cinema with it’s gorgeous carved frieze on the outside. It reeked of history inside and out and with further investigation I found out that it went back decades and was even used for film premieres.

The afternoon screening of TCM only had two other people in it. Watching TCM is like going to Hell (in a good way) for an hour and a half and it seemed really perverse that one minute I was trolling the West End and was then immersed in one of the most intense and frightening horror movies ever made. I remember none of the punters in that screening left before we had seen all of the end credits through to the end. The house lights then went up, we exchanged looks to each other as if to say ‘What the fuck have we just been through together?!’, smiled and then left.

A favourite more recent screening that sticks in my mind was when my local arthouse cinema showed Pink Flamingos. The Hyde Park Picturehouse here in Leeds shows a cult film most Saturdays under the banner of Creatures of the Night. The cinema is located in a part of Leeds which has a huge student population. Hence, you have plenty of students who attend these screenings, a minority of whom think that ‘cult’ means ‘rubbish’. These people obviously don’t know what cult cinema is and wouldn’t know shit from clay. I’ve attended screenings here of films such as The Terminator, The Warriors and Christine which, unfortunately, this clueless and jaded minority have thought it appropriate to snigger at and ridicule. As a side note, these people will never ruin a cinema screening for me. I would never give them the satisfaction or feed their narcissism in such a way.

A surefire way to tell if your film still has ‘it’ when it comes to cult cinema is to see and hear how the audience reacts. Right from the get-go Pink Flamingos shocked the audience at this particular screening into submission. At the start of the film there was a stunned silence of utter disbelief at what was being seen and then there were howls of laughter at all the right places with screams of disgust at all the appropriate scenes also (the dog poo scene especially) as Divine and co won the hearts of the punters.

In fact, there have been a few John Waters related screenings that stick in my mind. Firstly, the time I went to see his live film This Filthy World in New York which he attended. He answered questions after it. Also, the time he taught a film class that I was lucky to be invited to in which he showed one of his favourite films, Boom! starring Liz Taylor and Richard Burton. We all then talked about it and asked him about his career…But that has been covered by myself in a previous blog post. Talking about it again might be seen as bragging *walks away whistling*

Excursions Into Hell: My Favourite Filmgoing Experiences With the news that Female Trouble, John Waters' meisterwerk and design for living is being shown, my noggin got a joggin'.