It's a Funny World We Live In vol. 17

US teens 'had three-way sex on corpses of men they lured to their house, strangled to death and hog-tied'

 

Swoon Swoon You're a Balloon vol. 4

Fuck YOUR Life vol. 22

We Saw This: Church Whip

 

so there's this band called Church Whip. they decided to call their tour "Raping the East". this offended a lot of internet punk people to such a degree that some saw fit to slash the tires of their tour van and scrawl "RAPE APOLOGISTS" across the body of the vehicle.

so let me see if i have the selective Hypersensitive Politically Correct Indie Punk Hipster principals correct;

using the word "RAPE" in any context other than a sanctimonious decrying of the act:
YOU'RE A HORRIBLE PERSON WHO NOT ONLY THINKS VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN IS GOOD TIMES, BUT PROBABLY ENGAGES IN VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN YOURSELF. I'M SENSITIVE TO TRAUMA SURVIVORS BECAUSE I'M FEIGNING OUTRAGE OVER THE PERCEIVED INTENTIONS OF A BLACK METAL BAND, AND THAT'S THE ONLY KIND OF AID MY MAXIMUM ROCK AND ROLL SOAKED MIND CAN COMPREHEND.

destroying other people's property, setting them back financially and adding more stress to an already stressful situation:
A-OK!  BECAUSE SINCE I'M AN ATTENTION STARVED NARCISSIST WITH NO REAL PROBLEMS OR RESPONSIBILITIES, I CAN'T BEGIN TO UNDERSTAND HOW THE ABOVE SCENARIO WOULD SET ANYONE BACK IN A VERY REAL AND FRUSTRATING WAY. AFTER ALL, THERE ARE REAL ISSUES TO WORRY ABOUT, LIKE THE STUFF MY PROFESSOR TALKED ABOUT WHEN I WAS HALF ASLEEP IN MY POLITICAL SCIENCE ELECTIVE. CHECK OUT MY COMPASSION, YOU RAPECULTURIST!

U.S.A.! U.S.A.! vol. 72

Filmmaker Gets 4 Years for Grossing Out Jurors

Jacob Sullum|Jan. 16, 2013 7:41 pm

Today Ira Isaacs, a self-described "shock artist," was sentenced to four years in federal prison for shocking people a little too much. The FBI describes his crimes:

Evidence presented at trial established that beginning in or about 1999 and continuing until at least 2011, Isaacs, doing business under the name LA. Media, operated numerous websites, through which he advertised and sold obscene videos that he acquired from other people. The obscene videos included a video approximately two hours in length of a female engaging in sex acts involving human bodily waste and a video one hour and 37 minutes in length of a female engaged in sex acts with animals. The evidence presented at trial also established that in approximately 2004, Isaacs began operating under the name Stolen Car Films and made obscene videos in which he instructed women to engage in sexual activity involving human bodily waste.

Federal prosecutors had to try Isaacs three times before winning a conviction. According to Morality in Media, Isaacs' sentence "sends a strong message to the porn industry and to the U.S. Department of Justice that the sexual exploitation of women by pornographers is wrong." Yet no one was forced to participate in making these movies, and no one was forced to watch them. Except for the jurors, who took their revenge last April by finding him guilty on five counts of producing and distributing obscenity—which, lest you forget, is still a crime under federal and state laws, although one that has never been clearly defined. In practice, you find out whether you committed it only after you have been arrested and prosecuted.
Isaacs argued that he was an artist, but the jury did not buy it. (A Canadian horror movie maker had better luck with that defense last month, when he was acquitted of illegally combining sex and violence—one of the ways Canada defines obscenity.) It is rather startling that in the year 2013, an American's liberty can still hinge on the utterly subjective aesthetic judgments of 12 randomly selected art critics.
Previous coverage of the Isaacs case here.

fucking disgraceful.  complete and utter lack of justice. but you already knew that, and i really don't want to go off on yet another tirade about this.

i would love to know if all these obnoxious blowtards pinching a turd over gun control being a "civil rights violation" feel the same about this? probably not, because we live in a country where we care more about keeping violent mental incompetents armed to the chattering teeth, whining about a violation of their privacy if we out them as being gun-happy to the point of fetishistic psychosis, but the second we receive knowledge of sex happening that isn't the kind of sex we think is happening, LOCK THEM UP FOREVER BECAUSE CHILDREN.

last time i checked, 2 girls 1 cup didn't empty a high capacity magazine into a toddler's face and abdomen.

We are the Sprocket Holes vol. 203

micro-reviews;

ALPS: 9/10

Yorgos Lanthimos follow-up to the demented Dogtooth doesn’t quite match the weirdness of its predecessor, but it’s a memorable, original film that tackles the subject of addiction in a way that’s fresh and unburdened with brick-in-the-nose obviousness or sadness-porn manipulations.

COMPLIANCE: 10/10

LOL I TROLL YOU LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL: the Movie.  Dramatization of the prank call that descended into a Pavlovian BDSM meltdown. Just when you think it’s gonna go all Phone Booth stupid, with someone swooping in to save the day… you get a mouthful of cock and a fat bitch on the kind of pathetic power trip only running a fast food joint can grant you telling you to “stop talking.” Some of us love authority to the point of naively sadistic dementia, and this film brilliantly illustrates that.

COSMOPOLIS: 8/10

Nice to see Cronenberg getting weird again. I like the novel, but not that much (as Blake Butler says; “Don DeLio is Chuck Palahniuck with a dictionary”), but the film was a cool little piece of anti-entertainment  that looked pretty and sounded like a play written by fever dreams and cock gagging. Or something.

JACK AND DIANE: 4/10

Pluh. This could’ve been so cool… an indie horror film about lesbian teenagers with Quay Brothers animated sequences and the ever-present threat of a burn-victim werewolf eating your guts in the middle of the night. What starts out as All Over Me meets Ginger Snaps just turns into a tedious mumblecore romance where the horror element gets reduced to told-symbolism rather than a real threat, taking a back seat to the short-sighted naval gazing of self-involved idiots. Fuck this bullshit. And Ketchup on sushi? Bitch you gross.

KILLER JOE: 9/10

William Friedkin re-teams with BUG writer Tracey Letts for this southern fried date rape of a film. Greasy comedy of murder perversions. Letts writes the best third acts ever.

SILENT NIGHT: 6.5/10

Not a bad remake, but not particularly memorable either. dug the look of Santa. Some decent acting, good cinematography, pretty mean spirited…just feels like it ended before it began. still pretty gruesome. Nice little nods here and there to the original films (GARBAGE DAY), but lacked the strong characters of the first film. No Mother Superior, No Peace.  

SLEEP TIGHT: 10/10

Cannot recommend this enough. Jaume Balaguero (REC 1&2, some brilliant short films) crafts a merrily misanthropic thriller that serves as a metaphor for people who go out of their way to make life as miserable as possible. Life breaks you, and then you lament its passing. We’re fucking pathetic. Existence is bondage.

It's a Funny World We Live In vol. 16

On August 27, 2012 two members of the Big Red High School football team in Steubenville, Ohio – USA were arrested and charged with the rape and kidnapping of an out of town 16 year old girl that took place on August 11th. At the time of this gang rape, the girl was intoxicated and unconscious. The victim had been intentionally drugged with a “date rape” intoxicant. She was photographed and video was taken of her in this condition, and there is evidence that she was hauled in a comatose state to multiple parties – and almost certainly raped by more members of the local high school football team than just the two players who currently stand charged. There is even evidence that she was urinated upon during this hideous assault.

full story here

Michael Colin Nodianos: A former Big Red baseball player, and clearly an avid and full participant in the “Rape Crew” – Nadianos was videoed along with several other students, some of whom appear to be Big Red high school athletes and perpetrators of this horrible crime. In this explosive video, Nadianos goes on for over 12 minutes describing the crime in great detail and confessing to his full participation including raping the girl at least once himself. In addition, Nadianos implicates several other members of the “Rape Crew” in the attack. Local law enforcement had been advised of the existence of this video, but claimed they could not retrieve it. This video was obtained by the Anonymous Cell “Knight Sec” and turned over to LocalLeaks. The video was shot so soon after the attack, that one person present becomes disgusted and actually leaves to go check on the condition of the victim. It is important to also note that despite this strong evidence, Nadianos has yet to be arrested or charged in this brutal attack.

WARNING: This Video Is Extremely Disturbing – Viewer Discretion Is Advised

ask me again why i don't go out very often. 

We are the Sprocket Holes vol. 202

TEXAS CHAINSAW Review

Roughly 40 years ago, a filthy little bruiser of a film called the Texas Chainsaw Massacre left deep cuts in the landscape of horror cinema that seem like they will never heal. In the decades that followed, entries in the backward-ass lunatic fuck genre that range from very good , pretty ok, and  really fucking bad (also good-bad and bad-good) have come and gone, and the original film itself spawned one of the most bizarrely frustrating franchises in genre film history, with sequels and remakes that not only failed to capture the power and spirit of the original (part 2 being a minor exception), but seem like they were made by people who had never even seen the original, or if they did they just didn’t understand anything beyond “big guy w/ chainsaw runs around and cuts up pretty people”.

It’s a new decade, and once again we have a new addition to this series in the form of the simply titled Texas Chainsaw. While it’s a forgone conclusion that nothing will ever match the presence of the 1974 original, 2013’s Chainsaw is at the very least respectful, and at its very best a meaningful contribution to the continuing mythology of Newt, Texas’ favorite son; Leatherface, as well as fleshing out not only the Sawyer family, but the town itself, suggesting that not all maniacs wear and/or imbibe the skin of their kills.

In this new film, Heather Miller (the gorgeous AlexandraDaddario) discovers that her recently deceased grandmother has left the family estate in her name. turns out Heather was adopted, and her legal parents snatched her from her birth mother’s dying arms. See… they were part of a vigilante lynch mob that set fire the Sawyer family farmhouse in August of 1973, and Heather’s mother was Loretta Sawyer, sister to the hillbilly cannibal Bar B Q brothers from the first film, who were all burned alive after Sally Hardesty’s confession.

… well… not all of them…

The one constant in all the TCM films has been prot-slasher Leatherface. In the first film, he’s the frightened infant; the baby in a trio of ghoulish brothers. In the second film, he’s a bashful prepubescent, teased about girls he likes and bullied by his more outgoing brothers. In the third film, he’s the surly teenager; growing his hair out while listening to heavy metal on his walkman. In the fourth, a gender-confused twenty something. Now it’s been some time since the events of the first film, and he’s a middle aged shut-in, much more bitter and skeptical about anyone outside of his circle  it’s beyond refreshing to see this, as in the awful Platinum Dunes films from last decade Leatherface was portrayed as little more than a scary pro wrestler in a Slipknot mask, but the less said about those, the better. 

Anyway, the film’s first half plays like an effective (if typical) backwoods slasher, with miserable assholes getting cut up by the grizzled veteran Leatherface. Once this wraps up, the film really shows its teeth, delving into family relations, dirty little secrets, and suggesting that maybe Leatherface isn’t the worst thing to happen to this town. See, Burt Hartman (played by Paul Rae), the good-ol-boy who led the vigilante lynch mob back in ’73 is now the mayor of the town, but time has not tempered his bloodlust with regards to the Sawyer clan, and the discovery that not only is there a long lost Sawyer girl, but also the reemergence of the gas-powered spectre that carved up a brutal legacy, has made him want to get the old band back together and put an end to this once and for all. But Leatherface remembers who he is as well, and meat will be ground.

But where does this leave Heather? In an interesting development, instead of joining the “good fight”, she comes to understand that this is her blood (in a matter of speaking), and oddly enough, once she has all the pieces, she understands where her cousin (Leatherface) is coming from, and makes the decision to stand by her family. Maybe I’m being silly, but I found this not merely perversely moving (although it is), but perfectly reasonable. Everyone Heather has encountered is a selfish lying asshole. Her best friend and boyfriend are fucking behind her back. Her adoptive parents are miserable white trash who don’t seem to think very much of her. Her lawyer Farnsworth (character actor Richard Riehle, the Jump-to-Conclusions-Mat guy from Office Space) fails to mention that a mongoloid serial killer is living in the basement of the house willed to her, and the town mayor wants to kill her for something she not only didn’t do, but had no knowledge of until the shrieking manchild in the dead skin mask cut up her shitty friends and chased her around a carnival. Once Leatherface finds out who Heather really is, he immediately stands by her side, and her him. Sure, he cut up her friends, but they were shitheads anyway whose friendship was based on a free ride to mardi gras, so fuck em. At least with Leatherface, you know where you stand, and he’ll protect you till the bitter end. All you gotta do is keep him fed. 

I’m stunned at how much I actually wound up caring about these two. Sure, they’re murderers, but they’re the only honest characters in the entire film. They don’t do what they do for money or sex, and they certainly don’t justify their bloodlust by evoking scripture (as the vigilante mayor does at the film’s start) while deriving sick enjoyment from the kill. For Leatherface, it’s what he knows, how he survives, how he understands whose who and what’s what. Everything Heather has encountered up to this point in her life has been a lie, but bloodlines never lie, and she fully embraces that by film’s end.

Keep in mind, It’s not a perfect film. It suffers from leaps in logic and continuity issues, but no more than any other horror film; nitpicky pain in the ass stuff that’s prevalent in the history of the genre that pointing them out is just redundant. It’s gory, misanthropic, offers a fresh take on the long running story, and has enough genuine weirdness to suggest that the parties involved have an idea of what made the original film the enduring classic it has become.  

Seconds, please.

ADDENDUM:

reviews are in, and they're almost universally awful. while i understand completely, i feel like a lot of people already made up their minds about it before they saw it. obviously, no one will ever capture the essence of the original film. the way it was shot, acted, directed, written... you can't manufacture that kind of hell, and it's foolish to think you're gonna get something even close to that.

the other thing critics and fans seem to believe is that the film is making the Sawyers into heroes. i don't see it that way. what the film is showing you is degrees of brutality. you're not meant to side with the Sawyers, but you're not meant to side with the vigilante lynch mob either. they say they're doing what they're doing out of a sense of biblical justice, but they get a little too much enjoyment out of torching the Sawyers. Revenge is not justice, and even if it was, it not their revenge to have. it's not like TCM 2 when Sally and Franklin's uncle Dennis Hopper wanted the family dead, or in Rob Zombie's Devil's Rejects, when William Forsythe's character seeks to avenge his brother Tom Towles' death at the hands of the Firefly Clan. as far as we know, none of the Sawyer's victims were tied to any member of the vigilantes in any way. i'm not sure if it was the filmmaker's intentions, but it was kind of a nice little stab at the whole "Kill the Killers!" attitude that rears its head whenever its perceived that someone got away with murder. you saw it on Facebook when that party bitch was found not guilty of killing her child, we watch it on goofy-ass Dexter every week. the vigilantes in TC3D are closer to the police officers in Clive Barker's Nightbreed; hate mongering sociopaths who wanna get 'em cus ther dffrnt. granted, the Sawyers kinda deserve it, but in the mind of Leatherface, the "Local Heroes" (as the paper pinned to Leatherface's headboard calls them) also deserve it. it's that  theory of Revenge being a kind of emotional Ouroboros (explored in fantastic Korean films like Oldboy, I Saw the Devil, etc); a destructive means to an end, only there is no end. someone kills someone. you kill that person. maybe that person meant something to this other person, and now this other person kills you, and they tell two friends and they tell their friends and so on and so on and so on....

i don't wanna make this film something more than it is. it's an entertaining horror film and a pretty good sequel. it's not as gleefully over-the-top as TCM 2, but unlike 3 and 4 it at least ties into the original in a way that makes sort-of-sense. i will say that if this film takes place in the year of our lord 2013, and Heather was a newborn during the events of the first film (1973), she would be forty years old. now, there are some supremely hot 40 year olds out there, but Alexandra Daddario....

...is a 26 year old who looks like a 19 year old.

...wait... what am i complaining about?