The Comic Critic reviews Bugsy Malone

Bugsy Malone is a charming movie that thoroughly entertains. While not huge at the box office, it has legs. Bugsy Malone continues to pop up in various movie lists from the Top 100 Musicals to the Top 100 Mobster movies. The music, one of the movie’s strengths, is also one of its greatest weaknesses. They should have let the kids do the singing rather than dubbing in adult singers. In a gorgeously unique period film that’s cast with only children, pedal cars, and a huge amount of custard, its adult dubbing felt odd. The music itself is very strong, being covered over the years by great performers and continues to pop up in odd places—like the game Grand Theft Auto. This isn’t too surprising. Bugsy Malone was nominated for a few Oscars and the one it walked away with was for Best Original Score. Various movies and television shows have paid homage to Bugsy Malone through references to scenes and characters. It’s an endearing film that captures a cult audience every generation.

The Comic Critic Reviews Maniac from 1934

You might be thinking that I’ve reviewed Maniac already. Well, I did review a Grindhouse classic from 1980 by the same name, but this Maniac is a black-and-white exploitation film from 1934. Being independently produced, this Maniac was not chained to the Hays Code standards to which the studios were enslaved. It also lacked the studios’ wealth of talent. Some of the actors didn’t receive screen credit.  Others were gathered from the vaudeville circuit and apparently realized a chance for an oversized performance on film. Maniac is extremely weird. You can see it as either humorously bad on an epic scale, or as a brilliant work surreally delivered. It seems at times to diagnose itself as schizophrenic. Following the premise of Maniac is like trying to follow a bean in a carnival shell trick. I finally settled on the definition, “It’s so bizarrely awful, it’s entertaining.” And you have to wonder if an independent sex exploitation film from the ‘30s can pass the Bechdel Test, what’s keeping modern Hollywood from reaching the same high bar?

The Bechdel Test

1   1.     Has to have at least two women.

2   2.     Who talk to each other.

3   3.     About something other than a man.

I promised you photos from the pumpkin carving contest last week. Here they are:













And below is my pumpkin.
 
And how it looks at night.
 

The Return of Stickman #1514

This was a real thing. Besides spider venom there was also scorpion venom, and other poisons.

In other news, this will be the first weekend that I'll be spending the entire weekend at home. Then I only have one show in November and one show in December. I've lost count of the number of shows I've done, but I'm confident it's over a dozen. I have enough information now from the last three years that I can make a chart and establish which shows are the ones that I need to give priority. But, before I do that, I need to finish working on my next book and get it shipped to the printer.

The Comic Critic Reviews Matango aka: The Attack of the Mushroom People

I can’t help but wonder if Matango inspired Gilligan’s Island. You have a small crew of people with different roles in society cruising the high sea for jollies when a storm comes up and shipwrecks them. In Matango, the island on which they are shipwrecked has barely anything edible on it. Most of the movie is spent revealing the various crew members’ truly cruel and selfish natures as they struggle to survive starvation. It’s a dark and uneasy story compared to the kindhearted Gilligan’s Island, where everybody cheerily works together on their island rich in its bounty: bananas and coconut radios. It’s Matango‘s dark, brooding atmosphere that makes it so creepy. And also creepy is that the mushrooms’ poisonous nature is known, but never truly accepted (except towards the end of the movie). The mushrooms are more than an obvious physical metaphor on human society. Or maybe it’s the evil of peer pressure. Or it might be a bit of both.

Tonight I will be participating in a Pumpkin Carving Contest hosted by the CLAW. I'll be sure to post photos of the various pumpkins later.

The Return of Stickman #1513

They just had to arrest them for something.

The Return of Stickman #1512

I'm doing one last strip on this theme because I forgot to send new scripts to my copy editor and this strip only took one sentence I knew I could get right.

The Comic Critic Reviews Ginger Snaps

Horror movies have been exploiting hormonal teenagers from the very beginning. The number of sex-themed horror movie tropes is immense—and legendary. What gave Ginger Snaps its box office kick and subsequent legs is how it openly embraced the parallels of the onset of puberty with lycanthropy. You don’t want to talk to your parents, who are at best “lame.” You’re a social outcast morbidly focused on death because you’d rather be dead than be living in high school. So, you’re stuck fumbling for information from such questionable sources as old-wives’ tales, the Internet, and some student nurse. And desperately trying to keep it all together before people notice – the rising body count. This isn’t an “I was a teenage werewolf” movie; it’s an “I was an angst-riddled teenage werewolf” movie. And that twist saves it from being another fly-by-night werewolf film.