5 Different Movies To Watch This Halloween

Halloween… a time to watch the same fucking handful of movies over and over. Rocky Horror Picture Show, Ghostbusters, Beetlejuice, The Nightmare Before Christmas (which kind of works for two holidays, way to cash in Tim Burton), something from the Saw, Scream, Halloween, Friday the Thirteenth, or A Nightmare on Elm Street franchises, a bunch of weird J-Horror movies about ghosts that have bizarre endings, I’m sure you can come up with more but it’s all the same fucking shit year after year. Well, I’ve had enough. Here are 5 movies to watch this Halloween that probably wouldn’t make your traditional list, but are horrific in their own ways (and as a bonus, they’re all from different countries… have a cultured All Hallows’ Eve this year!):

Se7en
(USA, 1995)

David Fincher has made 3 amazing films (Fight Club, Se7en, and The Game) and a bunch of other ones that arguably range from “meh” to “not too shabby”. Not bad for a guy who used to make music videos for Madonna. Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman attempt to hunt down a serial killer who is murdering his victims based on each of the seven deadly sins. Se7en is not really a horror film as much as it is a thriller, but it’s a dark, moody thriller that just never lets up, and I know that sounds fucking cliched but it’s true. From the unnerving opening credits to the grim ending, this is a movie that fucks you up so well the first time you watch it, you wish you could erase your memory just so you could let yourself experience it again.

Cube
(Canada, 1997)

A Canadian horror film with a cast of nobodies (the most famous person in the movie is an actress that was in a couple Kids in the Hall sketches). People talk about how great the first Saw movie was on a budget of a little over a million, Cube was made for $350k and blows it out of the fucking water. A psychological thriller about a group of people trapped in a gigantic cube made up of smaller cubes probably sounds really boring, but within about a minute when the Cube claims its first victim, you’ll shut the fuck up about how boring you think it is. It’s a great minimalist film that has some excellent gory moments (the effects are pretty solid for how much they spent on the movie) and manages to be a pretty fun mind-fuck overall. Oh, but ignore the prequel and the sequel. They sucked.

Battle Royale
(Japan, 2000)

Not a horror movie at all, despite the section some shitty HMVs put it in, but the premise would be pretty terrifying for most 13-14 year olds: What would happen if your entire class was kidnapped, put on an island, and forced to kill each other for sport and because the government doesn’t have a better solution for population control? Battle Royale only recently became available in North America, conveniently just before the Hunger Games hit theatres (the plots are similar, and the author of the Hunger Games franchise claims that they never heard of the novel or the film Battle Royale before writing it, but then Battle Royale is kind of a rip-off of Stephen King’s early novels The Long Walk and The Running Man, and I’m sure someone would suggest those novels borrow elements from other works as well, so… what the fuck can you do). It’s got everything you need this Halloween: violence, creepy Asian girls, a weird bad guy that’s possibly a pedophile, and more violence. It’s kids viciously murdering each other on an island! What more do you need to know!?

13 Tzameti
(France, 2005)

Normally when you think “French films”, you think about a bag blowing in the wind for 45 minutes while a mime cries and it’s in black and white. While definitely horrifying, thankfully that’s not what 13 Tzameti is (although it IS in black and white). Absolutely NOT a horror movie in any way, but similar to Battle Royale in the sense that the situation is the terrifying part. A guy doing a construction job on a private house finds out about an envelope in his employer’s home, said envelope including instructions that could net him a fortune. What follows is so fucking awesome that I don’t even want to give any more away, although I’m sure someone will spoil it for you if you try to look any deeper into it, but the guy gets sucked into a world he wishes he hadn’t. Doesn’t ruin the whole movie or anything if you find out where the envelope takes him (it happens in about the first 30 minutes and the rest is him dealing with the situation), but if you can go in completely spoiler free, it makes it even cooler, so I’m not going to be the asshole to tell you. They did an American remake that’s pretty close to the original (it was made by the same director), so if you absolutely must watch it in colour and in English then the option exists, but don’t be lame. Just watch the original.

I Saw the Devil
(South Korea, 2010)

Before Kim Ji-woon made his American directorial debut with The Last Stand (an unfortunate misuse of his talents), he directed this modern masterpiece. The premise seems pretty simple at first (a cop tracks down a serial killer after the killer makes it personal) but then we get an interesting twist: the cop relentlessly tracks, beats, tortures, and maims our villain only to keep releasing him so he can beat him some more (with unfortunate consequences for all involved). Never let it be said that Koreans don’t know how to make revenge films (see also: Oldboy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, both of which could also have easily made this list). There’s a gruesome scene involving an Achilles tendon and a sharp object that makes me cringe every time I even think about it, a darkly humorous moment with a screwdriver, and so much brutality throughout that I couldn’t leave it off this list. Never mind the shitty “jumpy-loud-noise” scares of bullshit modern horror like The Conjuring or those Paranormal Activity movies, this is that creepy, uncomfortable and unsettling horror that stays with you some time after the movie is over.

So there you go, 5 different movies to watch beyond the usual crap we always end up watching at this time of year. The downside to all of these movies is that your girlfriend isn’t going to cutely grip your arm and hide her face in your chest while you watch them and then fuck you when it’s all over. They’re just going to be pissed that you made them watch these with you. Of course, if they do want to fuck you after watching any one of these… they’re a keeper. A weird, disturbed keeper. My kind of woman.

Radio Hypocrisy 2

So yesterday I got in a fight on Twitter with a couple local radio personalities: Sarah Burke, and Mark Cameron. Both host shows here in the city on a terrestrial radio station. It all started with this:

Sarah Burke posted the link to the ‘open letter to Miley Cyrus from the AriZona Ice Tea manager’ thing that has been going viral for the last couple days. Of course, the letter was NOT written by anyone from AriZona, it was written by a Funny or Die contributor. At no point does Burke mention this in the comment, but that’s not the worst of it… the worst of it is that she now believes that it’s funny to write an open letter to a celebrity and criticize them publicly. But wait… a few years ago, I did the exact same thing… with her! I wrote an open letter to Sarah Burke, something that resulted in her being incredibly upset over (she went out of her way to get my phone number from a mutual friend to call me to tell me how unhappy she was about it, and she e-mailed me several times to try and get me to delete the letter, at one time trying to threaten legal action). I’ve since deleted the entire thing (I did so after she came back to London after a stint in Kingston, figuring she deserved a fresh start), but here were some of the highlights:

Since your appointment to the [station name] weekend host position, I have been listening to your work quite frequently, as I do most of my driving around the city during the hours your shows are on, and I am an avid [station name] listener. I’ve enjoyed the work of the last several [station name] weekend hosts [I named a bunch of hosts]. Each one brought something different to their shows [I listed a bunch of unique elements each previous host had utilized], However, with you, Sarah, I have yet to pick out a single thing that makes your shows unique, with one exception: they’re uniquely awful.

Most of this letter centered on a BRUTAL bit she had done one Mother’s Day, where she interviewed a security guard, the only person that was in the building with her that day:

Very David Letterman-esque of you. So you give him a call, and start talking to him about his mother… who you immediately mention has passed away. WHAT!? What kind of dark turn has this taken? It’s Mother’s Day and now I’m listening to some old man talk about his dead mother and how they enjoyed going to dog shows. Well, hold on, everyone enjoys dogs, so now I’m thinking “maybe Burke is going to salvage this in some way”. So you ask him how his wife and kids are… Sarah, you’ve picked the saddest old man in the world to put on the radio, as he explains that he and the wife are separated, and I’m pretty sure he mentioned he doesn’t see the kids that often. AND after all of that, you decide to wish him a “Happy Mothers Day”. I suspect he will not be having a Happy Mother’s Day, nor will other people who are in a similar situation that may have been trying to not think about how depressing their lives are and just wanted to listen to the radio and be entertained. I wouldn’t be surprised if that security guard was found later that day hanging in the janitor’s closet with a note sticking out of his pants that just said “Burke”, written in tears.

I wanted to let Burke know that I’m glad she’s changed her mind about open letters, so I tweeted her the above photo and my screen captured comment, which of course she deleted immediately and blocked me from commenting further. That’s fine, it’s their Facebook page, and they can do what they want (and it’s not like I don’t have enough places to post things). The following Twitter conversation ensued:

Burke is notorious for lazy show prep. I’ve heard numerous bits where she essentially read a Buzzfeed article (without saying it was from Buzzfeed too, so that makes it even worse). But anyway, clearly she tries to brush me off, she thinks she’s in the right so that’s all that matters. If you don’t believe you’re a hypocrite or that you’ve lied to your audience, I guess you’re not a hypocrite or a liar.

So, that’s that. She’s brushed me off, I’m not pursuing the conversation any further, we’ve both said our goodbyes and it’s all over. Right? Nope, because the Gallant White Knight Mark Cameron must come to save poor Princess Burke! You see, Burke’s just a girl who can’t take care of herself, and mean smelly old Buckley just picks on women, and must be taught a lesson by this brave warrior, who is not at all a hypocrite either, as we’re about to see. Of course, he never thought that this has nothing to do with her gender and everything to do with her being fucking terrible at her profession (This is a radio host who segued a story about a child’s death into a station contest, and she once referred to former Maple Leaf’s head coach Pat Burns as “alive and well” 2 weeks before he succumbed to the cancer that he’d been living with for some time… very “well” indeed). I believe I’ve included every tweet, and the only editing that has taken place was the order the tweets were made, in an attempt to make this look like a coherent conversation (but it’s Twitter, where it would be easier to find Bigfoot than a coherent conversation). None of the context has been changed, and I have not edited anything to make myself look better. This is the conversation, and you’re all free-thinking human beings who can make their own minds up about what they’ve just read.

By the way, the picture reference in my first tweet to him… we had our picture taken together during an awards ceremony when I was going to school. He presented me with the “Announcer of the Year” award in 2009.

Of course, Mark Cameron no doubt thinks he’s walked away the victor. As I said to one of my fans on Twitter later that night that claimed I was “destroying him”, “Arguments are only won in the minds of those who participate.” I’m sure Mark is very happy with this. But I don’t believe he should be for the following reasons:

• He sat at his keyboard calling me “chicken shit” and a “coward who sits behind their comp”, then claimed he doesn’t stand for personal attacks (which, at no point during these conversations did I personally attack anyone, I only critiqued their professional work). Nothing hypocritical there of course.
• He tried to bring gender into it right off the bat, to attempt to twist it into some other sort of angle that has nothing to do with the topic (which is that Burke was in the wrong for posting this considering she got so upset when she was criticized as a public figure, and for posting it as a legit article).
• He acted foolish while representing his employer (even though he claims his personal account doesn’t represent his employer, he speaks for them on several occasions in his tweets and even claims I’m welcome to come meet with them… I’ll bring the donuts!)
• He keeps claiming that because the Funny or Die letter was satire, that makes it ok. They’re still being critical of Miley and trashing her behavior, which is what makes the letter funny. But it’s ok because it’s satire. So he’s fine with personal attacks on Miley Cyrus (who by the way is a woman, last we all checked), but doesn’t see how that’s hypocritical.
• He claims that I should meet with them to discuss issues I have with their station, then claims he wouldn’t want to meet with me anyway. Of course, I’M the coward still, him calling me “chicken shit” from a computer in the safety of his own home, that’s as brave as it gets.
• He shows that he clearly doesn’t understand how The Onion works. If someone posted an article from The Onion but claimed it was real, they’d be laughed at by anyone who knows what The Onion is. That’s exactly what Burke did with the Funny or Die article. If he’s claiming that the station’s Facebook page is like The Onion, so they can post fake news and report it as real… well, they’re not. First off, The Onion doesn’t repost fake news stories that someone else wrote and claim they’re true, they write their own fake news stories and never make any claims about anything. Second of all, this radio station is not The Onion. And they never will be. The worst Onion writer is 10x better than anyone working for any terrestrial radio station on the planet.
• He tries to be condescending toward me because “he could pass me on the street and have no idea who I am”, but I have a bigger following than him on every major social networking site and more people hear my work every week than hear his work. In fact, people have PAID to hear my work. As far as I’m aware, no one has ever bought a collection of Mark Cameron’s bits, and they only listen to him because they have to listen to him for a few minutes every hour in between the songs they want to hear. When people come to my channel, they’re coming to listen to me.

So, that was my Wednesday night. Fighting with hypocritical radio hosts who are fine with dishing it out, but not fine with being scrutinized themselves. If you can’t take the heat, get out of the studio. Forever.