Jingus

I never minded the Andre/Hogan matches. Hulk is Hulk, you know exactly what you're getting there. But I always thought Andre tended to be underrated as a worker. Sure, he was crippled and immobile by the late 80s. But he had air-tight psychology and was actually really good at selling a beating when he wanted to. My vote? First one that comes to mind is Big Bossman/Big Show from 1999. All of their matches sucked hard. Bossman was somehow in a World Heavyweight Title match on Pay Per View in the year Nineteen Ninety Nine. And on top of all that, it was attached to a jaw-dropping storyline which was an instant piece of legit Wrestlecrap. Also, any of Bobby Lashley's ECW title feuds from the first few months of his reign. Whether it was with Test or Holly or whoever, they were all stinkers. It seemed like Lashley would wrestle the same guy every single week on television for a month straight, and beat his opponent every time... yet somehow his PPV matches with the same guys tended to be much shorter and always have fuckoff non-finishes. Even worse, none of this shit got over with the live crowd; between his crappy competition and Lashley's inherent blandness, nobody outside of the WWE creative staff ever gave the tiniest shit about Bobby until the Vince feud. MAN was ECW the worst show in the world a couple years ago.

I'm not sure if I'd make such a sweeping statement, but thinking about it I'm also not sure what I'd say was a better vamp flick than LTROI, it's one hell of a movie. BTW Hawky, thanks for the recommendation a while back, it got me to see it sooner and I'm glad for it.

Aw what the hell, it's been way past everybody's 12 hours. My last pick: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre I still think the most powerful horror movies are the grungy 70s flicks which simply do not feel safe. Watching one of these movies, you really have no idea if the "heroes" are gonna live or die. You don't know what depths the villains are willing to stoop to. It's that unsafe feeling, a world where any number of truly horrific things are waiting just around the corner for the unlucky, which really frightens me in a way that no Jason or Michael ever could. The original Texas Chainsaw Massacre was probably not the dirtiest or most shocking of these films; that would probably go to Last House on the Left or I Spit On Your Grave or other, more obscure but equally appalling works of art. However, Texas Chainsaw seemed to perfectly capture that 70s zeitgeist of paranoia and despair even better than movies like All The President's Men which were specifically about the causes of that atmosphere. It's also a Vietnam parable, and a shot at the hippie movement's failures, and a pessimistic indictment of America in general. It's also a movie in which a guy in a skin mask butchers people with a sledgehammer and chainsaw, seemingly onscreen, though the film actually uses almost zero visible blood or gore in order to make its penetrating impact. One hell of a horror flick.

bump What with all the drafts being consolidated into their own threads, I thought this one should go too. Weird how close to the end we got before quitting.

Same here. Stupid flick, sure, but I kinda liked it. I strangely find that I enjoy Guillermo's slumming genre work like Mimic and Blade 2 better than his indy/foreign/oscar stuff like Pan's Labyrinth or Cronos. .

Completely unhelpful to people who have this turned off. Why do you keep harping on that? Anyone who read my post can turn sigs on and link to the site.

Yeah, Ron is a friend of Threadkiller's, and he hosts the site. Anytime anyone wants to sign up for The Pit, the link is always in my signature. What'd I do to piss you off now? Hell, back at our aforementioned battling board I yelled at Bob for gheying up that thread where you were grieving for your friend.

So DCH and me are the only ones who have parents who hate wrestling? My dad doesn't watch it, doesn't care about it, thinks it's a waste of time, and he's the kindest opinion in the family. My mom is a pacifist liberal who spent a while working at a head injury rehab clinic, so she looks at wrestling as basically being on the same level with hardcore pornography or devil-worshipping. Her second husband, my stepdad, thinks it's a stupid waste of braincells entirely populated by maniacs and retards, partly because his younger brother many years ago was dumb enough to do one of those "fans challenge the wrestlers" thing at some old territory show and got pretty badly fucked up. That's why I literally never watched wrestling at all until I was nineteen years old. It was never watched, never talked about, never considered, never even thought about in our households.

Someone else pointed out the plot hole in the Rhino & Dudleys' Time Together In ECW thing, but it really needs to be restated. They spent about four months together in ECW. Compare that to the 4+ years they spent together in WWF/E. Of course, going down that road would mean even more mentioning of the competition, so they're just kinda fucked all around there. You guys probably know me well enough to already fill in my complaint here. On the other hand, I might just watch this week's Impact just for this match. I mean, WOW. This has trainwreck possibilities beyond my wildest dreams. Also, I maintain that Christy Hemme is a perfectly tolerable wrestler, at least as long as her opponent is Awesome Kong. Remember the early days of Kong's tenure, when every time they got in the ring together, Christy ended up broken in half and sent out on a stretcher? Hemme takes a spinning backfist shot like no other woman in this country. Eventually, she just started screaming and running every time Kong even showed up. Now that's some quality television right there.

I used to like KotH, but fell out of it a couple years back. I think the last straw recently was the episode where Cotton died, which was shockingly terrible. I am slightly surprised that American Dad is now by far the consistently best Fox sunday cartoon; four years ago, who woulda predicted that? Therein lies the movie's single biggest flaw. For some reason, they decided that a color palette of black objects in front of black backgrounds, shot in near-total darkness, with an overreliance on closeups and handheld shakycam would be the best way to film the events in this movie. I humbly disagree. EDIT: wait a sec. You don't think that was noteworthy? I mean, that's the kind of thing that most horror flicks never even tiptoe around. Pretty much. The writers were apparently real sticklers for making sure that no evidence of the Aliens was left lying around by the end, since when they're encountered in the future nobody has ever heard of them. But considering how things turned out, I don't think he even needed the blue acid to begin with. As for the test-tube delivery system... yeah, that was lame.

Sayles has a good rep, for what it's worth. The only thing of his I've seen was Lone Star, which was indeed a very good movie, very unusual in some of the character choices it decided to go with. Not that I know of. Wiki's got nothing on him. A quick Google turns up some cover art pieces done for Dungeons & Dragons books and not much else. Sad, because he was indeed fucking awesome. I've never seen airbrush work which was done in such a precise manner, with even stuff like the little red ammo counters on the sides of the guns looking perfect. Admittedly, at the time he was basically a noob whose only major credits were the original Buffy movie (which was pretty fucking terrible) and some co-writing work on Toy Story. And the Alien series does generally have that tendency of giving relatively young and unknown artists their first big breaks. Unfortunately, it just backfired in this case. Although oddly, you can see some of the same stuff in this script show up later in some of Joss's other projects, most notably Firefly. Ron Perlman's Johner and Adam Baldwin's Jayne are damn near the same guy. Oh yeah it was. Come on, man. I know you've read the AvP books and comics. With all they could've done with this concept, they decided to go traipsing around a pyramid maze in the antarctic on present-day earth? What? And I liked Predator 2 too. Not exactly great cinema, and all those action movies involving inner-city gangs in the 80s and 90s do look dated pretty damn quick. But it was a tolerable action flick, with decent fight scenes and an unusually good cast.

I see your fanboyishness, and match it. I've still got volumes 2 and 3 of the Aliens comic wrapped up in plastic somewhere around here, and the first series of AvP too come to think of it. I think the early Aliens books suffered more than anything else from some really bad artwork. The first volume was really drab black & white which is just a chore to look at, and the third volume is this ludicrously awful pastel shit which literally looked like some kid's watercolor paintings. Which makes it even worse compared to the absolutely gorgeous airbrushed artwork from Dennis Beauvis in Volume 2, which pointed out how great this stuff could look, and sadly never would ever again. Volume 3 was indeed hurt by a retarded anticlimax, which was also illogical as hell (if Ripley wanted the alien superqueen to gather all the aliens on earth, why the fuck did she shoot it dead?). BTW, if you haven't read them, I'd recommend Steve Perry's novelizations of those Aliens comics. He adds a bit of psychological depth to the characters, which is worth putting up with his constant yammering about guns. (Seriously, in the movie novelization of the Jim Carrey flick The Mask, he took a full page to describe the villain's firearm and ammunition. What the hell is wrong with this guy.) I've got one of the old scripts for Alien 3, the one I think you're referring to with the airborne alien spores. It kinda comes off as one of the comics being copied into screenplay form. Interesting idea, but cardboard characters and not a terribly unique setting or plot. I wouldn't even say that it's much superior to what David Fincher ended up filming. And oh yeah, I don't really see how the "Director's Cut" of that film is supposed to be any better than the theatrical version, it was mostly some fairly insignificant plot points which got changed or cut. Joss Whedon's original script for Resurrection was much longer and more complicated. It had several long action scenes which weren't filmed, including a much longer and far superior finale with a constantly-evolving boss alien which was unfortunately dumbed down into the shitty-looking puppet we got at the end of that movie. However, despite being as much of a Whedon fanboy as you'll find around these parts, I'd argue that he was simply not the right choice to write an Alien flick. Whedon's work is witty, funny, twisty, and poignant, but it's never scary, and the primary goal of any Alien movie should be to scare the shit out of the audience. Jean-Pierre Jeunet was a terrible choice for a director, too; while I'm a pretty huge fan of City of Lost Children and Amelie, this comedic dude should never have been let anywhere near the very serious Alien series. Ridley Scott claimed that the first AvP was the 3rd-best in the series? Really? Well, he's also the guy who made Legend and Black Rain, so it's not like he's never had a brainfart before.

The sequel's a little better. Has a proper R rating and doesn't try to make the Predator heroic. Awfully darkly-lit and very hard to see at times, though. As for Alien Resurrection, some people liked it better thabn 3. I didn't, but some did. YMMV.

I've got the first two books, but it's been so long since I read them that I'd utterly forgotten absolutely everything about them. I was gonna go back again after the season ended and refresh my memory, but tonight's episode left such a bad taste in my mouth now I'm not sure if I want to.

This got missed. Yes.

So am I the only one still watching? If so, the rest of you did yourselves a favor. The season finale was fucking terrible. They quickly hurried to finish up the serial killer plot in a fairly anticlimactic manner, and I still have a hard time buying it. I mean, the Cajun guy? That's your deadly mystery? It's like the writers didn't know who it was until now either, since they went out of their way to explain how Sookie had never read his mind in the many long stretches of time that their characters were close to each other before now. And then he gets put out of his misery right quick, just so we can spend the majority of the show setting up cliffhangers for next year, which is about the most annoying thing any show can do for a season ender. I mean, jesus, your average finale on Lost answers more questions and gives more closure than this one did.

Once again though: where is the money coming from for all this college tuition? We're already rather heavily in deficit. How much tuition do they get? Would it possibly be worth more for them to just get a job for the same length of time and save the money?

Which is noble enough, but as Czech pointed out at length, if you force people to do it you're gonna get shitty results. Ask any old soldier how the enlistees felt about the drafted recruits back in the day for a good comparison. You sometimes really have no idea when someone is legitimately trying to pick a fight because they hate you and when they're just being chronically cranky because they're a person who enjoys complaining and bitching like myself, do you. (Admittedly, I have not read any of Blume's books since they stopped forcing me to back in grade school. Was I missing some kind of overlooked genius in the prose stylings of Superfudge! and the like?) (Hey, was she the one who wrote that I, Houdini book about the hamster? I did like that one.)

They do live in a little fortified compound to keep away possible security risks.

Says the guy who only consumes the work of Victor Hugo when it's on clearance. In seriousness, though, I don't see the point of the mandatory civil service. Sure, it will get a bunch of people out on the streets doing stuff, but most likely doing stuff in a sulky half-assed manner since they don't want to be there. You couldn't trust them with anything more complex than picking up garbage off the side of the road. And I don't see how being used as slave labor for a period of time is supposed to just magically make someone a better person. What's it supposed to do, teach 'em the value of hard work? When they don't get paid for it?

Please, Milkhawk, save this thread with more penis.

I admit it, I lolled. Stupid Judy Blume and her heartwarming tales of childhood which are written in such a simplistic style that binary code might be considered a step up for her. How the hell did this literary equivalent of Skittles become required reading, anyway?

No Venk, I think that's a fairly accurate summation.

So, whatever happened to that KaneRulesFan fellow?

Hey, if it means bringing more Summer Glau into our lives, I'm all for the vicious-tusked mammocalypse.