There Must Be Some Mixtape: Track #1 – "The Rockin' Ghost" by Archie Bleyer (1956)

When I was a kid, I was told that Steve Allen was a genius. I was told this by Steve Allen himself. And I believed it.

In the ‘70s, the first things I knew about Steve Allen were those tidbits that my parents told me about him. He was a comedian, he started The Tonight Show in the 1950s and he also wrote the show’s theme music. (Being told this, I thought for years that Allen had written the music for the Johnny Carson version of the show, when in fact, that was Paul Anka.) After their input, I had to figure Allen out on my own, gathering information from his numerous guest appearances all over television. I would have to admit that I was usually entertained by him. Mr. Allen would take part in skits on variety shows or act in small roles on dramas and sitcoms, and I always liked him. He would show up on the Dean Martin Roasts and throw out a bunch of insults in the network-acceptable style and I would laugh along, whether I got the jokes or not. I thought Steve Allen was a pretty swell guy.

It was his appearances on talk shows like Carson, Cavett, or Griffin were where you could get to know an artist a little more personally. It was on talk shows that I first heard the term “renaissance man,” and it was always in conjunction with Steve Allen’s name. I would learn that he had written thousands of songs and put out dozens of albums. He had written numerous books, none of which I had ever seen in a bookstore. (But then again, I wasn’t looking for them there, was I?) And time and again on many of these talk appearances, I would be reminded that Allen was a true genius and, yes, a renaissance man.

The moment where the genius label really stuck in my mind with Steve Allen was from watching a show on PBS called Meeting of Minds. Created and written by Allen, Steve served as the congenial host to three or four historical figures each episode (played often by well-known Hollywood actors, including Allen’s wife, Jayne Meadows... yay, nepotism). Allen and the historical figures would cross the barriers of time to discuss all manner of subjects, always pertaining to the areas for which each respective figure on the show was famous. The show was smart, very informative, and Allen was quite wise to never allow a character to get too far from their own quotes when discussing their beliefs and philosophies. I not only watched the show on my own when it aired on PBS, but even watched a few episodes in Social Studies at school, as I had a teacher who thought the series was a marvelous teaching tool.

How could I not be impressed by a man who supported his own bid as a genius by surrounding himself with those of a like mind from past centuries? Steve Allen seemed a pretty sharp cookie to me. By all accounts, he probably was the genius that he and his wife liked to convince everyone he was, but then I discovered his one fatal flaw... He liked to disparage rock ‘n’ roll lyrics.

Allen used to do a bit back in the 1950s during rock ‘n’ roll’s original heyday with various songs, where he would read out the lyrics, sometimes doo wop-oriented so that the lines were comprised of nonsense syllables, and make the tongue-in-cheek case for rock ‘n’ roll being the reason that there were no longer any great poets at large at the time because they were all employed as lyricists. Given that this time was also that of the beat poets, and that Allen's musical playground seemed to belong at least tangentially to that of cool school jazz, I can't imagine he had not been exposed to the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and others of the time. Sure enough, he not only had Jack Kerouac as a guest on his show in the late '50s, but he also recorded an entire record album with the man, where Jack read his own poetry while Allen tinkled along on piano. I'm not trying to say the beats and rock 'n' roll were inexorably entwined (they weren't; the beat movement was an intellectual exercise chiefly created by elitists, whereas rock 'n' roll was its exact opposite), but there was enough crossover in attitude that some common ground was quite apparent.

And yet, Allen was a real square, daddy-o, when it came to the rock 'n' roll of his time. It didn't matter that he premiered many famous rock artists on his shows; he accepted them as acts, but like to put them through the ringer, especially Elvis Presley. His disdain is most apparent in a clip from his show where he reads the words to Sweet Gene Vincent's seminal rockabilly hit, Be-Bop-A-Lula. Allen launches into the lyrics, but somehow gets the actual title to the song incorrect each time he pronounces it, saying "Be-Bop-A-LUBE-A" instead, over and over. That single slip of a syllable reveals the errant man behind the genius label, a man who decided to take a swing at a supremely easy target but displayed his own prejudices and ignorance at the same time. Not that his audience of the time cared; they laughed along all the same, each one probably attempting futilely to come to grips on their own terms with the teenage delinquent madness that was overtaking pop culture in the late '50s.

Back to the late '70s...

I did not see any of Allen's 1950s performances of this routine until years later, but I did grow up seeing him perform variations on his popular music bit on several shows in the '70s and early '80s. He went after Donna Summer's Hot Stuff when he was given a new shot at a variety show in 1980 (that only lasted 6 episodes, which is possibly telling that his style no longer matched that of the times). Most memorable to me was his appearance on the Sha Na Na show, which my brothers and I watched fairly religiously on Saturday afternoons when it aired on KTVA, our local CBS affiliate. Surrounded by the members of the famous band actually named after the lyrics within the song he was roasting (which was meant to be ironic on some level), Allen set about reading off the words to Get a Job, a '50s doo wop stable originally released by The Silhouettes. He would steadily and emotionlessly read out each “mum mum mum,” "sha na na" and “yip yip yip” to make his case, and then solemnly closed his book almost like a hymnal when he was finished.

At the time, I was wrestling with whether I actually found the antics on the Sha Na Na show funny anymore, my comedic tastes having jumped to George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and Steve Martin somewhere in the middle of the show's run. (Call it the Saturday Night Live Influenza...) As a teenager, I was drifting away from the complacency that allowed me to accept the first few years of Garry Marshall's Happy Days as solid entertainment into a rebelliousness that would not allow me to accept the last few sorry (and too self aware) seasons of the show. (The same went for Laverne and Shirley, but I really wrestled with the last couple of seasons of Mork and Mindy, which had the same expected Marshall drop in quality, but did have both Robin Williams and Jonathan Winters making things worthwhile in the fourth and last season.) In the end, my taste for the bland humor of the syndicated '50s greaser show with Bowser and his buddies was waning by the time Allen showed up in 1979.

For me then, around the general time that I was getting hard into rock music myself, to see a man in his late fifties – a man that I had otherwise been convinced was no less than a genius not long before – to take a dive into such an unfunny and out of place bit was astounding to me. I started to doubt his once formerly divine status in my mind. Was he really a genius? How could someone so smart be so utterly blind to how great that early rock ‘n’ roll music was? What was his problem? What did he do when Bob Dylan went electric a few years later and there was a genuine poet at play in the fields of rock? Did he ever do the same routine to All Along the Watchtower or Tangled Up in Blue? But while it seems like overnight now, it took a few times for me to see Allen repeat this routine on other shows (it was one of his standard bits) before I pretty much wrote off Mr. Steve Allen as any sort of a genius.

And so it went until the early ‘90s. Steve Allen was no longer much of anything in my mind; just another actor, like so many others, trying to hang on in a decade far past his prime. He had squandered his genius on pettiness, I thought, though I was the one who had not followed through on my own research. I had not taken into account the man's own discography. I had not sought out any of his records to find out if he had a leg to stand on in this debate. Or whether he had created music equally as insipid (on the surface) as the rock songs he was mocking.

In those early '90s, Comedy Channel (soon to be Central) began running old episodes of his original TV series, The Steve Allen Show, I finally got to see the man in his prime, and I was deeply impressed. He was truly original in his comedy and broke incredible ground with his gags, stunts, writing, and the format of his show. He surrounded himself with incredible, (then) young comedians like Louis Nye, Don Knotts, Tom Poston, and Pat Harrington, and many bits on the show became national water cooler fodder. And as I mentioned earlier, Allen also broke many early rock artists first on his show, despite how he felt about the music himself. Most of all, there was a steady air of cocksureness about his demeanor; the type of attitude that allows a performer to consistently walk a tightrope when performing for the public, often trying new and astounding things before their eye. (However, it is the same demeanor that allowed him to pull his creaky rock lyrics routine in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, so there is a downside to such bravado.)

Let’s cut to today...

Now, I did not want to start my new Halloween mixtape – that I am calling There Must Be Some Mixtape this year – with a full bio of Steve Allen, and I don’t believe that I have gotten anywhere near that at all. Rather, I felt it was important to set the stage for how the man once deeply impressed me in my youth, then broke my heart (and mind) with his truly dopey reaction to another art form, but then started to crawl back into my good graces for the rest of eternity. And that spot within my good graces was all because of one song...

No, it was not This Could Be the Start of Something Big, perhaps Allen's most famous composition of his supposed 8,500 songs, and the one that became (in its instrumental version) the original Tonight Show theme. Over the past couple of decades, I have come into the possession of a few of Allen’s old LPs, and I found out what he preferred over the too childish rock ‘n’ roll of his day. The music is uniformly jazzy and it swings, and the pervading sense is one of '50s suburban cool, even if there was nothing remotely cool about suburbia in the '50s. That is, unless you were three martinis in at a cocktail party, and then you were probably having a pretty good time. And that is kind of where Allen's records end up for me, stacked up next to Ferrante and Teicher and The Three Suns. (And I have a lot more albums by those last two groups now than I do of Allen.)

But nowhere on those albums resides the song in discussion (finally) today... The Rockin' Ghost. For that song, we have to go to another figure, one Archie Bleyer, a bandleader whose career began in the 1930s and ran up until his days as a record executive in the mid-1960s. Bleyer's band had a few big hits, like the original version of Hernando's Hideaway (which peaked at #2 on the charts) and a cover of the Ames Bros.' The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane (which hit #26). He became Arthur Godfrey's right hand guy in the late '40s and started his own label, Cadence, in 1952. With Cadence, he broke the Everly Brothers, who went on to massive success, and he was also the first producer to record Link Wray, though he only ever released the amazing, feedback classic Rumble before send Wray on his way to other label.

The nice thing about having your own studio is that you can release your own music if you are so inclined. In 1956, Archie Bleyer took a song written by Mr. Steve Allen and Ira Lee (I am unable to find confirmation of which one wrote the music or the lyrics), put it through his own arrangement with his big band, and inadvertently released one of my very favorite Halloween songs of all time... The Rockin' Ghost. In fact, it may be in my Top Five...

The Rockin’ Ghost
(Steve Allen – Ira Lee)

“On a night when you
Are out on a lark
All alone and so
Afraid of the dark
That's the time you may
Encounter your host
(Who?)
The rockin’ ghost!

When the winds are
Blowing up in the trees
And you're feeling
Kind of weak in the knees
Gloom will follow you
From pillar to post
(Who?)
The rockin’ ghost!

Luckily if you
Want him to get going
All you do is say
‘I dig you the most,
Ghost!’

Then you'll notice
He'll be tipping his hat
'Cause he really is
The swingingest cat
When he hears you say
‘I dig you the most’
(Who?)
The rockin’ ghost

The rockin' ghost
The rockin' ghost

[whistle break]

The rockin' ghost
The rockin' ghost
The rockin' ghost
The rockin' ghost

[horn break]

The rockin' ghost
The rockin' ghost
The rockin' ghost
The rockin' ghost

[horn break 2]

The rockin' ghost
The rockin' ghost

Luckily if you
Want him to get going
All you do is say
‘I dig you the most,
Ghost!’

Then you'll notice
He'll be tipping his hat
'Cause he really is
The swingingest cat
When he hears you say
"I dig you the most!"
(Who?)
The rockin’ ghost!

The rockin' ghost
The rockin' ghost
The rockin' ghost...

Now, if you were not grooving in your seat, wiggling around and tapping your toes and fingers to The Rockin' Ghost, then there is nothing that I can do for you. If you were not caught up in the smooth vocals delivering those charming lyrics, then you need a blood transfusion and probably some form of brain surgery. You are clearly broken inside. You need to be expunged from the records and put out of your utter misery.

When I first encountered this song a few years ago when I ran into it by accident on a mixtape dropped by someone else on the WFMU website, my jaw dropped. If raised the question that comes to me so often when I find something that so perfectly captures my mindset and my own musical tastes... "How have I lived this far without this song in my life?"

Well, the song was then in my life, but it wasn't until I decided to find some artwork for the song to go with my file in iTunes that I saw the songwriting credits for the song: Steve Allen and Ira Lee. Searching about find several other references to Steve Allen having co-written the song, and so until I find a master list of all his compositions that can prove it otherwise, I am assuming it is the same man. But the style of the music is certainly within Allen's own range, and the cool jazz leanings of both the music and some of the key words within speak to Allen's sensibilities. The phrase "Gloom will follow you from pillar to post," certainly the most deftly descriptive line in the lyrics, certainly has a sense of Mr. High-IQ Allen about it.

The questions that the song leads to further down the line, though, make me wonder at Allen and Lee's intentions with the song. If Allen was such a hater of rock music, why would he try so hard with a title that had Rockin' in the title when so many current songs of the day (1956) were reaching for the audience in the same way? Was it for an easy hit? The song itself is nowhere close to rock 'n' roll, so the title itself is unnecessary in that regard, expect perhaps to set the record purchaser off balance. It could have easily just been called (and more accurately) The Swingin' Ghost, as the song is quite clearly a jazz swing tune delivered by a big band orchestra, and has the horn charts and breezy singing to mark it as such. And yet, The Swingin' Ghost just doesn't quite have the right sound to it, especially when sung in quick succession several times, whereas The Rockin' Ghost does swing a bit more in repetition.

Besides, the real strength of Bleyer's arrangement of the music is that the whistle motif established early on in the song gives a real sense of ghostliness and comedic lightness that play very well with the listener. Leading into this is a pulsing organ sound creating the effect of a spooky walk through the dark. The song builds through a pair of repeated horn breaks leading to the song's climax but never lets us escape from the meeting with the ghost and its odd whistle effect and the pulse of the organ. Compare this to a later version by the popular singing group, The Modernaires, where the whistle is replaced by a lighter flute sound and the organ is non-existent, though the arrangement there leads to a much larger and more traditional big band climax with vocals and horns blaring to the last note. It's still a fun, fine version of the song, but has nowhere near the appeal or the fun of the Bleyer version (even when they pull out a not entirely successful Boris Karloff imitation late in the song). 

But the key side effect of discovering this song was co-written by Steve Allen was that I finally had my real proof that there was a real genius within him after all. The song may not have lyrics sharp enough to pass a lampooning from Mr. Steve Allen himself, but the words flow easily and set the character up in a minimalist fashion that tell us what he is (a ghost, who may appear when you are out on a lark in the dark) and how to get him to leave you alone in a polite fashion (tell him that you "dig him the most" and then he tips his hat and is on his way). What doesn't get imparted is exactly why he is "rockin'" or "the swingingest" but what is a ghost without a little bit of mystery left over? And everything is made perfect when there is that slight pause after the vocalists sing "I dig you the most..." and then punctuate the bridge by almost shouting out the final word, "Ghost!"

And what is a genius without the ability to occasionally get a little too comfortable with that status now and then and really stink up the joint? I saw Steve Allen do that in my teenage years and wrote him off for a while, but then I came around to him again in my later years. And all it took was a little rockin' ghost to float into my ear canal and never freakin' leave for the next dozen years... 

It's Countdown to Halloween Time!!!

Taken on the Haunted Mansion (sans flash – I don't break the rules) this month
 at Disneyland when the ride stopped momentarily.

Yes, once more – I believe for the fourth time – I am taking part in the annual online Countdown to Halloween festivities. To put it as simply as possible, if you have a website that specializes in articles, photos, how-to activities, cosplay, videos, etc. related to Halloween or the horror genre, you get in touch with the Countdown to Halloween website (http://countdowntohalloween.blogspot.com/), and then your site gets added to a handy list that people can reference throughout October (and the rest of the year, really). They promote you, they give you nifty badges you can use on your site or on social media to draw people to your sites, and thereby help promote Countdown to Halloween in general. Fun and free, with the only real consequence being that you will find out exactly how many people are really interested in whatever crap you have to say (if that is something that will bother you in the end).

I posted a hell of a lot last year as part of the 2016 Countdown. I not only had articles here on the Pylon, but also on Cinema 4: Cel Bloc (my animation site), on The Shark Film Office (self-explanatory), and on my then-latest site, V for Voluminous, C for Cinema (my book review site). My buddy Aaron and I also had a couple of posts we promoted on our Stephen King site, We Who Watch Behind the Rows. In fact, I posted so much material last year, that I probably set a high bar for quantity (let's not even get into quality) that I will probably not be able to meet this year (or ever again).

There are just too many things going on with me in a physical sense, too many personal things going on, and too many distractions from the real world for me to keep up that pace this year. To say my mind is split a thousand directions right now is an understatement, and so I have decided that I need to calm down a little bit and just get done what I can get done. I will not be driving myself crazy trying to keep apace with anyone else or some imaginary publishing schedule that I have created in my head. Last year, I had something posted every single day in October on the Pylon; sometimes, more than one thing. At a point late in the month (specifically, the 26th), I suffered a hip injury that made it difficult to sit or stand for long (and which would haunt me for basically the next 8-9 months). I also had friends and family in town (in different groupings) and so my time was of a premium leading up to the actual day of Halloween. Despite all this, I still managed to post at least once every day on the Pylon, in addition to writing and publishing everything else on my other websites.

This year will be different. I am starting out the month away from home and away from my computer (this is a prepared, pre-scheduled post itself). Later in the month, I will again have various friends coming to town, and with that will be visits to Disneyland and Disney California Adventure and probably the beach. At those moments, I really won't care if I get anything posted in time.

But away from those moments, I hope you will enjoy what I will be publishing this month. Here on the Pylon, I will have a couple of articles in my The Monster's on the Loose! series – which concentrates specifically on formative moments in my horror movie upbringing – in which I will delve into a couple of monstrous documentaries from my youth and also one of my favorite all-time monster flicks, The Monster That Challenged the World. I am planning the third installment of my annual look back at Topps monster trading cards from the 1970s, and also the third piece in my recap of episodes from the old Monkees TV series that involved supernatural themes. There will probably be a couple of pieces of my Halloween visits to Disneyland, including checking out the new stuff they have added to California Adventure for the season. I am thinking of taking a stroll through some old, creaky horror comics that I own. There will probably be some mixtape tracks added to my collection for the Halloween season. And a whole lot of stuff that will work out as things pop up throughout the month. Don't want to give away everything. Or promise too much... I also have a lot of monster movies to watch this month as well, you know...

On Cinema 4: Cel Bloc, I have a half dozen (and possibly more) scary cartoons lined up for discussion, including a couple of Disney classics late in October. The Shark Film Office will finally see me tackle the two films that got cut last year when I got injured: my reviews of the atrocious Sharkenstein (that's right: basically, Jaws crossed with the Frankenstein Monster) and the absolutely mind-destroying Shark Exorcist, one of the absolute worst pieces of cinema I have ever encountered (and that is saying a lot). It is a film so painful that it nearly made me give up writing about shark films. Over on We Who Watch, Aaron and I will start out this month with our review of the new It movie, then a review of Mike Flanagan's new adaptation of Gerald's Game on Netflix, and we are planning to reread King's 'Salem's Lot during the month to also review, And if we can, we then want to do separate reviews of the 1979 Tobe Hooper TV movie and the 2004 mini-series remake.

OK, I have a lot to do this month. I hope that you will return here through the month (and afterward) to check out the fun on my various websites. And feel free to drop a comment or two while you are here. I love to talk to other fans of the stuff that I love.

Happy Halloween (in advance)!

RTJ

This Week in Rixflix #20: August 25-31, 2017

There's just no way around it. In order for me to post this recap within the timeframe I have set for my regular This Week in Rixflix pieces, I need to post it today. The problem is that my body and mind are nowhere in the vicinity of where they need to be to do it any justice.

Illness has taken me under again. This time it is some sort of flu or flu variant, possibly a stomach bug but I also have an ongoing headache and my throat is slowly getting rawer over the past 36 hours. As I posted on Facebook, nightmares have come with the illness, and they have been pretty severe on their own, let alone having to also feel completely shitty while dealing with monsters and murderers. As a result, this post is going to consist of this lead-in and a single review of the new American version of Death Note. I had planned capsule reviews of several other films that I viewed in the previous week: Cher and C. Aguilera in Burlesque (2010), Greer and Garson in Adventure (1945), J-Law and galaxy guardian Chris Pratt in the gorgeous but vapid Passengers (from this year), Ida Lupino and Joan Leslie as an odd sister pair in The Hard Way (1943), and Elvis himself in Easy Come, Easy Go (1967). 

It's a shame, because I had a few things to say (as I usually do) about all of these films, but the way I am feeling, it would be eons before I got the thing written. This is primarily due to my having some other topics I hope to write about this weekend, and I don't want to shift ever more projects to the back burner. (It is already a horrid habit of mine that I need to overcome.) And my reason for choosing Death Note as the single review this time is because I had already written three-quarters of it. It too was intended as a small, capsule review but turned a bit larger as I got going on it, so now my inability to edit myself down for once has turned into providence.

One note that I should add for the films that appear in the header image for This Week in Rixflix this go-around: most of the films that I watched over the past two weeks were an attempt to catch up on films from TCM's Summer Under the Stars, an event they hold annually each August. The 24 hours within a single day are used to focus on a particular star, and I love to use the event to catch up on films that I have missed in the filmographies of certain actors. This year, Summer Under the Stars overlapped with my attempt to finish the Hitchcock film course, and so I pretty much ignored the first week of SUTS, and really only came into it near the end of the second week. But I was able to knock out several titles each from Barbara Stanwyck (three films), Glenn Ford (two films), Greer Garson (six films), Ricardo Montalban (another six), and Dennis Morgan (never big with me, but I took advantage of it and saw a whopping eight films, most of them co-starring screen partner Jack Carson). When I drink, I drink deeply.

The Numbers: 

This week's feature-length film count: 28; 23 first-time viewings and 5 repeats.
Highest rated feature-length films: The Getaway (1972) – 8/9
Lowest rated feature films: Easy Come, Easy Go (1967) and Texas Terror (1934) – 4/9
Average films per day in August: 2.77
Average films per day in 2017 so far: 3.00
Consecutive days with at least 1 feature-length film seen per day: 261

The Reviews:

Death Note (2017) Dir.: Adam Wingard – Did we need another one? Look, a few years ago, against my better judgment, I decided to delve into the whole Death Note thing after all the initial hype burned itself out in the manner of most pop culture. Not the manga though; I had pretty much taken myself out of the comic buying game by the time Death Note started being available in the U.S., and so I went straight to the anime. I went into Death Note with some serious qualms about being sucked up in yet another "phenomena," but then it turned out that I quite enjoyed watching the series. It took me a little while to warm to the concept, but eventually I got caught up in the cat-and-mouse between the holder of the death note, Light, and his pursuer, L. Still, even with liking the series (but not loving it), I had serious doubts about the live-action version I had also heard about it. I been through a few other anime series that had been transfered to live action, and in most cases, the results were rather tepid overall. Did I want to waste my time?

And so I watched the live-action films, Death Note and Death Note 2: The Last Name. While my main interest was to see just how faithfully they would reproduce the story away from animation, once more, I was pleasantly surprised with how much I enjoyed them. In fact, I liked the films better than the series, and even rewatched both of them pretty quickly after I finished them. So, was I a Death Note convert? Not exactly, but I could not claim to not have found enjoyment in the property. Even with that, I had even more reservations when I discovered there was a third Japanese live-action film that had been produced, which was titled L: Change the World. The film had nothing to do with the Death Note series apart from the main character of the Holmes-like detective, L, who delves into one final case at the end of his young life. Since L is the most intriguing persona in the series, I naturally had to watch that film and once again enjoyed another piece of the Death Note property, though it was not nearly the same level of quality as the first two.

So, I had success after success after success (however qualified) in watching the various pieces of Death Note; surely this could carry over into the new American version? Especially when the director is Adam Wingard, a young talent for whom I have developed a high regard over the past few years, chiefly due to You're Next and The Guest. I wrote last week about my disappointment in another Wingard project, his sequel-cum-remake (for hire) of The Blair Witch Project. I felt that his direction was fine, but he was simply overwhelmed by the necessity of both slavishly replicating the mood of the original while also creating yet another chapter in a property that really had seen its day about fifteen years ago.

Here, in Wingard's version, that disappointment is mirrored, as over-familiarity is a definite factor, but the real problem is that Death Note, unlike TBWP, is still a live property in its native land of Japan. [*See note below this review.] Wingard's direction can be as taut as ever (which it is) but the film just kept nagging me with questions over its necessity. Much of the bad press surrounding this new version has been about possible "whitewashing," in replacing formerly Japanese characters with mostly Caucasians. I don't really have a problem with that since the locale is now in the U.S. (Seattle), and so a greater diversity of races becomes more possible, but the character of Light could (and really should have, in my opinion) have easily remained Japanese. (L., always the most fascinating figure in any version of Death Note, is African-American in the Wingard version.) 

My real problem with the film, apart from its ridiculous finale (which differs greatly from other versions), is the question of why couldn't the Japanese versions just stand as the versions seen in the U.S.? The originals are both well-shot, high quality productions with some excellent acting and solid action sequences. I ask this not long after having already derided the American remake of the Argentinian Oscar-winning film, The Secret in Their Eyes. The American version was not bad overall as a film on its own; it was just completely unnecessary, as were many changes to the story to try and make the film more topical in the current American climate of terroristic fear. I felt even stronger almost 25 years ago when an American studio decided to do a remake of George Sluizer's incredible The Vanishing (Spoorloos). At least they hired the same director to screw up his own remake (coincidentally also shot in Seattle) just five years after the original. I know people who loved the American version at the time, but to a person, not one of them had seen the Dutch version, which differs greatly in style and tone from the one with Jeff Bridges and Sandra Bullock. 

Of course, I don't hate all American remakes of foreign films. We wouldn't have Some Like It Hot, 12 Monkeys, The Magnificent Seven, and The Departed without some things being remade. (These are just a few brief examples; there are many others.) Closer to the subject at hand, speaking of U.S. remakes of J-horror properties, I loved Gore Verbinski's American update of Ringu back in 2002, a case where an already terrific Japanese horror film was arguably equaled (if not bettered) in effectiveness. So, this is most definitely not a call for American studios to stop remaking foreign films. People love to point out trends, but I feel each film project is unique unto itself. Some movies work and some movies just don't, and for me, as long as the creators of the new version have an interesting or original approach to even an old, crusty idea, wonders can often come out of that. That is part of the beauty of filmmaking, and art in general. So, I say let the sequels and remakes continue to come; I will find the ones worthy of my time eventually. And a small portion of them might turn out to be spectacular.

But the new version of Death Note? Not so much. It looks like product and it feels like product. I love Wingard, and still have hopes for his Godzilla vs. Kong film in 2020 (and contrary to popular opinion, it is no mere remake), but this film just has the sense of a job for hire. He's treading water here waiting for the big money down the line. I will give the writers some credit for attempting something different from the originals with the flashy ending, but as I mentioned before, it comes off all wrong, and every step taken along the way to get the story to that ending cheapens the overall film. It is really the second half of the film where the new Death Note truly goes awry. I don't hold this against Wingard as he had no credited hand in the screenplay, but he is still the boss in the end. The film's failure as a novel production unto its own is his failure as well. Why couldn't the series just stay in Japan? – TC4P Rating: 5/9

This Week in Rixflix #19 : August 18-24, 2017

OK, let's get this ship righted... I have missed a few weeks in-between my last supposedly weekly installment of this series and this post. I am not going to go into the hows and whys, apart from saying that I, for the last week of July and the beginning of this month, decided to concentrate full-time on the TCM online course on Alfred Hitchcock in order to complete everything before the course's expiration date (August 5th). That's my excuse for the first couple of weeks I missed for This Week in Rixflix; the rest is my own concern. 

But complete the TCM course I did, and not only that (as I posted on Facebook a while back), between July 6th and August 10th – a span of 36 days – I watched 42 of the 56 feature-length films that Hitchcock directed in his lifetime. Twelve of those movies (about half of them silent features) were first-time views for me, of which I will speak more on The Cinema 4 Pylon in coming weeks. (If you think this isn't going to turn into a couple editions of my All or Nothing series, you'd better rethink your position...) Most amazingly to me, in that group of 42 films, I never got around to watching some of my favorite selections of The Master, such as Psycho, North by Northwest, The Birds, To Catch a Thief, The Wrong Man, and my #1 Hitchcock film overall, Strangers on a Train. So now I have decided to casually play catch up with the rest of the films, so I can say that I have watched as much of his available oeuvre as I could within the same year. The Birds was the first film in that follow-up, and I plan on relaxing with NxNW this coming weekend, if not more. 

I just couldn't stop at 42, you know...

The Numbers: 

This week's feature film count: 21; 15 first-time viewings and 6 repeats.
Highest-rated feature-length film: The Birds (1963) – 9/9
Lowest-rated feature-length film: Toxic Shark (2017) – 4/9
Average films per day in August so far: 2.4167
Average films per day in 2017 so far: 2.97
Consecutive days with at least 1 feature-length film seen per day: 254

And, to finish off the course, here is the list of the 42 Hitchcock films that I watched from July 6, 2017 to August 10, 2017. I have lined them up chronologically by release year (but not necessarily in order of release) so you can get a quick snapshot of the breadth of the man's career. The list covers 49 years of the man's work, extending from the silent era all the way up to Family Plot in 1976, the only Hitchcock film I saw in a theatre within the same year of its release:

1927
Downhill (1st time)
The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
The Ring (1st time)

1928
Champagne (1st time)
The Farmer's Wife (1st time)

1929
Blackmail
The Manxman (1st time)

1930
Murder!

1931
Mary
Number Seventeen (1st time)
The Skin Game (1st time)

1932
Rich and Strange (1st time)

1934
The Man Who Knew Too Much
Waltzes from Vienna [Strauss' Great Waltz] (1st time)

1935
The 39 Steps

1936
Sabotage
Secret Agent

1937
Young and Innocent (1st time)

1938
The Lady Vanishes

1939
Jamaica Inn

1940
Foreign Correspondent
Rebecca

1941
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
Suspicion

1942
Saboteur

1943
Shadow of a Doubt

1944
Lifeboat

1945
Spellbound

1946
Notorious

1947
The Paradine Case

1948
Rope

1950
Stage Fright

1953
I Confess (1st time)

1954
Dial M for Murder
Rear Window

1955
The Trouble with Harry

1956
The Man Who Knew Too Much

1958
Vertigo

1964
Marnie

1966
Torn Curtain

1972
Frenzy

1976
Family Plot


This Week's Reviews:

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016) Dir.: Edward Zwick – I would ask "Did we need another Jack Reacher film?" but then I would have to also ask "Did we need the first Jack Reacher film?" No, and no, would be my hard answers. This is not Tom Cruise hate, because as my wife will tell you, he is my boyfriend. Or at least she loves to say that because I seemingly have no qualms about going to the theatre to see the latest Mission: Impossible installment or the latest big-budget sci-fi or action flick featuring him in the lead. (There is a huge story behind all of this Cruise discussion between my wife and myself, only some of which I have made clear on Facebook; maybe in the near future.) Despite my dislike for his weird religious cult (sorry, but until their practices are more open to the public, that's what they are), I think Cruise is just fine as an action star, and even a pretty good actor in the right role. (And he is dead on hilarious in Tropic Thunder...)

So, I do see nearly everything that Cruise puts out eventually, though I don't necessarily see many of them in theatres apart from the hugest blockbusters. And then there are these Jack Reacher films, based on an extremely popular series of books that I cannot (and possibly never will) ever fathom. Of course, people I knew made a lot of jokes when the first movie came out about "Jack Reach-around," and other people told me how fantastic the books are but that Cruise was the completely wrong choice for the titular role. Part of this attitude is pretty easy to understand: Cruise is very nearly a foot shorter than the six-foot-five Reacher in the books, and at least 75-80 pounds lighter. And I totally understand that if you read the books and envision this Paul Bunyan of a man battling against the world, and then you go to the movies and see what amounts to a pipsqueak – a very muscular pipsqueak, but a pipsqueak nonetheless, I can understand your disappointment. I am not going to rip on the books only to say, "Not interested" because from the plots of the two films that I have seen, they would not be my thing at all. It doesn't matter who is in the role. Seems more like a thing for people who enjoy JAG or NCIS. I liked the first film a little bit more, which surprises me, because this sequel has Cobie Smulders in it, whom I like in everything. (Sometimes, she is the best part of that "everything," but you know what I am saying...) I just found myself mired in a pool of general annoyance at the absolutely incoherent and unbelievable plot line – especially the parts involving a girl who may or may not be Reacher's daughter – which itself has found praise in its book version.

So that's the split line between me and the book-reading world right now. (OK, there are actually a great many places where I am divided against the rest of the book-reading world, but this is the one under discussion right now.) I am not going to hold forth further until the day that I, out of sheer desperation in an airport somewhere, decide to actually read a Jack Reacher novel. Perhaps I will get swept up in Lee Child's prose and find a way to buy into this world of a brooding drifter who gets caught up in conspiracy after conspiracy against him; perhaps I won't. For now, I will just say that I am not fond of the movie series, but apparently, neither are many fans of the books. On this, we can at least currently agree. – TC4P Rating: 5/9

Blair Witch (2016) Dir.: Adam Wingard – Why? I am a horror movie fan of longstanding, but even I did not want to see another iteration of The Blair Witch Project come around at all. Do I still like the original film? Well, I did when it came out even though many people of my acquaintance claimed they got sick from the whirling handheld camerawork or just thought the movie was a dumb idea and poorly acted. I thought the original film was pretty spooky, was a clever way to transfuse some new blood into what at that point was a fairly stale horror environment (in my opinion, though I am sure you can always find others who professed the same at the time), and yes, was amateurishly acted and produced but with a huge amount of chutzpah. That chutzpah got its creators, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, a ton of box office and critical buzz, and even put them on the cover of Time, and that was pretty remarkable at the, ahem, time. I saw it a couple of times in the theatre in 1999, bought the DVD, and watched it twice more trying to convince people they should also "at least see it" before badmouthing it. Then I saw Joe Berlinger's cranked out sequel in 2000 on DVD instead of the theatres because of poor word of mouth, though I did watch the phony documentary promoting the second film at the time it appeared on TV. At that point, I then promptly set the Blair Witch story aside, possibly even to shut it away forever. I just no longer cared. Stand me in the corner.

It's 18 years later, and there is a whole new generation of suckers, er, young millennial horror fans out there that may not even know that The Blair Witch Project was ever even a thing. The found footage device that served as the original film's gimmick is now done practically everyday on YouTube and other sites, and there have been innumerable feature films since released in the style (the bulk of them in the horror genre), many of them quite successful. While The Blair Witch Project was nowhere near the first such film to use found footage, it was certainly one of the biggest in terms of the cultural impact it had almost immediately. I am also pretty sure that someone more knowledgable on the entire subject than I probably has connected all the dots between TBWP and the Creepypasta phenomena that we must suffer through today.

If there were a chance for a remake/sequel (because, come on, the new film really serves as both) of TBWP to be pulled off even halfway decently, I would think that director Adam Wingard would be in the list of those who could do it. A hugely prolific talent, Wingard tends to work mainly in horror, but also has a foot in the supposed "mumblecore" genre (a term that I hate). While I did just finish watching his new Netflix version of Death Note and was mildly disappointed in the result (possibly more on that film next week), WIngard has, in recent years, directed two of my favorite recent horror films – You're Next and The Guest – and I am also excited about his involvement in the eventual production of Godzilla vs. Kong (to be released in 2020). As for the movie at hand, I will say that he is the perfect pick for someone to replicate the look and feel of the original film, which is what Blair Witch tries and mostly succeeds at artistically. The film builds up some decent atmosphere, and the house they find (c'mon, you know they have to find her house eventually) is a good deal more extensive and the action there more explicitly detailed than in the original. While I never agreed with those who ripped into the amateurish acting, I will say that the cast in the new film are all most likely professionals (hey, the girl with the purple hair plays Arthur's sister Dot in the new Tick series on Amazon), but the downside to that is the original amateur feel is what I liked in the first film. The people in this film, girls included, all seem to have boners over having as many cameras as possible on them.

Now about those cameras... For me, not being a video game player of any real account, when the film starts revving up and looking more like a first person shooter being attacked, I kind of tuned out of the whole thing. I also felt, despite being told how everybody had body cameras and whatnot filming the affair that some of the angles still did not make sense to me. I am certain someone out there will protest that the angles all made sense – "You're forgetting about the crotch cam she crammed in her shorts, dude!" – but to me, that is always an annoyance in found footage films. (The only thing more annoying is when someone doesn't just drop the goddamned camera and just fucking run for it...) Me? I don't care if I saw film footage of my long lost sister (Heather Donahue, the girl from the first film) in window of the house where the evil witch supposedly lives (the premise of this film), I'm not going out in those stupid woods. I don't even believe in the supernatural at all, but if I found evidence, however sparse, that my sister is where many people are rumored to have gone missing over the years, I will hire every private detective in the book to go do the dirty work. When they don't come back, well, gather everything you have and bring it to the cops. Fuck those woods. As for the film, I am not going to tell it screw off, but I have seen it, and now I have seen two Wingard films in two weeks that have left me mostly cold. Not what i was expecting from someone that I thought had caught fire. – TC4P Rating: 5/9

Dude Bro Party Massacre III (2015) Dir.: Tomm Jacobsen, Michael Rousselet and Jon Salmon – I completely stumbled upon this film by absolute accident, and then I spent a couple of wild hours early that morning reveling in sick, gory effects and an almost completely unrestrained comic sensibility. I laughed so much that I couldn't believe it, and then I had to keep stopping the video so that my brain could catch up with the flurries of rapid fire gags and insults via a great many replays of scenes. The third in a series of films that don't really exist, Dude Bro Party Massacre III operates somewhere in the vicinity of South Park as far as humor goes, and if that is not your cup of tea, please move it along, because we won't be friends. As I said, this is supposed to be Part III of a series, and the first two non-existent films are recounted at the very beginning, much in the style of the Friday the 13th series. But the film is far more than a mere slasher parody; it acts like a lost VHS tape of a film that would have disappeared altogether if some über-geek hadn't plopped a tape into his deck and captured the thing for his own collection. (It seems an impossibility that anything could disappear like that, but there are still some obscure films from the '80s that I have on tape that I have yet to see on DVD.)

I don't know which channel that makes its hay by selling advertising would have shown this film uncut back then, but we get flashes of fake advertisements intermittently throughout Dude Bro III that, even at a mere second or two are pretty entertaining. (The feeling is that the taper paused the tape at each commercial break and then started it again at the end of the break.) In one ad is Matt Oswalt, brother of Patton Oswalt, and that is more than mere coincidence, because Patton shows up in a supporting role (as a favor) in the main plot of the film (as the sheriff). We also get a brief flash, most surprisingly, of Larry King – yes, that Larry King – in another intentional cameo. The people behind the film are a comedy troupe called 5-Second Films, who are pretty well known on the interwebs for their long-running site of the same name. I have been to the site off and on over the past decade, but it had been long enough (certainly more than five seconds) that I was completely unaware they had sprung this film upon the world. I think that I may have enjoyed it even more the way that I did discover it, rifling through archive.org that morning. (Yes, I found it because someone posted it illegally; no, I did not download it for myself.) This one will definitely get added to my collection once I start buying discs off Amazon again, but if they don't put this out as a collector's item on VHS, I would be really upset. A must watch for me again (and again) in the very, very near future. It may become a perennial. – TC4P Rating: 7/9

Last Girl Standing (2015) Dir.: Benjamin R. Moody – Longtime followers of this site might recall that over the past couple of years, I reviewed two different titles based around the popular slasher movie concept of the last survivor who fights the villain/monster to the death known as the "final girl". I hated one of those films, that being Final Girl (with Abigail Breslin) but loved the other one, the far more intentionally comedic and dimension-warping The Final Girls (with Taissa Farmiga, Vera's little sis). Of course, just like slasher films themselves, those two films weren't going to be the only films that would dabble with the fringe concept outside of the normal run of slasher films. At the same time as those other films were released in 2015 came Last Girl Standing (though I have only discovered its existence recently), yet another variation on the final girl trope. While I still feel The Final Girls is the most fun and accomplished of the three films, but Last Girl Standing has plenty of spunk – and loads of great gruesome gore – of its own.

Just like Dude Bro Party Massacre III, this film is technically a sequel to a movie that does not exist. The difference in tone is one of awareness. Dude Bro is completely aware of its existence as a winking and more than nudging comedy in a completely ridiculous film universe; it never allows for reality to step into it in any way, not even in its fake commercial breaks. Not so with Last Girl Standing, where its heroine, Camryn (an excellent Akasha Villalobos), is the lone survivor of a horrific attack on herself and her fellow campers by a serial killer known as The Hunter. That set-up may be a basic one for a slasher scenario, but for Camryn, the horror is all too real. This film is no tongue-in-cheek affair; Camryn has PTSD from what occurred, and it is affecting her life from every possible angle. She shuts herself down from the world and hides behind the counter and clothes at the dry cleaning establishment that has hired, where the owners have special rules where she doesn't interact with customers. Camryn is haunted by constant flashbacks of The Hunter, to the point where she starts confusing reality and what both she and we first think are hallucinations. Or is she being stalked by someone posing as The Hunter, the killer she herself dispatched by hand? Or is The Hunter really back in her life? And then stuff starts to get really weird, and bodies start piling up...

Last Girl Standing is a bare bones production, filmed in Austin, Texas with a mostly local cast and crew. (Villalobos' husband plays her love interest; that's how tight-knit the work is.) This is not to say that there isn't production value on display in the film, especially in relation to the rather extensive gore effects, all practical and mostly terrific. Don't be fooled either... the film looks and feels like an earnest drama (which it is) that takes a deeper look into a stock slasher character than we normally get to see, but it doesn't, to paraphrase Mr. Creosote, skimp on the pâté. And yet, for much of its running time, it is not a normal genre film either, though it does take a turn deep in the second half where it goes full bore towards its grim conclusion. I was more than pleasantly surprised by the film, though it certainly has some areas with which I found fault. Since I first watched the film, I wavered a bit in my feelings for it, and felt I was a bit stingy in my initial response when I added it to my film diary on Letterboxd. But after thinking about it for over a week and also watching a big chunk of the film a second time to get the mood back, I finally settled on 6/9.

The Big Sick (2017) Dir.: Michael Showalter – You know, sometimes you just need The Big Sick to clean out your system. I love the summer movie season. I love the middle months of the year where giant action blockbusters all try to outdo each other for the weekly box office take. And you will never hear me cry about there being too many superhero movies, because they are exactly the movies I wanted to see when I was a kid but were rarely made because the effects just weren't there. But even I long for the occasional break from BIF! POW! WHAM! KA-BOOM! and that is where The Big Sick came to our rescue today.

Jen and I had been planning to see if for a good while now – pretty much since its creators hit the talk show circuit – but just hadn't made it. The Big Sick is a marvelous comedy-drama about the beginnings of the real life relationship between comedian Kumail Nanjiani and his wife, writer and producer Emily V. Gordon. They meet cute, they fall in love, they break up, and then he ends up having to sign as her husband (even though they weren't married then) to induce a coma to possibly save her life. It's quite funny and adorable, but becomes almost entirely a drama for a long chunk of the film as he not only juggles possibly losing the women he loves, but also dealing with her initially surly parents and with his own family, who want him in an arranged marriage with someone else from Pakistan. Kudos to Michael Showalter, Nanjiani, Gordon, and Judd Apatow for bringing this story to the big screen. It's a pretty satisfying, small film, and I hope it gets some recognition come awards season. – TC4P Rating: 8/9

Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016) Dir.: Mike Flanagan – A while back, my pal Aaron mentioned to me via Facebook Messenger that the Ouija sequel was, in his words, "surprisingly enjoyable". We had been discussing numerous other items of worth (to us, at least) and so I rather passed by his statement without comment. I hadn't the inclination to watch the sequel, as I had leapt on the first film, mostly out of loyalty to Olivia (Bates Motel) Cooke, and found it severely lacking apart from her participation. And so I wandered for weeks after that, secure in the knowledge that I would probably avoid the sequel for a good while, but Aaron's words kind of nagged at me. Our viewing tastes are fairly similar, and even when we don't agree on a project, we still are able to see what it is the other one found intriguing in a film. Seeing the film pop up on Cinemax one evening, I recorded Ouija: Origin of Evil and when I started watching it the next day, I found the opening of the film a lot of fun and pretty captivating. As the film rolled on, I continued to enjoy what I was seeing, and it was only in perhaps the final half hour that I finally wearied of the story they were telling me, which was that of the fate of a family that occupied a house visited by the characters in the original film. There was also the use of an effect that I am not especially fond of in films today, something I will refer to as the "Black Hole Sun effect" (after the Soundgarden video) that really takes me out of nearly any film that employs it (which, today, is a lot of horror films).

Still, even after tiring of the story and that stupid effect, I felt the film was pretty taut and sharply directed, and a damn sight better than the original. About halfway through, I decided that I needed to look up the director and found out it was Mike Flanagan, who had already delivered the truly excellent Hush a couple years ago as well as the really spooky mind-bender, Oculus. (I also liked, but not to the same degree, Absentia, from 2011.) It seems, with the recent loss of Romero and even more recent loss (this past weekend) of Tobe Hooper, that perhaps there are some openings in the ol' Masters of Horror lineup. It might be a little premature, but might I offer up Flanagan's name to the list? II feel like Wingard will eventually hit that list as well with a couple more solid films.) Flanagan has an adaptation of Stephen King's Gerald Game, in the works as a major release, so maybe his time has come. We shall see. – TC4P Rating: 6/9

Until next time,

Jon Spencer Blues Explosion Meets Rik Johnson Brain Explosion...

This afternoon, as I was listening to some of my go-to "concentrate on writing" music, that being the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, I found myself getting a little more immersed in the lyrics than I expected.

Part of why I am able to write during Spencer's music over many other artists is because the main thrust of his music is not the lyrics. His songs tend to be exercises in style and rhythm over saying anything even remotely profound. His music is based in rhythm and blues, but with a very punky edge, a massive dose of ironic detachment, and a wild, often non-PC sense of humor. Spencer often makes grunts and crazed noises into the microphone (a la Lux Interior) just before whipping off another frenzied run of squalling, squealing guitar notes.

When I listen to music casually, I tend to concentrate first on the lyrics over the music in most things that I listen to in my collection. But when I listen to lyric-heavy music while I write, I get easily distracted when I find myself singing along instead of focusing on my own words. This means that I needed to cultivate a certain portion of my collection that leans more towards the instrumental. And I now have a lot of options, running from Beethoven symphonies all the way to Man or Astro-Man (who have very few songs with actual singing in them), the group that is possibly my favorite all-time for this very purpose.

But Spencer also counts in that area, even though he does have lyrics in most of his songs. The thing is, Spencer's lyrics are often hard to discern, chiefly due to the wild roar he uses to shout over his most often very loud music. He growls, he grunts, he groans, he whoops, and he whines, and every third word or so on every other song, you might make out a line or two clearly, most often a joke that he really wants to sell you. I own several of his albums, and have listened to at least three of them probably umpteen dozen times or more, and I am still working my way through some of his lyrics.

Then there is History of Lies, one of my favorite tracks off his Extra Width album from 1994. (I maintain this album is probably the best entry point into his music, but others would probably point to 1996's Now I Got Worry, which featured the song "Wail" (which actually got some airplay and also some time on MTV. Or you can just listen to Spencer's wonderful song Bellbottoms, which is used in a major scene in Edgar Wright's terrific Baby Driver.)

While listening to History of Lies for what may have been the 300th time (but the first time in the Trump era), I was supposed to just let the heavy, rumbling blues riff that anchors the song wash over me and not think about anything being said while I attempted to concentrate on a piece I was writing for The Shark Film Office. But Spencer got the best of me, because History of Lies had some hidden stuff that was going to come back to bite me. And once that got started the writing stopped...

I was struck near the end of the song when Spencer invokes the number "45" in his final go at the song's brief chorus. Then I started thinking about the song's title, and then the lyrics where he says "You're still talkin' all that shit out your mouth," and then what mostly amounts to a series of insults, calling the target a "vampire," and then telling that person that he is "gonna treat you... like a stepchild."

I am still pretty certain Spencer was either putting down a past romantic partner or just somebody with whom he had a falling out or a long dispute. And the opening verse with the insults could be made worse if there something misogynistic in his threats. But there are no clues as to the gender of the target, apart from Spencer singing "between you and I, son" during the bridge before the brief guitar solo. The "son" part could even potentially make Spencer himself the target, as if this were his father talking to him. The song was released at least 23 years ago, possibly more, and so it has to either be about someone in Spencer's life or just in his imagination.

But then I got to thinking: so many of the lines in this song are almost directly applicable to "45". The constant yelling about lies over and over, having a veritable history of lies (no one lies more bigly), growing so ugly that the narrator can't even "look at you," and having bad blood within. BUT then Spencer invokes "45" right at the end of the song (though he is likely talking about a gun... or maybe even malt liquor). Whatever the "45" is, it is hard for me to not to think of the current ill wind blowing hot air in the White House.

What if, 23 years ago, Jon Spencer was actually a political prophet? Did he smell the foul stench of the rise of Trump from the distance of almost 2½ decades?

Of course not... I don't believe in that junk. I'm just having fun. But if you have never heard Jon Spencer (while knowing it was him) and his terrific band, here's the song on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctsJ3Pf8jQI

And here are the lyrics, so you can play along at home:

History of Lies
by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion

"You're still talkin'
All that shit out your mouth
Come home
I been a fool too long
There's blood within
That's bad
You grown so ugly
Vampire
I can't even look at you
Stupid child
Why do you lie?
I'm gonna treat you
Treat you
Like a stepchild
Watch it!

You and I
That's a history
Of LIES

Late night
Hollywood
You're so alone
Baby, angels
In the sand
I'm on high
Where you goin’?
Understand
Let me tell you about it
It's hot
It's cold
It's hot and it's cold
And it sucks
At the same time

You and I
That's a history
Of LIES

Our bodies
Are made up of
Like molecules
Between you and I, son
There ain't much difference
You still got to choose

Come on!

You and I
That's a history
Of LIES!!

You and I
Forty-five
Sssh…"