Lady Gaga has given us all of us Halloween heads a great early gift for spooky season in The Dead Dance, a masterpiece of song and dance. It ranks up there with Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Wednesday’s dance from the Netflix series Wednesday. There are some Jacksonian moves to it, yet the production, directed by Tim Burton, is unique and distinctly Lady Gaga’s.
For one thing, the video incorporates the feeling of Mexico City’s Island of the Dolls, a place where aging, discolored, rotting, and dismembered dolls are strung up in trees and around the landscape. Such dolls are rather creepy, and appear right from the beginning of Lady Gaga’s video wheas such does not appear in Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Lady Gaga’s zombified dead also seem to do a lot more twitching as they hover in that nether world between death and a recall to life…
Is there anything that Lady Gaga cannot do? She sings, dances, and writes songs, and The Dead Dance can easily be interpreted to represent recovery from romantic break-ups, depression, and other forms of mental illness and personal setbacks in life. Although its topic is dark and presented in terms of the paranormal, the video is both dazzling and yet uplifting…what a triumph! Enjoy, if this is your first viewing of the video…
It’s daunting to deal with the Netflix series Stranger Things in a single post because of the scope and complexity of it. For those unfamiliar with it, suffice it to say that the series is a science fiction/horror delight, and it doesn’t get much sweeter than this!
Stranger Things might be compared to the works of Stephen King blended through The X-Files and run through Buffy the Vampire Slayer, though the comparison is inadequate. If watching the series, begin with Season 1 Episode 1, or it will seem incomprehensible. You may think you’re watching a kid’s series at first as the protagonists are all pre-teens initially, but hang in…
The Duffer brothers who created the series set it in the sleepy Indiana town of Hawkins in the 1980’s, where the government has been conducting secret unethical experiments on children with psychic powers, kinda like human lab rats. One of them, named Eleven as her subject number, has awesome psychic powers, and is at the heart of the show…psychokinesis and remote viewing are among her talents. Raised in a lab, Eleven initially shows a lack of language training, conventional education, and even human contact, but is a fast study...
And it gets stranger still, turning out that there’s kind of a portal to another dimension in the area called the Upside Down, through which monsters pass, and abduct people when it suits them. Some of the monsters closely parallel those of Dungeons and Dragons, such as the Demogorgon or Demo-dog…
There are other monsters jumping between dimensions, too, like the Mind-Flayer, which can possess people and assume a variety of forms. Those possessed can be referred to as the Flayed… 🙀
At the top of the food chain is Vecna, which sounds like an insurance company but who is actually another lab experiment gone terribly awry, and turned to the dark side. Once human, Vecna resembles someone who has been flayed and burned, and also possesses powerful psychokinetic powers, which leads to epic good-versus-evil battles with Eleven.
Soon to enter its fifth season, Stranger Things brings together science fiction, horror, and a little leavening humor in a rare combination, and is likely to hook you into its winning formula...
Let me start by saying that I would be beyond excited and thrilled if living aliens or real alien corpses were actually produced. As Fox Mulder’s office poster proclaimed, “I Want To Believe.” I could die happy if positive proof of alien life were produced…
Jaime Maussan, a journalist and self-proclaimed Ufologist, recently presented to a Mexican congressional committee two supposed alien mummified “corpses” that were gray, had three fingers, bulbous heads, an “ET”-type elongated neck, and measured about 1-1/2′ in length. They were presented behind glass panels in small caskets, with the claim made that they were discovered in 2017 in algae mines in Cusco, Peru. They are supposed to be between 800 and 1,700 years old…
These “alien corpses” look phony at even casual photographic examination, and smart money holds that they are paper mache constructions overlayed on a doll body or wire armature. This makes them akin to sideshow gaffes like the “Rat Boy.”
The presenter of said defunct aliens has done such things before, unveiling in 2015 another “alien corpse” that turned out to be the remains of a long-deceased child with a head deformity.
So continue to “look to the skies,” but take comfort in the fact that if 1-1/2 foot tall aliens invade you, with little effort you could boot them into tomorrow… 👽
Say it ain’t so…Winnie the Pooh as a serial killer?! Yes, it is so in an upcoming horror movie. Winnie the Pooh and Piglet too have gone feral, abandoned by college-bound Christopher Robin and basically starving. It’s not exactly the beloved A.A. Milne characters from the original 1926 story here, nor their Disney versions. Nope, the boys have gone rogue, reverting to their wild roots and becoming seriously creepy. Piglet even sports tusks, and is clad in black…
In a scene which to me seems reminiscent of Steven King’s Christine, Pooh-bear is driving an ominous-looking vehicle. Just don’t bother looking for Eeyore the donkey, although you’ll see his tombstone. The boys have already killed and eaten him…
With the Winnie the Pooh tale now in the public domain, liberties may be taken with the classic story, although the film strives not to run afoul of Disney copyrights by omitting certain characters like Tigger, and changing the clothing styles of others. Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is not a big budget horror movie, and was supposedly shot in just ten days.
So be afraid, be very afraid of Pooh and Piglet sneaking up on you in your bath. In this horror comedy, you might not even recognize them anymore.- – Aieee! 🙀
Warning: this post may not be suitable for some of our more sensitive viewers. Well, you’ve already seen the headless chicken photo, so what remains are the gory details…
In September of 1945, a farmer who lived in Fruita, Colorado by the name of Lloyd Olsen who raised chickens was killing large numbers of them to take to town for market, and using a hatchet for the fowl task. Most of the chickens obligingly died as expected, although chickens beheaded will sometimes kick and run about for several minutes before succumbing. One chicken, however, had his jugular spared and retained most of his brain stem, and was able to develop a blood clot to prevent bleeding out, and so remained ambulatory. The brain stem which remained controlled his breathing, digestion, and heart rate.The fowl also retained an ear.After his decapitation, the headless chicken got up, and began to strut around the farm.
The farmer took this curiosity and kept it in an apple box overnight, the next morning describing that “The damn thing was still alive.”The event then took on a life of its own, so to speak. As the rooster survived, Olsen let him continue to roam around. He would sleep with his neck stub tucked under his feathers, tried to peck for food with his neck stub, and even gained weight due to the chicken being fed milk and water directly into his esophagus with a dropper. He could even so digest small pieces of corn…
Recognizing how unique a living headless chicken was, his owner made a cash cow out of him, taking him on the road where he became a sideshow sensation, and earning 25 cents per head (so to speak) for people to gawk at him. At the height of his fame, Mike made his owners $4,500 per month...not exactly chicken feed, in the 1940’s.
Sadly while on road tour in Phoenix, Arizona his owners awoke to the sounds of Mike choking. As they had to suction mucus from his throat throughout the day, they would usually keep a syringe nearby, but had forgotten this equipment at a previous sideshow event. Mike couldn’t dislodge the mucus himself, and so suffocated in March of 1947, about 18 months after his decapitation. From thesideshowprofits, however, his owners were able to buy a horse, mule, hay baler, two tractors, and a Chevrolet pickup truck.
A statue of Mike was erected, and Mike the Headless Chicken was awarded his own special festival day, celebrated annually in Fruita, Colorado with a chicken lunch, an egg toss, a chicken dance, a race, and even chicken bingo, which is chosen by chicken droppings that land on a bingo board! Mike would have liked that. Only in America…is this a great country, or what?!
Mary had a little lamb, goes the familiar nursery rhyme…and so, apparently, did a childless couple depicted in the upcoming movie Lamb, set in rugged rural Iceland. Now the couple (Maria and Ingvar) did not produce the hybrid themselves, but rather received it as the product of a kind of supernatural visitation to their sheep shed during lambing season. They regard the hybrid as a gift, and raise it as their own rather defensively, the human-ovine child bringing the couple happiness and filling in the gap in their lives. The lamb-child is raised in a crib and fed from a bottle, becoming a bipedal furry humanoid of sorts.- – Kinda the ultimate blended family, right?
Called “the strangest movie of the year,” Lamb crosses a number of borders and genres as good films so often do, and viewers are left confused thinking about whether they’ve seen a folkloric horror flick or some kind of absurdist comedy. Perhaps a bit of both in what’s been described as a “visual poem.” The lamb-child herself is the product of puppetry, performance acting, and CGI blended seamlessly.
This isn’t Sheepsquatch, but we of the furry fandom are quite familiar and comfortable with the notion of animal-human hybrids; I’m on board with this! We all know people who think that their kid is a little lamb whereas they’re really a little devil, right? Reviewers of the film are not overly talkative about the details of it out of fear that doing so might spoil the cinematic experience for viewers. Produced by the A24 studio that has done such films as The Lighthouse, Hereditary, and The Witch, the film may become a cult classic. Lamb brings forth the elemental beauty of the Icelandic landscape, and touches upon the deep, often unfathomable relationship between animals and humans…and that’s not a baaad thing! Watch for Lamb premiering in the U.S. October 8th… 🐑
Well, this certainly is a unique business, alrighty…one which in the Liberty Mutual commercial sells wet teddy bears. It’s modeled on the cart hotdog vendor stands which you undoubtedly have seen almost everywhere, only this one isn’t selling hotdogs but rather, yep, wet teddy bears!
Can you even imagine a demand for such? The concept is both bizarre and somewhat horrifying. What exactly does one do with a wet teddy bear? The hotdog vendor stand setting suggests that in some fashion the teddy might be consumed, and that’s too horrible to entertain the notion. People usually want to hug or seek comfort and security from a teddy bear, objectives which are diminished by the object being sopping wet. Yet wet they certainly are, as the vendor demonstrates by pulling one from a bin on the cart, holding it aloft with tongs to demonstrate its wetness, and then plopping it with a flourish on a plate for a waiting customer, who thought he was buying a hotdog. Well, it certainly wasn’t that guy’s day! Get away from this vendor, guy, no, run away, and fast! Something’s terribly wrong here…
The apparent theme of the commercial is that not everyone wants the same thing, and Liberty Mutual allows you to customize to get and pay for just what you want. It’s hard to imagine any demand, however, for a wet teddy bear, which seems a perversion of their nature. To each their own, however, while this concept certainly isn’t one for me. This wet teddy bear stand seems headed for financial ruin, even if it is what its owner wants. Perhaps a mobile psychotherapist might be more in order…
The Osbournes Want To Believe is a strange combination of reality and paranormal shows airing on the Travel Channel. Why is it on the Travel Channel?- – Who knows?! Why is wrestling on the SyFy channel? The series does “travel” in the sense of airing paranormal film clips filmed in different locations, I suppose. Each episode is filmed with three members of “The First Family of Darkness” sitting on comfy oversized red chairs in a rather gothic-styled room, complete with black accents and lots of candles burning. Patriarch Ozzy is there, complete with wife Sharon and son Jack. There’s also a Pomeranian dog or two resting on one of them or a chair armrest, and moving so little that you wonder if they’re alive. Ozzie wears a black knit hat decorated with skulls, often looks on the verge of falling asleep, and occasionally chugs large mugs of coffee to perk up a bit, requiring bathroom breaks. His speech is often accompanied with subtitles as he can be, well, difficult to understand. Sharon and Jack are readily understandable, and seem like sharp people who could pass in regular company. Ozzie may have seen better days.
In each hour-long episode, son Jack who is involved in paranormal investigation shares videos with his parents who then comment on them, and rate each on whether they are creepy and credible on a ten-point Woogie Boogie scale. The videos may be supposed to represent a variety of things like ghosts, UFO’s, and cryptic creatures such as Bigfoot or reptilian humanoids. Predictably, the images seen on the videos are brief, blurry, and jumpy, filmed by amateurs.
With low production values of the footage, this is certainly not a scientifically rigorous presentation of any of the unexplained paranormal phenomena. Experts or professionals are nowhere in sight, and son Jack is the glue who holds the show together and advances it. The show does not take itself seriously, and doesn’t pretend to. It does grow on you, however, and is just strange enough to be fun, even if the Osbournes are now about as scary as The Munsters show of the 1960’s…
There are advantages to being a cybernetic organism. In addition to being extremely cool, it’s awfully easy to exercise when your lower body machine components are those of a motorcycle; just roll onto a treadmill, and you’re off to the races! You can even multi-task while you’re on a roll by reading a book. That’s right, our Progressive motaur isn’t just a pretty face getting his laps in, he’s improving his mind! We can all learn from this…
In our latest Progressive commercial, as our motaur hums along, he’s approached by a gym rat who tries to remind our man-machine that there’s a thirty-minute limit on the treadmill. “Tell that to the rain,” counters our motorcycle/man in a fashion which reminded me of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Tell it to the hand” line from Terminator 2. Would you care to argue with a cyborg? No, I didn’t think so. Our motaur sets the treadmill faster several times during the commercial, and calmly continues both his reading and his ride…
In our scary times, perhaps we’ve all been thinking a bit more about Charon lately…you know, the dread boatman who ferries souls across the River Styx to the afterlife in Greco-Roman mythology. He looks a lot like the grim reaper, clad in a cowled, all black, shroud-like garment. Charon would be perfect as a goth or performing in a heavy metal band. In our Dashlane commercial, the River Styx is a suitably forboding, mist-veiled river where strange birds cry out mournfully, and our nameless “Everyman”passenger is none too happy about being ferried on his final journey…he even attempts to bribe the Boatman with money! But then, things brighten up, and a radiant light breaks through the darkness in the distance…this looks like an afterlife possibly worth going to, and our voyaging soul smiles in anticipation for the first time!
But wait, there’s a catch for our departed soul…Charon, who as per tradition never speaks but only looks grim and spectral, prompts the man for a password by holding up one of those whiteboards that you can write on with marker. As the boat’s passenger struggles to recall his password, Charon even thoughtfully gives him prompts via the board, such as “Name of kindergarten teacher,” and “Name of first pet?” The man fumbles trying to recall his password, even giving the spectral figure the name of a later pet, causing Caron to try to redirect the man through gestures and underlining to the fact that the password response requires the name of his first pet…but alas, all is in vain as the guy has utterly forgotten his password, and no amount of prompts are going to help him, otherworldly or not. After three tries, Charon dramatically throws his board into the River Styx, for the man has exceeded the number of his allowed prompts. The man gives off an epic cry of “Nooo!” when realizing the gravity of his plight; yep, it’s password purgatory, baby, and abandon all hope ye who enter here. Too bad our hapless lost soul didn’t have a password manager such as our advertiser Dashlane would provide. Eternal damnation is a high price for a bad memory, and many of us know that special Hell. I can certainly relate…
FOXSYLVANIA 
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