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…
I would probably have long since starved to death were it not for peanut butter. I’ve eaten it since childhood, and continue to turn to it several times a week. At times, I even crave it; peanut butter is my go-to lunch and snack of choice when I don’t know what to eat. That being said, I indulge my guilty pleasure at home; even I may not be seen at a park, slathering peanut butter on a slice of bread. I’ve never been known to carry a jar of peanut butter around with me; I’m just not that hard-core…
…not so the curly-haired young lady in our Jif commercial! Seated on a park bench, she whips herself up a thickly-spread slice of peanut butter bread, only to find herself approached by a squirrel. Aww…isn’t he cute? Who could deny him? So she gives him a tidbit, and is soon approached by another squirrel, then another! No good deed goes unpunished, after all. Soon the woman is surrounded by dozens of squirrels, kinda like what happens when you feed french fries to sea gulls at the beach…
…It’s then that the commercial takes a surreal turn, for towering above the sea of squirrels is a creepy man-squirrel, wearing a squirrel mask that covers his entire head. He, too, is seeking a hand-out, and even making beseeching squirrel-noises. Is this a peanut butter pervert? And what should the young lady do? Mace him, scream for help, or try to bean him with the peanut butter jar? This question is left unanswered, but some people will go to any lengths for the product. It’s that Jif’ing good, we’re told. I do sympathize, honestly, sharing the addiction…
…but in my twisted mind fed by a love for horror, the question lingers; what happens when the woman runs out of peanut butter? Do the legion of squirrels and their squirrel-headed human-sized leader decide that the lady might be tasty, too? A few pounce on her to take a tentative nibble, and soon she is writhing under a blanket of them…Aieee! (The screen fades to black as we hear squirrels chittering…the Day of the Squirrel is at hand!)
I had thought that last November’s KFC commercial featuring a Colonel Sanders impersonator dancing with a human-sized bottle of Mrs. Butterworth syrup was a once-and-done thing, but in a companion piece commercial airing currently, the Colonel is back, complete with a misty, bedroom-eyes type expression as he meets Mrs. Butterworth in a marble hallway while a Celine Dion ballad plays. I know that they say “the South shall rise again,” but this is ridiculous!
Mrs. Butterworth appears to make the first move as the impossible couple stare into each other’s faces and the Colonel caresses her molded plastic cheek, probably thinking of all the syrupy goodness contained within…then the couple lean towards one another as a preliminary to a kiss which thankfully, we don’t get to see!
I don’t know what will happen next, and frankly prefer not to go there. Some things are best left to the imagination, and I cringe to think of a Sanders/Butterworth union. Perhaps in the aftermath, however, a horror writer could pen an installment called Children of the Syrup. It would not be suitable for children or sensitive individuals, and viewer discretion is advised…
For the second consecutive year, First Lady Melania Trump’s East Wing Hallway decorations have proven unusual and controversial. The 2017 ornamentation featured bone-like white branches, icy and devoid of warmth in a darkened hallway. This year the dystopian nightmare theme continues with blood red trees that some have commented to be appropriate backdrops to Stephen King’s The Shining. They spring up from the ground, as if drawing from some unspeakable underground plasma pool…
Care to promenade through the gauntlet of forty towering, blood red trees devoid of decoration? Perhaps we can hear them whisper, “Feed me, Seymour! Must be blood! Must be fresh!” The Internet has had a field day with memes and commentary. And as if resonating on the same wavelength, it bears mentioning that black Xmas trees are making inroads this year.- -Bring on Jack Skellington in his Santa suit!
So have yourself a scary little Christmas! It’s perhaps only payback for holiday merchandising beginning in October…
FOXSYLVANIA 
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