Me once we re out of quarantine. Courtesy of Anchor Bay Entertainment
In George Romero s 1978 classic zombie flick, the flesh-hungry undead overrun the world. Stephen, a TV newscaster, and his pregnant girlfriend, Fran, team up with SWAT officers Peter and Roger, escaping via helicopter to find safety. They end up taking refuge inside a mall, the heart of American consumerism. Of course, the zombies that stagger around the giant complex don t look too much different from the COVID-infected Floridian families you might find roaming through one today.
What delights me about
Dawn of the Dead is that, over four decades later, the film still has genuine scares and gore like zombies taking exuberant bites out of warm-blooded humans after suddenly, unexpectedly appearing in the twisty underbelly of a mall. And exploding heads!!! Even the silence in the film is haunting, as it can only stay silent for so long.
John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands are a force in
Love Streams. Courtesy of Criterion ChannelEvery Friday, we write about four films that you can t find on major US streaming services in our column Unstreamable. We didn t have time to watch new picks this week because we were slammed with Sundance coverage (which you should really read right here). Instead, we re bringing you ten previous picks from each year of the 1980s that you can t technically stream. All of them fucking rule. (And yes, we know you can find many things online illegally, but we don t consider user-generated videos, like unauthorized YouTube uploads, to be streamable.)
Definitely recommended if you like Adult Swim or chatty British comedy. Garth Marenghi
Richard Ayoade is a genuinely genius weirdo. The English actor and director and general Renaissance Man is maybe most known for his work on
The IT Crowd, although he s done a considerable amount of mainstream Hollywood work, like voice acting for
Soul and
Garth Marenghi s Darkplace.
This one-season British horror parody TV show is based around a fictional horror author named Garth Marenghi (Matthew Holness) and his producer (Richard Ayoade, who also directs). The lore goes that the two created a TV series in the 1980s that flopped so hard it wasn t even broadcast. But then, in the 2000s, it was picked up and revisited. This is where viewers see the current show, with Marenghi and his producer giving interviews about the random perils and mistakes that occurred in the original filming, of which there are many. The show heavily parodies the 80s, and the synthy soundtrack gives you an idea o
Listen to us talk about unstreamable Christmas and New Year s Eve movies on
KUOW s The Record here, and then check out our list below, presented in chronological order:
USA, 1971-1974, ~60 min episodes
Sonny and Cher never made a holiday album together, but they did record multiple Christmas specials for their
Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour, which ran for four years in the early 70s on CBS. Added together, the specials constitute enough jingles for an album, and luckily, a DVD was released in 2004 devoted to all of these Christmastime shows. It s seriously delightful, with special guests including Bernadette Peters and some old TV personas I can t place. These episodes air during the era of Nixon s potential impeachment, and the show s struggle to create joy around impeachment news is particularly relatable.
A great film about phone sex. Courtesy Rosebud Films
The Telephone Book is smut of the highest order. Every frame is perverted, twisted fun. I felt giddy the entire time watching it, like I was flipping through a
Playboy for the first time. Though there s no full penetration,
Telephone Book is, without a doubt, a pretty porny (or porn chic as producer Merv Bloch says) affair. The film is centered around Alice (Sarah Kennedy), a perpetually horny woman who receives Thee Most Obscene And Hottest sex phone call from an unknown caller. Determined to bang him in real life, she pours through the telephone book, encountering pervy stranger after stranger, looking for the peen that matches the mysterious voice.