Heaven by Katie Skelly

Heaven by Katie Skelly 1

I’ve been reading a lot more comics lately. I’ve been reading a lot more books lately. At the beginning of the year, I decided to dedicate some time just before bed to reading, and it has been working. I generally try to read a couple of chapters of a regular book and then maybe a section of a comic book. I’ve been enjoying that, and as such I’ve started requesting some comics from Fantagraphics.

They don’t do a lot of superhero stuff or the type of book you’d find at a mainstream seller. They have a lot of weird, indie comics. Which is fun to read. It gets me out of my comfort zone.

Heaven is a slender little book about a teenage girl who discovers a strange strip club outside of town. She gets a job there and finds it liberating, until she discovers something else about it. It is a slight book, but a fun one. You can read my review here.

Pretty Maids All In A Row (1971)

Pretty Maids All in a Blu

When I review discs for Cinema Sentries, it is by request. The owner of the site, Gordon, sends out emails from the PR people noting that they have discs for review. When I want something, I make a request, and if I’m lucky, I get a copy of the disc.

I don’t always know exactly why I request something. Sometimes, it is for a film that I already love and want to own on disc. Sometimes it is for a film that I’ve been wanting to see. More often than not, it is for a film I’ve never heard of, but that sounds interesting. I get a lot of films from Kino Lorber and the Warner Archive that are like that. They usually star actors I really like or are from a director I enjoy. I also often request films from the Criterion Collection or Radiance Films because I know they will be great releases, and usually the films are interesting.

And then there are films like Pretty Maids in a Row. This is a sleazy film about sexy teens getting murdered in a high school. It stars Rock Hudson as a football coach/counselor who’s sleeping with half the student body. Angie Dickinson plays a sexy teacher, and Telly Sevalis is the cop trying to solve the murders. It was written by Gene Roddenberry and directed by Roger Vadim. That’s a lot of talent for a skeezy film. Which I guess is why I requested it.

It isn’t good exactly, but it is a fascinating time capsule into a certain period of Hollywood film. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.

Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944)

Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo Blu

Spencer Tracy gets top billing in this World War II epic, but this is really Van Johnson’s film. He plays a fighter pilot who volunteers for a secret mission to bomb Japan just weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The title is apt as the actual bombing raid takes hardly any time at all. The film therefore focuses on the time before, when the men are training for the mission, and the time after, when Van Johnson’s plane is shot down on the Chinese shoreline, and they must find a way to escape to safety.

I wanted to love this film more than I did. Honestly, it is a bit of a drag as the training exercises are dull and the romantic engagements even more so. Things pick up once they crash, but by then I was just ready for the film to be over. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.

Five Cool Things and Small Prophets

Crisis on Infinite Earths 35th Anniversary Deluxe Edition

I apparently forgot to post my Five Cool Things from July 8, so I’m doing that now. In it, I talked about the classic comic book crossover Crisis on Infinite Earths, the great Jean Gabin noir Hi-Jack Highway, a Charles Bronson thriller called Violent City, Chloe Zhao’s first film Songs My Brother Taught Me, Back to the Wall, a wonderful French thriller, and Small Prophets, a brilliant new show from MacKenzie Crook. You can read all about it at Cinema Sentries.

Five Cool Things and Digger

Hobtown Mystery Stories Vol 1 The Case Of The Missing Men cover

As per usual, I’m a little late with the posting of my Five Cool Things article. This week I’m talking about a Hobtown Mystery, Deadly Circuit, The Souffleur, Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, Destroy All Monsters, In the Mouth of Madness, and the new trailer for a Tom Cruise movie. You can read all about it here.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Faces of Death (2026)

Faces of Death (2026)

If you are a person of a certain age and a person of a certain disposition, then you likely have memories of the 1978 film Faces of Death. It became quite the rage in my high school. This would have been the late 1980s or early 1990s, nearly a decade after the film came out. I’m thinking we must have learned about it due to one of the many sequels, or maybe when they hit the VHS rental market. There was only one place anywhere near me that rented it – Mega Movies. They had bought out an old Burger King, so it had a huge amount of floor space, and they filled it with all sorts of crazy movies. My love of oddball cinema and glorious B-movies in part came from Mega Movies.

For those of you who aren’t of a certain age or disposition, Faces of Death was a purported documentary in which a mad pathologist obsessed with death shows us a whole lot of supposedly real images of death. There is man getting eaten by an alligator, a SWAT team shooting a gunman down, accidents, suicides, and a death by electric chair. In truth, only some of the scenes were real; most of them were fake. But we thought it was real. And shocking. You gotta remember this was way before viral videos were a thing. These days you can see all sorts of very real death on the internet, but back then this was it. It was utterly fascinating and horrifying.

I haven’t thought of those films in years, so when a new Faces of Death film was announced (totally fictional, just sort of based on the idea of those old films), I wasn’t particularly interested. I haven’t thought of those old films in years because I have no interest in that type of thing anymore. The real world is full of enough real horror that I don’t need to seek it out on the Internet. But then there was a certain amount of buzz, and I wanted to watch a horror film before me and the wife went to see The Odyssey in theaters, so this was it.

The story is an interesting one, but this did not work for me at all.

Margot Romero (Barbie Ferreira) works for Kino, a TikTok-like company, as a content moderator. She sits in a cubicle all day, watching flagged videos and deciding whether they should be banned, allowed, or allowed with a content warning. Speed is the name of the game. She watches just a few seconds of the video and makes a determination. Interestingly, she allows a great deal more violent content than sexual. Pretty heavy violence gets an okay, but a woman giving instructions on how to put a condom on a cucumber gets banned.

One day she watches a strange video where a man surrounded by mannequins is decapitated. It looks real. But she decides it is a fake and allows it. The next day she sees a similar video where a man is electrocuted. Once again, he is surrounded by mannequins. This time she brings in her manager, but he brushes it off. It has to be a fake. And no, we can’t turn it into the cops because that might damage the company’s reputation.

When she sees a third video, she decides it is real. She presses her boss but is once again turned down. She shares the file on Reddit, where internet sleuths decide it probably is real. A little more searching and she realizes the videos are eerily similar to the ones on Faces of Death. A copycat is recreating those murders, but for real this time.

The film spends some time with the killer Arthur Spevak (Dacre Montgomery). He uses his internet skills to find people who have said mean things to him on the Internet or who just annoy him in some way. In one pretty funny bit of satire, he grabs an influencer. We first see her at a public pool because that’s the one place you can film yourself in a bikini and not get flagged. While filming, some dude runs in front of the camera, and she yells at him for interrupting her “work.”

All of this is fine. That’s a pretty enjoyable concept for a movie, and it worked relatively well for me. There was nothing about it that I found to be particularly good, but nothing that I hated either. But then it takes a turn. Margot keeps digging. Eventually she finds the killer, and they have a showdown. Well, two showdowns. Both turn the film into very typical and very average modern horror nonsense. The killer puts his victims in cages, then stages the Faces of Death kills in a ridiculous manner. His motivation is all about likes and hits and influencer culture, and I hate that stuff. I’m probably just too old for it. A younger me may have dug that content, but fifty-year-old me has no taste for it. There is a moment near the end that I won’t spoil, but I just hated. It turned the film from something that was just ok to a great big “nope.”

ImgBox is Down

I’ve been using ImgBox to host my photos for years now. They have been down all week. There is no official word (at least that I’ve seen) on what’s going on. I’ve seen a lot of talk online, and none of it seems good. Maybe it will come back, but my guess is they are just gone. Or if they do come back, I’m betting my photos are lost.

I didn’t store any personal photos on the site, so it isn’t a loss in that sense, but now I have to figure out what to use for the blog. I’ve started using ImgBB and that seems okay, but I’m not sure how much storage they give you. One of the things I loved about ImgBox was that you got unlimited storage and there were no ads or anything you had to deal with.

For now, I’m just gonna move forward. New posts will get images, but I’m not going to mess with the old ones. Eventually, if ImgBox definitely proves to be gone, I’ll try and go back and add in new image links. But that will be a massive project, as there are thousands of photos I’ll have to reupload.

Consider this an FYI.

Show Review: Neil Young & Crazy Horse – Chicago, IL (11/15/76)

Neil Young
1976-11-15
Auditorium Theater, Chicago, Illinois, USA
w/ Crazy Horse

Early Show

Disc 1 (32:01)
01. The Old Laughing Lady>Guilty Train
02. Human Highway
03. After The Gold Rush
04. Pocahontas
05. Too Far Gone
06. The Needle And The Damage Done
07. A Man Needs A Maid
08. Sugar Mountain

Disc 2 (57:01)
09. Country Home
10. Don’t Cry No Tears
11. Bite The Bullet
12. Down By The River
13. Lotta Love
14. Like A Hurricane
15. Drive Back
16. Cinnamon Girl
17. Cortez The Killer(cut)

Late Show

01 Heart of Gold
02 The Old Laughing Lady
03 Journey Through the Past
04 Too Far Gone
05 Give Me Strength
06 The Needle and the Damage Done
07 A Man Needs a Maid
08 Tell Me Why
09 Sugar Mountain

10 Country Home
11 Don’t Cry No Tears
12 Peace of Mind
13 Lotta Love
14 Like a Hurricane
15 After the Gold Rush
16 Are You Ready for the Country?
17 Down by the River
18 Inca Queen
19 Opera Star
20 Eldorado

Tour: 1976 US Tour with Crazy Horse
Band: Crazy Horse, Line Up 3
Neil Young – vocals, guitar, keyboards, banjo, harmonica
Frank Sampedro – guitar, keyboards, vocals
Billy Talbot – bass, vocals
Ralph Molina – drums, vocals

Sources:

Source 1
Early Show Only

Lineage: Audience Master > Unknown generation > DAT > CDR > EAC > xACT 1.5b3 > flac(8)

Source 2
Late Show Only

SBD Recording
Artwork: Front, Back, Front 2

Source 3
Late Show Only

The “Joel Bernstein” 1976 soundboard collection I put up recently was very popular,
so here’s another 1976 soundboard.
I haven’t been at Dime too long, so I don’t know if it was put up recently.
If you missed it before, it’s definitely a keeper.
The sound is really superb.
I beleive this emerged among collectors as a commercial bootleg,
so I don’t know the lineage, but it sounds like it could be straight from the master or very low-generation.
Supposedly several songs were performed after these, but they were not recorded.
This recording was taken from the “Chicago Hurricane” bootleg. There’s a little sound dropout at 2:39 on Disc 1, Track 6, but it’s after the song has ended. This was on my original.

The Midnight Cafe notes:

Out of the four main artists that I used to post about every week, Neil Young is the one I know the least about. Truth be told, I’ve always been more of a Jack of All Trades and an Ace of None than one of those folks who know every last detail of an artist’s career. But I am pretty well versed in Dylan and the Dead and Van Morrison. I love me some Neil Young, but I have to admit I’ve not listened to every record, and I’m pretty hazy about most of his tours.

I mean, I know there was Buffalo Springfield and his tenure with Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and of course Crazy Horse. I also know he’s played with lots of different bands with names like The Ducks and the Restless and Promise of the Real, but I’d be hard-pressed to give you dates on any of those or who was in them. But I’ve definitely listened to recordings of all those guys.

The point I’m belaboring to make is that I don’t know how to put this particular show into any type of context. I believe 1976 is a well-regarded year in Neil Young lore. He did a big tour of Japan and Europe with Crazy Horse in the spring, and a tour with them of the US in the Fall. In the summer, he toured with Stephen Stills, with whom he released an album called Long May You Run, but it ended badly.

This show comes from the middle of his American tour with Crazy Horse. He often did two shows a day on this tour. Each performance began with Neil performing solo on acoustic guitar and sometimes piano, and then Crazy Horse came out for a full electric set.

There is a soundboard recording of the late show, which apparently came from Joel Bernstein, a photographer and producer who hung out with Neil around this time. I don’t know all the details of that. Only audience recordings exist of the early show. I tried listening to the early show, but I couldn’t do it. It isn’t a terribly bad recording; I’ve certainly heard worse, but I just wasn’t in the mood. This is partially because I mislabeled it as a soundboard and was really annoyed when it was definitely not that. But the late show is a true soundboard, and it sounds terrific.

Listening to the acoustic set, I realize I don’t know what to say about it. Neil is in fine form, and he plays the songs well, but they sound more or less as they do on the records. For the most part, he’s not doing anything different with them, and he’s not blowing me away with raw emotion. Don’t get me wrong, they are great. I love these songs, and he performs them well; I just don’t know that there is more to say about them.

It opens with a nice version of “Heart of Gold.” My copy has some digital static a couple of times right at the beginning. “The Old Laughing Lady” is really good with a lovely harmonica bit in the middle. At the very end, Neil starts singing what the setlist calls “Guilty Train,” but I can’t find any information about it. It is just a snippet, really, but all the lyrics websites only list the lyrics, “Guilty train
Don’t whistle my way again,” which is repeated. Does anyone know anything about this song? If it even is a song.

“Journey Through the Past” is a lot of fun with this barroom-esque piano work. Neil switches to the piano or an organ during “A Man Needs a Maid,” and he also blows his harmonica, which gives it a really beautiful, haunting quality. The band comes out on “Country Home,” and they rock. About two minutes into the song, Neil seems to get confused, and he repeats the line “Leave myself behind” a few times. For a moment, the band seems like they don’t know what to do, and then they just jump into a great little jam.

“Lotta Love” is very pretty, but at the end it gets really soft for some reason. “Like a Hurricane” starts off kind of weird. Neil does this intro where he plays really fast and just kind of noodles for a minute, and then it kicks off into the actual song. It is loud and ragged and glorious. In the intro to “Are You Ready For the Country,” Neil says it is their first time playing the song. As it was written in 1972, that seems unlikely. Was he just talking about him performing it with Crazy Horse, or was this really the first time he’d played it live? Is there a Neil Young Base out there with listings of all his live performances? Whatever the case, it is a rollicking version.

“Down by the River” is one of my favorite Neil Young songs. It has an excellent groove, and it is a great launching pad for some classic Neil Young jamming. He does not disappoint this night. One of my favorite parts of the song is after the big jam; he comes back to the first verse singing, “Be on my side. I’ll be on your side,” and he just nails that moment here. From the big rowdiness of that song, he transitions to the subtle beauty of “Inca Queen” with this lovely synth keyboard and some very fine guitar picking. “Opera Star” and “El Dorado” finish us out, and they are rocking.

It is a very fine show overall. Well worth grabbing.

I’m a funny man. When talking about a GarciaLive release, I noted that in order to write more of these music reviews, I was just going to give them one good listen (instead of the three I initially was trying to do) and then just jot down my thoughts. These aren’t intended to be in-depth, full-on reviews, but just thoughts on a show. I listened to this show on my way to and from work, and I made notes whenever a song was good or interesting. The plan was to come home that night and write a review. That was Monday. By the time I got home, I was too tired to talk about anything. Then Tuesday came and Wednesday, and to be honest, I just kept forgetting to write. Here it is Thursday, and I’m finally getting this thing out. I could have listened to the show a couple of more times!

Maybe next time.

The Terror: The Devil In Silver: Season 1, Episode 3 – “New York In June”

the devil in silver

Season one of The Terror is one of my favorite seasons of television over the last decade. It is a beautiful piece of historical fiction about a group of 19th-century British sailors trying to find a Northwest Passage and discovering something sinister in the frozen wasteland. I don’t think it was originally intended as an anthology series, but it became one. I have not seen the second season set in a Japanese internment camp during World War II, but they say it is very good.

And now, some seven years later, we are getting Season 3. I didn’t actually know this was part of The Terror until I started watching it. On their main screens, AMC+ just shows it as The Devil in Silver. But the opening credits do say The Terror. I don’t know why. Had I known, I would have watched Season 2 first.

The Devil in Silver follows Pepper (Dan Stevens), a guy who had the great misfortune of getting into a fight with his girlfriend’s ex, with the police nearby who were at the end of their shift. Rather than arrest him and deal with the paperwork, they take him to a mental hospital where he’s put on a 72-hour hold. If he behaves, they say, he’ll be released. As is the way with these things, he gets stuck there indefinitely.

New Hyde Hospital is a rundown, shabby place, and the series hits the state of our mental healthcare with a hammer. Hospitals are underfunded, understaffed, and tend to treat the symptoms with drugs rather than get to the heart of the actual disease. Also, there may be a monster. It might also be a scary patient they keep locked behind a silver door. But probably it is a monster since this series is all about the supernatural.

Our first two episodes introduced the situation and our characters: patients and doctors. It is a great cast, with Aasif Mandvi as the head administrator, CCH Pounder as one of the doctors, Stephen Root as the book club leader, and Judith freaking Light as one of the patients (I haven’t seen her in anything since Who’s the Boss, but one look at her IMDB page shows she’s kept busy – good for her.)

Pepper is angry and belligerent. He’s the McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in this scenario. Episode Three begins with the aftermath of Episode Two, where he was attacked by the monster. He awakes to find that the doctors are telling the story that he became belligerent and violent, and they had to get rough with him – hence his injuries.

He tries asking the patients who this patient is behind the silver door, but they give conflicting answers when they give answers at all. When he’s told that the patients are going to be taken to a pizza parlor for a treat in a few days, he decides that’s where he’ll make his escape. To keep the patients calm (and zoinked out of their minds), the staff gives everybody some heavy downers. Pepper doesn’t swallow it and tells his roommate his plan. The roommate tells someone else, and before you know it, all the patients are not taking their meds. The pizza party is a disaster with everyone acting, well, crazy, and Pepper ultimately decides he needs to stay to try to help them get real help.

He is once again confronted by the monster, who basically tells him if he doesn’t comply, he’ll kill everybody.

Ok, I’m once again rambling for too long. I really don’t want to do full recaps. I just don’t have the patience for it, but I’m struggling talking about single episodes without giving out quite a bit of information.

I’m struggling with this show. It has a great cast, and the story has potential. Though it does lean a little too heavily into the well-worn tropes of mental institutions. It’s lacking something. Maybe a specificity to the characters. The actors, especially Judith Light, give it their all, but I don’t find myself interested in them. And they’ve brought out the monster too soon. It’s not really that scary but keeps lurking about and doing stuff. I’d prefer a bigger mystery about what it is and what it wants.

The cast is good enough that I’m going to keep watching, but I truly hope it gets better.

Now Watching: Deadly Circuit (1983)

deadly circuit poster

Deadly Circuit (1983)
Directed by Claude Miller
Starring Michel Serrault and Isabelle Adjani

Synopsis: A private detective becomes obsessed with a serial killer who he thinks might be his daughter.

Rating: ***1/2

Thoughts: A very French take on the neo-noir. A private detective known as “The Eye” (Serrault) is hired to locate a rich couple’s son and find out more information about the woman he has been seeing. He finds the man and watches the woman, Catherine (Adjani) murder him. The detective doesn’t turn her in, but continues to follow her, where he finds that she regularly seduces rich men and then murders them. He becomes convinced she is his long-lost daughter and begins secretly helping her dispose of the bodies.

This is a weird little film that mostly follows the detective as he follows the girl. Serrault is great as the detective. He’s a guy who was once great at his job but has lost his way. As he’s gotten older, he’s feeling the weight of having never known his daughter (what exactly happened to her is only revealed late in the film). Adjani is lovely as well, but Catherine is someone we mostly just see through his eyes. The plot is strange and quirky and kind of wonderful.