Waaaaaaaaaalllleeeeeee

I saw Pixar’s latest moneymaker Wall-e on the last day of my Disney vacation. You already probably know that the movie is so cute it’s disgusting. I need to give props to the animation company for somehow balancing post-apocalypsism ( yup I made up that word) and tenderness. I’m assuming everybody that’s reading is well aware of the film’s setting, so I wont waste time trying to explain the film. If you haven’t seen Wall-E, you seriously need to go and see it. This comes from an avid horror fanatic.

People that go to Disney need to chill the fuck out.

I just came back from a Disney vacation. My family, Katrianna and Mary (my brothers girlfriend) spent the past week in Orlando. Yes, it’s way more fun to go as an adult than as a kid. This is my 6th or 7th trip to Disney, this being the first time I’m old enough to do whatever I want. A huge part of “whatever I want” was the Twilight Zone’s Tower of Terror ride in Hollywood Studios ( formerly MGM). Katie and i went on it 6 times on a row on a bizarre day that the park was mostly empty. The parks were packed for the most part. We walk the theme parks extensively and observed the people around us. I noticed that Walt Disney World is a pretty mean place if you are being observant. Everywhere I went I saw people screaming at their kids, being mean to one another, cutting in line, being anxious and acting paranoid. It’s like people are so focus on having fun that they forget to do just that. I came to this realization on our very first day when Katie got bitched at by a chick who misunderstood something she heard while evesdropping. I haven’t have not seen that much bottled up aggression anywhere else.

Next time you go to Disney be observant of your surroundings. You’ll see what I’m talking about.

Have a magical day!

Chill RPG

I have always been a sucker for cult culture. I feed off the energy of the fanatics that keep obscure art and games going years after it’s shelf life. My latest obsession is a 90’s horror role playing game called Chill. The game, originally designed in the 80s, deals with an organization called SAVE which combats the evil forces of the Unknown. Unlike other horror rpgs, like Kult and Call of Cthulhu, SAVE pays homage to the universal horror, the hammer movies, and the horror camp of the 90s while keeping psychological horror elements present. These disperate elements attract me to the game. I look forward to creating stories that embrace the camp of the 80s: Bela Lugosi-esque Vampires, Werewolfs, and ghosts with splatterpunkish sensibilities. I see Chill as a platform for me to tell stories about the 80s schlock movies as well as the fortean stuff I’ve spent most of the past two years reading about. My Chill game will deal with a Transylvanian vampire one week and with Mothman on the next. The character’s antagonists are creatures of The Unknown. The unknown manifests as creatures from 80s horror movies. I figure the complicated parapsychological stuff that Jacques Valle and John A. Keel wrote about can also be applied to the Unknown. (Wikipedia Jacques Valle and John A. Keel if you don’t know who they are.)

There are still a few angelfire looking Chill website around. They all host the journals of Chill campaigns that lasted for years, created by people who think Chill is Christ made into an RPG.

A young company tried to revive Chill but they have been unsuccessful. The game seems to be down for the long sleep. All the better as far as I’m concerned.

Other Me’s out there.

George Noory: Wild Card line you are on Coast to Coast Am.

Caller: Are you talking to me?

George Noory: Yes, that is if you are really you.

So goes a running gag on Coast to Coast AM.

I decided to google my own name. There are many other Tony Reyes. The two most important ones are the owner of a fishing store and a pro-bowler. There are also dancers and random old dudes. The Tony Reyes that’s writing was nowhere to be seen among the hits produced by the search.

“Wanted” is going to suck donkeyballs

I’m telling you now: Wanted is going to suck donkeyballs.

Ok, I really did read the comic before I knew it was going to be a movie. The Wanted comic can be seen as deconstruction of the Supervillian genre. In Wanted, the world is ran by supervillians. Instead of some Doctor Doom bullshit, they run our lives in the shadows. Wesley discoveres that he is the son of the world’s most dangerous assassin and he stumbles into a war between the supervillians.

What I love about the book is that all the characters are evil. They are supervillians which behave like real-life bad people.  Mark Millar wrote a comic full of compelling villians and he gave them the spotlight.The most interesting of them is Mr.Rictus. Rictus was a hardcore christian who died chemically after a fire related accident. He was revived by doctors, but he came back with the knowledge that there is no afterlife. And now he kills and fucks whatever he feels like.  Mr. Rictus is real-life intelligent as well as vicious. Quite possibly the best villian I’ve ever come across.

There is nothing typical about it. It’s creative and bold.

The movie on the other hand is obviously junk food, hollywood bullshit.  It looks nothing like the comic book.

I understand that movies and comicbooks are two different beasts. A comic book has to change ( sometimes dramatically) to “work” as a screenplay. I’ve make it a point to not judge one in terms of the other. That said, the Wanted movie still looks like such a dumbass blockbuster.

Elegant Elliot Offen

Witness the genius of the Elegant one. That’s all.

Jordan Maxwell

Jordan Maxwell called into Coast to Coast AM a few nights ago. The man was a mess. He rambled on about the “they” who have wrecked his life. These “They” broke up his marriage, tap his phones and other things of that nature. He was saying he’s about to give up on his life’s work.

Maxwell’s is an expert (maybe self proclaimed) on symbols. He says that our culture and society is based around symbols that have transcended from the beginning of time. It is actually quite interesting. Maxwell also specializes in secret societies. He has found connections between words, symbols, and forgotten histories. He’ll tell you that money is called currency because of the root word current which is associated with electricity an so on and so forth.  I can’t do justice to this man’s ideas in this blog.

Maxwell’s research has lead him to an anti elite stanze. He seems to be extremely anti-Vatican. He quoted a mysterious man telling him, “when one deals with the church, one deals with organized crime in the highest levels of society.” He claims that we are controlled by the elite who have built our society using the ancient symbols I’ve talked about.

After finishing Maxwell’s segment, George Noory, Coast to Coast’s host, announced that Maxwell’s website was out mysteriously offline. A few hours later, the website came back up.

Check out his website

I’m planning on checking out more of his conferences.

Funny Books I read

Earlier today ( or maybe yesterday, depending on when I publish this) I went to my local comicbook store, Borderlands, to get my monthly comics. I had Warhammer: Condemend by Fire, The Boys #19, The Punisher #57, and H.P. Lovecraft’s Haunts of Horror waiting for me in my pull. I wont make this a review post, cause I know that you couldn’t care less about my opinion about a comic book. I just thought listing my comic reads could be a nice indicatior of my personality. What the fuck, the fact that I admit to reading comics is an indicator of my character all in itself.

Funny books really are the pulps of my age. They are stories- which are sometimes simple, yet often not- that I sit to read without the dedication of a book. They are the weird tales of the new millenium. The similarities between comics and pulps are quite eiry: they are both considered to be “cheap” by the establishment and half of them are really just that. I love everything about them.

It looks like Katrianna ( my girlfriend) will come and visit tomorrow. She always makes my life fun, as well as laugh at my comics.

Gamer Life

Table Top Role Playing Games have been a constant through my adult life. My love for dice chugging began in the seventh grade when a friend of mine introduced me to this game called Rifts. The selling point was that you could “do anything” in the game. It was like a board game without a board, where the players described all their actions verbally. It was like a form of improvisational theater.

Years later, 3 friends began a Dungeons and Dragons campaign ( that’s a series of connected rpg sessions) titled “The Green Cloaked Man Saga.” There were 3 players during the first game, but during the course of the year long game that number grew to 9. The epic story began with the siege of a small anglo-saxon inspired town by the dreaded Blood Moon Clan. Eventually the characters realized that the Clan was being manipulated by a man called Kortren, who wore a green cloak. That lead the players on an epic quest to stop the dastardly villain. Some how, that quest led the characters to a massive Minas Tirith like fight between Elves and Demons. After the death of half of the heroic party, the villain was killed. And a story which I will always remember fondly was completed.

The RPG group disbanded due to real life. As usual, people moved and lost interest in those childish games. But for some reason I still find myself drawn to them. It’s much more than nostalgia, i think. I still crave to be involved in the RPG hobby. But it seems like a hard thing to do now a days. Whenever I sit down to work out an RPG game I always find my self repeating a sort of mantra, ” I should be spending this time writing a book or short story.”

If I got one of you semi-interested in Role Playing Games, I’ll go ahead and throw in the names Dark Heresy, Vampire: The Requiem, and Kult.

The List

Bouncing off the previous post, I’ve decided to give you guys a list of late 80’s/ early 90s horror films every hipster/artsy person should watch. I’m purposely keeping the list as esoteric as I can. Remember, It’s artsy if not a whole lot of people have watched it.

1. Monster Squad : Read the previous post.
2. The Dead Next Door: With a zompocalypse in full swing, a group of government agents go to Akron, Ohio in the search for an anti-zombie serum. The group calls itself the Zombie Squad and each member of the team has the name of a famous horror movie director. There’s been rumors of a sequel for the past few years. Nothing yet.
3. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 : One sentence, “The Saw is Family.” The follow up to the original could fall under the category of comedy. Well, it’s more of a comedy for the those of us with a really morbid sense of humor. Denis Hopper, in his most demented, plays a texas ranger who hunts down the Sawyer family. He uses a pretty hot radio-dj to lure Leatherface ( refered to as Bubba by his family members) out in the open. This one has everything: chainsaw duels, blood, gore, Dennis Hopper.
4. Cannibal Holocaust: The one that goes all the way. A group of film makers travel to the green inferno to make a documentary about the amazonian tribes. They find their doom in various grotesque ways. The beautiful score composed by Riz Ortolani serves as the perfect counterpoint to the brutality of the images on screen. Blair Witch Project and to a certain degree Diary of the Dead owe much to this movie both thematically and stylistically. Ohhh yeah, the filmmakers were put to trial because it was thought that Cannibal Holocaust was a snuff film.
5. Dellamorte Dellamore ( Cementary Man): The blatantly artsy zombie flick. This is one of those movies that’s hard to describe. The movie changes a lot from beginning to end. It starts out as a story about a man who works in a cemetery, whose job is to keep people in rather than out. It ends up as a existential piece. The word Existential alone makes it worthy of this list.
6. Dead and Buried: I have to admit that this one is blurry. If memory serves right: it’s about a town where people who get killed return as smart zombies. Dead and Buried is all about atmosphere. The writers tried to make it as Lovecraftian as possible, and I think they’ve accomplished it.
7. In the Mouth of Madness: The only smart John Carpenter Movie. Another ode to Lovecraft. Corporate Private Eye John Trent goes to a town that doesn’t exist to find a missing novelist. Madness and lunacy follow.
8. Roadkill: The Last Days of John Martin: John martin is splatterpunk at it’s most pure. It’s an 12-16 minute long gorefest with not much of a storyline. Roadkill is series of sounds and grotesque images that semi relates the story of a sick fuck’s torture of two hitchhikers. The only two places you’ll find this treasure is on ebay or in the kiosk owned by that weird Chinese dude from the Hellraiser movies.
9. The Evil Dead 2: If you are on wordpress, you know all about this movie.
10. Braindead ( Dead Alive) : Refer to number 9.

Like Lovecraft’s essay ,Supernatural Horror in Fiction, I’ll come back to this list. I’ll update it and expand upon it.