Category Archives: Reviews

Reviews, Television

Trash Culture’s Doctor Who Reviews – The Ark (1966)

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by Chad Denton

Dodo frustrates Stephen by being clueless to an almost surreal degree, hopping out of the TARDIS without hesitation into a jungle and thinking she can just hop on a bus back to London. The Doctor actually agrees with Dodo – at least insofar as he thinks they actually are still on Earth somewhere. Dodo, who is at least knowledgeable about animals, notes that the jungle is filled with different species from across the world while the Doctor discovers that there is no sky but a metal roof. The mystery unravels when the Doctor and the others are taken to a group of humans by alien beings, the Monoids. They are told that the ship is a futuristic Ark, taking the human race and samples of all its species away from an Earth that’s slowly being destroyed by an expanding sun to a new world much like Earth, a journey that will take 700 years. The Monoids are an alien race that migrated to Earth long ago from their own dying world and “offered” to become servants in exchange for their new home. Most of the human population has been reduced to a microscopic state and placed in stasis until the ship finally arrives at the new planet, while the humans left active are Guardians, who, along with their descendants, are expected to protect the ship. After figuring out the Guardians’ understanding of time, the Doctor deduces that they’ve wound up 10,000,000 years past the twentieth century. Continue reading Trash Culture’s Doctor Who Reviews – The Ark (1966) →

Movies, Reviews

Westworld (1973)

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"You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe...whatever you want to believe...you take the red pill, you stay in wonderland...and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes..."
“You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe…whatever you want to believe…you take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland…and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes…”

If you were alive on planet Earth in 1993, you probably found yourself face-to-face with the work of Michael Crichton. He was fifty-one by that point, and a multiple New York Times bestselling author with a shelf’s worth of fiction and non-fiction to his name. Most didn’t bother looking at them, but some of us did, and through them we learned Jurassic Park was the end point of a thought-line that runs through Crichton’s whole career, possibly his entire life.

To tease that thought-line out, it’s best we step back into the shoes of a thirty-one-year-old Crichton as he attempted to become a full-time filmmaker. It’s 1973, and Crichton’s last two books are doing well, though nowhere near as well as his first real success, The Andromeda Strain. Published in ’69 and made into a movie two years later, Strain contains the seeds of Crichton’s literary obsessions…though neither book nor film are as thrilling as they think are.

Which is probably why his next book, Binary, reads more like an episode of CSI than as an actual Michael Crichton novel (and since it was the last one he published under a pseudonym, that kinda fits). Police procedurals always sell, especially when they can wow the audience with all that fun, new forensic technology modern cops (supposedly) get to play with these days. So Binary became a made-for-TV movie, re-titled Pursuit, with Circhton himself directing. Continue reading Westworld (1973) →

Movies, Reviews

Open Your Eyes (1997)

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"So...am I 'legend' yet, or do I have to kill a brace of vampires? Is it three or more? Is there a minimum to beat? A Buffy quotient?"
“So…am I ‘legend’ yet, or do I have to kill a brace of vampires? Is it three or more? Is there a minimum to beat? A Buffy quotient?”

Alejandro Amenabar was another one of those film school drop outs who said “screw it” and began writing, producing, directing and staring in his own films in the mid-90s. There’s a good chance you haven’t heard of him because he went to school at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid instead of UCLA or whatever the hot New York film school is this season. (Really should ask my New York friends about that at some point when I start caring.)

Amenabar’s first movie, Thesis, was about a Universidad Complutense student Nancy Drewing her way towards a snuff film ring. Open Your Eyes (Abre los ojos) is his sophomore movie, the kind that proves you can avoid the stereotypical sophomore slump if you’re smart and/or talented enough. Not only is Open Your Eyes better than Thesis, it’s more interesting and seems a bit more personal. As you’d expect from any movie born out of a flu-based fever dream. Continue reading Open Your Eyes (1997) →

Reviews, Television

Trash Culture’s The Simpsons Reviews: Season 1, Episode 2: “Bart the Genius”

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By Chad Denton

Hell, who doesn't remember this image?
Hell, who doesn't remember this?

So it came to my attention that, around the time I started doing my “Simpsons” write-ups, Onion AV Club writer Nathan Rabin has been doing his own reviews. This was kind of discouraging, since one of the reasons I do pop culture write-ups is to make a desperate shot in the dark toward getting a paid writing gig. And while I’m just some random person on the Internet, he gets paid for writing for a major website, which in the light of the Internet’s hierarchy means that I’m a groveling peasant and he’s a bejeweled archbishop.

I honestly did think about giving up this series before I even really began it, but it occurred to me that I’m not writing these as strictly reviews but as a reflection on a show that I literally grew up with. Also I said that I would try to generate more substantial content in this space to try to get you all to throw some change my way, and so here we are. Continue reading Trash Culture’s The Simpsons Reviews: Season 1, Episode 2: “Bart the Genius” →

Movies, Reviews

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

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Could be worse...could be an Aundrey II...or a Triffid...I'm just sayin'...
Could be worse…could be an Aundrey II…or a Triffid…I’m just sayin’…

John W. Campbell Jr. published the novella Who Goes There in 1938 and went on to inspire the next generation of alien invasion stories, usually involving duplication, replacement, and the resulting paranoia. Who Goes There escaped the printed page in 1951 and became The Thing from Another World. That same, year Robert Heinlein published The Puppet Masters, which non-Heinlein fans might facetiously describe as “Who Goes There v. 2.0.” (If we want to be dicks about it.) Two years later, our “friends” at 20th Century Fox chose to distribute a little independent horror movie called Invaders from Mars. The year after that, Collier’s Magazine began serializing a novel from 5 Against the House author Jack Finney called The Body Snatchers.

With all these other Alien Invasion films making such a big splash, Poverty Row studio Monogram Pictures had to snatch up the film rights. It had no choice, having been around since 1931 and gained a well-deserved reputation for low budget Westerns (which weren’t all that bad), Bowery Boys comedies (which weren’t all that funny) and Bomba, the Jungle Boy adventures (which really were all that racist and then some). Like any small timer, Monogram hoped for some respect, and so transmuted itself into Allied Artists Pictures. It began fielding “B-plus” films with at-the-time-insane production costs, sometimes climbing north of one million dollars. Continue reading Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) →

Reviews, Television

Trash Culture’s The Simpsons Reviews: Season 1, Episode 1, “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire”

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by Chad Denton

So I realized that I do, in fact, own the first ten seasons of “The Simpsons,” which is one season plus what I consider to be the show’s “golden age.” Also I realized that I had actually been with the show all through that era, beginning with “Simpsons Roasting On An Open Fire.” Because I can never lack excuses to waste valuable timebuild up my writing portfolio, I thought I could start doing what I’ve been doing with “Doctor Who” and just reflect on the episodes – what made them work and why I was in love with the show for so long.

So without further Apu (rimshot)…

"Why you little..."
"He's a looser! He's worthless! He's...a Simpson..."

Continue reading Trash Culture’s The Simpsons Reviews: Season 1, Episode 1, “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire” →

Movies, Reviews

Justice League: Doom (2012)

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Dutch angles!
Dutch angles!

…is the thirteenth straight-to-video DC animated superhero movie and the last one credited to Eisner Award-winning writer/producer Dwayne McDuffie, who passed beyond the Source Wall to join the fundamental forces of the multiverse on February 21, 2011. He will be sorely missed.

Especially since Doom is far from his best work, that being all those episodes of Cartoon Network’s Justice League show that weren’t written by Stan Berkowitz, Rich Fogel, or Bruce Timm. Together, that team did more to introduce superheroes to “normal” people than the last thirty years of comic book company presidents, all while working withing the constrictions of network television censorship regime. Their movies…I don’t know. They’ve been okay…but I’d only recommend four out of the thirteen to you fine people with any degree of seriousness. Doom could’ve been number five, and it almost was…until I made the mistake of thinking about it for more than two seconds at a stretch. Continue reading Justice League: Doom (2012) →