Now this brings back memories. Or rather, this brings back memories despite the possibility that I’ve never actually seen this commercial before and it just seems so familiar I have convinced myself otherwise. Whatever.

And was there anything Vincent Price wasn’t great in?

Doctor Who is hands-down the scariest fucking television show ever broadcast. It’s so damn frightening that legions of people who have never met can immediately relate to one another based solely upon their experiences hiding behind the sofa during the scary bits. I have a friend who is unafraid of nearly anything, but when I showed him a Doctor Who novelization with his childhood bogeyman on the cover, he shrieked and averted his eyes.

The Whomix Project collects well over 100 variations on the show’s theme, from the expected ambient, electronic and techno mixes to more daring compositions in metal, ska, funk and kazoo.

Doctor Who scars children for life. And it all starts with that theme song.

“Trapezoid’s kisses burn.”

I caught the premiere episode of the previously mentioned stop-motion cartoon What It’s Like Being Alone on CBC last night. The show is of the cutesy gothic variety exemplified in Slave Labor Graphics titles like Lenore and Gloomcookie and the animated ouvre of Tim Burton. It revolves around a group of freakish orphans, including a pint-sized version of the Creature From The Black Lagoon, a child who is constantly aflame, a cyclops kid with no mouth, a two-headed baby and many more, as they attempt to find a way to escape their orphange.

As I’ve said before, I’m a huge fan of stop-motion animation. I love the how tactile and improvisational it appears. What It’s Like Being Alone has some wonderfully subtle acting, with most of the best gags being visual in nature. There’s one little bit with a worm and a creature in the rafters, and another with some dead bunnies, that lend the show the little details that make it just watchable. However, nearly everything else falls short.

One of the main problems with the show was that there were, as I’ve already mentioned, far too many characters competing for airtime, with the result being that I had forgotten about nearly half of them by the show’s end. In addition, What It’s Like Being Alone seems to be covering too many comedy bases, with an overabundance of fart jokes ruining what little quirky charm manages to be conveyed. By far the worst offence in the show is the grating voice acting for many of the characters. Special mention has to be made for the main character of this episode, Princess Lucy, who is so incredibly annoying that I was hoping the rest of the characters would feed her to the lake monster.

As someone who is all too aware that sometimes a show needs a few episodes to work the kinks out, and who was impressed by the concept, setting, character design and animation, I’m willing to give it another shot. I’d certainly like to see more of Aldous, Seymour Talkless, Armie and the rest of the gang, but if they’re going to be hanging out with bad apples like Princess Lucy, maybe they’re better off being left alone.

A classic. An addled Crispin Glover shows off his mad kung-fu skills and tries to kick Letterman in the head. Any further commentary would be superfluous.

I can’t believe this escaped my attention for so long. I just found out that CBC television will be airing a new stop-motion animation show on June 26th entitled What It Is Like Being Alone. Any show that combines freaks, snot, scorpions and suicide is alright by me. More YouTube clips are available here.

When I was a kid I used to watch Morton Downey, Jr. all the time. Like the exploitation peddlers of old, Downey would couch things that were otherwise unavailable on television within a cocoon of outrage and moral indignation. In other words, if you wanted to see clips from horror movies that you otherwise weren’t allowed to see, the perpetually smoking Downey would showcase them at least once a week in a thick-headed attempt to have them banned.

Morton Downey, Jr. would go on to appear in the television shows Monsters and Tales From The Crypt, as well as the film Predator 2.

Now this is interesting. Some of horror’s most noted indie filmmakers are getting together for their own television series, entitled Fearmongers.

When the Masters of Horror was announced, I was happy to see them place a few of the less historically notable directors on the roster, a decision that was met with some criticism. Looking at what passes for masters of the genre, the majority of directors placed on that pedastal are best-known for movies they made twenty to thirty years ago when they were upstarts themselves. Sometimes the horror community seems to be caught in the kind of nostalgic malaise that comics has found itself in. New works of horror aren’t measured up to the average, or even the best, but to an ideal that has been cultivated over years of worship and probably doesn’t come close to reality.

I’m looking forward to seeing what these young punks can do.