It’s the holidays and we’re feeling it even here in the Sewer. This
year we’re taking stock of the many gifts we’ve gotten from the movies
over the years and celebrating them in the form of a Christmas carol.
In our own special way.
While the traditional 12 Days of
Christmas counts up from one, we thought it was more fun to count down
between now and the big day. (And to the people who emailed complaining that we were doing that part wrong, how did none of your finely tuned holiday senses catch the fact that the twelve days of Christmas begin on Christmas day and run until Epiphany, rather than counting down to the holiday? Low points for the Catholics out there.)
The pages that follow collect all twelve items in our countdown, but because each entry ran fairly long I’ve only excerpted each one. You’ll have to click through to the original page to see all the goods. You don’t want to miss great Manitou screen grabs, Gene Siskel shredding Silent Night, Deadly Night and Devin’s roundup of all the Warriors, do you? Damn right you don’t.
Devin says: The landmark 1978 film The Manitou is one of the strangest movies ever made. And the final [or first!] entry on our 12 Days of CHUDmas list. Susan
Strasberg is a woman with a lump on her neck and, as sometimes happens,
discovers that it contains the evil fetus of a reborn Indian medicine
man. Tony Curtis is a phony psychic who gets involved, and Syrian
Michael Ansara plays the good guy medicine man who helps fight the
beast. As if the set up wasn’t weird enough, it includes Curtis in a
wizard’s robe and fake mustache and an old women possessed by an evil spirit who not only falls down a flight of stair to her death but falls THROUGH the railing on her way down. The
movie only gets stranger once the titular Manitou is born. The lump has
moved down Strasberg’s back, and he begins popping out of it…
Russ says: Douche supreme Bob Morton (the note-perfect Miguel Ferrer) is
celebrating his rise at OCP with a couple of willing ladies when
Clarence Boddicker busts in to lay down a little justice courtesy of
Dick Jones. You don’t need me to tell you that as Boddicker, Kurtwood
Smith gets most of the movie’s best lines. (“Can you fly, Bobby?”) But
his insistent, intimidating “bitches leave!” while pushing into Bob’s
home is one of the funniest, scariest and most memorable bits in a
movie that’s packed with dozens of rival moments…
Devin says: Conventional wisdom holds Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter
to be the best Jason Voorhees outing, but as I get older I find that
I’m more in love with the end of the trilogy which began with Corey
Feldman shaving his head. Part VI: Jason Lives picks up after Feldman’s character grows up and goes to a mental institution (which takes place in Part V: A New Beginning, the second F13th to
feature no Jason). He’s haunted by the spectre of Jason Voorhees, so he
heads to the cemetary to make sure the retarded serial killer is
actually dead. It turns out that Jason is in fact highly decomposed
worm food – but not for long. An errant lightning strike resurrects the
killer,and he immediately punches the heart out of Welcome Back Kotter‘s Horschack (Ron Palillo!). This is where our CHUDmas gift comes in…
Russ says: R.J. MacReady has problems. The remaining members of the team at
Antarctic research outpost #31 are tied to chairs. Petri dishes full of
their blood are on a desk ready to be probed with a hot wire. We know
that one of the blokes in the chairs is an alien in disguise. It seems
a pretty good bet that MacReady is right, that when he sears the
alien’s blood it will react to the attack just as if he’d attacked a
full-size version of the creature. So he goes down the line, heating
dishes of blood in succession — including his own — until one reacts. In a film that’s full of big gore the little shot of jumping alien blood is a great shock that gets almost everyone…