When you think of writer/director Wes Craven, chances are you think of 1984’s “A Nightmare on Elm Street.” I am, however, willing to bet you’ve never heard of 1986’s “Deadly Friend” starring Matthew Laborteaux (who?), Kristy Swanson (Buffy from the movie “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”) and Anne Ramsey (Momma from “Throw Momma from the Train”). Don’t feel bad, be glad you haven’t.

The basis of the movie is as follows: teenage kid, mom, and yellow robot named BB move to a new town, kid is super smart and is a brain surgeon/professor at the local polytechnic college, kid makes friends/makes out with girl next door whose dad beats her, robot becomes violent due to “brain” glitch and teenager shuts down robot, girl gets thrown down a flight of stairs making her a vegetable, dad OKs her separation from life support, teenage kid decides to steal already dead girl out of love and experiment and puts robot BB’s computer chip “brain” into her brain, girl becomes lobster-claw robot killer and bodyguard of teenager and eventually dies from gunshot and comes back from the dead to kill her maker…Amazing, right?

Actually, the most amazing thing about this movie is how ridiculous it is. First of all, robot BB talks like a possessed retarded gremlin with Tourette’s—or the devil if he were drowning—whose only utterances are the repetition of his name or a load of nonsense which could be considered his own language. Troll Anne Ramsey is the crazy old lady with a shotgun who won’t give back their basketball, the score and gore (rhyme) are fucking epic, and Matthew Laborteaux has very hairy arms. But by far, the greatest thing about “Deadly Friend” is this badass scene.

In case you want to, you can watch all of the movie on YouTube.

When Rufus Thomas was “Walking the Dog” in 1963, musician and outsider artist Daniel Johnston was busy “Walking the Cow” 20 years later.

In the ‘90s, a slew of Kurt Cobain photographs were taken of him wearing a shirt with the image from Johnston’s Hi, How Are You? album cover. Since then, Johnston’s two-track, bipolar, lo-fi, manic depressive songwriting has been the stuff of wanting-to-impress-your-friends-with-obscure-music-by-putting-a-song-on-a-mixtape dreams. Guilty.

But dreams are for sleeping. In 2005, Jeff Feuerzeig’s documentary, “The Devil and Daniel Johnston,” premiered at Sundance and had many indie-band-shirt-wearing music junkies rethink their track lists.

Today, Johnston has teamed up with Dr. Fun Fun and Smashing Studios and created an iPhone game based off of Johnston’s froggy alien guy from the cover of the aforementioned album. The game is set to his original music and art and is, apparently, much like Frogger. Sorry, guys.

Preview the game on YouTube!

I break for vampires and apparently so does everyone else these days. This is a good and bad thing. Good: I am more comfortable admitting that I prefer reading Anne Rice to Ayn Rand. Bad: New wave vampirism is seriously lacking. Solution: Let the Right One In, the book and the movie.

Recommended to me by our Swedish friends, Let the Right On In is in the simplest terms, a love story between two children (one of them is a vampire the other is not) in 1980s Blackeberg, a suburb of Stockholm, Sweden. While the story’s main characters are 12 years old, nothing about the book is juvenile or even PG-13. (I should clarify that nothing pornographic happens between the kiddies.)

Writer John Ajvide Lindqvist’s interpretation of vampire lore is by far the most interesting of contemporary versions (They sparkle in the sunlight? Really? Bullshit.). His writing style is easy to follow and also cryptic, using the power of allusion like a pro, while the storyline remains genuine and intriguing. He is also a really big Morrissey fan, loosely borrowing the book’s title from the song “Let the Right One Slip In.”

While director Tomas Alfredson’s version nearly omitted 2/3rds of the original details, the movie is still incredible, probably the best I’ve seen in recent years. The cinematography is infallible, dialogue is nearly and befittingly nonexistent, and the horrific things they did feature are freakishly subtle which is all the more frightening. I wish I lived in a film still:

You can watch it instantly on Netflix!

I should mention, additionally, that I thought the movie was really special, but I don’t know if I would have been so enamored if I hadn’t have read the book. Therefore, I recommend you first read the book and then watch the movie. But if you’re a really busy person, watch the movie, done, the end. I just might be sad that you missed out on a really good read, but I can forgive you.

If you know me at all, chances are you are well aware that: 1. Zach Galifianakis is one of my all time favorite comedians (“Live at the Purple Onion” being one of the funniest things you will ever see), and 2. Jason Schwartzman is the love of my life and by far the sexiest Coppola. So when my sister told me that these two Mediterranean men were starring in a new HBO series, I lost my shit, mentally readied myself for some possible and classic HBO series nudity, and set a calendar alarm for September 20^th at 9:30pm for the series premiere.

In the spirit of the internet and iTunes, HBO released the pilot at least a week earlier than the air date. Emotionally, mentally, and sexually prepared, I watched the first episode on my QuickTime player—ice water in hand—and was sorely indifferent.

“Bored to Death” centers around a recently heartbroken and writer’s-blocked Jonathan Ames (the actual name of the show’s creator and producer) played by Schwartzman who posts an unlicensed “Private Detective for Hire” ad on Craigslsit to live out his film noir/pulp fiction detective fantasies in wake of failing to produce a second novel. Galifianakis is his cartoonist friend, Ted Danson is his boss, there’s some dialogue, Galifianakis is slightly funny but not the Galifianakis I know, Schwartzman plays himself again, it takes place in New York… I admit it’s common for a new series to start out slow, so I’m hoping over time it will pick up because when you break it down, it sounds fantastic.

There were some positives that I will note: the theme song is performed by Schwartzman (of his solo project: Coconut Records) who plays a sensitive and “self-hating Jew”, there are some witty remarks, an aversion to babies en masse, Danson resembles a clean-shaven suit-clad pot-smoking white wizard, good soundtrack, Parker Posey is in two tentative episodes, and the white wine references are funny.

All in all, I had to watch the episode twice in order to like it, but that’s okay. Here’s to future initially funny episodes and some mild Schwartzkis (get it?) nudity. Cheers!

Official HBO site

Watch the first episode on iTunes for free

I’ve been hearing a lot about this lately and it makes all kinds of sense because it is fucking brilliant.

Soul suckin’ Scientologist, Beck has come up with an idea akin to themed parties, secret societies, and book clubs—except his is more mind-blowing. His latest project, Record Club, is an off the cuff collection of covers, of complete albums, recorded in one day, with one track released each week, by a rotating list of talent (Nigel Godrich, Joey Waronker, Brian Lebarton, Bram Inscore, Yo, Giovanni Ribisi [brother of wife Marissa], Chris Holmes, and himself included), purely for kicks.

First order of business, the championship Velvet Underground & Nico.

Listen AND watch.

You can also read an in depth interview about the project on Pitchfork.

In the aforementioned interview, Beck makes casual mention of a proposed but unrealized edition of an Ace of Base record that would have featured MGMT, Devendra Banhart, and the guy from Wolfmother. The idea alone makes me want to projectile vomit out of hypothetical anticipation.

The British are a gift that keeps on giving and to top that, they are ridiculously hilarious (Little Britain, The Office, Extras, Monty Python, Black Books, Never Mind the Buzzcocks, etc…). The comedic outfit known as The Mighty Boosh is no exception and now, for the first time on American DVD players, we can watch Howard Moon (Julian Barratt) and Vince Noir (Noel Fielding) “crimp,” quip (which I am using as a verb for the sake of alliteration), and cause trouble, only to be saved by the enigmatic Shaman, Naboo (Michael Fielding) and his familiar, Bollo (Dave Brown), a talking gorilla, while vocabulary-deficient Bob Fossil (Rich Fulcher) does some ridiculously funny stuff. Each episode features an amazing original musical production written by Barratt.

American fans have either had to watch the show in parts on YouTube under a phonetic spelling (thanks, lauraschantz, whose account was sadly suspended for that exact reason) or settle on poorly edited versions on Adult Swim (at times I still never manage to find).

Having made first-time US appearances this July at Comic-Con, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, Chelsea Lately, Amoeba Music (which I happened to attend), and the Roxy, my favorite Brits have been busy and are not dispelling rumors of a tentative MB movie.

While the individual DVDs have been out since July 21^st, a super special box set is scheduled to be released on October 13^th, 2009. But lucky for you, if you cannot wait, our dear friends at Netflix have Season 1 available for you to rent (Seasons 2 and 3 still have an “unknown” availability status).

Watch This!

Special thanks to my good friend, Alison, who brought this show to my attention two years ago.

Generally, the average little girl’s dream job is to either be a Mommy or a Ballerina. I, however, wanted to be a Mad Scientist. (Little girls also wish for a pony, I wished for magical powers, the ability to break dance, and a cigarette.) So after Barbie and I broke up, and sometime after playing mafia restaurant (instead of house) with my sister Azure and my cousin Kevin, I asked my parents for a chemistry set. In 1994, a little before my love letter to Eddie Vedder, and long after I quit imaginary smoking, I received the coolest goddamn present: a blue chemistry set from the Discovery Store.

Sadly, my memories of playing Pogs with the neighborhood pig-nosed boy snuffed any recollection of conducting experiments with Big Blue. Though, I do remember trying to harvest insects with the vials.

Three years later, still an aspiring chemist and drunk on HBO, I first saw my all time favorite movie: The Young Poisoner’s Handbook. A dark British comedy loosely based on the true story of Graham Young, otherwise known as the “Teacup Poisoner”, who discovers Antimony Sulfide, a chemical which “if treated incorrectly leaves the residue of a lethal poison, but Newton discovered that it could also be transformed…into a diamond of breathtaking beauty.” I’ll stop there.

Before the interweb, it was near impossible to get a copy of the movie and it wasn’t until 2005 (ten years after its original debut) that it was released on DVD. But now, you can watch it in parts on YouTube!! I made you a playlist:

The Young Poisoner’s Handbook

(Thanks, PixieLustrosa!)

Epilogue:

In high school, I nearly failed chemistry. I did, however, excel in photography (this was before digital cameras, when students were still being taught how to process and develop film with—you guessed it—CHEMICALS.)