Venture Bros: Pinstripes and Poltergeists
What does the Monarch want? The Monarch wants what the Monarch has always wanted: he wants to "win" in his arching battle against Dr. Venture. Never mind that Dr. Venture barely seems to know that the Monarch exists, and gives no thought at all as to his motives or reasoning. For that matter, never mind that the Monarch hasn’t really thought through what it means to "win" against Dr. Venture, or what he’ll do after he’s "won." The Monarch wants so badly to "win" against Dr. Venture that he makes a poorly-thought-out alliance with a fellow villain who actually wears a bathing cap with devil-horns on it. "Faustian bargain" is evidently not a phrase with which the Monarch is familiar.
Zombie query
So, I’ve actually gotten into the whole zombie-movie thing lately. I’ve sat down to watch Quarantine, Night of the Living Dead, both versions of Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later. I’ve recently seen The Omega Man and I Am Legend and Day of the Dead, not to mention the spooky French movie They Came Back (Les Revenants). Now I’m opening the floor up for suggestions. This is a rich and complex genre. It is both the last genre where pure, unspeakable horror is possible, and, paradoxically, the genre most capable of making broad statements about civilization and its fragility. That is, it is both the dumbest and smartest of genres. I haven’t ventured very far outside of acknowledged classics, and barely at all into the realm of low-budget exploitation (the closest I’ve come to that is Robert Rodriguez’s gonzo tribute Planet Terror). I saw one Robert Fulci* (*I mean Lucio Fulci, obviously) movie a long time ago, but otherwise have not seen a foreign language zombie movie and wouldn’t know where to start. I ask my strong-stomached readers to recommend their favorites.
Venture Bros: The Better Man
What does Dr. Orpheus want? Dr. Orpheus has brought his Triad to some sort of desecrated cathedral, to stop Torrid from opening a portal to Hell. When The Outrider, Orpheus’s romantic rival, steals Orpheus’s thunder and takes care of the Hell-portal problem, Orpheus wants to prove to his ex-wife (or maybe only himself) that he is a "better man" than the Outrider.
Venture Bros: Self-Medication
"Self-Medication," in a way, removes all the subtext from The Venture Bros: this is a show about child abuse, plain and simple. Rusty was abused by his father, everyone in Rusty’s therapy group was either abused by their fathers or father-figures (even Ro-Boy reserves his rage for "big robots"), Rusty abuses his own children by putting them in the care of a pedophile. "Boy adventure" almost becomes a code-word for trauma suffered at the hands of an abusive father. The group therapist, quite eloquently, considering, explains that his patients’ behavior is what they do to keep themselves from dealing with their real problems — they are obsessed with their "boy adventures" because they can’t deal with the fact that they’re all abused children. As long as they can solve one more mystery, defeat one more bad guy, escape one more trap, they won’t have to face up to the horror of their existence: they were all abused, molested and neglected by their fathers.
Musical note
The "best of decade" lists are out. I note that I own four of the titles on The Onion’s list, and eighteen of the titles on Rolling Stone’s list.
Make of that what you will.
Mainstreaming of horror postscript
After my previous post about the mainstreaming of horror characters, where I mentioned that somehow Frankenstein’s Monster and Dracula had been made into mascots for children’s breakfast cereals, I remembered that the third of the monster-mascot bunch, Boo Berry, had been presented as a Peter Lorre soundalike. Karloff, Lugosi and Lorre, who came to prominence as a child murderer in M. A reanimated corpse, a vampire and a child murderer — part of this complete breakfast!
Quarantine and the zombie narrative
I watched Quarantine last night (I know, I know, I should have watched [REC] instead, sue me). I have a soft spot in my heart for zombie movies, and I’ve been thinking about them a lot lately for some reason. New Moon is a smash hit, through the roof, with its vampires and werewolves. Is it possible, I wonder, that one day there will be a supernatural romance between a teenage girl and a zombie? It seems implausible, but then let’s step back and think about this for a moment.
Venture Bros: The Revenge Society
The protagonist of "The Revenge Society" is Phantom Limb, who has undergone a transformation since we last saw him. This is, of course, nothing unusual in the Venture-verse, "transformation" is one of the strongest themes of the show. Phantom Limb transforms in this episode, The Sovereign transforms several times, Red Mantle and Dragoon merge into one (with limited success). Sgt Hatred tries desperately to transform into a good father-figure for the benefit of Hank, and Rusty even continues his delicate transformation into a father-figure for Dean.