Here’s an interesting footnote to a Wikipedia entry on the 1981 horror film The Entity: “A video game based on the movie was created in 1983 for the Atari 2600, but never released.”

Where is this game?!!

If you haven’t seen The Entity starring Barabara Hershey then you might not know it is about demon rape. And the producers went to great lengths to show it. They even had ghostly fingers manipulating Barbara’s breasts.

So for there even to be consideration to make a video game based on this concept for the original Atari is mind boggling to me. With today’s “Grand Theft Auto” type games I could see it happening, but in 1981 video games were still pretty innocent. The biggest hit of course being “Pac Man.”

You also have to consider the graphics. Would ghost rape look good on a 2600?

Most likely the game had nothing to do with the film. There’s no way the marketing department would greenlight promoting a game that depicted rape of any kind. Still I would like to see the game. Some old programmer is sitting on it somewhere and it’s a shame that it has to be lost forever just because at one time it was denied distribution. This is the kind of game that should be released on the internet for the sake of geek history.

There may be hope for seeing this game yet. Due to the growing interest in retro-gaming this post suggests that The Entity video game will be dug up.

It seems inevitable that a sequel or prequel will be made of I Am Legend. They will probably coax Will Smith back into the role even though he is not interested in doing repeats of his character roles.

But does anyone besides me think that I Am Legend was a bad, bad film? Yes Will Smith did a great acting job, he always does. This was the director’s fault, Mr. Francis Lawrence. It was his decision to replace old school effects (actors in costume) with CGI monsters.

The CGI was horrible! The entire film felt like a video game. I feel like everyone is excusing this film from criticism simply because Will Smith starred in it.

Why can’t directors learn that you use CGI for special shots but not for close-ups? It was the same issue that ruined The Mummy 2 to some extent because of The Scorpion King close-ups (what? No one trusted The Rock to act?).

I Am Legend could have been a good film if the director had spent time creating realistic humanoid-zombies, but he treated them like cheap special effects.

Compare the 2007 incarnation of the classic science-fiction story to The Omega Man with Charlton Heston. It has its faults: some cheezy soundtrack music, not the greatest make-up effects, etc, but the zombie-like things were real–they felt real! And because of it the danger they posed felt real.

 I couldn’t take I Am Legend seriously. I don’t care if it was hit. I wouldn’t watch it again if I were the last man on earth.

I like science even though my scientific intelligence is average. Here’s a weird blog post I found on “Primate Porn”, I don’t think it’s surprising though. On Scienceblog.com someone posted about how monkeys will use a monetary system (in this case fruit juice) to pay to see other monkeys. In particular they would pay to see female hindquarters (achem, close-ups) and high status faces within a group (the cute chicks).

This post was poorly written from a scientific perspective because it doesn’t go into detail on what kind of monkeys we are talking about. I would assume chimps but? What it does demonstrate is that humans aren’t alone in paying to be perverts.

They often say that males require visual cues to be attracted to a female and then later on a relationship can develop. Women are supposedly more mature and don’t require visual cues in order to be attracted to a man–they look for the “inner man.” That’s a bunch of B.S. of course. Women look for all kinds of visual cues and if it isn’t about looks they’ll dig deeper to find out how much is in “the wallet.” If it’s not about the wallet then it’s about power. Both genders are equally shallow and I think it’s perfectly natural from a biological standpoint.

Those men and women who say that visual cues don’t matter are the ones that didn’t have their own visual cues to barter with in the first place. Let’s all be honest, people. My over-sized glasses in highschool didn’t cause women to come clamoring to me.

 I will admit there may be some exceptions to these observations, but let me know when a gorgeous, attractive woman with a perfect body joins the peace corp and marries a slug of a man who studies vaccines for a living.

Porn, I believe, is a byproduct of visual cues because obviously when the average Joe looks at a pornographic picture there is no chance in hell he will be able to hook up with the likes of Jenna Jameson or some other nude starlet. The same goes for the average Jane and those romance novel covers–rippling muscles porn.

The real question here is how do we get monkeys off the fruit juice and onto our monetary system?

Then we teach them how to surf the internet so entrepreneurs can start monkey porn sites. Monkey credit cards may not be so easy to provide though. Since primates don’t wear clothes where are they going to keep those pieces of plastic. I shudder to imagine.

Christmas Evil is a little known cult classic I discovered recently while searching for Christmas horror movies. Besides Black Christmas it is the best holiday horror film I’ve seen. John Waters agrees with me–or rather I agree with John Waters, let not my ego supersede his. According to Wiki, John Waters believes Christmas Evil is  the “greatest Christmas movie ever made.”

I wouldn’t go that far, but Christmas Evil is surprisingly well done for a low budget holiday exploitation flick. It was released in 1980 and I find that seventies to early eighties horror films are all creepy just by the nature of them being filmed in that time period. That of course is when I was a kid growing up and my whole neighborhood seemed creepy in rainy Oregon.

If you’ve seen the other Santa cult classic Silent Night, Deadly Night about a Santa with uncontrollable gas–I kid, it’s about a slasher Santa–you might think Christmas Evil is more of the same. Not true. Christmas Evil, despite some descriptions is not a slasher flick.

 It’s about an emotionally disturbed child named Harry who grows up to embrace the idealism of Santa while in reality everything around him protests against the warmth of the Christmas spirit: his job is crap, co-workers are jerks, he’s single, no friends, and his future looks dim.

It is this dark reality that begins to cause Harry to lose himself in the Santa mystique until he “becomes Santa.” That’s when everything goes wrong and people start to die.

There’s nothing typical about the storyline except for the beginning scene with the traumatized child. We’ve seen that before in several horror movies. And Christmas Evil is filled with some rather funny to hilarious moments if you have a dark sense of humor. In some ways I’d almost call it an “office” horror/humor film because of his job situation and the scenes of the employee Christmas party which seem so drearily familiar.

I’m not sure I’d share Christmas Evil with your family on Christmas Eve, but if you’re having your geek friends over on Christmas Day then pop it in so everyone can cheer on Santa Harry in his quest to find out who’s naughty or nice.

BTW: On the special edition DVD of Christmas Evil, John Waters is on the audio commentary. How cool is that?!

Did anyone get what Delgo was supposed to be about? Apparently not because it had one of the worst opening weekends ever taking in 511, 920 in box office receipts. Freddie Prinze, Jr., must be having a heart attack. Or maybe he already saw it coming.

The frog-like things with leopard skin decorations failed to interest anyone and the economy is not to blame. If anything it was the marketing of the film.

When I saw the trailer I immediately hated the character designs. I can’t explain it and it’s not fair to say when you can’t pinpoint an exact reason–but I hated the character designs. And the story, only going by the trailer, seemed to be a hybrid of Romeo and Juliet mixed with Lord of The Rings and Narnia. A rehash of everything we are growing tired of.

The lack of interest might have to do with humanoid frogs being main characters in the first place. Plenty of testing should have been done to see if an audience could relate to them and if parents would take their kids to see them. The problem being that either you’re going to aim a 3d fantasy film at the kiddies or you’re going to take the riskier approach and go for sci-fi and fantasy adult fans.  If the producers were going for the adult fans they got it all wrong.

First of all we don’t want Freddie Prinze, Jr., as the hero. Just putting his name on a character waters down the personality to that of Fred from Scooby-Doo. And then Jennifer Love Hewitt? She has the same taint–sorry Ghost Whisperer fans but her talent is either crying or cleavage.

The only saving grace was Anne Bancroft who passed away before having to experience this bomb dropping.  

To be fair, if a movie bombs this badly it is not the actors fault but the marketing department. They failed to define the film in the minds of the public. If ticketgoers don’t know what they’re going to see, why are they going to pay to see it? Looking at the trailer you’ll feel the confusion already.