Beautiful Creatures (2013)

Year 15, Day 286 - 10/13/23 - Movie #4,568

BEFORE: OK, first of all, it's Friday the 13th in October, so really, I need to be at the meeting of horror and bad luck and superstition and all that.  What movie could fit the bill?  Oh, if only there were a horror series that would be totally appopriate to watch on a Friday the 13th?  But what would that be?  I should probably learn to stop wishing for things that I can't have.  JK. 

Secondly, it's Day 2 of New York Comic-Con, I'm working sun-up to sun-down sitting in a booth (a lot easier than carrying all the stuff over, like I did on Wednesday) but also there's a lot of walking around when I'm not at the booth, so again, I point out, I'm exhausted.  I shouldn't even BE watching movies, I should be going to sleep as soon as I get home because I have to get up the next day at 7:30 am in order to leave the house at 8:00 am so I can be there at 9:00 am.  (OK, really I get there at 9:30 but the boss doesn't need to know that, the convention doesn't really open up each day until 10:00 am.)

Thirdly, it's my wife's birthday and it sucks that I can't spend more of it with her, but we did go out to dinner on Wednesday night, knowing we couldn't be together today and order food in and watch "Hell's Kitchen", airing Thursday nights on FOX-TV.  AND she had to take out the garbage tonight without me, she's a trouper, because when I do get home I'll be too tired to lift anything, even a garbage bag.  OK, type up the review and then it's straight to bed, I've got one more day at NYCC.  

So I don't know about this movie, I'm not even sure if it's a horror movie, because everything I see about it says something different.  The IMDB has it under "drama", "fantasy" and "romance", but the TV listings put it under "thriller" and "mystery", so just what the hell IS this film all about?  Does it even belong in October?  I need it here to make my October chain possible, so I guess we're all going to find out together what this movie's deal is.  

Jeremy Irons carries over from "Dead Ringers".  

THE PLOT: Ethan Wate longs to escape his small southern town.  He meets a mysterious new girl, Lena Duchannes.  Together, they uncover dark secrets about their respective families, their history, and their town.  

AFTER: Once again, the accidental genius of my linking system shines through - this movie is everything I needed it to be, it's about a Southern family with magical powers - so yeah, fantasy, there's the tie-in with Comic-Con.  If "Harry Potter" and the "Lord of the Rings" movies can be represented at Comic-Con, a movie about a family of witches would certainly qualify.  And the young woman who falls in love has a curse placed on her - that's bad luck, that's Friday the 13th in a nutshell, right?  And it's part romance as she falls for a muggle in the town of Gatlin, SC, and her ominous 16th birthday is approaching - there you go, tie-in with my wife's birthday, and the romance angle to boot.  I'm just not sure how it happened, but this movie tied everything together, it couldn't represent my day today any better unless it had a character paying $19 for a burrito in the food court of a convention center. 

All right, so what is this film really ABOUT?  Jeez, I just watched it and I'm not sure I know, or can even really describe it.  (Actually, there are TWO films named "Beautiful Creatures", this one that was released in 2013 and another one, which is some kind of crime film, came out in 2000.  Both films were on my watchlist, but now just the other one is.). Yes, this is a romance film with two high-schoolers falling in love in a Southern town, but one of them, Lena, has a family secret - she comes from a family of witches (though they prefer the term "casters") some of whom are bad witches and some of whom are good ones, and her 16th birthday is coming up, when she will be expected to decide what kind of witch she will be, also she is NOT supposed to fall in love with a mere mortal, or muggle, or half-blood or whatever the people with powers are calling the norm humans. 

The problem goes back to the Civil War, when Lena's ancestor, a Union witch, fell in love with a Confederate mortal soldier, who couldn't stay away from the witch he loved, and he was shot by Union soldiers, at this point Genevieve, the witch, brought him back to life, and this brought a curse on all her female descendants, that on their 16th birthday they'd all give in to the dark side and become bad witches.  Lena and Ethan learn all about this via flashback when they both touch the silver locket that belong to their respective ancestors - she's descended from the witch and he's a descendant of the soldier. 

Lena's father does not approve of his daughter's romance with a muggle, as the only way for the curse to be lifted is for someone that Lena loves to die, or something.  Meanwhile, two other casters show up to help push Lena toward the dark side - her cousin Ridley and her mother, Sarafine, who has possessed the body of Ethan's friend Link's mother, Mrs. Lincoln.  (If this sounds confusing, you're absolutely right, I couldn't keep track of which spirit was possessing which body, or honestly, how all of the characters were related to each other.  There are just way too many characters here, and so many of them are youngish women who look and dress the same, this made it very difficult for me to tell which witch is which. (Sorry...)

While these two bad witches are trying to bring Lena over to the dark side, her father, Macon, is working with family friend Amma (who maintains the spellbook library for the casters, or something) to keep her on the good side, by trying to keep her from loving Ethan, because that can only bring bad things, as somebody she cares about is fated to die because of the curse. 

Then there's that annual Civil War re-enactment of the Battle of Honey Hill, which, wouldn't you know it, falls exactly on Lena's birthday.  What ARE the odds of that?  Cousin Ridley seduces Ethan's best friend Link and convinces him to put REAL bullets in the guns, which as you might imagine, is not a very safe thing to do.  But if Ethan gets shot and dies, well, at least that would break the curse, wouldn't it?  No, really, would it?  I'm asking because I'm just not sure, this is another thing that's WAY too complicated - so please, movie, explain to me EXACTLY, if you can, how this curse gets broken - is it from Ethan dying, or Ethan NOT dying?  Does Lena have a choice to make about becoming a good or bad witch, or is that choice already made because the family is cursed?  What are all the damn rules to this story?  

Of course, this isn't really a horror film per se, it's just a film with witches in it, which means that, yes, technically it can fit into an October chain and I'm not going to stress TOO MUCH about that.  But this is horror Lite, it's horror for Y/A fiction and it's mixed with enough romance to appeal to teen girls, if that makes any sense.  So, yes, OK, it's Southern gothic horror, but it's just not very scary, and usually you'd expect those two things to go hand in hand.  Nope, not here.  It just can't be a coincidence that this film came out about a year after the "Twilight" film series ended - they probably started working on this when the first "Twilight" film became a hit, and it just took a few years. (Both films are based on Y/A romance/horror novels, come on, I could just FEEL it...)

I could just not make heads or tails out of the ending.  Come to think of it, I may have fallen asleep because I was so brain-tired and body-tired from NY Comic Con.  I've simply GOT to get some sleep - so no Mountain Dew tonight, and no movie tonight, because I've got one more day of the Con to get through.  

Also starring Alden Ehrenreich (last seen in "Solo: A Star Wars Story"), Alice Englert (last seen in "The Power of the Dog"), Viola Davis (last seen in "Black Adam"), Emmy Rossum (last seen in "Cold Pursuit"), Thomas Mann (last seen in "Marcel the Shell with Shoes On"), Emma Thompson (last seen in "Wit"), Eileen Atkins (ditto), Margo Martindale (last heard in "My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea"), Zoey Deutch (last seen in "The Year of Spectacular Men"), Tiffany Boone (last seen in "The Midnight Sky"), Rachel Brosnahan (last seen in "The Courier"), Kyle Gallner (last seen in "Just Before I Go"), Pruitt Taylor Vince (last seen in "Identity"), Robin Skye, Randy Redd, Lance E. Nichols (last seen in "Assassination Nation"), JD Evermore (ditto), Lucy Faust (ditto), Leslie Castay (last seen in "Green Book"), Sam Gilroy (last seen in 'Roman J. Israel, Esq."), Cindy Hogan (last seen in "Boy Erased"), Gwendolyn Mulamba (last seen in "Between Worlds"), Bryan Adrian (last seen in "Charlie Says"), Camille Balsamo (last seen in "The Paperboy"), Lindsay Clift (last seen in "The Big Short"), Milton Crosby, Andrea Frankie (last seen in "Broken City"), Treston Miles, Philippe Radelet, Jackie Tuttle (last seen in "The Whole Truth"), Justine Wachsberger (last seen in "The Twiight Saga: New Moon"), Teri Wyble (last seen in "Reminiscence")

RATING: 5 out of 10 broken windows

Dead Ringers

Year 15, Day 285 - 10/12/23 - Movie #4,567

BEFORE: Yesterday was load-in day for New York Comic-Con, and I'm completely exhausted. I only had to do two runs over to the convention center, pushing a cart with three boxes on the first run, and carrying a collapsible banner and stand on the second, but I'm wiped out.  Came home early and took a nap before we went out to dinner (my wife's birthday will take place during the convention...) and so I really really need to get some sleep tonight if I'm going to survive the next three days, which each involve spending 12 hours working at a convention table.  Oh, I've done it before, many times, but I was never THIS old when I've done it - and now I've got sore legs and bad knees and arthritic fingers maybe, and a sore back.  

So I'm going to keep watching movies at night and posting if I can, but if I should feel the need to suspend the blog for a couple days, I'm willing to do that, even if that means I fall behind and I don't finish the horror movies by Halloween - some sacrifices need to be made in the interest of my own health and sanity.  I might be able to catch up while on vacation next week, we'll see.  And then I could always double-up during the last week in October, that's not out of the question.

Genevieve Bujold carries over from "Coma", and it's another film from the rather obscure (?) "medical horror" genre. 

THE PLOT: Twin gynecologists take full advantage of the fact that nobody can tell them apart, until their relationship beings to deteriorate over a woman. 

AFTER: Well, this seems to be the month for lesser horror films from notable directors, so far in October I've watched films from Wes Craven ("Swamp Thing"), John Carpenter ("The Fog"),  George Romero ("Creepshow") and Michael Crichton ("Coma").  Tonight it's David Cronenberg - now, were all these films those directors' BEST films?  Eh, I'm not so sure.  

Also, a running theme this year has been movies where an actor plays two (or more) different characters in the same film, or at least different versions of the same character, as in multiverse stuff.  I'm planning to list them all at the end of the year, but you can probably figure some of them out, like the "Flash" and "Spider-Verse" movies, and the one that won Best Picture.  But sometimes it really HAS been twins, like Tom Hollander played twins in "Breathe" and a certain actress played twins in a mystery movie, but to even say which one is kind of a spoiler, so I won't. So far there are FOURTEEN films watched this year with one actor playing dual roles, that's got to be some kind of record.  

There's something inherently weird and creepy about identical twins, that's for sure.  And any actor would probably consider it a challenge to play two characters in the same film who look exactly alike, but might be different in subtle ways - because if they both look AND act the same, then, like, what's the point of having two characters?  No, that's got to be in there, even in the multiverse stuff, like in "The Flash" - what made one Barry Allen different from the other?  One had super-speed and the other didn't, but one watched his mother die and the other didn't, so that's GOT to have an effect.  

So "Dead Ringers" therefore plays around with what might be the difference between the two gynecologists, but I'm afraid the best they could come up with was that one was SLIGHTLY more outgoing and confident than the other.  The quieter one, Beverly, also seemed more capable of being emotionally attached and having a long-term relationship, and one preferred to write their research papers while the other saw clients, but these are MINOR differences.  Like, one could be a serial killer and the other one could be the FBI agent who hunts him down, that would really be something...  Late in the film, one gets addicted to drugs after being alone for too long, but then the other one follows suit, umm, I think, so then that's not a difference at all, is it?  They kind of imply that when one takes drugs it affects the other one, but that can't be a thing.

Unfortunately this was listed as a horror film, but is it, really?  It's creepy, sure, because identical twins are weird and creepy, and it's cringey, because surgical operations are cringey, but is it scary?  Outside of one dream where one brother imagines that they're Siamese twins and their girlfriend Claire bites through the connecting tissue, it's just not that scary.  Maybe at the end, but by that time I couldn't even tell the brothers apart because they'd kind of switched positions and maybe even personalities, so I didn't even know which was which.  

For a time in the first half of the film, Beverly always hid in the background, while Elliot was the public face of their practice, but I'm just not sure WHY they kept up this deception, I mean, they went through medical school together, side by side, did everyone then just forget about this when they opened up their own gynecology practice?  And were they pretending to be just one person when they saw patients, because I think that MIGHT be illegal to impersonate another doctor, even if you're also a doctor with the same degree and the same last name.  Was this some kind of scheme to double the available hours they could see clients?  Or were they able to double-bill on the insurance if each client was secretly been seen by TWO gynecologists instead of one?  Consulting fees?  What's the angle here, exactly?  

Oh, right, the sex.  Elliot would start a relationship with the most attractive clients (also unethical, at least, if not illegal) and then when he got tired of them, his brother Beverly would step in and pretend to be him and get laid a few times before the women realized how boring he really was. Jeez, it seems like an awful lot of work for a little payout, that's all. And furthermore, once the women figured out their little scam, you've got to imagine they'd probably want to find a new gynecologist after sleeping with both the exciting brother AND the non-exciting one.  When your gynecologist is also not one but TWO of your ex-boyfriends, I really can't imagine a more awkward check-up.  Best to just move on, right? 

Well, the two twins get locked in a downward spiral, so really, it's going to be a moot point very soon.  Claire goes away for a few weeks to shoot a movie, and Beverly calls her hotel and her very gay assistant answers, and he totally gets the wrong idea.  Meanwhile his brother takes on a bigger consulting job at a hospital, leaving Bev alone to run the practice, and he turns to drugs, because that always ends well.  His girlfriend was gone for what, two weeks?  OK, ten, but come on, pull yourself together, man!  Before you know it, he's commissioned an artist to design a set of gynecological instruments for "mutant women" and then starts inhaling the anesthesia from his patients during surgery, and really, that's not a good look. 

This year has also been filled with films where people make some really bad choices about who they sleep with - no, you should not sleep with your gynecologist, it's unethical for him and awkward (at best) for you.  Neither should you sleep with your pharmacist, your MMA coach (twice? really?), the guy who accidentally got booked into the same AirBnB (two different movies? really?), another patient in the same psychiatric hospital as you, your best friend's sister, your dead husband's best friend, your boyfriend's favorite singer/songwriter, your former high-school teacher or the young artist who's staying in your house.  And it SHOULD go without saying that you should not have sex with a horse, yet this is where we found ourselves in January, isn't it? 

Also starring Jeremy Irons (last seen in "The Flash"), Heidi von Palleske (last seen in "RED"), Barbara Gordon (last seen in "Life" (2015)), Shirley Douglas (last seen in "Lolita"), Stephen Lack, Nick Nichols, Lynne Cormack (last seen in "Guilty as Sin"), Damir Andrei (last seen in "Shazam!"), Miriam Newhouse, Richard W. Farrell, Jonathan Haley, Nicholas Haley, Marsha Moreau, Denis Akiyama (last seen in "Pixels"), Jill Hennessy (last seen in "I Shot Andy Warhol"), Jacqueline Hennessy, Bob Bainborough, Joe Matheson (last seen in "The Hurricane"), Nora Colpman with a cameo from David Cronenberg (last seen in "Into the Night").

RATING: 4 out of 10 latex gloves

Coma

Year 15, Day 284 - 10/11/23 - Movie #4,566

BEFORE: I've been meeting a lot of new people lately, people hired at both jobs who I'm then left alone with, and I have to decide when to let them know about my other job, and my even other-er life as a blogger and OCD movie-watcher.  Yes, I'm THAT weirdo, but once we've worked a few shifts together, I might feel comfortable enough to reveal my secret identity.  When I let slip that I watch 300 movies per year, no more, no less, that sometimes raises their interest level, and then when I reveal the whole linking thing, well, they may find that incredibly interesting, or I may notice that they then back away from me slowly and leave the room.  It's too much, I get it, too much for someone else to wrap their brain around, so that tends to be followed by "How..." and then "Why..." and then I think they usually just shake their heads and write me off as a weirdo.  WHICH would be absolutely correct, I admit and own that. 

But part of the answer to "How..." comes in understanding my listing system, I have lists of movies that I HAVE and want to watch, another list of movies that I DON'T HAVE but think might be culturally or cinematically important, and then another list of movies that are, well, available.  I'm only able to put together 25 to 31 horror movies each October by maintaining a list of scary films that may not be right up my alley, but society has deemed them to be "successful" or "relevant" in some fashion - "good" of course is subjective and not necessarily a factor.  A "bad" film is just as likely to get on my radar as a "good" one, and I've decided that "good/bad" can only be determined by watching each film, so instead I go with "Hey, I heard about that movie.." or "Hey, MAD Magazine once printed a parody of that movie..."  

Tonight, it's that last one, I remember reading MAD's parody of "Coma" many years ago, and therefore I added it to the "possibly relevant and probably available streaming somewhere" a few years back - then of course, it took me two or three years to figure out how to work it into the chain.  Lois Chiles carries over from "Creepshow 2" and once I finish this year's horror chain, that will leave about 110 films as a combined total on both the "HAVE and want to watch" list and the "DON'T HAVE but might be important" lists.  However, this total does not include such famous franchises as the "Saw", "Child's Play", "Nightmare on Elm Street" and "Halloween" films, but really, I've got maybe 6 months before I have to think about what I should add to the list to increase my linking opportunities for next year.  Just thinking about it now to get ahead of it, that's all. 

THE PLOT: When a young female doctor notices an unnatural amount of comas occurring in her hospital she uncovers a horrible conspiracy. 

AFTER: Set in the fictitious (I think) Boston Memorial Hospital, this film both highlights the tremendous need for organ donors in the 1970's, sure - but also I think it's a snapshot of the feminist movement, right about the time that the U.S. failed to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. Oh, yeah, I remember that time well.  How easy it is now to say that women should be paid the same as men, given exactly the same opportunities as men, and basically should be treated, well, equally across the board in all things, given that all thing are equal, which apparently they were NOT, because the amendment never passed.  Well, jeez, why not just pass it now?  Oh, there was a deadline?  March 22, 1979?  What the hell happened? 

OK, hold everything while I look this up. The E.R.A. got ratified by 35 U.S. states, but I guess it needed 38.  And then conservative women got involved and pointed out that it could disadvantage some women, like they could be drafted into the army and others would lose the right to alimony, and might lose custody of children in some divorce cases.  This caused five states to revoke their ratifications, so then the E.R.A. was D.O.A.  The deadline was extended to June 1982, but it didn't matter, nobody picked up the cause again until 2017 or so.  At this point I think it might make more sense to start over, can't somebody draft a new version of this amendment, maybe keep what people liked about the first one and drop the parts that some people had a problem with?  

The reason I bring this up is that the central character, Dr. Susan Wheeler, is really caught in a bind here, being a female doctor in a Boston hospital whose best friend has just fallen into a coma after an abortion procedure.  Her husband apparently didn't know about it, which implies that she had an affair, I guess, but I'm not going to open up THIS can of worms, now that abortion is no longer legal in some parts of the U.S.  (But once again, it's conservatives screwing everything up - they scuttled the ERA, they reversed Roe v. Wade, and they're currently banning all books they find offensive all across the American South.). But if Dr. Wheeler shows too much concern for her comatose friend, then she's perceived as high-strung, overly emotional and potentially hysterical.  And if she shows too little concern for her comatose friend, than she's a cold, unfeeling, frigid bitch.  

Where is the middle ground, if any, where she's just a concerned friend using her medical knowledge to investigate her friend's post-operative state to, you know, just figure out what happened and maybe FIX IT?  Nope, doesn't exist - if she strays too far into either emotion or callous lack of emotion, she's going to hear about it, and that JUST wouldn't happen to a male doctor in the same awkward position.  Obviously she's got an emotional investment in figuring out what happened to her friend - and then when the same thing happens to another patient (played by Tom Selleck!) who's having routine knee surgery after a touch football accident, Dr. Wheeler tries to figure out JUST how many patients at this hospital have gone comatose in the last 2 years. 

The number is, well, a bit overwhelming - why didn't anybody else notice this before her?  It's like every third patient at this hospital ends up as a vegetable and gets sent to the Jefferson Institute for examination.  No, wait, not examination - storage, yes, that's it.  Somebody is clearly up to something at the Jefferson Institute, but what?  Come on, surely you've figured it out by now...

I've heard various breakdowns over the years about how much a human body is "worth".  I once read that it you break it down into component chemicals, the materials in a body are worth like maybe $1.98.  I just Googled it and got a different answer, about $585 for all the oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, calcium and phosphorus.  Ah, but this all depends on how you break down that body, because you could take out the corneas and help a blind person see, or take out the bone marrow, kidneys, lungs, liver, and other organs and given the right buyers, a WIRED magazine article from 2012 calculated you could make $46 million.  OK, so maybe they're on to something over at the Jefferson Institute.  

Wheeler then signs up for the official tour of the facility, and finds out that the bodies aren't stored in beds, or even in those morgue drawers, they're suspended by wires and are kept stacked and hanging in temperature-controlled rooms.  And if a family member should ever want to visit, a person's body would be taken down from the wires and brought into a fake hospital-like setting with a bed and a fake chart and a fake ventilator, and then when the family is gone, it's back up on the wires.  So one assumes that eventually that family is going to STOP visiting and then a couple days later some lungs, kidneys and corneas are up for sale?  

Why, just imagine what they could get for Tom Selleck's mustache!  Surely there must be someone somewhere who can't grow a mustache of their own and would be willing to pay a cool million for that thick, luxurious and very famous lip hair!  Wait, can you transplant a mustache? 

Dr. Wheeler confides in her lover, who's a resident at the same hospital, but is often more concerned with hospital politics than treating patients - and he's a really selfish boyfriend, apparently, who still thinks that women should cook him dinner after they BOTH worked an equally hard day - so, a typical 1970's man, in other words. Jeez, man, would it kill you to cook dinner once in a while, or you know, take turns maybe?  That would be fair, right?  Or come on, don't let this be a sticking point in your relationship, you're both DOCTORS why can't you afford take-out?  Sure, this was before GrubHub and Uber Eats was a thing, but still, you've got a phone and there are restaurants in Boston that deliver, right?  Again, it was a tough time for women...I know my Dad never cooked at home, it was always Mom.  

Where was I?  Oh, right the coma investigation - Wheeler suspects that the chief of anesthesiology is behind it all, but is he?  Or is his character just played by one of those actors who always plays the villain.  She then brings her concerns to the chief of surgery, but is she putting her trust in the right people?  Darn, if only she knew somebody at the hospital who was more concerned with hospital politics than treating patients....

NITPICK POINT: What was up with all those DOGS in cages at the hospital?  What was that all about?  Were they there for some kind of medical research?  Did doctors walk their dogs on the way to work and then leave them in some kind of doggie daycare?  I've just never seen a room in a city hospital with a room full of dogs in cages, so I'm kind of scratching my head about this.

Also starring Genevieve Bujold (last seen in "Anne of the Thousand Days"), Michael Douglas (last seen in "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania"), Elizabeth Ashley (last seen in "Oceans' Eight"), Rip Torn (last seen in "Happy Tears"), Richard Widmark (last seen in "Against All Odds"), Hari Rhodes, Gary Barton, Frank Downing, Richard Doyle (last heard in "Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Part 1"), Alan Haufrect (last seen in "Crazy People"), Lance LeGault (last heard in "Home on the Range"), Michael MacRae, Betty McGuire (last seen in "Up in Smoke"), Tom Selleck (last seen in "Lassiter"), Charles Siebert, Joanna Kerns (last seen in "She's Having a Baby"), Kay Cole (last heard in "Igor"), Tom Borut, Philip G. Brooks, Benny Rubin (last seen in "The Other Side of the Wind"), David Hollander, Mike Lally, John Widlock, Robert Burton, Ed Harris (last seen in "Creepshow"), Philip Baker Hall (last seen in "Person to Person"), Nicholas Worth (last seen in "Swamp Thing").

RATING: 5 out of 10 dogs in the hospital (?) 

Creepshow 2

Year 15, Day 283 - 10/10/23 - Movie #4,565

BEFORE: Sure, it's a no-brainer to follow up "Creepshow" with "Creepshow 2", but I still have to make sure that something in this film connects to the next horror film, which connects to the next one, and so on.  It's also great that this franchise is about horror comics, and "Swamp Thing" was also based on a comic book, and yesterday I packed up 3 boxes for New York Comic Con (1 box books, 1 box DVDs, 1 box supplies) and the convention starts in just two days, I'm doing the load in TOMORROW because that's how I roll.

My boss doesn't QUITE understand how hard I work for this event.  When I said we need to do the load-in on Wednesday, he said, "Why can't we do the load-in on Thursday?"  Well, because we do it on Wednesday so we don't HAVE to do it on Thursday.  "Yeah, but why can't we pick up the badges on Thursday?"  Well, because on Thursday we want to already HAVE our badges so we can just walk right in and not have to stand in TWO lines, which would cut into our selling time on Thursday.  "Yeah, but last year, I just walked right in on Thursday..."  Yes, you were able to walk right in on Thursday because we picked up the badges on Wednesday, and also because I loaded all the merch and supplies in on Wednesday, too.  That's how this works, I work hard on WEDNESDAY so you can just walk right in on THURSDAY.  But if I don't work hard on Wednesday, well, you're bound to have a much tougher time on Thursday,  So, please, just let me do what I do.  He's become spoiled because I've spent years making things easier for him, to the point where he just thinks that things are naturally easy, but they're not.  I work very hard to make them SEEM easy, at least from his perspective.  A little more appreciation might be, well, appreciated. 

Stephen King carries over from "Creepshow" and I'm going to try to keep up with my movies, even during the convention.  Sure, maybe I could have lined things up a little better so that these comic-book movies would get reviewed DURING the NYCC, instead of a few days before, but I can only do what I can do, and what the linking dictates. The linking, she is a cruel mistress.

THE PLOT: Three macabre tales from the latest issue of a boy's favorite comic book, dealing with a vengeful wooden Native American, a monstrous blob in a lake and an undying hitchhiker. 

AFTER: Well, there's really no better lesson about economics, particularly inflation in the 1980's.  In 1982, paying for a movie ticket got you FIVE shorts (and a wrap-around) written by Stephen King presented in anthology form, and then just five years later, after movie ticket prices had gone up a little bit, that same ticket only got you THREE shorts (and a wrap-around) written by Stephen King in "Creepshow 2" and this time the wrap-around was in animated form, and it looks like it was done on the cheap to boot.  Wow, what a gyp, but that's Reaganomics for you.  They kept saying the good horror stories would "trickle down" to the working class, but horror fans, well, they're still waiting.  Instead, they got "Creepshow 3". Nuff said.

And now I come to find out that the same production company that made the "Creepshow" movies also made the "Tales from the Dark Side" TV show, they just couldn't use the "Creepshow" title because of some copyright restriction or something.  George Romero directed the "Creepshow" movies and then wanted to make a TV show, but Warner Bros. had some rights to the elements seen in the movies, so Romero just went ahead and made the TV show without that title and the framing elements, to compete with "Tales from the Crypt" on HBO, I thiink.  But I feel like there's another economics lesson in there somewhere, about monopolizing the market or being your own competition, or something. I don't know, I never studied economics, just movies. 

What's weird to me about "Creepshow 2" is that the stories ingtroduced via the comic book are told in live-action, and the framing story supposedly taking place in the "real" world, with the boy who reads the comic, is told in animation.  That almost seems like it's completely backwards, in terms of presentation format. Just me?  Billy is that small boy in a small town in Maine who rides his bike to the newsstand to get a copy of the latest issue of "Creepshow".  Then in-between the stories we see him at the post office, picking up the Venus flytrap bulb that he ordered from the comic, and then in the next interlude, Billy gets ambushed by the town bulles, who crush his plant bulb - but Billy kicks the biggest bully in the groin and escapes.  And in the last animated segment, the bullies chase Billy through an abandoned lot, but it's a place where Billy had already planted some Venus flytrap plants, and the giant plants devour the bullies.  Hilarious, right?  Ah, you can do just about anything with animation - so, umm, why did somebody choose THIS?

The first of the three main stories is "Old Chief Wood'nhead", in which an elderly couple runs the general store in a small town that's fallen on hard times.  Ray and Martha have extended credit to many of the local Native Americans, who have chosen to allow them to hold on to their tribe's sacred treasures, turquoise jewelry, while they raise money to pay their bill at the store.  OK, already I've got a NITPICK POINT, if the jewelry is valuable, then why not just sell it and pay for their groceries with good old cash?  Whatever, but this country hasn't worked on the barter system in a few hundred years.  This becomes a moot point, however, when the elder's nephew, Sam Whitemoon, robs the store, takes the jewelry, which he says is worth about ten grand, and then kills the grocery store owners for good measure.  

So, it's up to the grocery store's decorative Indian statue to come to life and track down Sam and his two delinquent cohorts, killing them with arrows and a tomahawk.  (Umm, wait, Happy Indigenous People's Day?).  The statue, aka Old Chief Wood'nhead, also returns the jewelry to the tribe, but unfortunately it's too late for the store owners - but I guess the good news is that since they're dead, the tribe doesn't have to pay their grocery bill!  

The villain, Sam Whitemoon, was played by an actor who looked a lot like Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, only it just couldn't have been him, this was back in 1987, when he would have been only 15 years old!  It turned out to be Holt McCallany, who I've seen in a bunch of films like "Run All Night", "Three Kings", "Gangster Squad" and "Jack Reacher: Never Go Back", but man, back in the 1980's he was RIPPED!  Not as chiseled as The Rock, but then again, who is?

The second story is "The Raft", about four college students (two couples) who drive out to a desolate lake to swim and smoke weed and have some fun - there's a platform floating out on the lake that the locals keep in place almost until wintertime.  There's also a mysterious oil slick on the lake though, and it's more like a blob that moves with purpose and oh, yeah, it's hungry.  Well, I guess they missed the sign that says "Swim at your own risk" and so it's another ironic ending for the people who are just out to have a good time.  Well, blobs gotta eat, too, you know, as do all of God's creatures.  Circle of life, top of the food chain, the beauty of nature, whatever helps you reconcile this - also who's going to miss a couple students from "Horlicks University", which is the same institute of higher learning seen in "The Crate" in the first film.  Oh, yeah, I noticed. 

And the final story is "The Hitch-hiker", in which a woman has an affair (sinner!) and is driving back home to try and get there before her husband (adulterer! liar!) when she loses control because of ashes from her cigarette (and she's a smoker! She deserves to DIE!) and she accidentally hits a hitch-hiker with her car.  Since nobody else saw the incident, she drives off before anyone else arrives on the scene - but she's plagued with guilt and then either haunted by the reality of what she's done, or possibly haunted by the ghost of the hitch-hiker, who keeps clinging to her car and ironically screaming, "Thanks for the ride, lady!"  She drives erratically through the woods, trying to shake the hitchhiker off of her car, but he's very persistent.  Finally he falls off and lands by a tree and she's forced to repeatedly drive her car into the tree to crush him - but was he ever really THERE?  Believing the whole thing to be some kind of horrible nightmare, she drives home - only to have the hitchhiker crawl out from under her car in her garage and attack her.  Later her husband finds her in the garage, dead from carbon monoxide poisoning - or WAS IT?  And it's for sure not based on Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" in the same way that "Jeepers Creepers 2" had nothing to do with "Moby Dick".

I don't know, just because the stories here were longer, that doesn't really mean they were BETTER.  Certainly the ones in the first film were more clever, so I suspect this illustrates the other economics law of diminishing returns - I feel much less need to watch "Creepshow 3" now, but since there's no actor connection, that doesn't even matter.  These stories just feel kind of half-written, like they could have all been developed better or needed some input from a focus group or something. 

NITPICK POINT #2 - how did Deke get his joints out to the raft?  Did he have them in his swimsuit or something?  Also, this movie had simply the fakest swimming scenes I've ever seen.  The actors were clearly bending over in shallow water and just pretending to swim.  Lame.  

Also starring George Kennedy (last seen in "The Gambler"), Domenick John, Tom Savini (also carrying over from "Creepshow"), Philip Dore, Dorothy Lamour, Frank Salsedo (last seen in "Almost Heroes"), Holt McCallany (last seen in "Nightmare Alley"), David Holbrook, Don Harvey (last heard in "Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker"), Dan Kamin, Dean Smith (last seen in "The Sugarland Express"), Shirley Sonderegger, Paul Satterfield, Jeremy Green, Daniel Beer (last seen in "Point Break"), Page Hannah, Lois Chiles (last seen in "Sweet Liberty"), David Beecroft (last seen in "The Border"), Tom Wright (last seen in "Message from the King"), Richard Parks, Chere Rae Bryson (last seen in "The Legend of the Lone Ranger") and the voice of Joe Silver (last seen in "Deathtrap").

RATING: 3 out of 10 Stephen King novels seen on a shelf in the background (blatant cross-promotion!)

Creepshow

Year 15, Day 282 - 10/9/23 - Movie #4,564

BEFORE: I've got to come clean tonight, I have never seen this movie before (that's the cardinal rule around here), however I know all the stories in the film.  How is this possible?  When I was about 14 years old and I was just getting into comic books, I used to spend hours in the bookstores in malls, reading whatever I could get away with reading for free.  And that includes the comic-book adaptation of this movie, which itself was loosely based on the format of old horror comics.  (The comic based on the movie based on comics - yeah, that tracks.). However, at the time, I was forbidden to watch horror movies, only films rated "G" or approved by the Boston Catholic diocese newspaper, The Pilot.  Anything rated "O" by that paper (standing for "offensive" or possibly "Oh my GOD" was nixed by my parents, which left me only Disney films and Star Wars, maybe some old Oscar & Hammerstein musicals.  It was a life that left me yearning for more, let's leave it at that.  

But I was intrigued by this horror comic adaptation of a movie that I thought I'd never get to see, and I read it often, somehow as a comic book it wasn't quite so scary, and, funny story, I just never got around to watching the movie, even when I could, so I'm finally crossing it off the list tonight, even if that's something of an afterthought, and quite possibly unnecessary, because I know every turn taken by the plot already, backwards and forwards.  But this year it happens to fit into my chain, as Adrienne Barbeau carries over again from "The Fog" and at least two other actors also carry over. 

THE PLOT: Five grisly tales about a murdered father rising from his grave, a bizarre meteor, a vengeful husband, a mysterious crate's occupant, and a plague of cockroaches. 

AFTER: I took so long to watch "Swamp Thing" that since that movie first came out, there's been a sequel, a TV series and a planned reboot.  Same thing goes for "Creepshow", there have been two sequels, and at least one TV series, and I bet somebody somewhere is planning a new movie.  I can include "Creepshow 2" tomorrow, but that film does not link to "Creepshow 3", so it's got to wait - I didn't get 36 films away from another Perfect Year to break the chain NOW.

There are five stories here, it's a similar format to other Stephen King films like "Cat's Eye" and other non-Stephen King films like "Twilight Zone: The Movie" and "Tales from the Dark Side: The Movie". I think this film really brought back the horror anthology film as a trend, I'd seen some movies from the 1960's that were based on several Edgar Allan Poe movies presented as sort of short film anthologies, and then of course Tarantino tried to revive the trend again with "Death Proof" and "Planet Terror", but really, it kind of goes back to TV shows like "The Twilight Zone" and "The Outer Limits" where each episode would feature different characters in bizarre sci-fi or horror situations, always with an ironic twist.  "Tales from the Dark Side" I did watch, because my parents went to bed at some point and the TV was then under my control - and I made it a goal to watch every episode of "The Twilight Zone" in reruns, maybe that's why I'm so good at predicting the endings of movies, if they fit the ironic patterns. 

"Creepshow" features a lot of people getting what they deserve, sometimes it's terrible people getting killed horribly, or sometimes maybe it's marginally OK people, but if you think about it, even nice people die at some point, and it's never going to be pleasant.  Who am I to say about anyone's end, whether it's fitting or ironic, it's not really up to me - but sure, in a movie, there's a pattern to it all, if not irony then some form of symmetry.  We the audience then get to choose whether we agree with what happens to these people or not, provided that we're not too scared or grossed out to think along those lines.  

In the introductory scenes, a father throws out his son Billy's Creepshow comic book.  Well, that's an easy one, Dad deserves to die.  You don't mess with someone's comic book collection or their porno mags, even if you're their parent or guardian.  No way, no how, I will accept no debate on this topic, hands off, full stop.  Billy gets his revenge by ordering a voodoo doll using the mail-away coupon inside the comic book, and his father gets a painful lesson.  Well, Billy, you shouldn't tear up a page of your comic book, either, that decreases the value - just make a photocopy, it's a simple solution.  Anyway, I approve this lesson, as anyone with a comic book collection should. 

In the second story, "Father's Day", a rich family discusses their Aunt Bedelia, who, according to the grapevine, killed her father after a lifetime of abuse, and then in his later years she was forced to become his caretaker.  Old man Grantham died after slamming his cane on his chair too many times and demanding a cake for Father's Day.  Bedelia has a bit too much to drink, and visits the old man's grave, at which point his corpse rises out of the ground (because whiskey is the "water of life"?), still demanding that cake - the rotting corpse proceeds to kill several family members, including the new spouse of his granddaughter, whose only crime seems to be marrying in to the wrong family.  We also find out that Bedelia didn't kill her father, but her sister did - I'm not sure why on the last-minute switcheroo, it doesn't really matter in the end if the corpse is going to kill 'em all anyway.

Lesson: Buy your father a damn cake, even if you don't like him, because it will at least shut him up.  Plus, then you probably ALSO get cake, unless Dad eats the whole thing, which is unlikely.

"The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill" shows a backwoods farmer who finds a meteorite in his field, and then has dreams of getting rich from it, bringing it to the university's "Department of Meteors" (which, umm, isn't a thing) and finally paying off that $200 (?) bank loan.  Stephen King stars as Jordy, and we learn why King has made so many short cameos in films based on his novels, because while he's an incredibly gifted writer, he's an incredibly terrible actor. Jordy gets his fingers burned by the meteor, and also touches the goo inside, which causes his body and his entire farm to get covered in growing plant matter.  Did Jordy deserve this?  Not really, he's just a simpleton, nobody ever explained the dangers of alien matter to him, and if the planet were to eventually get covered in new rapdily-growing plant life, would that really be such a terrible thing?  

Lesson: We could probably use a lot more trees than we currently have.  If that costs us a lunkhead or two, it's maybe a fair trade-off.

"Something to Tide You Over" is the simplest when it comes to revenge and ironic death - a rich man discovers his wife is having an affair, so he buries both his wife and her lover up to their necks in sand in different parts of his private beach.  His wife's boyfriend is forced to watch her die thanks to this wonderful new VHS camcorder technology (or perhaps CCTV) and then he gets to watch the boyfriend die the same way.  But then late at night Richie Rich gets a visit from two animated corpses that are waterlogged and covered in seaweed, and they want him to come down to the beach.  

Lesson: Nothing good ever happens at the beach, so just don't go there.

"The Crate" centers on two college professors, one of whom gets contacted by a janitor who finds a mysterious crate under a college hall stairwell.  The crate was sent to the college by an Arctic expedition 134 years ago, and then somebody forgot about it.  What's inside?  Something very hungry, still alive, and possibly demonic.  The professor watches as it eats the janitor and an unlucky grad student, then he contacts the other professor, who tricks his annoying and belittling wife into coming too close to the crate.  Look, if you want to get out of your marriage, there are much easier ways, although none of them are faster or cheaper.  No notes. 

Lesson: Friends will help you move, real friends will help you move bodies. 

The final story, "They're Creeping Up on You" is about a business mogul who lives in a Manhattan penthouse, is germ-phobic and also very cruel to his employees, underlings and building personnel.  He hates cockroaches and other bugs, and also refers to people he doesn't like and who he feels are inferior as "bugs", and he's got equal sympathy for all, which is to say, none. Possibly based on Howard Hughes, this segment would seem to have become even more relevant in recent times, what with the pandemic and the rise of more and more real-life evil billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and of course Trump (also a notorious germophobe). Here's the thing about both poor people and insects, though - there is strength in numbers. 

Lesson: Sic semper tyrannis. 

I think I almost prefer this film as a comic book, because with a comic book you can show anything, as long as somebody can draw it well.  But with movie special effects, especially those from so long ago, there are always limitations.  The drowning scenes and the roaches coming out of the body looked particularly fakey - in modern times they would just use digital effects, press a couple of buttons and CGI it, it's easy to make somebody look like they're under water, like in "Aquaman", and the roaches I'm sure would look fine in CGI and not as a practical effect. 

Also starring Hal Holbrook (also carrying over from "The Fog"), Tom Atkins (ditto), Fritz Weaver (last seen in "This Must Be the Place"), Leslie Nielsen (last seen in "Superhero Movie"), Carrie Nye (last seen in "Hello Again"), E.G. Marshall (last seen in "The Chase"), Viveca Lindfors (last seen in "Stargate"), Ed Harris (last seen in "Top Gun: Maverick"), Ted Danson (last seen in "The One I Love"), Stephen King (last seen in "It: Chapter Two"), Warner Shook, Robert Harper (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in America"), Elizabeth Regan, Gaylen Ross, Jon Lormer, Don Keefer (last seen in "Sleeper"), Bingo O'Malley (last seen in "Bob Roberts"), John Amplas (last seen in "The Dark Half"), Christine Forrest (ditto), David Early (last seen in "One for the Money"), Nann Mogg, Iva Jean Saraceni, Joe King (aka Joe Hill), Chuck Aber (last seen in "She's Out of My League"), Peter Messer, Marty Schiff (last seen in "Blankman"), Tom Savini (last seen in "Planet Terror"), Darryl Ferrucci, David Garrison, and the voices of Ann Muffly, Mark Tierno, Ned Beatty (last seen in "Prelude to a Kiss").

RATING: 5 out of 10 footprints in the sand

The Fog (1980)

Year 15, Day 281 - 10/8/23 - Movie #4,563

BEFORE: It's the time of year to train new people to work at the theater, so after two years there it seems like I might know what I'm doing after all - by comparison, anyway. Sort of. So, time to pass along that knowledge to other people, younger ones who might just end up replacing me.  Today (Saturday) is a rare day off from both jobs, but tomorrow I'm back at it, guiding the young Padawans on their path.  Just not too well, because then my services may no longer be required.

I spotted a couple guys at the theater Thursday night who were freeloaders of a sort, the kind of people who probably get the college newsletter to learn about upcoming events, then attend those that are both open to the public and also serving free food.  Or maybe they just REALLY love thesis presentations, but I have a feeling that's not a thing.  Anyway, I spotted the same two guys in June, putting plates together to hold food from the buffet and then stuffing those plates into their tote bags.  I've heard that some people attend art gallery openings just for the free wine and cheese, but come on, please don't be so obvious about it.  Besides, eating the food leftover from the events JUST before it gets thrown away is kind of MY thing, and these guys are interfering with that, so they must be stopped. JK. Maybe.

Adrienne Barbeau carries over from "Swamp Thing", and it feels like at one point in the 1980's you just couldn't make a horror movie without hiring her or Jamie Lee Curtis, or both.  Case in point, tonight's film, from legendary director John Carpenter. (It was Wes Craven yesterday, forgot to mention...).  You might think from here I'd link to the "Halloween" series, but not this time around, I've got another agenda in mind.  The linking kind of tells me to go in a different direction, after all I am the "Movie Whisperer".  Nah, that's hella stupid. 

THE PLOT: An unearthly fog rolls into a small coastal town exactly 100 years after a ship mysteriously sank in its waters.

AFTER: Well, I haven't had a ghost story in a while, and that's essentially what this is, as it starts with a ghost story told around a campfire on a beach.  And that makes sense because the story is about a bunch of crewmen on a ship who died because somebody mistook their campfire for a lighthouse light, and well, you can see how that might cause a navigation problem.  But the story's told this way for a reason, to tell the people in front of THAT campfire that there are a bunch of angry undead who want revenge on the people who built that other campfire, but they're confused and OH MY GOD, here they come!  Ha ha, just kidding, man, you should have seen the looks on your faces, I think you all lost control and peed your pants!

Only, well, the storyteller here kind of forgets to do that, and that really takes the wind out of the ghost story's sails, so to speak.  To illustrate my point, watch the scene from "Club Dread" where there's a similar campfire on the beach, and the spooky story also starts with, "It was a night just like this one, right here on this beach" only it's a story about a resort worker named Phil Colletti who got his Johnson cut off and now roams the island with a machete, looking for the people who mutilated him, but basically attacking everyone in sight.  And of course he now goes by the name of "Machete Phil", which becomes a bit more hilarious when you think about what he could have been called instead of that.  

Don't get me wrong, this story IS going to get there, but the thing about a ghost story told to kids sitting around the campfire is that you're supposed to scare them THEN and THERE, not a few hours later when the fog rolls in.  Well, the storyteller is old and maybe he thought the story was strong enough as is, that he didn't need to scare the crap out of the kids immediately, but it just strikes me as a bit odd.  But I guess "There is an art to the building of suspense" as Tom Stoppard once wrote.  

Instead there's a slow build here as the fog rolls in, along with those ghosts who for some reason waited exactly 100 years to take their revenge, despite the fact that whoever built that campfire in 1880 and caused their ship to sink is no longer around.  But let's roll with it - it's also a bit weird that these are ghosts who can carry weapons, and kill the sailors on the trawler named Sea Grass, who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.  They weren't even doing any night fishing, they just sailed out into the water from Antonio Bay just to drink some beers and have some bonding time together in the hammocks.  Umm, OK, guys, don't ask, don't tell.

But I have to wonder (NITPICK POINT #1) why the ghosts would attack the town exactly 100 years later TO THE DAY after their horrible deaths?  Why not one year, three years, ten years later if they're so keen on getting revenge?  Nobody would understand better than, say, a dead person that the longer they wait, the more likely that the people who caused their deaths are no longer alive?  And after 100 years, well, it's almost a certainty that they'd be killing the wrong people.  Which is more important, marking the centennial anniversary of that dreadful day or making sure that the right people pay the horrible price?  Or, if the people who lit that bad campfire died, why didn't the dead sailors find them in the underworld and get their revenge them?  Probably would have been a lot easier, although there might be millions of dead souls to sort through, and maybe they tried for 99 years and couldn't do it, so they naturally thought to try back in the land of the living?  That doesn't make much sense, and now I feel that I've already put more thought into this than the screenwriter did. 

Oh, yeah, somebody had leprosy, as revealed by the journal written by Father Malone in 1800 and read by another Father Malone in the present day. (Put a pin in that for a second...)  So maybe the leprosy affected the brains of the dead seamen and that caused them to not think rationally once they were dead / undead?  OK, now NITPICK POINT #2, is one Father Malone supposed to be the grandson of the other Father Malone?  Because that's kind of not how priests work, they usually take a vow of celibacy.  So why not just give the present-day priest another last name to avoid any confusion, like I'm having now?  

Really, this is kind of about how we celebrate our American history and notable anniversaries of historic (historical?) events but a great many of them have a dark side, whether that's connected to slavery or sexism or xenophobia or war or genocide.  But unfortunately the film kind of glosses over all that, just like most of us tend to do when we think about history.  But it's there, man, and if it were to manifest itself in the physical world it would probably stab you with a fishhook or a cutlass, too.

It turns out that the founders of the town set the campfire on purpose, because they didn't want the owner of the ship to establish a leper colony nearby, and so it was considered the lesser evil to sink the ship and kill the lepers, then use the riches found on the ship to establish the town.  Because only that way could they create a town that would have its own AM radio jazz station and also be free of lepers. You know, I think I'm on the ghosts' side here.  Just saying. 

NITPICK POINT #3, why couldn't the kid just find a piece of driftwood with the name of the ship, and that's it?  What was all that nonsense about the rock turning into a coin, catching on fire and then being a piece of wood again?  Sometimes it's best to keep things simple. While we're at it, NITPICK POINT #4, what are the ghosts going to do with that gold, anyway?  You can't spend it in the afterlife, isn't that what people always say, "you can't take it with you"?  I get revenge, but ghosts coming back for their gold hardly makes anything close to sense.  

NITPICK POINT #6, why does the DJ need to send the call out to her listeners to help save her son from the vengeful ghosts?  Can't she just put on a long Miles Davis album or something and go save him herself?  It's called being a responsible parent, but I get it, it's hard for anyone to balance their career and family.  But we really don't need a DJ to announce what time it is every three minutes between songs, because most people also have clocks, sometimes right there on their radios.  This is kind of why terrestrial radio died and Pandora and Spotify took over, right? 

Big surprise, the local weatherman has the hots for the female DJ, who he's apparently never met in person.  But NITPICK POINT #7, he keeps calling her to tell her when the fog is rolling in, but I have a sneaky suspicion that you just can't track fog on the radar, not even the Doppler 3000.  Because you know, it's FOG.

Also starring Tom Atkins (last seen in "Bob Roberts"), Jamie Lee Curtis (last seen in "Everything Everywhere All at Once"), Hal Holbrook (last seen in "Spielberg"), Janet Leigh (last seen in "The Automat"), Nancy Loomis, Ty Mitchell, Charles Cyphers (last seen in "Coming Home"), James Canning, John Houseman (last seen in "Ghost Story"), John F. Goff, George "Buck" Flower, Regina Waldon, Darwin Joston (last seen in "Eraserhead"), Rob Bottin (last seen in "Rock 'n' Roll High School"), Darrow Igus, John Vick (last seen in "The Dead Pool"), Jim Jacobus, Fred Franklyn, Ric Moreno, Lee Socks, Tommy Lee Wallace, John Strobel (last seen in "Escape from New York") with a cameo from John Carpenter.

RATING: 4 out of 10 broken stained-glass windows