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one of the most pathetically reactionary sports sections in the world
Watching Movies Alone with crumbsroom
I have a rough draft. It’s about 30 films yet, so I need to ponder which ones get kicked to the curb before I finally submit it.
The slaughter to come will be unfathomable....
How many do you have to submit?
And do I have to pick ONE of the Trois Couleurs Trilogy?
And do I have to pick ONE of the Trois Couleurs Trilogy?
You could actually give each film it’s own ranking on the ballot, as they were released individually, unless I missed a ruling on this somewhere.
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How many do you have to submit?
And do I have to pick ONE of the Trois Couleurs Trilogy?
And do I have to pick ONE of the Trois Couleurs Trilogy?
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It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
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It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
My IMDb page
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IN THE BASEMENT, WHERE THE MOUSTACHE'S GROW
Upon first glance at Hallucinations, you can tell exactly what cinematic stains the Polonia Brothers have gotten down on their knees to sop up. They’ve found lots of overflow from the troughs of HG Lewis and George Romero. And there’s more than enough Frank Henenlotter stickiness to make a DNA swab of their cultural influences particularly hazardous. Blood, barf and **** have saturated this creative sponge of theirs. Squeeze too hard at your own peril.
For many, the result is a movie that might seem full of little more than the diminished echoes of other films you have already seen. Freddy Krueger makes an appearance (as long as it still counts as being him when he’s wearing a track suit and a floppy fisherman’s cap). And a giant Cronenbergian phallus crawls into the shower just in time to block our view of the tighty-whitey brief junk John Polonia keeps threatening to show us. There is also a general overall slasher ethos that runs through the film, even though they hardly have enough crew or cast members on hand to rack up much of a body count.
If anything is clear from the murk of these bedroom recordings, it is that the Polonia Brothers have spent a lot of time with these kinds of movies. Presumably locked themselves in a cellar with them. Had their meals slid underneath the door. Stayed down long enough to grow out their teen-boy moustaches and become men under the tutelage of all the other basement dwellers out there. The ones who somehow managed to get their **** together long enough to make a movie of their own. In other words, time well spent.
And so, to reduce Hallucinations to little more than a rudimentary copycat of better films would be to overlook what it really is at its heart. It is a shared language between two outcast brothers. And for us in the audience, it is a shorthand with which they can express their movie love to those willing to sit and watch their devotional home videos. As a result, Hallucinations acts as a secret handshake. A knowing wink that understands the life you too have lived under the staircase, in the shadows, beneath floorboards, or whatever nook or cranny you had to scurry off to in order to get your next horror fix. It is horror removed from the burdens or cultural critique or cinematic expressionism. Horror as pure escapism.
What will ultimately add a layer of poignancy to the meagre escapist aims of Hallucinations though, is that rarely does a film co-exist in the same world in which its creators are hoping to imagine themselves out of. While the violent outbursts it peddles may always exist in the foreground of the frame, it will be the details which clutter the background which ground the film back in the real place from which the two young filmmakers dream. They are details which have been left undisguised for us to discover inside the home the Polonia Brothers clearly still share with their never-seen parents, and which they are now using as the sole location of their movie shoot.
Much in the same way that their images of horror seem all too familiar, what we can glean from their home life will be equally recognizable to all who have grown up in a similar suburban kind of squalor. There is the awful, sun blotting drapes. The clots of un-ironed blankets stuffed between couch cushions. The perilous balancing of Chef Boyardee overflow in the kitchen trashcan. Floor mattresses. The browny-orange glow of a lifetime lived in low wattage lamp light. It is a creatively paralyzing kind of dishevelment. The kind of purgatory that seemingly awaits the two brothers at the end of every school day, offering them little more than yet another television weekend.
But as much as this may be the kind of place where little more than half-awake infomercial watching ever happens, and how it still all seems so depressingly familiar, and remains such a reminder of all my own lost time, the film remains a joyous experience to watch. There is a pent-up liberation in watching the Polonia Brothers bloody-up their parents' bathroom and cat shred their basement in defiance of the existence you would otherwise imagine here. In watching them detonate a possible lifetime of couch naps by testing the boundaries of exactly how much movie wizardry they could foreseeably emulate (and dare get away with) inside of their parents' home, there is an inherent urgency in their filmmaking. A need to just get it all on tape. You can almost sense the threat of Monday fast approaching as the movie nears its conclusion.
And maybe that’s what we are really supposed to fear. This villain of squandered potential. Of lost time. This is much worse than anything the imagination of these brothers might will into existence with their mix of cheap effects and the help of their parents wardrobe. In fact, these monsters of their creation are exactly how they are fighting it. To make sure they have something to show for the weekend before they are back in class, being bored, doodling sword crushed skulls in the margins of their notebooks. Biding their time before the next weekend production and being bitter they can't get to it immediately. After all, what else could possibly be more dangerous than all this time away from the movies, whether it be watching, aspiring towards or actually really making one.
In short, if you haven't done it already: **** school, destroy your parents home, ignore the rules. Grow a moustache and become a Polonia Brother. Anything to save yourself from the drudgery of not daring to do stuff. Because that's when the real monsters come to get you. And I should know. I'm still here waiting for them to take me away, half asleep on the couch, and trying to remember all of those wasted words of encouragement Richard Simmons once used to slip into my dreams.
For many, the result is a movie that might seem full of little more than the diminished echoes of other films you have already seen. Freddy Krueger makes an appearance (as long as it still counts as being him when he’s wearing a track suit and a floppy fisherman’s cap). And a giant Cronenbergian phallus crawls into the shower just in time to block our view of the tighty-whitey brief junk John Polonia keeps threatening to show us. There is also a general overall slasher ethos that runs through the film, even though they hardly have enough crew or cast members on hand to rack up much of a body count.
If anything is clear from the murk of these bedroom recordings, it is that the Polonia Brothers have spent a lot of time with these kinds of movies. Presumably locked themselves in a cellar with them. Had their meals slid underneath the door. Stayed down long enough to grow out their teen-boy moustaches and become men under the tutelage of all the other basement dwellers out there. The ones who somehow managed to get their **** together long enough to make a movie of their own. In other words, time well spent.
And so, to reduce Hallucinations to little more than a rudimentary copycat of better films would be to overlook what it really is at its heart. It is a shared language between two outcast brothers. And for us in the audience, it is a shorthand with which they can express their movie love to those willing to sit and watch their devotional home videos. As a result, Hallucinations acts as a secret handshake. A knowing wink that understands the life you too have lived under the staircase, in the shadows, beneath floorboards, or whatever nook or cranny you had to scurry off to in order to get your next horror fix. It is horror removed from the burdens or cultural critique or cinematic expressionism. Horror as pure escapism.
What will ultimately add a layer of poignancy to the meagre escapist aims of Hallucinations though, is that rarely does a film co-exist in the same world in which its creators are hoping to imagine themselves out of. While the violent outbursts it peddles may always exist in the foreground of the frame, it will be the details which clutter the background which ground the film back in the real place from which the two young filmmakers dream. They are details which have been left undisguised for us to discover inside the home the Polonia Brothers clearly still share with their never-seen parents, and which they are now using as the sole location of their movie shoot.
Much in the same way that their images of horror seem all too familiar, what we can glean from their home life will be equally recognizable to all who have grown up in a similar suburban kind of squalor. There is the awful, sun blotting drapes. The clots of un-ironed blankets stuffed between couch cushions. The perilous balancing of Chef Boyardee overflow in the kitchen trashcan. Floor mattresses. The browny-orange glow of a lifetime lived in low wattage lamp light. It is a creatively paralyzing kind of dishevelment. The kind of purgatory that seemingly awaits the two brothers at the end of every school day, offering them little more than yet another television weekend.
But as much as this may be the kind of place where little more than half-awake infomercial watching ever happens, and how it still all seems so depressingly familiar, and remains such a reminder of all my own lost time, the film remains a joyous experience to watch. There is a pent-up liberation in watching the Polonia Brothers bloody-up their parents' bathroom and cat shred their basement in defiance of the existence you would otherwise imagine here. In watching them detonate a possible lifetime of couch naps by testing the boundaries of exactly how much movie wizardry they could foreseeably emulate (and dare get away with) inside of their parents' home, there is an inherent urgency in their filmmaking. A need to just get it all on tape. You can almost sense the threat of Monday fast approaching as the movie nears its conclusion.
And maybe that’s what we are really supposed to fear. This villain of squandered potential. Of lost time. This is much worse than anything the imagination of these brothers might will into existence with their mix of cheap effects and the help of their parents wardrobe. In fact, these monsters of their creation are exactly how they are fighting it. To make sure they have something to show for the weekend before they are back in class, being bored, doodling sword crushed skulls in the margins of their notebooks. Biding their time before the next weekend production and being bitter they can't get to it immediately. After all, what else could possibly be more dangerous than all this time away from the movies, whether it be watching, aspiring towards or actually really making one.
In short, if you haven't done it already: **** school, destroy your parents home, ignore the rules. Grow a moustache and become a Polonia Brother. Anything to save yourself from the drudgery of not daring to do stuff. Because that's when the real monsters come to get you. And I should know. I'm still here waiting for them to take me away, half asleep on the couch, and trying to remember all of those wasted words of encouragement Richard Simmons once used to slip into my dreams.
Last edited by crumbsroom; 06-04-21 at 04:25 PM.
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Joe Bob Briggs did THINGS as one of his films tonight.
Masterpiece.
Masterpiece.
My 13 year old self would be so pleased to see a future where this is finally becoming universally recognized.
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My 13 year old self would be so pleased to see a future where this is finally becoming universally recognized.
Even got retweeted by Darcy the Mail Girl during the showing. I’m a pretty big deal now.
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Joe Bob Briggs did THINGS as one of his films tonight.
Masterpiece.
Masterpiece.
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Is that on his Shudder series, or somewhere else?
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Yeah. On Shudder’s The Last Drive In. I think it should be up for non-live viewing now.
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Ok, it wasn't there when I checked. I'll be on the lookout
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Grindhouse violence. A homage to hard boiled detective films. Goopy blasts of surrealism. A perverse sense of humor. Hallucinations may offer the naive joy of cinematic discovery inside of a dismal home, but this teenage production gets right out on the streets and really attempts to fuse together a weird and woolly movie to mostly fascinating results.
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I suppose dented trashcans aren’t particularly scary. But have you ever thought about the rage a ten-tons pile of garbage masquerading as a monster might feel as he sees its oppressors lined up along the curb, full of all the cornflake boxes and melon rinds and knotty wads of snotty Kleenex that compose its soul? Waiting to be shipped off to the outskirts of town, where the ravishing mouths of seagulls and the piss of the homeless wait to desecrate it. Can you blame the mess he might make of your driveway in saving what we discard so cavalierly?
Maybe a little empathy for this weekly agony of the Milipitas Monster is what we require to understand the deep emotional turmoil this film depicts. And how we should treat all those cranks who show up at city hall demanding answers to what happened to their trashcans as the real enemy and not the civic revolutionaries we might believe by default. So let’s not join their chants of “Gimme back my trashcan” too quickly, and instead sympathize with the true outsider here. This pile of sentient garbage. This monster whose greatest crime is little more than a bit of vandal rebellion in the name of the misunderstood candy wrappers we hardly had the foresight to even recycle back in 1975. Don’t let a couple of malformed or missing trashcans get in the way of our humanity. #TeamMalpitasMonster.
But alas, how can this emotional realignment ever truly manifest when everything in this film is much too blurry for us to ever get a good and proper look into his forlorn and buggy fly eyes. See the pain inside and understand that he is only a byproduct of our own evil society, and the sole victim of Malpitas’ mad rush towards a clean, garbage free modernity. Instead, I will once again be left staring at the plight of the white male, whose carnival date might end with him letting out a fear fart during a particularly arduous ride, and who I will find myself rooting for as he sneaks up on the monster while hidden under a discarded trashcan during the films conclusion (oh, the painful irony), chanting by myself, late at night: “**** the trash monster. Long live garbage day. Feed the seagulls. Drink piss”.
Or at least that is what I got from the mumbled smudge of film that is The Milpitas Monster. And maybe if I had been drunk I would have even liked it.
Maybe a little empathy for this weekly agony of the Milipitas Monster is what we require to understand the deep emotional turmoil this film depicts. And how we should treat all those cranks who show up at city hall demanding answers to what happened to their trashcans as the real enemy and not the civic revolutionaries we might believe by default. So let’s not join their chants of “Gimme back my trashcan” too quickly, and instead sympathize with the true outsider here. This pile of sentient garbage. This monster whose greatest crime is little more than a bit of vandal rebellion in the name of the misunderstood candy wrappers we hardly had the foresight to even recycle back in 1975. Don’t let a couple of malformed or missing trashcans get in the way of our humanity. #TeamMalpitasMonster.
But alas, how can this emotional realignment ever truly manifest when everything in this film is much too blurry for us to ever get a good and proper look into his forlorn and buggy fly eyes. See the pain inside and understand that he is only a byproduct of our own evil society, and the sole victim of Malpitas’ mad rush towards a clean, garbage free modernity. Instead, I will once again be left staring at the plight of the white male, whose carnival date might end with him letting out a fear fart during a particularly arduous ride, and who I will find myself rooting for as he sneaks up on the monster while hidden under a discarded trashcan during the films conclusion (oh, the painful irony), chanting by myself, late at night: “**** the trash monster. Long live garbage day. Feed the seagulls. Drink piss”.
Or at least that is what I got from the mumbled smudge of film that is The Milpitas Monster. And maybe if I had been drunk I would have even liked it.
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Yes, it was intentional I spelled Malputas different every time. I'm not thart stupid.
SPOILERS: I'm just too lazy to go back and change them. And I'm also kind of impressed at how little my brain can absorb that word. Or anything that happened in the movie, beyond the moaning of a nerd on an amusement park ride he is clearly not prepared for. "Ooooohhhh, Naaadiiiinneeeee"
SPOILERS: I don't think the girls name was Nadine. But at least it wasn't Murpurdas
SPOILERS: I'm just too lazy to go back and change them. And I'm also kind of impressed at how little my brain can absorb that word. Or anything that happened in the movie, beyond the moaning of a nerd on an amusement park ride he is clearly not prepared for. "Ooooohhhh, Naaadiiiinneeeee"
SPOILERS: I don't think the girls name was Nadine. But at least it wasn't Murpurdas
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There's a much more professional-looking poster or box cover somewhere that made me consider watching this many times back in the day. I eventually got a look at the actual beast that appears in the film and my interest dwindled substantially. I should just watch it anyway and confront it once and for all.
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There's a much more professional-looking poster or box cover somewhere that made me consider watching this many times back in the day. I eventually got a look at the actual beast that appears in the film and my interest dwindled substantially. I should just watch it anyway and confront it once and for all.
For fans of bad monster movies, there is probably a handful of shots that aren't so bad. Most of the time its shadowy murk and you can barely tell what he's up to.
The vast majority of the movie is watching the town drunk scrounge through garbage cans and collect mostly empty bottles. So, at least two of the characters spend the film rooting through trash, if that is something that sounds like fun.
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For fans of bad monster movies, there is probably a handful of shots that aren't so bad. Most of the time its shadowy murk and you can barely tell what he's up to.
The vast majority of the movie is watching the town drunk scrounge through garbage cans and collect mostly empty bottles. So, at least two of the characters spend the film rooting through trash, if that is something that sounds like fun.
The vast majority of the movie is watching the town drunk scrounge through garbage cans and collect mostly empty bottles. So, at least two of the characters spend the film rooting through trash, if that is something that sounds like fun.
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