Old Man Jenke

As of today, Dinner with Max Jenke is half a decade old. It's been five years since I inaugarated this blog back on September 12th, 2007 - that's practically an eternity in blogosphere time. A huge thanks to everyone who's stopped by to read and comment over the last five years - it's much appreciated.

I don't go back and look over old posts - mostly because I don't want to be confronted with my shortcomings as a writer - so I can't say how much, if at all, things have evolved or changed here over the past five years but I'm guessing that the picture that emerges of me is of a consistently middlebrow fan. I don't have esoteric tastes, I'm not especially intellectual (if at all), and I can't resist the allure of fair-to-middling genre efforts. That's my sweet spot right there. Hell, after I post this, there's a very strong chance I'll pop in my disc of The First Power. Or maybe Shocker. I don't know. God, I wish there was some beer in the fridge. That'd help me make up my mind.

When I started this blog I was still a fresh-faced thirtysomething. Now I'm a still moderately fresh-faced fortysomething. Every year, I wonder if this'll be the year when I finally get fed up with the current crop of horror and become disengaged as a fan but it hasn't happened yet. Sure, I don't love everything and there's plenty out there - including stuff that other fans embrace - that makes me roll my eyes in an exaggerated fashion but I like rolling my eyes in an exaggerated fashion.

More than that, though, I like coming across some new horror movie or TV show that reminds me of why I love the genre in the first place.

So here's to that. Cheers!

Here Comes The Broom

I have to say, I've been a little worried about myself lately. You see, for the first time since I've been old enough to get to a movie theater on my own, I skipped a new horror movie. If I tell you that movie was The Apparition, you might say "Duh, why wouldn't you skip it?" But that's the thing - I don't usually show that level of adult discretion. If a new horror film opens, I'm there - regardless of whether I suspect that it might not be the second coming of The Exorcist. I'm all about going into each movie with the intent to enjoy it for whatever it's worth. Sometimes a movie will break me of those intentions (I'm looking at you, Creature) but I'm always ready for the next ride.

With The Apparition, though, I just couldn't bring myself to go. You'd think that given how dry the summer has been horror-wise, I would've jumped at it but with The Possession due in theaters the following week, it didn't seem worth breaking the horror drought for the lesser of the two films. While that may seem like the sensible move, I've never been about being sensible when it comes to being a devoted horror geek. The fact that I couldn't be bothered to see The Apparition left me just a little bummed. I showed an ability to not waste my time with a movie that was almost certainly a piece of garbage and that uncommon act of willpower made me think I had turned a corner in my life. I was finally a discriminating, clear-eyed genre connoisseur - something I actually never really wanted to be.

Luckily, unexpected salvation arrived for me this week in the form of the trailer for Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters.



As soon as I laid eyes on this trailer and felt an involuntary rush of excitment at - among other things - the sight of witches on brooms flying into a zig zag of wires stretched across trees, I knew that my experience with The Apparition had been nothing more than a fluke. Most people will look at this trailer and, with good reason, ask "Who would ever go see this shit?" while I'm grinning in giddy anticipation.

Yes, I have a strong hunch that it won't be such a great movie. Hell, let's be honest - it looks like a complete train wreck. But what fun is there in making such an obvious observation?

Some might say people like myself are fools, rushing headlong to see films we know full well will be disasters and, you know, they'd have a point. But on the other hand I take comfort in the fact that a lifetime of seeing bad movies hasn't made me into a cynic.

I probably made the right call about The Apparition, though.

Evil Wears Many Faces

Coming of age during the glory days of horror franchises in the '80s made me soft-hearted towards shitty horror sequels so I'm already predisposed to giving the latest installment in the Chainsaw saga (due January '13) a fair shake but that said, the above poster piques my interest in the new Chainsaw an extra notch.

I don't know what kind of approach I expected the marketing for this movie to take but this is definitely grislier than I expected so thumbs-up for that. Back when the '03 remake was released, the poster was a real ho-hum affair. Remember?

I guess they were trying to stay classy, what with remaking a classic, but when you're working with one of the most brilliantly exploitative titles in the history of horror, why not incorporate that spirit of exploitation in your advertizing? After all, it worked for the original:

To be fair, we're talking entirely different times. And hey, the remake's poster was still arguably better than the poster for TCM 2, which - for reasons I don't think have ever been explained - spoofed The Breakfast Club.

But anyhow, back to this new poster...

It's ironic that the most graphically gruesome Chainsaw poster yet is for the first film in the franchise to have no Massacre in the title but dropping "Massacre" is no more offensive than squeezing another buck out of Hooper's masterpiece in the first place so I'll let it slide.

My reaction to this poster is pretty simple - I like how straight-up nasty it is. It reminds me of the kind of garish VHS box art that would've demanded that I take a movie home back in the day. It revels in surface level grossness rather than promising to explore true terror (we'll see how the film itself is) but my inner adolescent will always have room for crassly marketed horror.

As genre franchises go, Texas Chainsaw Massacre doesn't have the best track record but it's no Howling or Return of the Living Dead either. It's true that post-Hooper, there's never been a great TCM movie but when you're talking horror sequels, "great" seldom enters into the equation. Sometimes the closest you get to that is with the marketing material.

That's not ideal, but you've got to take great where you can get it.

Foggy Memories

Most of my fondest memories of watching horror movies come from the days of watching the ABC Friday Night Movie and the ABC Sunday Night Movie.

Those were the days before everybody had cable and before VCRs were common household items, when it was still a big deal when a theatrical film would make its network debut. It would be an edited, pan and scan version of the film, naturally - but it would still be a huge, gotta-see event because that was your only way to see the movie at all. The fact that movies had an unavailibility about them back then made them special to viewers, I believe. You didn't take movies for granted. You had to wait a couple of years to see, say, Raiders of the Lost Ark again and if you missed the broadcast, you were screwed. Now, you can just watch Prometheus on your phone.

Anyhow, The ABC Movie served as my introduction to some of my favorite late '70s/early '80s horror movies as they aired the likes of The Shining, the '78 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Coma, The Little Girl Who Lived Down the Lane, and John Carpenter's The Fog.

The intros to those movies, with voiceovers by Ernie Anderson (father to director Paul Thomas Anderson and for years the Cleaveland, Ohio-based horror host known as Ghoulardi), were burned into my brain and are inseperable from my memories of the movies themselves. They set the mood so perfectly for the movie to come and ABC's "star tunnel" opening was so dramatic to begin with.

Ever since I was introduced to YouTube, I've been hoping that someone would post the intro to ABC's presentation of The Fog and finally, that day has come. Well, actually it looks like that day came way back in March but, hey, I can't remember to check for this stuff all the time!

To the poster who uploaded this clip, a thousand thank you's. And extra thanks for including the promos for Ripley's Believe It Or Not, That's Incredible, and Tales of the Gold Monkey as well! They remind me of good times.



Today I have more movies in my collection than I could ever possibly have the time to rewatch, even if I lived to be a hundred and twenty, and more cable channels than I know what to do with but what I miss are the days when I would see a movie advertized in the TV Guide, wait for it to air, and when the movie was over it'd be gone, leaving wisps of excited memories behind until the next time it came around again.

Fifty Years Of Web-Spinning

Amazing Fantasy #15, featuring the debut of Spider-Man courtesy of writer Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko, was cover dated August 1962. That means it was probably actually on sale in June of that year but as August was the month on the cover, Marvel is honoring Spidey's anniversary this month with Amazing Spider-Man #692, on sale this week.

I won't go into a long lecture about Web-head's history - with fifty years of adventures across various comic titles and across various mediums, I wouldn't have the time to do Spidey justice - but I will say that Marvel's flagship character remains my favorite superhero many years since I first encountered him on the children's show The Electric Company.



I'll also take a moment - since I neglected to do so back in July - to say that I really loved the recent big screen reboot. It wasn't perfect, no, but I think that in most respects it was the best treatment the character has recieved on screen to date and I say that as someone who really enjoyed the Raimi films - even the much-reviled Spider-Man 3! Raimi's original Spider-Man was solid for the time and it stuck to the comics in a commendable and gratifying way but it came at the dawn of the comic book movie era and ten years later, it shows. Mostly in a charming way (to my eyes) but it's undeniably dated.

The action elements of the new Spider-Man film are its weakest component (in this regard, Raimi's panache is especially missed) but the characters and the emotions are dead-on and as much as I liked Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker, I much prefer Andrew Garfield's portrayal. And Emma Stone's Gwen Stacy is arguably the best love interest in any superhero film to date. I also loved how effortlessly Spidey's mechanical web-shooters are introduced. In the Raimi films, they were replaced with organic shooters because Raimi feared mechanical web-shooters would stretch credulity too much and it would take too much time to convince an audience that this high school kid could concieve of such a thing. In the new film, it only takes about a single scene to show the invention of the web-shooters and it never seems like it's asking the audience to buy into anything outrageous. Which, mostly, I think is due to the fact that audiences have become that much more accepting of comic book material over the past ten years. You don't have to work so hard anymore to get them onboard with the same stuff the fans have accepted for years.

I also loved that Webb and co. weren't in any rush to get to the fight scenes and special effects. It didn't feel like the film was ever trying to cater to the blockbuster crowd, which is pretty brave for a film that really did need to grab that audience as far as being able to recoup its massive budget. But it was really more about conveying the emotional quality of Peter Parker's journey than about bells and whistles and I appreciated that. There was a lot of loud grumbling in advance of the film's release about the fact that the origin was going to be retold and while I wasn't convinced going in that it was needed, the film won me over. I liked the tweaks that were done. They made it just different enough to not seem like a rerun while perserving the core elements of the story.

So, yeah, I liked The Amazing Spider-Man a whole lot. It got more than enough right to please this old-school Spidey fan, at least.

As for this week's anniversary issue, Spidey scribe Dan Slott takes things back in spirit to Amazing Fantasy #15 with Peter attending another scientific experiment on high school grounds but this time as a professional scientist giving a demonstration.

Of course, the famous Parker luck holds true to form and one accident later, Peter has inadvertently created a new young superhero - one who isn't cut from quite the same cloth that Peter was. As the story continues over the next issue or two, Peter will have to take on the responsibility of training this latest hero and something tells me it won't end well.

Luckily, Spidey himself is in good hands. Slott's tenure on Amazing Spider-Man has been exceptionally good and he looks to continue on the book for some time to come - even if he promises a major shake-up in time for issue #700. Spidey's movie reboot was a success and even in animation, Spidey's doing good with Ultimate Spider-Man on Disney XD. Some fans hate this cartoon for its irreverent and some say too-juvenile humor but all I can say is that my seven-year-old son loves it and I do too.

It's a safe bet that I won't be around to celebrate Spidey's 100th anniversay but it's an equally safe bet to say that the character will be every bit as popular when that date rolls around as he is today.

Remembering The Class Of '02

The older I get, the more I find myself saying crap like "man, where did the time go?" but I have to say it feels odd to consider that 2002 is already a long ten years ago.

It wasn't a particular milestone year for the genre but as the year following the events of 9/11, it did represent a crossroads of sorts. Post 9/11, some pundits speculated that the audience for fear fare might dry up in the wake of such a catastrophic tragedy but, if anything, the fall out of 9/11 and the two wars the US became embroiled in because of it led to a renewed popularity for the genre.

That new wave didn't really florish until 2003/2004 but 2002 laid the groundwork for big things to come and over at Shock Till You Drop, we've taken a look back at a handful of films that helped define that transitional year. This is not intended to be a "best of" list but simply an acknowledgement of several films that proved notable in one way or another - whether they kicked off trends, put an end cap on an era, or tapped into the cultural mood at the time. In sizing up the Class of '02, Spencer Perry writes about Signs, Tyler Doupe takes on Resident Evil, Paul Doro considers the teen thriller Swimfan, while I take a look back at The Ring and Halloween: Resurrection.

Regarding Halloween: Resurrection, even though that movie will never be much good (no matter how much time passes!), I'll always regard it with some affection. Filmed prior to 9/11 (originally it was meant to come out in September of '01 but reshoots and schedule shuffles moved its release to almost a year later), Resurrection has the virtue of being one of the last horror movies to be filmed pre-9/11 and as such feels like a bittersweet keepsake of a time when a "killer shark in baggy-ass overalls" could be more easily touted as the epitome of Evil.

A Heaping Helping Of Venom

Any regular reader of this blog knows that I'm as much a comic fanatic as I am a horror junkie so I'd like to take a second to give a shout-out to the current series Venom, which features Peter Parker's high school nemesis (and later friend) Flash Thompson joined together with Spidey's arch-foe, the Venom symbiote (aka The Black Costume).

In Venom, Flash, now a war vet who lost both his legs below the knees while performing an act of heroism in action, is given a unique but peril-frought opportunity by the military - join with the alien symbiote known as Venom and perform various black ops duties as directed. The military has contained the symboite and wants to exploit its potential as a weapon. Under close monitoring, Flash will be allowed to bond with the oozing black menace for limited periods of time (while merged, the symboite's morphing form will fill in Flash's missing legs) and the symboite will be removed after the end of each operation before the physical and psychological bond becomes permanent. Of course, this plan is not without problems and soon Flash is much closer to the symboite than his military superiors had planned for.

As written by Rick Remender, Venom was modeled as a twisted reflection of the early years of The Amazing Spider-Man. Remender took the angst and turmoil that Peter Parker endured under the direction of writer Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko and raised it to nuclear shitstorm levels. Remender took the ironic premise of Spider-Man's biggest fan (Flash's heroism in combat was shown to be largely inspired by Spider-Man's never-say-die attitude) being turned into the dark mirror of his idol and really ran with it.

Lee and Ditko ensured that their teen hero had it rough in those early ASM issues (one constant thorn in Peter's side then being Flash) and it was the ongoing emotional gauntlet that Peter had to endure that made the book so groundbreaking and distinctive. Angst-ridden heroes are no longer a novelty, thanks to Spidey paving the way, but Venom has the distinction of having to cope with a world of hurt that would've made Peter Parker want to hide behind Aunt May's dress.

While Peter was guided by the memory by his loving Uncle Ben, Flash is haunted by the childhood abuse he suffered under the hand of his violent, alcoholic father (who ends up being diagnosed with cancer during the course of Remender's Venom run, making Flash come to terms with his angry relationship with his dad). Thanks to that sour relationship and his brutal upbringing, Flash himself is a recovering alcoholic - a struggle that's only compounded by his new partnership with the symbiote, which represents an almost irresistable addiction of its own.

Remender also delibrately mirrored early ASM by having Flash's girlfriend be Peter's original girlfriend - one time Daily Bugle secretary and now reporter Betty Brant. Like Peter once did, Flash finds himself having to hide his secret identity from Betty and with his history of addiction, Betty is naturally suspicious that Flash has fallen off the wagon every time he vanishes for days while on a mission as Venom only to come back with a half-hearted excuse. Remender also included one of the most memorable foes from the Lee/Ditko days as Flash's key antagonist, a new incarnation of the masked villain known as Crime Master - making the new Crime Master's identity an ongoing mystery in keeping with the Lee/Ditko style. And where Spider-Man had to contend with the combined force of his greatest enemies when they teamed as The Sinister Six, Remender put Flash up against his own group of villains, The Savage Six.

Each issue of ASM would typically end with Peter brooding over his problems and lamenting his failures and in step with that, an issue of Venom would similarly end with Flash obsessing over his latest round of troubles - only they'd be much more grim than, say, coping with Aunt May's latest fainting spell. An ending to an issue of Venom would likely have Flash off the wagon and sleeping in an alley.

Remender just completed his run on Venom with issue #22, a story dealing with Flash's ongoing daddy issues in a tale titled "Father's Day." It's a great end to a great run - in my opinion, one of the sharpest runs in modern comics. Neither Flash nor Venom ever struck me as being particularly interesting before and I have to hand it to Remender for making Venom into such a strong book. He had some great artistic collaborators on board with him the whole way, with the likes Tony Moore, Stefano Caselli, Lan Mednia, Kev Walker, Declan Shalvey and others all taking turns making the book look incredible.

Remender's star has been rising at Marvel (thanks not just to his work on Venom but on Uncanny X-Force and other titles) so he's moving on to more high-profile gigs this fall penning Uncanny Avengers (a new flagship title for the company) as well as taking over writing duties on Captain America. I expect those books with be outstanding and I look forward to them but I'll sure miss him on Venom. I'll be giving incoming scribe (and former FANGORIA contributor) Cullen Bunn a fair shake but even if the quality doesn't keep up, the run Remender created is worth keeping and revisiting.