Give this man his cursed relic!
11 things that turned me out in January, including 'Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight'
This month, we set our intentions through pop songs, solved a mystery/rewrote history, started the new season of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” and said goodbye to a creative genius.
The cup runneth over. Here are 11 pieces of pop culture that turned me out in January.
‘Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight,’ directed by Ernest Dickerson
Very important things are happening in this movie. Billy Zane has neon green blood. CCH Pounder gets to use heavy artillery. Thomas Haden Church wears a mesh top. Yes … very important things indeed.
Horror comedy “Demon Knight,” released in 1995, was the first big-screen installment of HBO phenomenon “Tales from the Crypt.” I caught it at Terror Tuesday at Alamo Drafthouse last week; absolute giggle fuel. It’s gleeful, grim, gooey. The Blu-ray is already on its way to my mailbox.
“Demon Knight” packs an ensemble of off-kilter characters into a church-turned-hotel in the eerie New Mexico desert. This spooky setting becomes a deathtrap, as hellish ghouls attack in search of a powerful relic that will bring about eternal darkness. Real “we’ve just gotta make it through the night” stuff.
Zane plays the head demon/maybe the actual devil. If anyone here should have been knighted, it’s him. He got his bachelor’s in scene stealing from Tim Curry State Technical College. There’s smooth-talking; there’s kissing; there’s punching through a guy’s head. Zane just wants to get his relic so he can return the world to its primordial state of unbeing. I actually started to resent the good guys. Give! Him! His relic!
Director Ernest Dickerson absolutely freaks this thing, too. Cobwebs and creaky floorboards mingle with fluorescent eyeballs and blown-out lightning. Slimy, snaggletoothed creatures genuinely repulse the viewer. Magic spells glow red like “NO VACANCY” signs. The tone is perfectly arch, too. This film loves being midnight schlock, but it’s never clumsy. Plus, there’s lore. I love lore.
In conclusion, Billy Zane emits eldritch fire from his crotch in this movie. “Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight” is available to rent online.
‘Hercules in the Haunted World,’ directed by Mario Bava
When Terror Tuesday programmer Joseph Ziemba namechecked Italian director Mario Bava in his intro for “Demon Knight,” I did the Leo DiCaprio meme. At the beginning of the month, I watched one of Bava’s late-career schlockfests, 1961’s “Hercules in the Haunted World.”
Bava’s a horror movie pioneer celebrated for his striking visuals. This is a C-tier movie in that particular Italian way, but wow, was I ever taken by the tie-dye colors and dreamy sets. The muscle men in skirts aren’t bad, either. “Hercules in the Haunted World” is also notable as an unholy genre hybrid of sword-and-sandals and drive-in horror.
If I owned a bar, I’d play this on the TVs on mute. “Hercules in the Haunted World” is streaming for free on Kanopy and Plex; the whole thing’s on YouTube, too.
‘It’s a Mirror’ by Perfume Genius
Mike Hadreas, save us! Save us, Mike Hadreas! The artist aka Perfume Genius is back with “It’s a Mirror,” an alt-country-tinted single. This is road-trip music, the lyrics bursting with a desire to escape suffocating times, places, and people, even oneself.
Hadreas sings over a strummy, Kurt Vile-y tune:
“What do you get from the stretching horizon/ That you’d leave me spiraling with no one to hold?/ Combing the floor with the light from a cigarette/ Something was making you sick in our home”
The video, directed by Cody Critcheloe, has a Gus Van Sant-meets-Lana del Rey vibe — heartland rot and tainted love on the open road. Hadreas loves to play with masculinity and femininity; here, he pairs a motocross jacket with stilettos. The visuals actually remind me of Kathryn Bigelow’s biker flick “The Loveless,” except when Hadreas drinks gasoline from a pump, which is very “Zoolander.”
‘Midnight,’ directed by Mitchell Leisen
Picked up this 1939 screwball rom-com from the Criterion Channel. Shocked that I’d never seen or heard of it, because this is the kind of thing baby me would have slurped up. Billy Wilder of “The Apartment” fame co-wrote the screenplay, for a vibe clue.
Claudette Colbert plays Eve, an American showgirl who just lost all her money in Monte Carlo. She ends up in rainy Paris with nothing but the lamé on her back. Eve immediately starts an enemies-to-lovers arc with a suave cabbie played by Don Ameche. (Modern society languishes under a drought of suave cabbies.) Long story short, she poses as a wealthy baroness, infiltrates the French oligarchy, and hijinks ensue.
It’s a full black-and-white swoon. Wondering how much a glittering, hooded gown costs these days, I ask: Whatever happened to style?!?!
‘Marvel Boy’ by Grant Morrison
Pretty sure I read “Marvel Boy” at a Barnes & Noble soon after the trade paperback came out in 2001. But I grabbed it from the library a few weeks ago, and uh … reading a Grant Morrison joint at 12 is very different from reading it at 35.
“Marvel Boy” is a tenuously canon reinvigoration of old Marvel Comics concepts dating back to 1950. Mostly, it updates the Captain Marvel mythos from the late ’60s for a Bush administration world. Noh-Varr, the sole survivor of a crashed extradimensional vessel, encounters a hypercapitalist bent on godhood, his dominatrix assassin daughter, and most presciently, a living corporation named Hexus. The way Morrison writes the last one stings quite a bit in 2024.
Marvel later retooled Noh-Varr as a pop music-obsessed himbo space adventurer in Kieron Gillen’s excellent “Young Avengers.” No complaints. But Morrison’s pre-9/11 creation, who fell to Earth and didn’t much like what he saw, still offers spiky, invigorating commentary on now-terminal American ills.
‘DuckTales’ (2017)
After our deep dive into the coin-filled pool of the “DuckTales” theme song, I decided to start the 2017 reboot. It’s completely taken over my life. (A-woo-woo.)
My best sales pitch: The voice cast on this goes crazy. Danny Pudi, Ben Schwartz, and Bobby Moynihan play Huey, Dewey, and Louie, respectively. David Tennant voices Uncle Scrooge, and I hope the casting director got a bonus for that. Plus: Margo Martindale! Allison Janney! Jim Rash! Beck Bennett! Catherine Tate! Don Cheadle!
I’d say it’s my background TV show, but I’m paying a lot of attention. All three seasons are streaming on Disney+.
The fire evacuation episode of ‘The Bald and the Beautiful’
Truly believe that this episode of my current favorite podcast — in which Trixie Mattel and Katya evacuate from the Los Angeles wildfires and record the experience in the car — breaks boundaries for audio entertainment. It’s a real-time document of climate change; it’s zany improv comedy. It’s a primary source for archival purposes; it’s two mentally ill drag queens saving their wigs from the inferno’s all-consuming appetite.
Put this in the history books: “It’s a wrap on Miss Earth,” Katya says at the 5:51 mark.
‘The Running Man,’ directed by Paul Michael Glaser
As an adaptation of a Stephen King short story, “The Running Man” wanders off and mostly concerns itself with giving Arnold Schwarzenegger one-liners. As a bit of futurism, it’s psychic. A fascist government manipulates entertainment media to placate and persuade the same public it oppresses. If you made the same movie today, we’d call it social commentary for babies.
The most upsetting part of director Paul Michael Glaser’s 1987 sci-fi goof fest, though, is the casual cruelty of the downtrodden masses. It’s not a visionary leap to predict that the powerful will always torture and lie to control the people. But “The Running Man” gleefully indicts those masses for how much they love seeing their peers get punished. Seems relevant!
Also: The costume department cooked with Arnold’s skintight murder suit. See those flattering hourglass lines? He might get sent to his death in televised gladiatorial combat, but he looks snatched. “The Running Man” is streaming on Paramount+.
‘What a Relief’ by Katie Gavin
The folk flavors really come through on MUNA singer Katie Gavin’s solo album. Where even the quietest moments in her band’s discography shimmer like a dance club mirror, Gavin gets into her singer-songwriter bag throughout “What a Relief.”
Not to imply the album is placid fare for the neighborhood crystal store. Gavin packs chutzpah to spare on songs like “Aftertaste,” which is a kissing cousin to MUNA’s “Silk Chiffon.” The vibrations are most attuned to Indigo Girls on “The Baton,” a rousing, festival-ready ode to daughters and mothers. Later, “Inconsolable” grabs a fiddle for the kind of country moment we knew Gavin had in her after 2022’s “Kind of Girl.”
My fave: the guitar-and-handclaps summertime banger “Casual Drug Use.”
‘Desperate Measures’ by Marianas Trench
The (mostly disappointing) fifth season of “Canada’s Drag Race” used this song for a lip sync. Imagine if you were watching the U.S. show, and right after RuPaul barked “Don’t fuck it up,” they played a mall-emo song from 2011. Obsessed with the idea of a drag queen death-dropping to, like, Forever the Sickest Kids.
Do you think RuPaul knows what a scene kid is? Anyway, I def would have set this as my MySpace song for a week or two.
‘Better Man,’ directed by Michael Gracey
Honestly? I forgot he was a monkey about an hour in.
Outbox
Last week, I published a few thoughts about the late, great David Lynch. That issue included a link to actor Kyle MacLachlan’s tribute for The New York Times. He also did a great interview with GQ, which my friend (and loyal Turning Out subscriber) Kyle sent our group thread.
Paula Mejía’s article contains several lovely anecdotes about being friends with Lynch. Here’s a fave:
I realize this might be a difficult question, but I was wondering if you could tell me about the last time you saw David?
Not difficult at all. [It was] probably sometime in September, maybe October, it was warmer. He would see people on his sort of back terrace. It's more of a patio, really, which was outside because he had a lung condition and wanted to be in the fresh air. Laura Dern and I had come for a visit. He loved the croissants and the pain au chocolats, actually, from Porto’s. So I got everything, I brought it back to the house. And he was so happy to see us together, and we spent three hours just talking.
Oh, to eat pain au chocolate with David Lynch, Kyle MacLachlan, and Laura Dern. Read the story here.
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Since starting to freelance, I’ve had fun contributing to Backstage magazine’s annual special issues for SAG Awards voters. Now that nominations are out, a few pieces I wrote about great film and TV ensembles are online:
How the ‘Hacks’ Ensemble Brought New Depths to the Dynamic Comedy
The Cast of ‘The Diplomat’ Keeps Their Secrets—and the Audience’s Attention
What the ‘Abbott Elementary’ Ensemble Can Teach You About Great Sitcom Chemistry
Yes, my streaming services are business expenses.