At Furdell.com, every week is Vagina Week

If you haven't yet been exposed to the wonder of television that is The Doctors, now's your big chance. Every weekday afternoon, a panel of "doctors" attempts to turn the human body and its potential ailments and inadequacies into an hour-long fart joke, all while trying to convince you that your breast implants should be at least one size larger than what you think they should be. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you...the Vagina Show.

Yes, The Vagina Show, complete with Margaret Cho and a vagina hand puppet. If I needed proof that The Doctors was the tackiest show on television, there it is...Margaret Cho. (See what I did there?)

We like Billy Joel just the way he is

Slate presents someone who hates Billy Joel more than James. Impossible, you say?

He can't even celebrate his "New York State of Mind" without displaying his oh-so-rebellious contempt for "the movie stars in their fancy cars and their limousines." You think Billy Joel has really never ridden in a limo?

Wow, guy. Calm the hell down.

I counter with this much more relaxed article (also from Slate) that argues that "the essence of [Joel's] badness lies in his squandered excellence."

Personally I think the fact that the extremely-obscure "Rosalinda's Eyes" was used so effectively in Freaks and Geeks (episode "Carded and Discarded") proves that Billy Joel's music can at least be worth something.

Come with me...to Dark Towers

"Look and Read" is a series of British educational shows meant to teach reading in primary schools. Each show has a book that goes with it, so you watch the show, read the book, and listen to Wordy the Horrible Orange Thing and his librarian friend as they go over the fundamentals of learning with you.

The only one I ever saw when I was a kid was "Dark Towers", a 10-part story made in 1981 that they were still using when I saw it seven or eight years later. After years of searching, I've found it. I've removed most of the boring educational bits. For the nostalgic amongst you, here's the whole playlist of 10 episodes:

Anyway this is the first time that one of my YouTube postings has resulted in a Video Response, which is pretty hilarious:

Furdell Classic Cinema Theatre, Vol. V: Tombs of the Blind Dead

This is going to be a slightly different edition of FCCT, with a modified format. The film in question is a very well-made, straight-up modern horror film, and almost anyone who's ever seen a scary movie knows what's going to happen -- some people are going to go someplace they shouldn't, and those people are going to die horribly. Since this movie is all about the voyage rather than the destination, I'm going to eschew the usual plot synopsis and character descriptions.

The Film: La Noche del terror ciego (1971), literally The Night of the Blind Terror -- but in America we call it Tombs of the Blind Dead.

Planet of the Apes connection: Apparently because some of the baddies' beards make them look moderately simian, and because of the timeless popularity of movies about intelligent apes, American drive-in distributers changed the title to Revenge from Planet Ape and added a poorly-narrated prologue explaining that humans destroyed ape civilization centuries ago, and that the apes vowed to one day rise again. (Bonus promotional tidbit: some theaters required both a ticket and a free, Blind Dead-branded barf bag for entrance. Adorable.)

Background: Tombs is the first of a series of four films by Spanish writer/director Amando de Ossorio. I stumbled upon it recently, while thumbing through Jamie Russell's very informative Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema, and as a fairly knowledgeable fan of living dead movies I was surprised to find a cult-favorite series I'd never heard of. Even more shocking, this first installment at least is very, very good. (I haven't gotten around to the other three yet, but I'll see them soon -- I got the DVD collection, which comes in its own coffin.)

Who are the Blind Dead?: Though it's not explicitly stated in the Spanish-language version of Tombs, their background makes it pretty clear that they're the Knights Templar, the same guys recently made somewhat more famous by the conspiracy theory presented in The Da Vinci Code. Apparently in their travels the Knights learned a thing or two about occultism, and specifically discovered the secret of eternal life. (Note: the secret is to visualize your goal and ask the universe for eternal life, and also to drink the blood of a virgin.)

The knights' misdeeds were full of graphic female nudity and gore, so they were excommunicated and hanged. They're blind because crows devoured their eyes while they hanged, as evidenced by this totally awesome medieval illustration.

What are the rules?: Every great horror film has rules. The rules in Tombs aren't specifically stated, but we can extrapolate a few important facts. First of all, the Blind Dead are blind (obviously). They're very slow-moving in close quarters, but that doesn't mean you'll get away; out in the open, they suddenly have phantom horses (and this is Europe, so you don't own a car). Bullets certainly don't do much, although -- in this installment, at least -- nobody appears to get a headshot, so it's impossible to say for sure. But again, you're in Europe and it's likely you don't own a gun. When they do catch you (and they will), they bite your skin and drink your blood until you die. Awesome.

Note that, with the blood drinking, the Egyptian origin of their occult doings, and their general sense of purpose, the Blind Dead are more like mummies than traditional zombies, which might explain why they seem to be totally unkillable. Meanwhile, at least some of their victims also come back to life to drink the blood of the living -- only one does in this film, but I anticipate more walking corpses in the sequels -- but at least they're vulnerable to fire, so they've got that going for them.

Selected Scenes: Like I said, there's no point in doing a detailed synopsis. But I would like to talk about some of the interesting choices de Ossorio uses, and how those choices set Tombs apart from lesser exploitative European horror of the 70s.

Let's start with a scene from near the beginning of the film. Here's the setup: poolside in Lisbon, Virginia bumps into her old boarding school friend Bet, and aside from a brief, weird moment, they seem very happy to reconnect -- until Virginia's friend Roger invites Bet to join them on a trip to the Portuguese countryside. Virginia is clearly irritated, but Bet pretends not to notice. (NOTE: In case you can't tell from the preview image, you might feel uncomfortable if coworkers see you're watching it. It doesn't have any nudity, though.)

There are so many things I love about that clip. I love how the smoke from the train becomes the mist in Bet and Virginia's surreal memory. I love that music cue, which comes up two other times in the film (once in the aforementioned awkward moment, and again when Virginia's body is discovered). I love the twist that Virginia wasn't unhappy for the reasons we assumed, and how skillfully that twist is delivered. For a low-budget sex-and-gore ultra-obscure 70s drive-in movie, this is really excellent filmmaking.

Like the blind dead themselves, the movie takes its time. I'm usually not a fan of slow-paced movies (I still can't get over the hour of footage that could be cut from Dr. Strangelove if only the establishing shots of the airplane could be cut down to a reasonable duration), but in Tombs every scene has a purpose. For example, Virginia spends a lot of time exploring Berzano, the abandoned medieval town she saw from the train. Those scenes serve to establish the setting, so that later, when the Blind Dead chase Virginia through the town, there's a great sense of space and everything feels more real. When Virginia's shoe gets stuck in a broken stairway, and she takes an impossibly long time to get free, the camera gets a chance to give us a really good, up-close look at the monsters as they slowly creep towards their victim.

In Eugene I worked with a kid who insisted the slow-moving zombies of yesteryear could never be as scary as the sprinters in 28 Days Later and the sub-par Dawn of the Dead remake. What a tool. The Blind Dead are not only slow, they're blind, and I submit to you that the following scene is scarier than anything either of those films presented.

You know I loved that heartbeat zoom at the end of that scene, too.

The last minutes of Tombs, when the creatures get on the train, are among the most shocking and terrifying I've ever seen. I'm pretty sure I actually had my hands over my face, and I may have said something to the effect of, "My god, when will it end??!?" I meant, when will the creeping terror end, not the movie. Anyway, I'm not going to show you the awesome scene I'm talking about. If you found the above clips entertaining, you really have to see this film, and it would be wrong for me to spoil all its major shocks. But I will show you the very end, after the carnage has subsided. Bet, riding on top of the coal, somehow managed to survive the ordeal. Note how the film ends on a couple of still pictures, in homage to the ending of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead.

I've typed a lot, and there's so much more to go over -- the weird morgue scenes, the lighting in Bet's mannequin manufacturing studio, the fact that the Blind Dead only seem to wake up when there's sex or nudity around...just, do me a favor and see the movie. There's no good reason for this one to be as obscure as it is.

The Female Perspective^tm with Julia Katz: Unfortunately there will be no Female Perspective today. Because I assumed this movie would be terrible (it's a European zombie movie I'd never heard of -- come on), when we originally watched it on Halloween we watched the American cut, reasoning that dubbed movies are always funnier. The American cut was good enough that I watched the Spanish cut within a week; however, it moves some scenes around and neuters the most shocking moments. Until Julia gets the authentic La noche del terror ciego experience, you'll just have to take my word for it.

I refuse to fixate on Amanda Knox's sex appeal

That's right, this article about Amanda Knox will focus entirely on her innocence, and not on the fact that I'm completely hot for her, because that's the right thing to do.

For those of you who don't know, Amanda Knox is a local student, abroad in Italy last year when her also-quite-lovely-but-that's-neither-here-nor-there flatmate Meredith Kercher was murdered in a particularly slow, painful, bloody way -- her throat was slashed, but her carotid artery was intact. Italian prosecutors came to the amazing conclusion that two men held Meredith down while Amanda did the cutting, either because Meredith refused to participate in or because Meredith was actively participating in some kind of really messed up sex act.

American student in Italy? Excessively bloody murder? Cops way out of their league? That's right, giallo fans: Amanda is actually living in a Sergio Martino film. That is not a place anyone wants to live, my friend.

OK, so, unless you actually watch a lot of giallo movies -- which, by the way, you totally should -- it's hard for me to explain just how perfectly Amanda Knox embodies the giallo protagonist. The connection occurred to me immediately when I saw the first video of her, when she kissed her Harry Potter lookalike boyfriend and then looked off in the distance apprehensively, as if she was thinking, "wait, didn't they say the killer owns a yellow scarf?"

See what I mean? She actually looks like an inexpensive Italian actress in the 1970s. How is that even possible?

The case against Amanda (and ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, Gryffindor House) is, in a word, bonkers. For a while, the evidence was reinterpreted on a weekly basis, and some of it is circumstantial enough to be laughable. My god, Amanda's fingerprints were found on a knife! A kitchen knife! In her home! Of course, the actual murder weapon is still missing. But wait: Amanda did laundry at some point! CASE CLOSED.

The international press really, REALLY wants Amanda to have done it, and they've jumped on every sleazy item they could. My favorite example: Amanda was told by a prison doctor (falsely, as it turns out) that she was HIV positive. Shocked and terrified, Amanda listed in her diary all the men she'd ever had sexual contact with, in an attempt to figure out how this could have happened. Somehow the tabloids not only got a hold of this information, but even distorted the facts, claiming she had sex with seven men in two months in Italy. Wow, international press. Nice one.

And all of this overseas anti-Amanda fervor of course makes for a fair trial in Italy, where apparently it's totally okay to detain a suspect for up to one year before even bringing them to trial. Un, fucking, believable.

Now, I'm kind of a true crime fan. I've read up a bit on the subject. Outside of Charles Manson's followers, I can't think of any scenario where three people would get together and decide to murder a girl for not having weird sex with them. Really, I'm trying to make that work in my head right now, and I just don't see it. Because these would have to be three completely ruthlessly evil bastards, if they were willing to hold Meredith down, cut her, and watch her slowly bleed to death. You're lucky to find one bastard that ruthlessly evil, but three in the same place? Preposterous.

What really happened? Hopefully, the third suspect -- one Rudy Hermann Guede, convicted of the murder in October and sentenced to thirty years -- actually did commit the crime, maybe while robbing Meredith. (His story -- that he was in the bathroom listening to his iPod when the murderer, an unidentified Italian man, entered and killed Meredith, prompting Guede to flee to Germany for some reason -- is almost as far-fetched as the prosecution's.) Unfortunately, with the state of Italian detective work as it is, there's absolutely no way to be sure.

Amanda, Furdell.com officially hopes that you're aquitted in a speedy trial and that you get back to Seattle safely, and not just because you are smoking hot.

My god, how her eyes pierce my soul. And say what you will about the Italian justice system, but installing a wind machine for more attractive defendants was a good call.

Oh, and lest you think my belief in Foxy Knoxy's innocence is in some way connected to her extreme hotness, consider this: it has long been the position of Furdell.com that the only thing sexier than a blood orgy, is a blood orgy that goes way too far. If anything, by finding her innocent, I'm condemning Ms. Knox to be not quite as hot as she otherwise would have been.

Patrick McGoohan: still dead

I just have to share this obituary from the AV Club. If you're a fan of McGoohan's work (and the Prisoner in particular), you'll know exactly what this guy is talking about.

I know he lived to be 80, and that's all well and good, but couldn't we have kept this one guy? Just this one? I mean really. The Prisoner. My god.

Belated R.I.P.: Ricardo Montalban (1920-yesterday)

In our grief over Patrick McGoohan, we didn't even notice that Ricardo Montalban died. I'll always remember him as Armando from "Escape from the Planet of the Apes."

You're asking me to risk imprisonment for the sake of two fugitive apes? The answer is a thousand times yes.

This year in RoboCop

FOX and Kiefer Sutherland -- noted long-time Furdell.com readers -- have taken my advice from not two years ago and brought onto the show Kurtwood Smith, aka Clarence "Bitches Leave" Boddicker from RoboCop and its famous TV prequel sitcom That 70's Show.

Hopefully also appearing this season: Nancy Allen, Miguel Ferrer, Ronny Cox, and somehow the late Dan O'Herlihy.

The state of equal rights, 2009

It's a new year, and I'm still hung up on my same old boring political issue: equal rights for everybody. Well, it's on my mind, and I have a blog, so I guess I may as well write it down.

I've been thinking back to the Vice Presidential Debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin last year, and the weird vibes I got from both candidates on the subject of gay marriage. Specifically there was Palin, who, with a confused tone, said: "...no one would ever propose, not in a McCain-Palin administration, to do anything to prohibit, say, visitations in a hospital or contracts being signed, negotiated between parties."

As I see it, this statement showed that Palin -- and, perhaps by extension, some portion of the GOP's voter base -- doesn't really understand what marriage legally entails. If a dying spouse's family objects to their unholy gay union in the first place, you can bet that spouse won't get to say goodbye, which is pretty heartbreaking; and even in the best circumstances, gay partners sometimes have to depend on empathetic hospital employees who are willing to break the rules at their own risk.

Meanwhile Biden said: "[neither] Barack Obama nor I support redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage. We do not support that. That is basically the decision to be able to be able to be left to faiths and people who practice their faiths the determination what you call it."

Note that Biden did not say that this is a decision best left to the individual states; he said it's best left to the churches! Isn't there something a bit off about that? I mean, sure, I've been spouting off that marriage is an intrinsically religious institution for years, but I'm a fringe whackjob with a website. Joe Biden essentially said to all my married atheist friends, "you're affiliated with a church."

The problem with both of these views is that they fail to boil the debate down to its practical application. Palin, Biden, Republicans in general and Democrats in general get all hung up on semantics, as if it's more important how we define a word than how we apply the law. This is America, dammit, we're all supposed to be treated equally by our government -- at least in theory, if never in practice.