WEIRD WESTERNS: BILLY THE KID VS. DRACULA (1966)

★☆☆☆☆  The first of two Weird Westerns made back-to-back by William Beaudine in which Western outlaws battle monsters. John Carradine starred as Dracula, and regretted it. By Max Sparber I'm going to peek in occasionally on a subgenre of Western films, called the Weird West, which combines westerns with supernatural elements....

Read More

IRISH-AMERICAN DINING: POTATO CANDY

In February of 1903, in the Kalamazoo Gazette, there appeared an ad of unsurpassed strangeness. “TO SAVE COAL is the problem this winter,” it started, and then immediately dropped the subject, adding “but that has nothing to do with the fact that our new confection has struck the popular chord and has sprung suddenly into favor.” The company...

Read More

IRISH FIGHTING ARTS: WRESTLING

Whenever the fighting Irish are represented, it's with fists raised, in a traditional boxing stance, and why not? The American Irish did produce a series of world-class boxers: Your John L. Sullivans, AKA the Boston Strong Boy; your Jack Dempseys, AKA nonpareil. But there are more ways to fight than the sweet science offers, and, by God, I mean...

Read More

IRISH-AMERICAN DINING: ONION AND DRIED CODFISH

It's always my desire to help the aspiring foodie. After all, if any trend is au courant, perhaps the au courantest is taking regional, ethnic, or peasant food and refashioning it with the techniques of fine dining. And we Irish-Americans are falling behind the rest of the world in this. Our forebears from Erin have kept apace with the trends,...

Read More

JEWISH HORROR MOVIES: JERUZALEM (2915)

A few days before Rosh Hashana, I wound up watching "JeruZalem," which is set on Rosh Hashanah, and even makes a point of looking up at the night sky above Jerusalem at once point, locating the three stars that demonstrate the holiday has begun. I'm always thrilled to find a movie that I can watch on a holiday, and "JeruZalem" is just about weird...

Read More

EVERYBODY TOLD ME IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN GOOD: PSYCHO-CYBERNETICS, AN INTRODUCTION

I took a speech class once with a boy who once said the word "Pyscho-Cybernetics" and we never let him live it down. It was 12th grade, so likely 1985, and the class was taught by Ernie Gulner. He was the sort of oddball teacher -- young, bearded and showily eccentric -- that you usually only find in films about visionary instructors who transform...

Read More

JEWISH HORROR MOVIES: THE POSSESSION (2012)

If you do a Google search for "Jewish horror film," 2012's "The Possession" is the first and most common search result. It is also the only explicitly Jewish film produced by Sam Raimi, who, like fellow horror directors J. J. Abrams, Larry Cohen, David Cronenberg, William Friedkin, Stanley Kubrick, John Landis, Eli Roth, Rod Serling, and Stanley...

Read More

JEWISH HORROR MOVIES: WORLD WAR Z (2013)

I will soon post about "JeruZalem," which details a sort-of zombie takeover of Jerusalem, but since I am posting these stories in chronological order I will start with "World War Z," which details a sort-of zombie takeover of Jerusalem. Despite the similar themes, the films are quite different, with the former acting as a POV of a Biblical apocalypse...

Read More

JEWISH HORROR MOVIES: THE UNBORN (2009)

Generally speaking, I like writer/director David S. Goyer. Specifically speaking, I like the deco paranoid supernatural noir fantasy "Dark City" that he cowrote, am a fan of his work on the "Blade" films, and enjoy his work on the Christopher Nolan Batman movies. He also wrote the recent Superman movies, but I won't hold that against him, as I...

Read More