Just a pretty cool composite photo I created … maybe 10 years ago? It’s a mood. I’m pretty sure the original shots were taken in Salem, Virginia.
If you people feel compelled to give me a Sith name, Darth Loquacious will do just nicely.
This is probably a very odd way to remember Patrick Stewart following his passing, but I feel certain that my social media will be filled today with clips of the legendary actor’s role in the “Star Trek” and “X-Men” franchises. The first time I ever saw Stewart on screen was Tobe Hooper’s brain-busting 1985 horror/sci-fi opus, “Lifeforce.” (I don’t think I saw it upon its release … I’m pretty sure I caught it on either television or VHS.)
Stewart had a minor role. He is hardly in the trailer at all, though you can see him briefly around the .48 mark. (I am linking here, by the way, to the Youtube channel for Arrow Video.)
I think “Lifeforce” is one of those movies that is genuinely both good and bad. It’s … often incomprehensible, in my opinion. But the creature and special effects were top-notch, and the movie successfully conveyed an epic global monster-apocalypse. (The baddies that you see are space vampires.) You can’t really say that it failed as a horror movie … and it sure scared me a lot when I saw it as an adolescent. It might actually be overdue for a rewatch.
I’ve tried for many years to identify the two horror comics below. They were among the earliest scary stories I ever read. (Comics really are a great stepping stone to more advanced reading, people.) God bless the Internet.
It was waaaaaaay back in … 1980 or 1981. My family had taken a vacation to Nashville, Tennessee, and that was one LONG car ride. Both of my parents were unwaveringly cool about encouraging me to read, so they always picked me up something good when there was reading material available on the journey.
I’m pretty sure I was a second-grader at the time? (This is nearly a half century ago, folks, so the details may be fuzzy.) But the two stories you see represented below knocked my socks off. Unless I am mistaken, they appeared in Charlton Comics’ “Haunted,” #12 and #17, respectively.
The first (as you can probably tell) was about a little boy who finds a monster egg at the beach — and then brings it home to incubate it secretly in the basement. (Things get predictably sea-monstery.)
The second comic I am a little less certain of … the story I remember had a female protagonist who visited a mansion owned by a villain. She was consigned to a sprawling garden on the grounds that sprouted demonic vines that had skulls for faces. Our heroine somehow prevailed, and even managed to claim the villain’s mansion. (I guess he left the deed lying around in the open.) The story ended by explaining how she paved over the hellish garden with concrete. The concrete cracked every year, presenting the demon vines with possible escape — so she assiduously had it repaved every year. That ending really gave me the creeps.
One thing still puzzles me … these comics were originally published in 1973 and 1974. Would a tourist trap or local drug store really be selling back issues of a horror comic from six to eight years prior?
And any comics historians out there see that I’ve gotten any of the above details wrong, please just shoot me a note or leave a comment. I’d love to learn more. 🙂
Long Island, New York. Here are a few more photos of Longwood High School and its students, courtesy of our unofficial class archivist, the indispensable Carrie Schor. These would be shots of the International Student Organization, between 1988 and 1990.
I miss skinny 1980’s ties.
Thanks again, Carrie! 🙂
Long Island, New York. Here’s a set of incriminating photos from someone who really should be named our class archivist — Carrie Schor (formerly Carrie Harbach). I believe most of these come from our junior and senior years (1988 – 1990). But I’m not sure. That snow-colored, skinny little gnome Nolan in the red Adidas t-shirt looks considerably younger than a high school student.
That shot at the beach is of a couple of members of the International Student Organization.
More next week.
Occoquan Bay/Potomac River, 2015. I miss this lady — and her husband and sons. One of the coolest families I have ever met.
Sam Neill passed away on Monday at the age of 78. I think most of my friends would associate him the most closely with the various “Jurassic Park” films in which he appeared (1993 – 2022), or maybe the classic 1990 film adaptation of Tom Clancy’s “The Hunt for Red October.”
But, being an older Gen X’er, my first memory of this fine actor wasn’t for his roles as a nice-guy paleontologist or an affable would-be Soviet defector. It was the goddam anti-Christ.
“Omen III: The Final Conflict” arrived in 1981. (I would have discovered it on VHS a few years later at my local mom-and-pop video store.) It never became a part of the zeitgeist the ways its predecessors did in the prior decade, but it was definitely my favorite. (I am linking below to MDB Trailers for the trailer.)
It had a “cool” factor that the other movies lacked — thanks to Neill’s performance as a charismatic devil incarnate. He was smooth and charming and persuasive, and was a hell of a lot more fun to watch than a bratty kid who screamed when he was brought to church. He could even psychically control dogs, for some reason.
The assassin-priest protagonists were also really cool. (I was an apostate even then, so it took a lot to make me root for the clergy.) I think I was also really impressed with the broad canvas over which the film’s plot was placed. I’d grown up on scary movies that were mostly standalone monster movies (or maybe slasher films). Seeing an epic battle with lots of combatants in a larger theological context really entertained me as an adolescent horror fan.
Neill made the movie. It just wouldn’t have been the same without his perfect blend of charm and menace. I think he always got too little credit as a fantastic bad guy. Think about it. If you took his Damien Thorne and inserted him into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, would’t he be a contender for its best villain?
A few of my fellow horror fans have opined on social media that the film has not aged well. Maybe I was just easily impressed as a kid. I’m going to have to check it out again to decide where I stand today.
“All in the Family” (1971 – 1979) was an institution when I grew up. Even if you were a really young kid, you knew it was a pretty big part of the zeitgeist.
Both the opening and closing credits were filmed in Glendale, Queens. It probably didn’t look very different from Woodhaven, Queens, where I was a baby — though I obviously remember very little of that.
One of the show’s fans actually visited Glendale last year and found the house where the Bunkers were supposed to have lived. (The house’s fictional location was Astoria.) The guy posted a pretty neat video of his visit; you can find it right here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knUS6X36gkE
The neighborhood actually looks a lot nicer (and greener!) than it did back in the 1970’s. But I guess that’s probably true about a lot of places around New York City.
So people still remember this 1986 ad as the “Gallo wines commercial with the classical music” that they loved but could never identify.
Well … it sounds like classical music. But the composer for the pretty piece is none other than Vangelis. (If you’re anybody who’s anybody in my particular corner of sci-fi nerd-dom, then you know that Vangelis was responsible for 1982’s legendary “Blade Runner” soundtrack.)
The name of the piece is “Hymne,” and it was originally released on Vangelis’ 1979 album, “Opera Sauvage.” The original song, which differs a bit from the version in the commercial, can be found right here.
I only learned while writing this that Vangelis wasn’t really “a group.” It was a single Greek composer — Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou — who passed away in 2022.
