FACELESS (1987)

The passing of Lina Romay made me realize that I'd seen few of her films nor lots of Jess Franco's stuff overall.  I watched THE AWFUL DR. ORLOFF ten or so years ago and remember almost nothing about it except that it was awfully fun.  FACELESS was filmed much later and features Romay in a bit part as the wife of Dr. Orloff.  It's acclaimed as one of Franco's better works and also one of his juiciest in terms of splatter levels.

Truthfully, I wouldn't wander into this expecting ropes of intestines to be flying all across the screen.  The plot, which is basically EYES WITHOUT A FACE in the eighties, demands a certain amount of grue.  Can't have full face transplants without breaking a few faces, bro.  But this is no August Underground or Nacho Cerda thing, really.  A plastic surgeon makes one little mistake in his storied career and the victim/patient comes after him with a vial of acid.  His sister saves him only to get unprettied up.  From there, the doctor goes on a quest to find beautiful women and their faces to save his sister from her facelessness.

It is a Jess Franco movie, so I expected a lot of lurid sexy time.  Porn diva/Vanna White-doll hybrid Brigitte Lahaie is in this as the surgeon's assistant and Caroline Munro also shows up in a nighshirt to increase the dish count.  I wouldn't call FACELESS especially sleazy or anything, though.  It feels like the epitome of an eighties movie.  Models, cocaine, high-heel sex on pricey couches, and the Cutting Crew-style electro-pop "Theme from Faceless".  

I dug the cast a lot.  The aforementioned Lahaie and Munro, plus Chris Mitchum brings his usual spirit of grindhousey fun to a role as an investigator of sorts.  My hopes got high when I learned Telly Savalas was in this, but he really doesn't have much to do.  The effects are pretty solid and Franco wisely edits them in non-lingering ways for the most part, the second screencap above being a pretty egregious exception.  The film flirts with Big Themes like voyeurism (at one point, actresses and models are described as people who are paid to be looked at), but I suspect that most of it is pretty skin-deep, ha ha ha.

I wish I had more to say about this!  It's no masterpiece, but it's certainly an acceptable time-killer even if it's occasionally baffling in the Euro way.  Faceless!

THE TAINT (2010)

Great news, guise, the gender dichotomy inherent in the horror genre has been upended!  You know how almost every horror film after NIGHT OF THE LEPUS has been bejeweled with exposed and exploited lady breasts?  Well, thanks to THE TAINT and its 2.5 million engorged penises, it's not an issue anymore and we can all be separate-but-equals.  At the very least, the meatsword damage in this film checkmates the stone phallus lady-vexation in CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, so it's off the table from now on, K.

Science goes awry again as a male stimulant that inadvertently causes violent misogyny gets dumped into the water supply.  Heads get smashed and hideously erect beef whistles spout gallons of paintlike semen.  For the duration of this film, we'll follow sunglass wearer Phil O'Ginny (it's Irish) and badass squirrel-slaying park ranger Misandra(!) as they navigate the post-Taint apocalypse.  There are flashbacks aplenty and the film skips around like an eight-year-old girl playing hopscotch in front of a movie theater showing PULP FICTION.  But it works.  

It doesn't surprise me that Troma just picked this up.  The massive number of man bananas on display aside, TAINT recalls the best of Troma: profuse gore and ridiculous and hilarious purposeful camp.  The effects in this are pretty impressive, as in the applaudable decision to not make this a 2-and-a-half hour thing.  TAINT clocks in at just over an hour, which is plenty of time for this sort of exercise, so please tell every other horror filmmaker in existence today, okay?  The effects are GREAT except when they're not supposed to be, like when yogurt guns are shot and giggle sticks sliced by knives.  But the head-crushing, oh my, it's immaculate.

There's no reason to get too intellectual or whatever.  But obviously this movie is playing with gender roles deep-rooted in our society.  BUT here is what I want you to take away: THE TAINT is not boring!  This is NOT the movie equivalent of being lectured at by some chubby professorial type in a sweater with cat hair all over it.  It's fun, it's outlandish, and if you watch it and just get head-crushing and mutilated winkies out of it, I'm sure the film's makers would say, "Fine, bro."  It's also not part of the burgeoning gay-horror scene, like those BROTHERHOOD movies, 99% of which are horrible.  And why is American minority-horror always horrible?  Like, is there A single good black-American horror film? (PS: If this is not the most offensive part of the review, I am quitting)

I liked this so much that I forced my co-workers to watch it on my birthday (yesterday, THANKS FOR REMEMBERING) and, I don't want to give away my identity, but we work in a pretty conservative and staid field and they all laughed and were mortified immensely.  So that is a recommendation of sorts!  If you dig the seemiest side of genre stuff, you would be doing yourself a disservice by not obtaining this.  It's a good watch with your non-church or riot grrrl friends. 

Buy it here!

AMAZON JAIL (1982)

AMAZON JAIL comes to you courtesy of Oswaldo de Oliveira, who also brought us the superbly brutish BARE BEHIND BARS.  This man knows women in prison in the movie way, not the pen palling with the Manson ladies way.  AMAZON JAIL isn't as willfully putrid as a lot of ladies in lockup affairs, though.  Not even one vagina-burrowing rat shows up here, nor does anyone fire up a nipple-electrocution device.  But this film still glides along on sweet insanity and sweet bared manchests...

Is this not what you paid to see?  A pudgy and hirsute gentleman running a brothel in the Amazon?  With his neurotic and watermelon-loving main squeeze?  Keeping girls penned in with a series of wooden stakes?

The captive girls in this film get off pretty lightly on the WIP scale.  When Mr. Moustache tries to pressure them into sex business at his parties, they form a UNION to resist!  Thankfully, this is not WISCONSIN JAIL.  Inevitably, they escape into the jungle with only wispy nighties and girl power to aid them.  Birds, snakes, and lesbians rise to challenge them in their procession to freedom and suffrage or whatever. 

AMAZON JAIL is, overall, a pretty good bad movie.  Bad bad movies are 100% boring, but this is only 40% or so boring and overlong.  The remainder of the running time is devoted to hilarious, ridiculously good times like Moustache's sex/dance parties....

...and vaudeville sordidness...

It's really episodic, which is fine, because it's pretty consistently entertaining...

Especially when we meet the guy in the ice-cream suit who is a gay Satanist preacher.

If "quirky" hadn't been ruined by the likes of JUNO, I'd use it as a plank of support for this.  It's offbeat and fun enough in places.  Clearly, DW Griffith can just skip rolling in his grave, as AMAZON JAIL could only be confused by the most inept as a "classic film".  But those who seek background insanity to drink over will find fertile fields contained herein.  

This is my hundredth post on this thing!  And it will possibly be the last post for a good long while...I'm thinking about starting a blog to cover horror and genre ebooks, so that will likely take up more of my time until I get bored with it.  Mors ultima linea rerum est.

SATAN'S BLOOD [ESCALOFRIO] (1978)

Mondo Macabro delivers again!  This seventies sleazefest from Spain goes for the gold in one of the most difficult hybrids in horror: the erotic horror film.  I know there are tons of them out there, but has anyone, even a baby fresh from the oven, been frightened by the likes of the WITCHCRAFT series?  As stimulating and good as it is, do you think a viewer was ever really upset by the alluring DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS?  These are questions for science, but I can answer this question—what is a film that is legitimately both sexy and scary?  Answer: SATAN'S BLOOD.  Or ESCALOFRIO.  Either works.

A couple meet up with what are purportedly a college friend and his galpal, then everyone goes back to a mansion in the sticks.  The mansion-owning couple have quite the collection of occult doodads, although if you are like me, you will sigh and wave your arm like a diva whenever a pentagram is shown.  So these people are like Wiccans or something?  Still, it's the seventies and there's no reason to be a pentagram pedant about such business.  The foursome end up playing eighth-grade games on the coolest Ouija board I have EVER seen...

...then the non-Pagan couple discover their hosts naked on an (UPSIDE-DOWN) pentagram and are promptly placed under a spell and sucked into an orgy.  I cannot lie on New Year's Eve, these scenes are quite stirring.  The ladies are gorgeous and all-natural, the guys are not distractingly repulsive.  It's choice.  But SATAN'S BLOOD isn't just about sexy times on the logo of Wicca, it's about horror!  Awful lady-eating, bad things with dogs, and death aplenty all go down.  I don't want to overpraise this thing because it's a low-budget film with all the attendant flaws, but so few films get this stuff right that it's well worth your time to seek this out.  

One peripheral note: you'll recognize lots of the voices in the English dub from all your fave Italian zombie and such movies.  This kind of made me wonder if voice actors got pigeonholed into roles and, if so, if hearing their voice automatically colored the viewer's perception of characters.  This is another question for scientists, I expect.  In the meantime, break out las tits and los black candles and get yourself a copy of this one.

THINGS TO LOVE IN 2011

I live in West Virginia, so there's A LOT that I have yet to see (THE WOMAN, CHILLERAMA, MELANCHOLIA, etc.) because most things don't come anywhere near here. West Virginia is like Kryptonite to movies that aren't chick flicks or explodey superhero things. Also, I am going by US release dates because I can't fly over to Japan to see the 2010 premiere of 13 ASSASSINS; I can just wish about it. Fun fact: I watched 308 movies this year (so far).

 1. ABSENTIA ~ I saw this at a con and, as far as I know, it's still playing festivals exclusively, while CREATURE and DYLAN DOG made it into theaters, so there you go, there is no God. This is one of the most elegant horror movies I've ever seen and, from a storytelling/atmosphere perspective, it's irreproachable. It has the same brooding, melancholy tone that made SESSION 9 so memorable and it sticks with you long after viewing. Incredibly depressing and so good.

 2. HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN ~ The least elegant movie I've ever seen and one of the most quotable. "When life gives you razor blades, you make a baseball bat... with razor blades." "They're going to make comics out of my hate-crimes!" Most of the time, neo-grindhouse fails because it tries too hard to be arch and quirky or whatever, but HOBO manages to stay entertaining without crossing the line into being oh so pleased with itself and its wit. It's insane how much better the spin-offs of GRINDHOUSE trailers are than GRINDHOUSE itself.

 3. 13 ASSASSINS ~ It's probably impossible for someone to like everything that Takashi Miike has done, but I've enjoyed the majority of the stuff I've seen. Even so, this feels like a comeback, although it's probably one of his more conventional movies, even with the one-hour fight scene. That is not hyperbole. A dramatic martial-arts epic in the vein of Kurosawa, for real.

 4. THE TROLL HUNTER ~ I loved this and thought it recalled GHOSTBUSTERS or GREMLINS in that it was rooted in horror, but was generally a fast-paced action-comedy with really likeable characters. Scandinavia redeemed itself after my unpleasant RARE EXPORTS experience.

 5. ATTACK THE BLOCK ~ And this is like a modern-day GOONIES or something, only peopled with British street thugs. A better, not-annoying Euro SUPER 8.

 6. DREAM HOME ~ Not to be confused with DREAM HOUSE, which is American and allegedly sucks, this is the first genre thing I've seen from Hong Kong since the China takeover and it was shocking how explicitly the movie criticized life under China. It doesn't have the old Category III levels of gore, but it's wet enough. I hate slasher movies so much, but this one won my heart and nestled into a very short list of adored slashers, probably right under BLACK CHRISTMAS.

 7. I SAW THE DEVIL ~ Korean revenge horror from the director of the great TALE OF TWO SISTERS. Over two hours, but not at all bloated or boring & you definitely get your money's worth of violence. Wow, of things that I loved, a whole two so far were made in America.

 8. FINAL DESTINATION 5 ~ But America is sometimes really good at taking formulas that work and breathing a bit of new life into them. Seriously, never driving on a bridge again.

9. PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 3 ~ Formulas work, breathe new life, tank tops, demons, muy bien.

 10. SOURCE CODE ~ I almost put BLACK DEATH here because it's fabu, but it definitely released in 2010, so SOURCE CODE it is. Sharp modern sci-fi that recalls THE MATRIX and INCEPTION, only on a train, which recalls UNSTOPPABLE and SNAKES ON A TRAIN.

 Also pretty good: COUNTRY STRONG, ENDHIRAN (ROBOT), DRIVE ANGRY, DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK, CONTAGION.

 Best bad movie: It is going to be hard for anything to top the SHADOW PEOPLE, although you're not going to enjoy it as much if you don't get my friend Ernie to watch it with you.

I am very grateful that I have genre movies and the horror community to take me away from real life when I need an escape.  Best wishes for the little 2011 you have left and the 2012 that lurks in wait...

9 TO 5: DAYS IN PORN (2008)

If I ever made a porn, I would block it EXACTLY like this.

AKA the post that will finally make me alter my content settings.  I've been on a porn kick lately.  I read Ron Jeremy's book (there totally is one!) and Legs McNeil's pretty great The Other Hollywood, among others.  It's fun to learn about such a seedy and poorly-understood industry & it's depressing to learn that it's often exactly what you'd expect.  Abused or neglected girls with problems, creepy exploiters, low porn-industry self-esteem or raincoat-and-cigar sleaze.  9 TO 5 shows you a lot of that, too, but the delivery is a a bit more graceful and successful than many similar efforts.  

The doc selects a very varied group of subjects and jumps us all around their lives, an approach that recalls The Other Hollywood & Qbert and yields all sorts of benefits—I'd be skeeved out or gutted with sadness if I spent too much time with some of these folks, but pirouetting from couple Audrey Hollander & Otto Bauer to working-stiff-porn-agent Mark Spiegler to the charismatic Roxy Deville makes it easier to digest the whole.  

The filmmakers focus on pairs in a lot of instances—Belladonna and her husband, Euros Lucie and Tom, Audrey & Otto, Sasha Grey and her boyfriend, and sisters Mia & Ava Rose.  It's intriguing and educational to see how far from healthy these connections land, but it's difficult to measure the extent to which porn is responsible.  A good modern liberal would probably scoff at some fat schlub's insistence that couples are just the way we're meant to be, but I'm sure it probably doesn't help your trust issues to see your boyfriend sodomizing your best friend by a dishwasher.  Then again, maybe there's a golden mean between mating like Pentecostals and trying to out-orgy Rome.

But keep in mind that the porn business is all business.  One of the truest things that 9 TO 5 teaches is that porn has very little to do with real-life sexuality and contact.  It's highly doubtful that Audrey Hollander would be undergoing frosting enemas (or something...I was kind of covering my eyes with a sheet at this point) unless there was an enema gap in the free market.  The porn business is an adjunct limb of show business and is just as callous and bottom-line-eyed, despite dealing in flesh and fluids instead of cute robots and shit.  

Guess what: I don't even like porn (softcore/Skinemax material is a different story) and had no idea who 90% of these people were, but I still found 9 TO 5 to be a fine viewing experience.  If you're at all interested in the subject, I'd start here and then move onto the porn section of your local library to conduct further research.  I can't wait to see the Google keyword traffic patterns for this one!

IMPALER (2007)

After October's engorgement, I don't feel up to analyzing lengthy and often overlengthy horror movies, so I'm probably going to slowly fill up this blog with a few documentaries.  First is IMPALER, which covers the  gubernatorial campaign of "self-proclaimed" (this gets said A LOT) vampyre, Satanist, and wrestler Jonathon "The Impaler" Sharkey.  Fun fact: I have only known one person who spelled his name "Jonathon" and he had sex in public rest stops in Louisiana and liked to fondle the hair of sleeping boys.    

 This Jonathon could give mine a run for his money, though, as IMPALER starts off a mocking documentary, sneering at The Impaler's quirks and bingo-hall bravado, but it gets really really weird when (SPOILER) it's revealed that Jonathon's half-sister Kat, whom he claims to have nailed, is actually an alternate personality of Jonathon himself!!  Beyond that insanity, we spend lots of seedy time with Jonathon and delve into his mom-abused past and multiple fake deaths.  The worst traits of Satanists, wrestlers, and rednecks congeal into the cauldron of Jonathon.  Even given the traumas he allegedly suffered as a youth and all the hard luck, I still found it pretty hard to like him or feel for him.  He seems too infused with the spirit of every loud dumb redneck I've ever known.  I was rooting much more for his dingbat wife's kids to run away and escape to saner pastures.  

The film itself is pretty rough-looking, with gobs of handheld shots and minimal ambient lighting.  Parts of this drag and bore, but overall it's not a wasteful experience, albeit basically being just a sideshow.  

Watch it here.

HALLOWEENAGE #31: THE SHINING (1997)

So Stephen King was legendarily displeased with Stanley Kubrick's liberty-taking adaptation of THE SHINING.  A friend told me this story when we went to the Kubrick SHINING and it's tremendous, so let's pretend it's true: 

"Kubrick didn't have any contact with Stephen King before the movie except one time he called him late at night and the conversation was like...

KUBRICK: Is this Stephen King?

KING: Yes.  It's 2 in the morning!

KUBRICK: Stephen King, your novel suggest that you believe in an afterlife.  Do you believe in an afterlife?

KING: Uh...yes.

KUBRICK: (pause)  Well, I don't.  (hangs up)"

Whatever the case may be, Kubrick's film excised whole swaths of King's book and changed a lot of things around, so there was more reason for this remake than the usual "people know the title, so maybe they will pay to see this by mistake".  Plus it was a mini-series on ABC and occupied multiple nights like roustabouts occupy Wall Street, so very little had to be trimmed due to time constraints.  This is both a good and a bad thing.

I guess addressing the differences would be a good place to start.  Tony is this edition is not a croaking finger, he's a fully-formed floating nerd from the future who dispenses warnings to young psychic Danny.  Much more is made of Jack's alcoholism, including scenes at the AA meeting and him swinging around a copy of the Big Book.  Also, Jack's bitter relationship with his dad comes into play here, making me wonder how much of that is autobiographical, since King also mined it for the "Jordy Verrill" portion of CREEPSHOW.  Of course, a big difference is that this has a different cast.

Did you know that I hate child actors?  I'm not as fond of Kubrick's SHINING as some, but one of its strengths is the way that Danny never becomes annoying or cloying.  Bad remake, bad!  Because Courtland Mead as this Danny swallows way too much screen time with inane dialogue and songs about snow.  Plus he has an annoying nineties haircut, like he took a picture of one of the cannibals from CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST and told his beautician that he wanted to look like that.  Child actors should be seen, not heard, if they can't be sentenced to live on a farm where cameras are not allowed.  Too cute and cloying.  Advantage: Kubrick.

I like Rebecca DeMornay.  She is a knockout and a solid actress and I would love the chance to disappoint her, but perhaps this is not the right role for someone of classic beauty.  To me, Shelly Duvall works better in the role and seems more fragile and imperiled.  But Mornay delivers a really energetic performance and definitely should not ever feel jealous of Duvall.  I love you both equally.  Advantage: Kubrick.  

The casting of Steven Weber from that show WINGS was an interesting choice and he wisely opts to not channel Nicholson.  Pretty good performance, although it does feel hindered by TV content restrictions, as it's hard to take a person seriously as a crazy person when he keeps calling someone a "damned pup".  It's hard to top Nicholson's screeching screaming and camping around as well.  Advantage: Kubrick.

There are things that this SHINING does better, though.  It's much more a straight horror film, so the horror elements that come into play are sometimes more effective.  The tub lady is an easy highlight here, as she's memorably grotesque.  Sometimes the ghosts look iffy or laughable...

...but sometimes they make the whole four hours of this worth watching.  And there are fun cameos!

I've never read the book (and probably never will), but occasionally the dialogue is a little corny, especially the earnest interchanges between Jack and Wendy.  When people are shrieking and going nuts, it's fine, but those scenes could maybe benefit from a heavy editing hand.  Danny's dialogue, too, feels unconvincing, like kid dialogue from the fifties cut and pasted into a 1970s(?) setting.  The more obvious supernatural elements work just fine here and I wouldn't say that either film's approach is superior.  Of course, this SHINING lacks some of Kubrick's pricey helicoptered camera shots and stuff, but director Mick Garris of MASTERS OF HORROR renown does a good job at framing shots and keeping camera movement interesting and none too showy.

One more weakness and then I am never watching a horror movie again because I am so tired: the CGI hedge animals here.  Oh my god, this bungle!  They look terrible!  Thankfully, they show up at the midpoint of the film and then only briefly, but they are not even a tenth of the greatness that Kubrick's hedge maze is.  I actually became embarrassed for the film.  Such a poor choice. 

This is quite long and demanding of your time, but if you enjoy the story or books in general or the Kubrick version, you should probably check this out.  It's pretty interesting, if also pretty flawed.  

HALLOWEENAGE #30: DOCTOR DRACULA (1978)

I was taken aback and excited about this...

...but then I saw this and said, "FUCK FUCK FUCK!"...

...but this turned out to be a pretty good experience overall.  Al Adamson, director of BLAZING STEWARDESSES and DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN, made a pretty good bad movie here with the technical consultation of Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan.  Synopsizing the plot is going to be tough, but let's try: a gang of Satanists in tuxedos include a famous scholar named Wainwright, who is possessed by the spirit of Svengali.  At one of Wainwright's magic shows, he is confronted by a psychiatrist named Dr. Anatole Gregorio.  I doubt I am spoiling anything by revealing that the doctor in DOCTOR DRACULA is a vampire.  And vampires hate Satanists like Satanists hate Wiccans, apparently. 

There are whole other subplots involving dead moms and a girl named Trilby who is a goddess of psychic energy or some shit.  Plus a prostitute who gets turned into a slave of the Satanic grotto/coven, then exclaims, "I feel a lot better about the direction my life has taken!"  This thing is stuffed with good times, from lines like "He can't hear and can't speak, the way he expresses himself is through his magic tricks" to situations like Doctor Vampire answering the door with, "I was just about to go to bed" while wearing a full tuxedo.  It's such energetic nonsense that you won't have time to get bored.

A woman climbs a tree to escape a vampire and a girl possessed by her mom sounds just like Tony in THE SHINING and yet Robert Carradine as head Satanist Radcliff is still the best thing about DOCTOR DRACULA.  He delivers his lines with full-on Heston/Palance gusto, even when he has weird pauses in the middle of them, like he is trying to remember lines.  Even drunk or unprepared Carradine smokes everyone else in the cast.  Every Radcliff scene is a highlight.

The depiction of Satanism here as this weird booster club of middle-aged cranks makes me wonder how much input LaVey had into the finished product, as the Church of Satan allegedly started out as a similar gang of nerdy weirdos back in the sixties and it would seem to damage his mystique and profits to come right out and admit it.  I mean, I think it's cool that old people would get together to worship Satan and talk about "the mace of Lu Dong—Huxley wrote a book about it!", but I could see it going over badly with your typical moviegoing crowd.

This is atrocious and incompetent, but it avoids the cardinal bad-movie sin of putting me to sleep.  I'm actually surprised that it doesn't have more of a reputation, as I could definitely see people who like ROBOT MONSTER or TROLL 2 enjoying this.  Exquisite.

HALLOWEENAGE #29: SHOCK 'EM DEAD (1991)

IMDB-researching this was much more fun than watching the movie itself.  The gushing praise for the film should be in a textbook on ringer reviews and the fact that this is the first line of Traci Lords's bio—"Traci Lords is a study of a determined and complex woman with a very controversial background"—does not ever stop being incredible.  SHOCK 'EM DEAD is heavy metal horror, released in 1991, when this kind of metal was dying very quickly indeed.  For some reason, this feels more dated and less fun than similar flicks like 1988's BLACK ROSES and 1986's TRICK OR TREAT.  

I'd be curious to see how it was received in 1991, the same year in which Nevermind hit.  The story of loser  Martin, who strikes a deal with a voodoo woman to become the world's greatest rock star, but loses his soul in the process, SHOCK feels more like an "Up All Night" sex comedy with mild violence than any kind of horror film.  Same characters and stupid clothes from that era, same cramped sets and small jacuzzis.  And the music is much more embarrassing than Fastway's awesome TRICK OR TREAT soundtrack or the various true metal on BLACK ROSES.  This is tepid AOR, with titles like "Virgin Girl" and "Hairy Cherry".  

The music business scenes also seem really weird and ancient, with "band showcases" and lots of talk about six-figure advances.  Oh, yeah, and Traci Lords is in this, albeit not enough to warrant occupying the entire VHS cover.  She plays the bassist's girlfriend, who captures Martin's fancy after his rock star transformation into Vinnie Vincent or something.  She also stays fully clothed, which means that her acting ability is the only gift she gives this film and therefore ugh.  Traci wasn't bad in the NOT OF THIS EARTH remake and she's not terrible here, but her performance definitely ain't enough to salvage this thing.

"Bland" is a pretty fair term to use for the whole thing.  It's not the worst movie ever, although it might be the worst heavy metal horror film ever (ROCK N ROLL NIGHTMARE is a little more memorable than this...can't think of anything else that might trump it for sheer boredom or putridness).