Planet Birthday

As I mentioned in my last post, my birthday was the day before father's day. And it was quite an occasion in my life, a very important birthday, since I turned 30. I was so moved by this that my girlfriend got me a stripper.

What?

She did.



See?

This is, of course, Cherry Darling from NECA. Cherry was the main character in Robert Rodriguez' masterpiece (yes, there, I said it) Planet Terror. Cherry was portrayed by Rose McGowan and the figure, while is not nearly as perfect as it could have been, does have a pretty good resemblance to her.

The sculpt is great as you already expected from the good people at NECA but this again suffers from the non-articulation syndrome. This figure is so non-articulated that I'm a little uncomfortable calling it an action figure. Staction would be, perhaps, a little better. I know the word is horrible, but is better than "actatue" or "stagure"...

Cherry does come with a base, lucky us 'cause is the only way to get her to stand, and an interchangeable leg. Here's the leg with a couple of Justice Plastic Man legs for comparison (this also made me write the weirdest comic I've ever come up with...)



As I mentioned before in this blog, I have an arrangement with my girlfriend, since it's really hard for her to keep track of what Action Figure I'm looking for at any given moment, I promised not to buy movie related toys so she can get me those as presents. So far, this worked perfectly.

I loved Planet Terror and I love the idea behind Cherry Darling, a regular person that lost a limb to Evil and replaced it with... Wait a second! I've heard that story before in B class movies... She's not the first is she? I wonder if they have anonymous meetings to support each other...



Until next time.

(I got a stripper for my birthday, what did YOU get?)

Dude, you have a hole in your face...

When Jerry Bruckheimer asked me to come up with an idea for a teen version of his series C.S.I. I was honored. And only two months after that request I came up with the idea for a pilot that had the name I now, today, use as a title for this post.

"Dude, you have a hole in your head" was about an amateur club of forensics investigators/teens and their talking dog. My own personal homage to some childhood nightmares I must have had. Every episode would have fifteen to twenty minutes of incredibly gorey teen homicides, followed by five minutes of wacky chases and a twist secret ending in the last minute. I know what you're thinking: Pure gold.

But Jerry shut us down even before we get to production, but after I asked the fat kid from Nickelodeon's amazingly lame hit show Drake & Josh to loose some weigh for the pilot (he was going to play the corpse...)


Like this, but way cooler and with at least one of them dead.

But this was never going to be, doomed to join my other unproduced hits like The Possessed Flying Nun (she could spin her head as a helicopter) and Biker Mice from Mars... No wait, that actually happened...

Moving on, this time, I got a cool toy that finally allows me to use my unused title for something: McFarlane's T1000 action figure from the series Movie Maniacs 4 (released in 2001).



James Cameron's Terminator 2 was released in 1991 (ten solid years before this action figure was produced). On a side note, hey, did you remember when James Cameron used to direct cool science fiction movies? OK, when the movie premiered I was on holiday with my folks and we went to a drive-in to watch it. I remember that the drive-in was pretty much destroyed and the wall that prevented you from looking at the screen from the outside wasn't there anymore. All the cars waited in line to get in while the movie was still showing, so I distinctly remember seeing the ending of the movie without sound, incredibly weird images like the T1000 melting and not getting what the fuck was going on. Then I saw the complete movie and everything made sense. Yeah, I know now that the plot itself didn't made much sense... But still...

I loved that movie.




The action figure is great and it captures perfectly the moment when Arnold was shooting the T1000. Some of the coolest special effects of my childhood memories, and the reason a huge amount of kids got mercury poisoning trying to build their own T1000.

The sculpting is excellent, it doesn't only capture the character but also is incredibly accurate to Robert Patrick's face:


"FX Tech: OK Robert, stand still, we're going to blow up your face now
Robert Patrick: OK... What?"

Being it's from early 90s McFarlane, this figure came with a ton of accessories: Two hands, a gun, two of those hook hands he uses to jump on a car, a slightly bent metal blade that's not really too threatening, and last but not least, a whole new torso:



I don't display him with it because, frankly, it creeps the fuck out of me. But I can imagine the dialogue on set...


"FX Tech: Stand still Bobby, we're going to blow up your torso now...
Robert Patrick: Oh, DAMN!"

This is a very fun figure, and it's incredibly versatile in spite of the clear lack of articulation. I think that these figures need another name, maybe Action Statues, I'm not sure, something like that.


Until next time. STAND STILL BOB, HERE COMES THE BIG MELTING SCENE!

(SHIT!)

Black(toy)bird singing in the dead of night

Hello sociology enthusiast, welcome to another edition of: Meet the Geek. This week, we are going to discuss how geeks are usually polytheists. This is a conversation that might take place between to subjects of the species known as The Geek.

Wild Geek 1: How 'bout Josh Whedon?
Wild Geek 2: Man, Josh Whedon is GOD!
Wild Geek 1: Are you going to see Alice in Wonderland?
Wild Geek 2: Sure man, Tim Burton is GOD!
Wild Geek 1: Finished Sandman last night...
Wild Geek 2: Really? Neil Gaiman is GOD, man, GOD!

And so on and so forth... of course the problem with The Geek is that they can never agree about the gods they follow as a tribe, for example:

Wild Geek 1: Man, George Lucas is GOD!
Wild Geek 2: Are you crazy man? Gene Roddenberry is GOD!

That's why I can say without the shadow of a doubt that some of you will back me up when I say "JIM HENSON IS GOD!"

And all that introduction is because today I'll be talking about this:



That's NECA's Chamberlain from the movie The Dark Crystal, directed by Jim Henson in 1982. Let me sum up the story for you: The Dark Crystal is about the journey of a boy-like thing (actually a puppet) called Jen, he's a Galfling (not to be confused with a halfling because of copyright issues). Jen kinda reminds you the Na'vi from Avatar... Except he's not blue, and he's sort of small not gigantic, and he's the last of his kind, and he exist in the real world, and his acting didn't suck... (OK, so maybe he's not like the Na'vi from Avatar, sorry I brought it up).



So, there was this race of Ugly-as-fuck super creatures that lived in harmony with the world and the powerful Dark Crystal, but when the Crystal broke, the creatures were divided into two Semi-ugly-almost-as-fuck creatures: the Mystics, good guys that looked like camel lizards and the Skeksis, ugly bird-dragons that are, of course, the villains of the movie.


"Polly wanna cracker... And your soul!"

There will be a lot of bird jokes in this post, because when I was a kid, the dragon nature of the Skeksis was lost to me, I just saw evil vulture-like birds. The Chamberlain is incredibly well sculpted, he shows his bird side perfectly, he's clearly evil, the detail of the ragged clothes is very well done and molded in soft rubbery plastic to give the impression of cloth, and his (somewhat flabby) dragon side is there too, but you have to be a little more thorough to find it...



One of the greatest things about the Chamberlain was his evil raspy voice. The responsible was non other than Master Yoda himself, Frank Oz. The figure is really good, looks great in my movie display and the best part is that it was a gift for X-Mas! The other great thing about The Chamberlain is that he automatically turns any innocent situation in an evil situation!



The Chamberlain is a devious character that wasn't even liked in his own tribe, he was exiled (and stripped naked) in the middle of the film. Is not a mystery why NECA decided to make only this Dark Crystal figure and not the others (good or evil), because the one that you remember after watching this master piece is non other than the good old Chamberlain.

There's a sequel called The Power of the Dark Crystal that is announced to premiere in 2011. Apparently it will happen hundreds of years after the first story, it will be done by a first time director and it will be written by the guy that did... Moulin Rouge, Romeo+Juliet and a movie with Zac Efron? Yeah, it's probably going to suck.

More bird jokes:



Until next time. EVIL!

Good? Bad? I'm the man with the blog...

As you may have guessed by now, I'm a fan of Army of Darkness (and Evil Dead too of course). This has a lot of reasons, the leading role of Mr. Bruce Campbell (AKA the Greatest Man Alive), the great eye of director Sam Raimi, the short but powerful March of the Dead song written by Danny Elfman, the paper maché skeletons, the cheesy jokes and, last but not least, the fact that I'm a by-the-book geek and we like this kind of movies (especially this one).

But my love for the movie goes back to the time when I was just a proto-nerd in a video store, I was like 13 or 14 and I decided to rent a VHS. One of the first (maybe even the very first) I rented to watch by myself and not with the family. At that age I wanted to rent other videos to watch alone, but the clerk knew my dad and wouldn't let me take home Nice & Naughty - The sexcapades of Ms. Claus - Part III from the restricted section of the store.

Anyway I was looking for cool VHS covers and I saw this baby:


"You had me at Trapped in time..."

I just loved it. Now I own the three movies on DVD, but that's not enough for a guy like me, I needed some plastic people to prove my devotion. Sometime ago, my girlfriend gave me the great NECA's Cult Classics - Wave 6, S-Mart Ash.


"Give me some sugar, baby"

This figure is beautiful, as NECA usually does great sculpting, comes with a bunch of accessories, including a rifle ("this is my BOOM-stick!") that won't fit in the holster without cutting the price tag (he takes it from the gun rack of the store for those of you that don't remember the movie). He has almost no articulation, since this is supposed to be more a collector's statue than an action figure per se. Once you are able to make it stand on his own, is all good. I especially like the details of the metal hand, but that's just the problem with this figure: He has the metal hand of Army of Darkness, but no chainsaw. NO CHAINSAW. Actually that does make sense for the moment of the film, but still... NO CHAINSAW.

So I went and bought this one:


"Groovy"

The Ash from Movie Maniacs wave 3 by McFarlane Toys. The year was 2000, the details in this one are no as impressive as the NECA, but the posse, the blood, the ripped shirt the accessories AND the CHAINSAW makes it really worthwhile. The montage scene from Evil Dead, when he cuts the corpse of his girlfriend into little pieces, cuts the barrel of the gun and attaches the CHAINSAW to where his right hand should be is still one of my favorite movie moments of all time.

Here's a comparison shot of the two figures:


"We both kinda look like Bruce Campbell, but you are good Ash, and I'm bad Ash. Little goody two-shoes, little goody two-shoes".

But where the McFarlane figure really pays off is in the accessories department. McFarlane was sure that an Ash figure was never going to sell. So they made it with all the accessories a fan could ever want, that way nobody would complain when the low sales prevented having another Ash figure in the market. So he packs a shotgun (that will go in the holster), a CHAINSAW (Did I mentioned the CHAINSAW?), the metal hand, a Necronomicon (the book of the Dead) and a Mini Evil Ash. How cute is that?


"I shall call him Mini-Me" (I know, I know... That's from another movie...)

Hell, even the Mini Evil Ash comes with an accessory, the fork that was used in the film to force Good Ash to eat one of the little guys in order to spawn a Big Bad Ash. Complicated? Here's another pic:


"Actually, he's not cute at all. He looks evil, and kinda melting".

For all of this and more, McFarlane's Ash and NECA's Ash we'll be together in my movie display shelf. I don't repeat figures, is true. But I think I can make an exception to please the Greatest Man Alive. Don't you think?



Until next time. CHAINSAW!