I Drink the Tang, I Eat the Toast

Ugh. I have a cold/sinus infection/stomach issues. It started over a week ago and it's still hanging on like an annoying hanging-on thing. I haven't been sick like this for quite a while, where I just had to stay home and wait it out. Here I have this great job and I can't go to work! Suck. So I drink the Tang, I eat the toast. I sleep a lot. And cough. It's not that bad, it could be worse. I don't have a horribly stuffed-up head, thanks to this procedure some sensible doctor told me about a few years ago, nasal irrigation. It's basically like an enema for your nose. Hey, being sick isn't pretty! But seriously, this beats taking antibiotics, which will probably be the downfall of mankind.

Anyhoo, I've watched a lot of TV lately. I expected there would be some good stuff on for Halloween, but not so much. There was Exorcist II, which stars Richard Burton as a priest who gets brushed by the wings of the demon Bazoozoo. Uh, yeah. If you look it up, it's spelled Pazuzu, but it sounds like Bazoozoo. Couldn't they have come up with a demon name that inspired a little more fear, instead of visions of the fifth Teletubbie? Bazoozoo, yeah, he's the cyan-colored teletubbie who wanted to teach the kids irony, he didn't make the cut. And how sad is it to see the great Burton in this B-movie horror sequel? Oh, yeah, and James Earl Jones plays a great healer Kokumo (from the Beach Boys' song?--way down in kokomo?) somewhere in Africa in a mud hut wearing a locust mascot head, but also a city slicker entymologist who is developing The Good Locust, who calms all the other freakin' out locusts so they don't destroy crops and stuff. But wait, my favorite part of the movie was this funky hypnosis machine that Linda Blair's psychologist was using in her freaky all-glass clinic. It's like a strobe-light metronome that you control with your brain. And you can share your trance/vision/flashback with someone else, they just have to put the headgear on and synchronize their strobe-light metronome with yours. Very 70's, and very classic Hollywood, the whole hynpnosis thing being such a snap. And funny how Louise Fletcher plays a role very similar to the one she'll play only six years later in the much better movie Brainstorm: hard-working psychologist using freaky new scientific device to cure people.

Well, even though that movie kind of sucked, I obviously had fun watching it. Here's my shorter thoughts on Wolfen: Plodding. Gregory Hines plays a hip black dude coroner. Oh, yeah, you know he gets killed. He's too nice. But if you want to see what Edward James Almos looked like before he became the patriarch of Battlestar Galactica, here he is as a skinny young Indian. He even gets naked! Not for a love scene, but to mock the white fella cop who thinks he's shape-shifting into a wolf. It's pretty weird. The premise is interesting, about an ancient animal living on the fringes of society picking off society's throwaways. But then they use real wolves at the end and I'm just not buying it, they're just wolves, they're too small to rip people's heads off with a single swipe. I'm just too CSI-educated for that now.