Stoop Chat #5: We Bear Witness
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Tomorrow we hop an overnight jet to London, where we’ll pack our precious noise-makers 🎸🥁 into a neat little van (hopefully red🤞🏼 but black will also be fine!) and set out — three men alone, without a tour manager — for the wilds of Europe, as well as, of course, Europe’s great civilized strongholds. So sure, if we were die-hard we might’ve gone to the movies tomorrow afternoon, and if we were even really committed we could have gone today, but there’s so much planning and packing and family time that gets compressed into the 48 hours before departure that we jumped the gun maybe and went yesterday. It was great, obviously, as cinema-going always is, and here’s what happened:
… for some reason the phone stopped recording there. We caught it almost immediately, though, and resumed, mid-thought, like stone-cold pros. Would love to see Joe Rogan try this…
So, these mailers always make me want to do research and instead of doing my planning for next week, I thought I’d search up creature features on IMDb. It’s reminded me of Attack the Block which I don’t think is really in the same category as CB but I really enjoyed it and had completely forgotten about it so thought it was worth a mention.
About 80% of the films on there feature sharks, so maybe Sharknado started the trend, who can say?
Also, I now kinda want to watch this! 🙈😂
The VelociPastor - After losing his parents, a priest travels to China, where he inherits a mysterious ability that allows him to turn into a dinosaur. At first horrified by this new power, a hooker convinces him to use it to fight crime. And ninjas.
Thanks for this. Personally, I love a shoddy film but the ‘so bad it’s good genre’ is a tricky one to negotiate. It’s hard to know if you’ll just wind up watching something that’s bad. It got us thinking about creature features generally though. There were a few examples of this genre back in 1990 with films such as Tremors and Arachnophobia, and while Snakes on a Planes may have been part of a noughties resurgence (and was a particularly tacky example at that - I just feel a little unclean after watching it), it was preceded by Eight-Legged Freaks which is probably in the same vein so I’m not sure it can take credit for any revival. I’m a much bigger fan of Sharknado to be honest, which is glorious in its awfulness. I would happily watch the original any day of the week although, by number 5 even I had to turn off after 15 minutes. No mention of water spouts anywhere in those films, I can confirm. Given (potential spoiler alert) that the protagonist dives into a shark and makes his way out using a chainsaw with a woman in tow who had been eaten by said shark 20 minutes earlier as she fell out of a helicopter that it happened to be flying past, I would say the misuse of the term tornado is not the biggest issue the film has!
Not really sure about Cocaine Bear although my daughter has seen it and concurs it is funny. Thanks for avoiding spoilers in any case. Maybe I’ll pop it on my plane list. Will probably have to wait for long haul though. Not sure we get movies on a flight to Prague.
Hope you make the most of your family time before another month on the road. Travel safely and see you in a couple of weeks.