I’m a little late but I want to pay tribute to the late Rudy Ray Moore with a long overdue review of his first movie, DOLEMITE. But also I felt a little weird paying homage to a dude like that on the eve of our first black president, so for balance I decided to revisit MALCOLM X too. Pretty good double feature.

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Okay, we had that whole horror detour for Halloween. I want to get back into some action movies now. On Ain’t It Cool I recently reviewed the underwhelming TRANSPORTER PART 3 and the excellent J.C.V.D. And to celebrate that second one I also went and watched BLOODSPORT for the first time.

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I finished all the Phantasms, but there’s more Coscarelli where that came from so I decided to watch THE BEASTMASTER. Also, I forgot to link to this last week but I reviewed DANIEL CRAIG IS IAN FLEMING’S JAMES BOND 007 IN MARC FORSTER’S THE QUANTUM OF SOLACE.

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Well, these kind of taste like Halloween leftovers, but here in Obama’s America we accomplish what we set out to do, so I went ahead and finished reviewing the Phantasm series. I got PHANTASM III and PHANTASM OBLIVION.

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You know what sounds cool? PRESIDENT OBAMA. Am I right, or am I right? PRESIDENT OBAMA. PRESIDENT OBAMA. I like saying it.

I promise I’ll get back to the movies but honestly I can’t think about movies right now, my mind is too occupied. I was gonna try to buy an American flag suit but apparently there’s been a run on them, gotta get on a waiting list.

Anyway I’m sure you will not be surprised that I have a long and impassioned VERN TELL’S IT LIKE IT IS with my thoughts about election night. Please enjoy, etc. And congratulations everybody.

PRESIDENT OBAMA!

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Happy Halloween! (John Carpenter version.) Continuing with the Stephen King viewing I revisited PET SEMATARY. I’ve got a few more horror movies rented so there might be some Halloween spillover into November, but then we’ll get into some blaxploitation, maybe some old gangster movies and some action and shit. You know the drill.

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First of all, rest in peace to the one and only Rudy Ray Moore. The man who stuck his finger in the ground and spun the whole world around. I think his movies are hilarious, but he was also a big inspiration to me as a fellow foul-mouthed weirdo trying to do his own thing through whatever low rent self-financed format he could scrounge up. When I self-published SEAGALOGY I liked to fantasize that I was kind of like either Dr. Dre selling NWA tapes out of the trunk of his car or Rudy Ray printing up his own comedy records and travelling around selling them himself. I don’t think I quite matched the level of either of those, but it’s always good to have something to aspire to.

When I saw the man last year it was obvious he was getting older (in fact, it was his 80th birthday). But a man who uses earthquakes to mix his milkshakes, you don’t expect him to be whupped by diabetes. I guess beating up the days of the week or eating an avalanche can wear you down after a while.

I hope I’ll get time soon to sit down and watch my entire Dolemite box set (”Officially Disapproved By the Man,” by the way) and write up some more scholarly works, but I don’t think Petey Wheatstraw would’ve wanted me to interupt my Halloween marathon. So I got a review of a new horror DVD that comes out today, THE STRANGERS.

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How ’bout some more spooky Halloween fun with Oliver Stone’s W.? Ooh, scaaaaaarrrry.

By the way, can you believe Mother’s Cookies went out of business? What the fuck? I know many or most of my readers are in different parts of the world and have no clue what I’m talking about, but this has been pretty much the main cookie company here since 1914. I think they sold a little less than Keebler and somebody else, but they were around longer and made many of the staples that I never thought I would outlive. And yes, I do blame Bush for this, he fucked things up so bad it’s not even profitable to make a product that has been a staple for 94 years. So pour some sprinkles on the curb for those pink and white Circus Animal cookies. R.I.P.

And now that we got the important part out of the way, I just want to suggest that if you haven’t you watch the video of Colin Powell endorsing Barack Obama. I’ve never been on the Colin Powell bandwagon but this video is incredible in this A.D.D. age. It’s 7 minutes straight of a man talking very thoughtfully and fairly about the strengths and weaknesses of the two candidates. And then when he starts talking about the campaign and what’s going on in our country he makes some points on topics I’ve been thinking about but that I haven’t seen anybody else bring up, specifically his comments about “small town values” and about American Muslims.

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Sorry I’ve been AWOL for a week. Today I got a double-review of the two VHS obscurities I watched this weekend, a real good Australian giant crocodile movie called DARK AGE and a less impressive action movie called TRIPWIRE.

Also I’d like to note that using Google I stumbled across a guy’s Amazon wish list where the top two were Seagalogy: A Study of the Ass-Kicking Films of Steven Seagal by Vern and The Law of the Somalis: A Stable Foundation for Economic Development in the Horn of Africa by Michael van Notten.

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