First Price movie I ever saw in the theater was Scream and Scream Again in 1971 when I was 13. We still lived in an all-white suburb then (we moved downtown a year later), but my dad dropped me and my buddy David off downtown. David and I were terrified of all the black kids in the audience, but nobody fucked with…

I'm 58 and white, but first saw The Abominable Doctor Phibes in a double feature with it and Madhouse at the Colony Theater on downtown Fayetteville, NC's notorious Hay Street, in the summer of 1974. The audience included Sweet Jesus Jones, a pimp who was a regular customer at Tyler's News, where I worked from the…

Rogue Nation is the more generous, as it lets the great Ferguson be really believable as a badass. It helps that her fight with the giant goon involves knives. That's one form of combat where speed does matter more than size (lighter weight thrusting swords, too — Liam Neeson couldn't have beaten Tim Roth using a…

If you were over 12 and black in the 70s, you knew Phibes. Seriously, Vincent Price was as popular with African-American audiences as Bruce Lee or any Blaxploitation badass. Ah, the crossover that never was.

Strongly disagree, as they say in surveys. Sadako being a young adult allows her to be played by a trained actress/dancer with that great stick insect body language, as opposed to Samara, a slightly chubby little girl who doesn't move in nearly as creepy a fashion. And while Rick Baker is a god, I found his makeup,…

By "according to many historians," you mean according to Art T. Burton, author of the 2008 Black Gun, Silver Star: The Life and Legend of Frontier Marshal Bass Reeves, Mr. Burton is indeed an historian and most of his book is decently researched and fairly convincing, but even he himself admits that his speculations…

Bass Reeves was a badass and deserves to much better known, but not for the spurious connection to the Lone Ranger, which is complete bullshit.

There are photos where it's clearly Cassavetes in a scaly makeup.

The novel is similar to Stevenson's Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, in that it simply can't work the way it did when it was first published, as everyone knows the big reveal. I was a kid when the movie came out, and I and all my friends knew it was about a lady having the Devil's baby, even though none…

Diana doesn't get frozen. She either walks away from the war, or she ends it. If she walks away from WW2 before Hiroshima, she looks less heroic. If she stays in, she takes it straight to Hitler and ends it, and it's Tarantino style alternate history.

Ironically, the Cisco Kid is a murderous gringo hiding out in Mexico in the original O'Henry story.

Wyatt and Doc apparently had something of a falling out after Doc asked Wyatt if he was becoming a "Jew-Boy." Doc was one of the few people who could get away with giving Wyatt shit, but he drew the line at jokes about Josie.

That looks like it might be a ball python in the photo. They only get about 4 feet long, half the length of North America's largest harmless species like indigo snakes, bull snakes and black rat snakes, and not exactly "huge" in python terms. This one is being held close to the camera, so parallax, combined with…

There have been plenty of transcendent and optimistic love songs from him since '81, starting with 1985's pretty damn wonderful Various Positions, the album with the first version of "Hallelujah," but which also has the lovely "Coming Back to You" and "The Night Comes On" (not as gloomy as the title sounds), as well…

Cale pretty much assembled the famous version of the song from Cohen's dozens (allegedly over 80) of abandoned verses. Almost everyone who's covered it since has used Cale's five-verse version, with:

Too many people who cover "Hallelujah" leave out the dark humor and the self-mockery that rhymes the titular refrain with "what's it's to you?"

I wondered about that at the time, but even his early work has references to occasionally having sex with men.

Ethics and proper credit aside, one problem with the Marvel Method as practiced by Lee is that the artists were doing much more work without getting paid for it. Wally Wood had some pretty angry things to say about writing Daredevil without even a bare-bones outline and not being paid anything extra, when I talked to…

Does Beef Burger/Biff Burger count as fast food? There's only two left in the nation, one under the original Biff Burger name, but the basic biff is cheap (99 cents) and fast. Just meat and bun, roto-broiled so the former drips on the latter while it's being toasted, then dipped in that very special sauce. Best…

Country ham biscuits, goddamit. Biscuitville, Bojangles, even Hardee's. No sausage biscuit can compare to a decent ham biscuit.