Heads Will Be Shrunk

 BAKER STREET

by Eric J Baker

There aren’t enough exploding heads in movies these days.

In the glory years of splatter films (1978-87), an exploding head was the grand slam of horror set-pieces, worth at least three ax murders. With all the flesh eating and wall-to-wall zombie mayhem that unspooled in Dawn of the Dead (1978), for example, it was the scene of the SWAT team member kicking the door open and blowing the guy’s head off with a shotgun that made audiences holler the loudest. The grimy Joe Spinell vehicle (?) Maniac (1980) had a similar, even nastier sequence, as did an Alien rip-off flick from 1985, Creature (starring Klaus Kinski, whose head had its own problems).

David Cronenberg, master of the mindbender revealed.

But the crème de la crème in exploding-head scenes belongs to David Cronenberg’s telekinetic terror flick Scanners (1981), in which Michael Ironside blows up some bald dude’s melon just by thinking at him! That sucker went up like Mount Vesuvius (had Vesuvius been filled with blood, brains, and skull instead of volcanic ash). If you were a scrawny, socially awkward, wanna-be rocker/horror-buff adolescent back then (and who wasn’t), Scanners was the shit.

Antonio, Merchant of Menace

BAKER STREET | REVIEW

 by Eric J Baker

The most common evil is indifference, and it’s the form I practice. Sure, there are the more glamorous types, like serial killing, oppressing the citizenry, and being Michele Bachmann, but those take too much work. Indifference is passive. I can be indifferent to suffering the same time I’m watching Restaurant Impossible on Food Network. Work smarter, not harder, I say.

Almodóvar tries to figure out what the hell goes on inside a woman’s head once and for all.

That’s why I get along with my family doctor: He’s indifferent. It’s not that he lacks knowledge; he just doesn’t care if I live or die. I mean, some other patient will swoop in to fill the void, right? He’s the kind of doctor who tells you, “It’s nothing,” when you show him that mysterious dark blemish that recently appeared on your skin. Which is perfect for me, because that lets me avoid follow-up tests and treatment, thus saving time and effort while also encouraging me to ignore reality. Who knew conspiring in evil was such a breeze?

The Underage-Sex Reverse Richter Scale

BAKER STREET

by Eric J Baker

Editor’s Note: This marks the 100th post on the PFC blog, which wouldn’t mean much if this were TMZ with a dozen fluffy gossip posts an hour, but a PFC piece requires a lot of TLC to create.  It’s only appropriate that Eric Baker take this honor because it is he who kicked us over the 4,000-views-a-day mark on Friday with his Duran Duran story.  — James Killough

We were talking movie directors here the other day (actually, I was talking movie directors and Killough was like, “Yeah whatever, Baker—shut the fuck up—I know”) and Roman Polanski came up, not for his movies but for his marriage to Sharon Tate. The Polanski-Tate union suffered from the dreaded Billy Joel-Christie Brinkley syndrome years before medical science had even identified the disease, which occurs when an ugly, talented man marries a beautiful, possibly talented, but who cares, she’s a goddess, woman. And Sharon Tate was a goddess.

But, Sharon, why Frodo? WHY?

You may know that Tate was murdered in 1969 by Charles Manson’s gang and that Polanski went on to perpetrate a sexual act against a 13-year-old girl in the mid 1970s.

Lady Gaga’s All-You-Can-Eat Vag Buffet

I have to admit, I briefly joined my nieces, Savannah (7) and Uma (5.5), as a fan of Lady Gaga after Bad Romance was released last year.  I thought it was stompin’ good fun, not to mention that it kept me company whenever I thought about my love life.  But she has lost me with this:

In a nutshell, it’s a very expensive sophomore art school project.  She is trying too hard and the results of her efforts fall short of her earlier video work.  And, yes, that last sentence was rewritten several times; Galliano has homos worldwide stopping themselves before they go too far with what they really think.

Even though my nieces are Episcopalian Hindus — also known in the more rarified circles of Tribeca as ‘Piscadoos’ — at the risk of sounding like an avuncular prig, I’m not sure I want them to see filmed reenactments of the Black Goddess Kali giving birth to the cosmos as might be interpreted by H.R. Giger.  I can just imagine explaining this video to them.

“Uncle James, what is Lady Gaga doing with her cooch-cooch?”

“She’s letting her vagina enjoy a David Cronenberg moment, darling.  And stop calling it cooch-cooch, you’re making it sound like a region in West Bengal.”

“What do you mean what you just said she’s doing with her vagina, then?”

“We’ll talk about it when you’re old enough to watch twisted R-rated psycho-dramas funded by the Canadian government.  How about we watch something appropriate, like The Tudors?”

They love The Tudors.