Dope Island: Exclusive Advance Directors Cut of War for the Planet of the Apes!

Excerpt from "Felix Doubles for Darwin" from 1924, but of course you all knew that already. Some days I can't remember whether it was Felix the Cat or Gumby who had the Blockheads as token villains. That ever happen to you?

The CWRU Sci-Fi Marathon, making American college great again, January 20-21

Either scenes from METROPOLIS or Hillary Clinton leading angry audiences members to Strosacker Auditorum for the Sci Fi Marathon.

This weekend a brave group of college-campus student-activists and progressive community members will participate in the most COURAGEOUS act of protest-art against TRUMP yet conceivable! They will sequester themselves in Strosacker Auditorium and force themselves to endure a torturous 36 hours (estimated) of nonstop science fiction and fantasy and horror features, short subjects, cartoons, trailers, TV episodes or whatever, not ending the ordeal until early hours of Sunday morning.

In the spirit of high-profile hunger strikes by Nelson Mandela, Mohandas Gandhi and Aung San Su Kii that brought down other TYRANNICAL DICTATORSHIP REGIMES, this act of pure SUFFERING and RESOLUTE MASOCHISM in plain view of the EYES OF THE WORLD will undoubtedly inflame the country to RISE UP together against the villain TRUMP at his very inauguration, overthrowing the EVIL FASCIST REPUBLICAN and instill HILLARY CLINTON as the rightfully elected ABSOLUTE EMPRESS OF THE GALAXY!

...Or, it's just another installment of the CWRU Sci-Fi Marathon. Whatever way the liberal media elites want to spin it.

Wizard World Cleveland Comic-Con 2016, Feb. 26-28: a video preview

Dope Island: The Fiend presents DW Griffith's message to the graduating Class of 2015

 A video by Charles Cassady, Jr.

Isn't it a pity that Brian Williams loses his livelihood for telling one tall tale...while celebrities who lie to graduating college seniors about the bright futures ahead for them in this no-income no-jobs economy just get to pocket a hefty speaker fee and lots of applause. Thanks to D.W. Griffith's BIRTH OF A NATION (1915) I was able to do a bit of retribution. It still hurts to see Lincoln martyred again, even if he is giving his life for satire.

Dope Island: Exclusive preview footage of Batman Vs. Superman revealed!

Dope Island: Police brutality caught on camera! - A Cleveland Movie Blog special video report!

I hope I don't have to explain that the footage is from a classic two-reeler that's almost 100 years old, EASY STREET. The big guy manhandling Charlie is a character actor named Eric Campbell who played villains in practically all Chaplin shorts from this period. And there is a Ferguson connection, insofar as Campbell, a huge Scotsman, died in a car wreck the very year EASY STREET came out (check out his Wikipedia biography; it was an incredibly tragic year for the guy all around). Sentimental movie fans refer to him as a "gentle giant" - wow, sound familiar?

I hope you internet kids get the main gag here, that cop Charlie subdues the strongman four times his size by asphyxiating him using the natural gas piped into an old-fashioned street lamp. This must have been back in the days when many such lights still existed, as pre-electric filament technology (but the same lamp has a police-emergency telephone; don't ask me how true to life that is, the two existing side by side). At dusk the city had fellows who went around lighting the gas street lamps by hand, imagery you'll occasionally find in period movies.

Dope Island: Godzilla addresses the graduating class of 2014

I couldn’t let sleeping monsters lie. Bad enough I had to know there would be a GODZILLA remake in my lifetime (the 1998 Matthew Broderick one, which I actually found not half bad – meaning not half good, either). But there was another that came along in 2014, that even got the hoity-toity critics on National Public Radio (National Public Radio people still got jobs?) to expound on the wonderfulness of the 1954 Japanese original kaiju classic, as a metaphor for the atom bomb, US imperialism, racism in the National Basketball League, lack of gay marriage, or whatever else NPR commentators are always on about.

This is the real scoop/blasphemy. I’ve seen them both, the original Japanese edit and the more commonly TV-aired American edit GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS, with Raymond Burr as a US reporter on the scene, who describes (mostly in flashback) how a giant, radioactive sea monster stomped all Tokyo into ruins.

Fiend of Dope Island: The Fiend trick-or-treats for Halloween with an abomination of a Fat Albert musical number

By Charles Cassady, Jr.

I recently had to watch most of the ENTIRE decade-long run of Bill Cosby's "Adventures of Fat Albert" TV cartoon (1973-1982), for a home-video trade journal. It was a lot of hours, for a rather small amount of money (my life story). One thing alone kept me going: the idea that I would take revenge with THIS! Remember how the first season of "Fat Albert" had an original musical number near the end, summing up the moral lesson of the episode? Stay in school, obey your parents, finish your homework, don't get teen-pregnant, be kind to animals etc. Perhaps I am a Philistine when it comes to the Philly brand of R&B, but I found the songs pretty unmemorable...except for "At the Hospital," which attempted to teach the Cosby Kids not to be afraid of going to the doctor. It started playing through my head like a top-40 alt-hit you just can't get out of your mind, and I just had to do a mashup setting its upbeat lyrics to horrific public-domain horror movie footage of mayhem in hospitals and mad-science lab settings. Can you name all the clips? Anyway, "Weird Harold," what was the deal with that guy? Everyone in the Cosby Kids gang called him Weird Harold, and there was nothing weird about him except that he wore a sportcoat all the time, but no tie. Big deal. I did that. Maybe that's why I've been a lifelong outcast as well. So all the more reason to get even with humanity via gratuitously gory videos.

Dope Island: 'Finding Dory' exclusive! The Fiend escapes from Pixar with unauthorized footage of the Nemo sequel!

"It's a joke, son." Back in 1939, when these animated images were made, most people would actually get that line, "It's a joke, son."

Dope Island: The Fiend's 2013 Graduation Address (not that anyone asked me, and it's pretty despressing anyway)

For the second year in a row, the Cleveland Movie Blog welcomes college graduates into the real world (where you realize that the only reason the last four years may not be the biggest mistake of your lives: if you are still alive, it is remotely possible you have time left to make an even bigger mistake).

Dope Island endorsed Mitt Romney for President! (here's why)

Not particularly enthused about either of the mainstream presidential candidates - but quite charmed by the comedy possibilities invariably brought to the mix by whoever tends to represent the Establishment - I made this spoof of a negative campaign ad, using footage from the 1968 public-domain classic NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. You can take it as sarcasm or take it literally, fine by me. I habitually vote for some third-party weirdo in any given presidential race, so that whatever disaster ensues, the blood isn't on my hands. Maybe someday, if enough people adopt this method, we'll actually elect one of those third-party weirdos by accident, as in PUTNEY SWOPE, but I can't realistically see it happening in large electorates.

Bob visits "Billy, Billy, Vid Billy" to review 'The Human Centipede 2'

Once again the Cleveland Movie Blog's own Bob Ignizio has teamed up with J. Jarvis Spurwinkle of the "Billy, Billy, Vid Billy" podcast for a video movie review. This time it's for the horror seqeul 'The Human Centipede 2'.

Cleveland Movie Blog editor Bob Ignizio does a guest review on 'Billy, Billy, Billy'

Hey folks, Bob Ignizio here. Normally I stick to the written word, but recently my good pal J. Jarvis Spurwinkle of the 'Billy, Billy, Billy' podcast asked me to be a guest critic. We shot two reviews, one for 'The Human Centipede 2' and this one for 'She Devils a-Go-Go' which our own Matt Finley reviewed previously on the movie blog. Since I wrote a screenplay for the producer of this film and know most of the people in it, there's probably a conflict of interest here, so take that into account as you will.

Breaking News! Cleveland Movie Blog caught verbally abusing Joe Eszterhaus too!

Video by Charles Cassady, Jr.

Dope Island: a Dope Island tribute to 2012 graduates (it's pretty sad)

By Charles Cassady, Jr.

This I found on a "Little Audrey" cartoon from 1949. It does resound well today, doesn't it? Except, of course, none of you will get a job right out of graduation. Especially a cool government job like sanitation-worker, with benefits and things; that takes real connections. Oh, what's the movie connection? Besides that the film-school students will likely top the list of unemployables (giving the Philosophy Majors someone to look down on and bully, at least), it might be of interest that Jeff Lenburg, animation historian, informs that "Little Audrey" was a Paramount cartoon series of the late 1940s/early 1950s, that went into production when Paramount lost the rights on a previous moneymakes, the newspaper comic-strip derived "Little Lulu" (and I'm still seeing Little Lulu comic books out there; shouldn't she be at least Teenage Lulu by now?).

Merry Christmas from the Cleveland Movie Blog

Have a great holiday season whatever you celebrate, and enjoy this video mash-up from Charles Cassady, Jr.

Dope Island: Fritz Lang predicted Occupy Wall Street in 1926!

By Charles Cassady, Jr.

The thing about the Occupy Wall Street protests to which I most related and sympathized were not the college-age kids upset that, for example, their boss at the Cleveland Clinic internship docked their pay for playing Angry Birds on their iPhones during the exploratory surgery demonstration, but one rather sad-looking older guy on Public Square at Occupy Cleveland with a sign reading, simply, "IF I HAD A JOB I WOULDN'T BE HERE." Wow, my life story in nine words.

So on that note, if I had a job I would not have been so inclined to waste my time and my iMovie skills to create this travesty of Fritz Lang's immortal 1926 METROPOLIS, an essential of world cinema which happens to fit the trendy anti-capitalist protests hand-in-glove. Of course, I have yet to see the recently released, "definitive" restoration of the silent science-fiction epic. Perhaps by pure accident it's exactly like this.

National Lampoon's Dirty Movie (now available on home video)

Every so often one sees a poignant press-release news story to the effect that, hey, remember the National Lampoon, once America's cutting-edge humor workshop? It's back! Fresh new editors, hip attitude, redesigned website, returning to NatLamp's glory days, etc. etc. And pretty much...not much ensues. Maybe another VAN WILDER sequel.

See, you kids, for a few years there - chiefly, during the Nixon Administration - the National Lampoon really did shine as a beacon of saber-sharp political and social satire. It did so as a magazine, books, a radio show, a series of recordings, and even a stage production (Lemmings), serving as a launch pad for the Saturday Night Live school of humor (that's back when association with SNL meant a compliment). Scrounge around in the basement of Mac's Backs in Coventry or someplace for a copy of the magazine's best-of/ published compilations, like Would You Buy a Used War From This Man or The Paperback Conspiracy. Still brilliant, if yellowing with age.
When the Lampoon ventured into film, it scored with one of the biggest comedy hits ever, ANIMAL HOUSE, and some okay followups such as NATIONAL LAMPOON'S VACATION. But that was about what, 20 years ago? The Lampoon since has been a pale shadow of its former spoof, mainly offering trite retro-slob campus comedies about beer, sex and drugs, watched if at all by dumb young males who wouldn't grokk a single Spiro Agnew joke without a Wikipedia assist.

The new NATIONAL LAMPOON'S DIRTY MOVIE gets a little bit of respect – a really little bit - for seeming to spring from a desire to sincerely, truly get some of that old NatLamp spirit back, starting with an opening reference to the classic "Buy This Magazine Or We'll Shoot This Dog" gag. Sadly, since it’s about cell phones in the audience, it’s a tipoff that somebody actually thought this thing would play in theaters. Even sadder is the reference to the documentary THE ARISTOCRATS, a hint that not only did DIRTY MOVIE never reach auditoriums, but that it languished about five or six years before being allowed to creep into public view, via the DVD Walk of Shame.

Citing THE ARISTOCRATS as a role model in DIRTY MOVIE's so-called plot is a would-be comedy director Christopher Meloni, pitching the chief (Robert Klein) at a nameless but Lampoon-like entertainment company (one of their wall posters is a promo for a fictitious satire “Not Another Holocaust Movie”) that to get their game back they should do a feature that goes THE ARISTOCRATS better by being nothing but gross, dirty jokes, strung together sans storyline, one after another (Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In does get a nudge here and there). Some characters recur, like a pedophile priest or the ever-disgusted mom (Cyndi Lauper) of a foulmouthed tyke, but mostly what we see is dramatizations of various body-function, farm-animal and racism gags, interleaved with behind-the-scenes hijinks as the filmmakers-within-the-film audition topless chicks, argue whether this movie is ever going to work after all and, ultimately, (SPOILER ALERT) going on trial before a judge played by boxer Larry Holmes for their project being declared a hate crime.

If it sounds unworkable and uncinematic, it pretty much is. DIRTY MOVIE wears out its soiled premise thoroughly at the 20-minute mark - which is not to take away anything from the generally scabrous quality of the jokes; most of them are indeed sick/stupid/politically incorrect just as intended. A few clunkers, a few howlers. But at feature length it's just a lost cause - especially if one has seen THE ONION MOVIE, from a few years ago, in which The Onion, seeming successors to the NatLamp college-humor crowd, really did pull off an okay translation of the source material. Or go back to other blackout-sketch comedy features of the 1970s, like THE KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE, TUNNEL VISION or THE GROOVE TUBE. Compared to those, NATIONAL LAMPOON'S DIRTY MOVIE is sad stuff. And consider that in the DVD marketplace o’crap it will probably get confused easily with EXTREME MOVIE, a junky compilation of teen-sex sketches from a few years ago.

I’ll say this, to be generous; DIRTY MOVIE does indeed capture some the spirit of a National Lampoon magazine issue, but unfortunately it’s one of the sucky issues from the early 1980s, when the jokes were virtually indistinguishable from the adverts. Fans should buy a full-page ad in the trades: "Attention NatLamp: Become Relevant and Funny Again Or We'll Shoot This Dog." 1 star out of 4.

Bonus: Here's the Amazon page for a recent nonfiction book about the Lampoon's golden era and the virtually forgotten Chagrin Falls humorist who played a key role in it.

Dope Island with Charles Cassady Jr.: My video mini-tribute to Buster Crabbe

I guess in all the hysteria over President's Day (LOL) I overlooked the birthday in February of Larry "Buster" Crabbe, who would have been 104. The Olympic athlete and serial actor was a hero to countless youngsters back in the days when movie properties like "Buck Rogers" and "Flash Gordon" were innocent, unpretentious low-budget fun, and I can only wonder how much boys in the Great Depression (the first one) enjoyed escaping into such chapter plays onscreen. Crabbe always seemed to be having fun and really looked like an Alex Raymond drawing come to life. I fiddled with the Buck Rogers trailer in iMovie when I was stranded somewhere, sleepless, poor and unhappy without internet access for a night - but with a sometimes-functioning iBook - and lo, here is my little tribute.

Dope Island with Charles Cassady Jr.: Even Cavegirls Get the Blues

With persistent winter ice and snow I thought I might take us all to thoughts of warmer weather (or post-apocalyptic climate change) with a montage of cavemansploitation cheesecake I set to old-time blues music. It also brought up a thought I had during Black History Month; if Africa is supposed to be a cradle of human evolution, how come the cavegirls in all these movies are Anglos? Rae Dawn Chong in QUEST FOR FIRE and Halle Berry in THE FLINTSTONES are the only prehistoric sistahs I could think of. What, animal skins and rags weren't good enough for Pam Grier, Jeanne Bell or Lena Horne? The Tom Robbins parody title came to me out of thin air. I really thought it was wholly original until I did a quick online search and found an obscure Donald Duck comic had used it previously.