Pop Culture Petri Dish

As is customary, there are a few things cultivating in the Dish, but for now it's all about the Bacchanalean food orgy that is Thanksgiving. The missus, dog, and I headed south to my parents' digs for a satisfying feast yesterday, and today we'll be having some Thanksgiving orphans over to our place for a second gorge-fest. That means today, in my universe at least, is Thanksgiving Day, too. In celebration and thanks, please find the winning entry in the illustrious 2007 Seattle Opera Hand Turkey competition, magnificently rendered by, um, me. Enjoy (or at least, don't chortle too derisively). The Petri Dish will also ape one of television's grand traditions and direct you to a re-run in lieu of original programming: Namely, this 2005 entry about the greatest Thanksgiving movie ever created: Blood Freak (guess what's gonna be post-turkey-gorging entertainment at the old homestead this evening?). Happy Thanksgiving, and may all your turkey comas be restful, dar...

For a lot of years it wasn't fashionable to be a fan of Rick Springfield, unless you were a swooning teenage girl. Rock snobs and insecure males everywhere dissed the musician/ General Hospital heart-throb during the height of his musical success in the Reagan Years. But with that teen-idol stigma packed away in the old Pop Culture Hope Chest like a beat-up high school yearbook, the music he made stands the test of time surprisingly well. Listening to his 1981 watershed record Working Class Dog (with its inescapably brilliant hit single, "Jessie's Girl") just cements this hypothesis. Pound for pound, it's one of the best power-pop records of its day, easily the equal in bright hooks and energy of anything the Plimsouls or Cheap Trick put out at the time (that's high praise indeed coming from this affirmed Cheap Trick nerd). He gave his rock more polish and gloss than the aforementioned two outfits, but avoided Journey's strident hamminess and Bon Jovi...

For decades, Robert Goulet was Mr. Perfect. With his old-showbiz helmet of pompadored black hair, bright blue eyes, chiseled jawline, and bell-clear baritone speaking/singing voice, Goulet (who died on October 30 at age 73 ) was less a traditional leading man than a larger-than-life cartoon of that leading man, and to his eternal credit he always seemed as keenly aware of it as anybody. He rose to prominence as the stage's first (and I'd argue, definitive) Sir Lancelot in Lerner and Lowe's monster hit musical Camelot in 1959. That voice and those features--both strong and distinctive enough to clearly communicate to the back rows of the most packed houses on Broadway--ensured him frequent employ on the musical stage, most recently in 2005 for a revival of La Cage aux Folles . But Robert Goulet became celebrity comfort food of the most welcome variety for me (and many of my generation) on TV in the seventies and eighties, logging in scores of talk-show appearances and gues...

Once again, MGM/UA bows to Horrorpalooza. The Bat People , a favorite mid-seventies chiller of mine (and, yep, another special request from Horrorpalooza 2006 ), just made the digital translation on a nifty DVD double bill with the 1982 horror flick, The Beast Within . And both movies make for unpretentious good times. It had been a few years since I'd screened either. The last time I saw The Beast Within was as a horror-hungry adolescent during its initial theatrical run, and our dog-eared VHS copy of The Bat People hadn't seen the inside of a VCR since I lived in Tacoma six years ago. The Beast Within re-jiggers a classic sci-fi scenario, with a young woman (Bibi Besch) being assaulted by a giant monster. She gives birth to an apparently normal son (Paul Clemens), but once he grows up he develops an appetite for extremely rare meat and experiences an extra-traumatic growth spurt, if you know what I mean and I think you do. It's junk, but pretty entertaining junk, direc...

Rotten Tomatoes has posted its list of the 50 Best-Reviewed Horror Movies Ever , and like any Movie List, there are some bones to contend with. Just for fun, here's RT's Fearsome Fifty (with the occasional editorial blather), followed by my own completely personal and utterly subjective list. I shall cop out and put mine in no particular order... Rotten Tomatoes' 50 Greatest Horror Movies: 50) The Innocents (1961): No argument from this corner on its inclusion, but it should be way higher. 49) Dead of Night (1945) 48) The Dead Zone (1983) 47) Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) 46) A Tale of Two Sisters (2003): Haven't seen it. 45) Carrie (1976): Evilspeak is more fun, but if you've been slugging it out alongside me for the last two weeks you know that already . 44) Eraserhead (1976) 43) The Exorcist (1973) 42) Three Extremes (2005): Haven't seen it. 41) Fright Night (1985) 40) Ringu (1998) 39) House of Wax (1953) 38) Shadow of the Vampire ...

Some guys get a tie from their spouse for their fortieth birthday. I got monsters. Rita earned her cool-for-a-girl stripes once more by taking me to my first Fangoria Weekend of Horrors Convention in May . This entry from Rita's eminently worthwhile Blog covers the event with customary wit and aplomb, but in anticipation of my iminent blathering she deliberately omitted the Convention's rarest treat (and the personal highlight for me). Most of the guests at the Con were filmmakers and actors solidly rooted in current horror cinema--guys like Eli Roth , Rob Zombie, and Dog Soldiers/The Descent director Neil Marshall --with one fascinating exception: Fangoria editor/convention coordinator Anthony Timpone booked legendary Spanish actor/director Paul Naschy for a rare US visit. If you're not a horror obsessive, you've likely never heard of Naschy. He's been directing, writing, and starring in horror movies since the late 1960's, but most of his efforts wound up ha...

Unintentionally bad movie musicals hold an irresistible thrall for me, but (as has been intimated in these virtual pages before) I'm not much of a fan of the artform as a whole, especially the modern musical. Gloppy ballads (a trope of the genre) give me the heebie-jeebies, and the grunting rock dork in me involuntarily cringes at the slick and hyper-enunciated Broadway singing/composition style being wedged into a backbeat like Avril Lavigne throwing on a Sex Pistols T-shirt. So it's grand news to this musicals-loathing curmudgeon that Bat Boy the Musical , playing at the Artswest Playhouse in Seattle 'til November 10 , entertains so thoroughly. As the title indicates, this off-Broadway creation takes the late, great Weekly World News's favorite cover model as its inspiration. But rather than follow the WWN's increasingly outlandish printed reports for a plotline, Bat Boy the Musical keeps all of the action in Hope Falls, West Virginia, where the mysterious titl...