Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we focus on the Slit-Mouth Demon of Japan. Monday we were introduced to the world’s worst Butterface. Wednesday we gave you sure fire tips to avoid her wrath.

I still don’t feel like I’ve completely managed to twist my mind around Kuchisake-onna. By extension, it’s likely that you haven’t either. If you’re deeply familiar with Japanese culture and society, you probably feel as though I’ve only brushed the surface of the legend, regurgitating all the requisite facts – slit mouth, surgical mask, vain inquisition and murder – without arriving at any real interpretive narrative insight save for another bogeyman rant and some tired Women’s Studies rhetoric that, itself, was plucked from an American curriculum. If, like me, your understanding of Japanese culture and society is wrested from a pack of cultural stereotypes and loose associatives – anime, game shows, Samurai and academically motivated suicides – Kuchisake-onna probably remains, quite literally, a ghost, a fanciful story, untethered from any definitive cultural prerogative or fixed history. I can confidently link the Bermuda Triangle to the New Age movement, to the UFO mania that began in the 1950s and to a curious fixation on Atlantis. Kuchisake-onna? All I can do is tell the story.

Even the intrepid, if over-confident, know-it-alls over at our English-language Wikipedia have desperately tried to resolve the slit-mouthed woman through a Western lens. The “See also” column provides links to Bloody Mary, which is described as “a similar apparition in Western urban legends” (they’re both women who terrorize children, but, otherwise, I’m missing the connection), La Llorona (which I covered in November 2009) and the Glasgow smile, the popular Western (more specifically Scottish) term for the wound caused by the slitting of a victim’s mouth from ear to ear (think the Black Dahlia and/or Ledger’s Joker). Of course, run the Japanese Wikipedia page for Kuchisake-onna through Google translate, and you don’t get any of that. In fact, the page alludes (I’m sure in Japanese it flat out says, but the auto-translate made the syntax all wonky and there’s enough subject/verb disagreement to constitute a full-on armed conflict) to clashing histories and varied folkloric iterations of the legend, all of them re-shaping the grinning specter through the susurrus murmurs and whisperings rising up out of individual prefectures.

All of the treasures of Japanese Wikipedia lie AFTER THE JUMP…

(more…)

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we focus on the Slit-Mouth Demon of Japan. Monday we were introduced to the world’s worst Butterface.

Popular folktales are just that – popular. And they belong to the populace in a way that few other types of media ever will. Like in any game of telephone, these whispered stories are just one subversive tongue away from being notably and untraceably altered. If parents can use fictions to manipulate a child’s fears to form a sort of behavioral corral, the child can use fiction to build a ladder over the fence or, better yet, smash the beams entirely. One kid says something; a few more repeat it, and pretty soon you’ve got mobs of little Asian children pelting hotties with Pocky. Or, at least, that’s what you get in the case of Kuchisake-onna. While smirking mothers berated their children with threats of slice-and-dicement at the scissor-wielding hands of the grinning curfew enforcement proxy, the children were spreading rumors that a defensively thrown stick of Pocky proves perfectly sufficient in warding off the hungry snippers of ol’ Slit-gob McCutty. No Pocky on hand? Don’t worry. There are plenty more head-scratching Kuchisake-onna evasion techniques.

Blood Ruby

This is less a defensive technique than a befuddling rewrite of the whole story. In this version of the Kuchisake-onna legend, a person who answers, “Yes.” to the mutilated woman’s gash-flashing second query is handed a giant, blood-soaked ruby. I guess because kids are so nutty about their precious stones. Just make sure to wash it off before setting it in the eye socket of a cursed pirate skull. Also to make sure that it isn’t just a blood-soaked Ring Pop.

Confusion

This is a strategy that could only come from the Pocky-crusted mind of a grumbling, apathetic adolescent: In response to Kuchisake-onna’s maskless “Do you think I’m beautiful now?” simply reply, “You’re so-so” (in the seventies, when teens still exhibited a modicum of verbal competency, it was, “You’re average looking.”) The response will cause the insane monster to pause and think for a moment, giving you the opportunity to sprint away, or else trudge hollowly onward, burdened as you are by the soul shackles of your drone parents’ suburban conformity deathstyle. A more recent variation of this same strategy claims that you can tell Kuchisake-onna that you’re late to a previous engagement, and she’ll apologize for her rudeness and let you pass, unscathed (this also works with sharks).

Do the do

This variation’s a mixed bag – it spares your life, and you don’t have part with any of your crunchy snacks, but you also don’t get a fat gem smeared all over with someone else’s blood, and you have to wear Pomade. Because Kuchisake-onna hates the smell of Pomade. But, then, so do most ghosts. That’s why licensed parapsychologists call it “exorjism.”

Find four more SURE FIRE ways to avoid mutilation at the hands of the Slit-Mouth Woman AFTER THE JUMP…
(more…)

The title “Snakes on a Plane” offered a fairly explicit promise, which the so-named film delivered on in full. Now, I’m not saying that it was an amazing movie, or that it provided said snakes on said plane to the scaly, flaming, fangs-v.-martial-law degree that the Internet hive mind rabidly hoped… just that all the grumping and grousing about it left a bad taste in my ears (which, on the upside, resulted in my being diagnosed with synesthesia). Snakes. On a plane. Say what you want about the less-than-stellar CG, fanboy pandering re-shoots and laughably self-conscious cult-status-hungry mugging – the film delivered on its title. How can anyone complain?

Is my view apologistic? Perhaps. Self-righteous? Definitely. Have I ever believed this opinion was anything other than 100% objectively correct? C’mon. I write. On the Internet. The thought would never occur to me. Until this weekend, when I saw “Human Centipede (First Sequence).” Now I feel like I can’t even tell my left from my right. (Dyscalculia diagnosis is pending.)

“Human Centipede (First Sequence),” as you’re probably aware, has caused quite the e-ruckus among cinematic thrill seekers and genre enthusiasts alike. If you aren’t aware, the film’s notoriety comes from its gruesomely straightforward premise – a mad scientist kidnaps three people with the intention of sewing them together, mouth to anus, in order to create the ultimate domestic plaything: the human centipede. First sequence.

Get the rest of this post AFTER THE JUMP…
(more…)

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we focus on the Slit-Mouth Demon of Japan, come back Wednesday and Friday for more!

Ancient, feudal Japan’s legends of proud warriors and disgraced Samurai haven’t always mixed well with contemporary urban legends and trendy pop cultural fads. The harakiri-inducing “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III,” for example, found its titular rubber-suited pizza fetishists travelling back to 15th century Japan, where they pose as demons, fight an evil warlord and learn a valuable lesson about self-esteem. The legend of Kuchisake-onna, the grotesque and reviled slit-mouthed woman, however, gets the job done in both timelines. Bonus: some newer versions of the story sprint so far into left field that, by the time you realize the entire business is just another cautionary tale engineered to keep the ladies demure and the unaccompanied minors from running roughshod over the pachinko arcades, they’ve collided with the outfield wall.

Kuchisake-onna is, on initial inspection, a beautiful woman, save for her surgical mask – a not-uncommon Japanese urban accessory worn for protection against airborne viruses. She’s tall and graceful, with dark eyes and, often, a black umbrella. Most of the stories begin on a foggy night, just as a school-aged dawdler, procrastinating his way home, passes by the mysterious woman, who is standing in a circle of streetlamp light. As the boy glances up at her, she approaches him and asks, in a soft voice, “Do you think I’m beautiful?” He looks her up and down in his best, ignorant approximation of his horny uncle’s notorious roving-eyed strip leer. “Yes.” He replies. The woman’s response is not the anticipated, blushing “Arigatou.” Instead, Kuchisake-onna tears of her mask to reveal a hideous, gaping mouth that’s been slit open ear to ear. For some reason (probably because she’s evil), she has rows upon rows of razor-sharp teeth. “Do you think I’m beautiful now?” cackles the poo-grinning -Onna. The child freezes. He stammers. He swallows once and attempts a double-time version of the top-to-bottom ocular hump.

Who the hell is this lady?

Find out… AFTER THE JUMP…

(more…)

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. Monday we learned just why The Triangle might be the strangest result of number fudging in history and on Wednesday we explored the Triangle’s connection to aliens.

It only seems appropriate that our hatch-battened voyage through the Bermuda Triangle should take us from the star-gazing visions of Steven Spielberg to the subaqueous dreams of James Cameron. Sure, “The Abyss” has nothing to do with Atlantis, but given the number of Triangle enthusiasts whose necks are cramped in all the opposite places of the upward-looking UFO seekers, the film seems like a good place to start. USOs (Unidentified Submerged Objects), like the one that Ed Harris’ character hangs out in while assuring the aliens that humans do, in fact, remember how to love, make frequent appearances in Atlantean-themed conspiracy manifestos.

While you can find various reports from around the world of actual submarine crafts sighted tearing through the waves of this or that ocean (Japan’s Dragon’s Triangle, another of the certified-vile vortices, boasts a panty vending machine’s worth) most USO sightings seem to involve mysterious lights shining up from deep below the surface of the water. Over the years, tons of sea-faring busybodies have reported seeing these bizarre illuminations, both in motion and stationary, within the increasingly non-specific bounds of the Bermuda Triangle. Many sightings have come with the speculation that, below the Triangle’s waters, lay the ruined spires and crumbling streets of Atlantis, a long dead city where, prior to its cataclysmic destruction, a bunch of forgetful mermen left the lights on.

Of course, I’m joking –Atlantis obviously didn’t use the wasteful electric lights on which we primitive humans so desperately rely. They used giant crystals. Or so said Edgar Cayce, the late 19th/early 20th century American psychic who used his cosmic extra-sensory brain power to chug down a trough load of Atlantean revelation, which he then spat back out during a number of his “readings.” These “readings,” which began in 1901 and continued on for 40 years, always started with Cayce entering a dozy trance state, and ended in mystical predictions about everything from politics and business to ancient history and fallen empires, of which Atlantis seemed to be Cayce’s favorite.

A background on Atlantis and the one piece of hard proof that might have proved the whole theory correct… (more…)

Walk it Off – an abridged compendium of ye olde folk remedies and archaic antidotes culled from UCLA’s Archive of American Folk Medicine

Today’s ailment: Hair Loss

A Box of Memories

You will need: One Box
Instructions: Save all hair sheddings in box
Note: Also great for your “Hoarders” audition tape.

Lard and Iron: The John Goodman Story

You will need: Magnetic Iron Ore (Powdered); Hog Lard
Instructions: Mix ore into lard; Rub on head

Hair Of The Babe That Bit You After You Pulled Its Hair Out

You will need: A Baby That Has Just Grown its First Hairs; Baby’s Mother’s Permission; One Toy Train
Instructions: Pull out baby’s hair; Reward baby with choo-choo

Sort Of Like The Opposite Of Your Werewolf Transformation
You will need: New Moon (In terms of phase, not freshness)
Instructions: Cut hair at night
Note: Hair will grow back fuller and longer than before. Does not work on genitals.

Only Smokey Can Prevent Head Deforestation, Meaning Hair Loss. Okay, That’s a Stretch

You will need: 1 Bear; 1 Grease Harvesting Implement
Instructions: Obtain bear’s excess grease; Massage grease into scalp.

Hobo Percussionist

You will need: Both hands
Instructions: Rub fingernails together
Note: Works best if done continuously and in the same room where someone is trying to read.

Aesop’s Deleted Scene

You will need: 1 Lion; Pliers; String; Iron Cajones
Instructions: Pull out one of lion’s teeth; Tie tooth to string; wear as necklace
Note: Also great for your “When Animals Attack” audition tape.

Amateur Choreography

You will need: 1 Elder Tree
Instructions: Walk around elder tree three times; Jazz hands (optional)

The Rerouting Method (Only for Beardos)

You will need: 1 Razor
Instructions: Shave off beard

Bah Ram Eww!

You will need: 1 Ram; 1 Rubber-Tipped Ram-Gagging Stick
Instructions: Use gagging stick to gag ram until ram vomits; Continue gagging ram; Gag ram until ram’s stomach is empty and ram is still sort of vomiting but is really just bringing up thick strings of bile; Smear bile on head.
Note: Not the worst “Amazing Race” audition tape you could submit.

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. Monday we learned just why The Triangle might be the strangest result of number fudging in history.

It might be lost forever, but Flight 19 will never be forgotten. And not because generations to come will delight in the hootenanny that is the history of military training disasters. It’s because of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” in which Flight 19 is discovered (minus its directionally challenged flight leader and 13 aerial lemmings) in the Arizona desert. Spielberg’s implication was, of course, that the Brian Eno-wannabe aliens, who later blasted their astro-synths at a potato-sculpting Richard Dreyfus, were somehow responsible for the group’s disappearance and, it would seem, at least some of the Bermuda Triangle’s alleged spooky weirdness.

When Spielberg suggested that aliens are cherry-picking human subjects out of the Atlantic Ocean, he was merely creating a broad historically based fiction in order to bolster the plot of a narrative film. When writer Ivan Sanderson proposed that the Bermuda Triangle is one of 12 “Vile Vortices” – lozenge-shaped areas of ocean where the Earth’s energy fields host slammin’ electromagnetic parties – he was stating a scientific hypothesis. Sanderson’s ideas were subsequently absorbed into the New Age movement, which used them to create the World Grid theory. Essentially, according to pony-tailed acolytes of energy fields, Earth is a giant, resonating crystal with equidistant harmonic power areas, both positive (Sedona, AZ; Easter Island, etc.) and negative (the Bermuda Triangle, etc.). New Agers use these principles to explain stuff like crystal healing and energy centers and how pan flue music shields your soul from psychical tumors or whatever. UFO groupies apply them to abduction theories.

One theory states that the Triangle’s electromagnetic disturbances represent the opening and closing of transdimensional portals – the 12 Vile Vortices serve as doggie doors for daytripping extraterrestrials looking to sightsee and butt probe without all the cumbersome intergalactic schlepping. This notion hinges on the assumption that the alien races visiting Earth have mastered a means of transportation that involves the bending of electromagnetic fields and gravity. The vortices, then, operate sort of like naturally existing station platforms to which the intrepid space kidnappers can easily navigate. Or else the aliens earmarked a few selected areas of the planet for inter-spatial teleportation. You get to decide. At a certain point, the craziness just sort of plateaus off into a flat surface perfect for use as a bughouse buffet table of competing insanities.

Government tests! Alien joy riding! Abduction! AFTER THE JUMP!
(more…)

Below are descriptions of three grotesque monsters. Two of them are merely the fictional creations of popular artists; one is a creature that has actually been reported. Can you Find the Fiend?

a.) This bizarre man-sized grub-like creature is rumored to assist populations in containing outbreaks of mass hysteria or insanity.

b.) These giant crustaceans are supposedly able to increase their own intelligence by feeding on the brains of smarter animals.

c.) This shape-shifting mosquito-like monster is accused of sucking unborn fetuses out of pregnant women’s wombs.

Answer after the cut.

(more…)

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. Make sure you come back to read all about the Bermuda Triangle Wednesday and Friday.

If certain versions of events are to be believed, Flight 19 – and the 14 skilled airmen who were desperately trying to navigate 5 TBM Avengers back to the safety and dry land of the Floridian coast – disappeared with their compasses inexplicably spinning and the crewmen babbling incoherently across a static-drenched radio connection. We know the planes took off from Fort Lauderdale’s Naval base on December 5, 1945, with instructions to perform a standard training exercise dubbed “Navigation problem No. 1.” We also know that navigation soon became the mission’s no. 1 problem. To quote flight leader Charles Taylor, “I am trying to find Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I am over land but it’s broken. I am sure I’m in the Keys but I don’t know how far down and I don’t know how to get to Fort Lauderdale.” We also know that Flight 19 pulled an impressive aerial abracadabra – five planes and 14 people, poof, gone, forever.

19 years later, “Argosy” magazine, a classic American pulp publication specializing in adventure stories, published a feature article written by Vincent H. Gaddis. The piece was entitled “The
Deadly Bermuda Triangle” and introduced America to a new and dangerous menace whose insidious machinations were as wily and mysterious as its three-sided geometry was certain. While past articles in various other publications had laundry listed notable boat and plane disappearances in the southern Atlantic, including a 1962 piece in America Legion magazine
– “The Lost Patrol” – that directly implicated supernatural forces in the vanishing of Flight 19, no one had previously assigned such a snappy, sensational title to the area, much less such a handily imagined shape.

Gaddis’ version of the triangle’s wily super powers read like something out of a Dharma Initiative file folder: “[The] aberration might be called ‘a hole in the sky’… It is obvious that it occurs only occasionally in the well-traveled triangle area, without warning, but frequently enough to be alarming.” The article goes on to talk about the possibility of severe, but highly localized, magnetic storms and gravitational anomalies. Gaddis never addresses the possibility
of designing a simple button that could be pressed to control these phenomena, but does make several cryptic Slusho! references.

Find out why the factual basis for the Bermuda Triangle is shoddy even by urban legend standards AFTER THE JUMP…
(more…)

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. Check out the origins of the Grinning Man or how one journalist became the the focal point of the legend.

As has become apparent to any frustrated readers who would prefer insane stories of paranormal weirdness over weird stories of insane journalists, the tale of the Grinning Man says a lot more about reporter John Keel than it does about any sort of alien visitors or psychic
census takers. Looking at Internet assessments of Grinning Man facts and guesses, then, it’s hard to ignore that, in many cases, Keel is missing. The Wikipedia article at least mentions that Keel recorded all three sightings. (The opening blurb says that ufologist John Moseley also investigated the Grinning Man, which is sort of true… he tagged along on Keel’s initial trip to gather testimony from the Jersey witnesses.) Meanwhile, other sites simply paraphrase accounts of the stories without so much as a tip of the hat to the intrepid reporter, save for, in some cases, a brief walk-on appearance as Interviewer 1.

As one of Weird Things’ major preoccupations is examining the ways in which legends like that of the Grinning Man are able to proliferate and thrive outside the slipshod pretenses of their primary sources, it’s important to understand the significance of Keel’s relative absence from
the this whole smiling, green-suited clustercuss. I think we can all agree that, without Keel’s badgering insistence, it would be pretty difficult to make the case that the entities encountered in all three sightings are one in the same, or even distantly related. In fact, the only real link between them (aside from an affinity for easily donned green haberdashery) is the ancillary UFO activity that allegedly preceded each encounter. It’s no surprise, then, that these supposed
(by Keel no less!) unearthly airspace incursions provide the basis for the Grinning Man’s continued legacy.

From ProfilingtheUnexplained.com: “He usually appears around the time of UFO sightings.” Also – “He couldn’t be associated with the Men in Black, since he supposedly wears a shimmering green outfit.” (I just enjoy the latter quote because a.) It’s the concluding sentence in the site’s article and b.) you’d think cryptid-rabid Web publishers would immediately conclude that the green suit is precisely why he might be Men in Black, as not wearing black would be a great way for him to hide his affiliation. Come on guys, I’m not even a paranoid maniac and I figured that one out.)

Find the rest, AFTER THE JUMP…

(more…)

Look, people – I like those Saw movies. Judge if you want, but please don’t convict. I didn’t accost your delicate sensitivities when you were spit polishing the crown for Jason Reitman’s indie cred coronation. I politely clenched my throat to stifle the wet gags that came rolling up in the wake of your sacred dagger-wielding, blood-sworn Family Guy sacrament. Please withhold the stones, the jeers, the mass up-thrusting of rusty pitchforks, the lighting of oil-soaked rags
draped around halved shovel handles, the mob chants and rally cries and out-of-sync choruses – “Heretic! Blasphemer!”

I was at a bar the other night, ripping into a chorizo enchilada like I was the slow back-half of a wolf pack arriving late to the kill and diving in gracelessly, all desperate expectation, certain of the organic warmth, but unsure of the contents, and the topic of Saw wormed up to the surface. A bearded kid who was all Child’s Play and Elm Street (Brad Dourif and Robert Englund, we toast thee) before finally asking, maybe expecting confrontation, maybe even out for blood, maybe already charting a course to the door – weave around Giggling Cleavage, two steps left passed Ice-Stirring Stubble, then a cursory “scuse me” to Nose-Ringed Desperation and Dreadlocked Fear of Commitment before, swish, night air, fists up and into the ally – what do you think of the
Saw movies?

“I – I like the Saw movies” I responded, before, of course, appending the self-delusional caveat (read: justification) “or… I like the idea of them.”

Matthew decides enough is enough… AFTER THE JUMP

(more…)

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. Check out the origins of the Grinning Man and hear how things with ol’ GN are these days on Friday.

A brief personality test to help determine optimist/pessimist status: Is John Keel half full of crap or a halfway decent, if overly superstitious, journalist?

Let’s lay all our cryptid trading cards on the table – The Grinning Man is sort of John Keel’s joint. He interviewed the kids in Jersey and he recorded the account of Woodrow Derenberger. More to the point, he linked the accounts together under a looming, toothy umbrella, thereby, creating a monster. Had there only ever been those two encounters, and had Keel been content to forego conclusions and just revel in the sheer weirdness of the whole thing, I’d be more apt to come down on the optimist side of the test question – that Keel is well-meaning and proficient at collecting accurate witness accounts, but a tad overeager in the extent to which he analyzes and collates his data.

But then there’s the third account.

Grinning man aside, Keel spent much of 1966 in Point Pleasant West Virginia hot footing it after a shadowy airborne monstrosity with giant red eyes and a penchant for lurking. Written and filmic accounts of the Mothman’s year-long tenure in the Mountain State are multitudinous. For our purposes, all you really need to know is that beginning in November of 1966, multiple residents of Point Pleasant reported seeing a giant creature flying in the skies above their homes and just sorta milling about in their yards. Residents of the small town chattered and cowered and speculated themselves to the brink of mass hysteria. The sightings only tapered off the following December after the Silver Bridge, a local suspension bridge spanning the Ohio river, collapsed, killing 46 people. Keel suggests that all the Mothman’s ooking and spooking was a prescient, unheeded warning of the bridge’s unstable condition (in which case, worst supernatural portent ever). I, on other hand, tend to wonder if, in the minds of the populace, a massive, bloody disaster trumps rumored sightings of a fairly non-descript neighborhood bogeyman.

Much more AFTER THE JUMP… (more…)

If for some reason you haven’t see Alien, this post contains minor spoilers. And is probably really confusing.

Last week, Ridley Scott coughed up a bunch of details regarding his forthcoming Alien prequel. As many speculated, the film will, among other things, explain the origins of the strange chair-mounted “space jockey” that the Nostromo’s crew discovers inside the ova-packed derelict spaceship. In other words, Scott’s going for the obvious choice and, in doing so, opting to destroy one of the weirder, more evocative touches of mystery in the entire series. I have no problem with X-Men Origins-ing this bitch, but let’s be smart about it. There’s a whole Nostromo’s worth of characters to back story:

Treacherous Milk: The Story of Ash – How about a film centered on the construction and programming of this back-stabbing android? You can have the Weyland-Yutani scientists churning his robot milk and priming his dickish superiority engine while they have heated arguments about what sort of combat training to give him. Once they finely land on rolled up magazine suffocation tactics, there can be a bad-ass Danger Room-type fight simulation where Ash’s only means of defense is a bandolier full of National Geographics. Obviously, we also want to see them programming Ash’s weird xenomorph fetish, complete with complexly rendered sex dreams featuring the alien’s big, shiny banana head.

Or how about The Rise and Fall of Parker and Brett, a show business biopic in which we learn that the Nostromo’s engineering officers were once a popular Vaudeville act whose signature routine, “The Bonus Situation,” found them cashing in big on the interracial corporate-themed slapstick duo circuit. But when the mob comes knocking, Brett and Parker let them in, and take their coats. And then escape out a window. Now the mob wants their coats back. Disguising themselves as starship HVAC techs, Brett and Parker stowaway on a cargo vessel, flee the planet and contract space alcoholism. Cut to “Alien.”

I’d also watch South to Dallas, an action-adventure/coming-of-age movie depicting the thrilling tomfoolery of a rugged, young Captain Dallas as he smuggles, gambles and sass-talks his way to the wrong side of the tracks, where he meets, and falls in love with, a promiscuous tattooed smoker. During the course of their sexy, gun-slinging, cross-country romp, we learn that Dallas is terrible at orienteering and often gets North and South confused, which is like a metaphor for his life and decision making, and also, at one point, the hard-living couple actually travels from Oklahoma to Texas. What I’m saying is that the title is really clever.

Kane’s movie would probably be a raucous workplace comedy in which his good intentions, pleasant demeanor and consummate professionalism make him an object of scorn, ridicule and an escalating series of hilarious pranks involving toilets. Maybe it could be called Hazing Kane. That way, when you re-watch alien, you’ll be so used to seeing the quiet and sweetly pathetic Executive Officer bagged on, the chest burster sequence will evoke only resigned head shaking and tutting exclamations of, “Oh, Kane!”

Nobody wants to see a Lambert movie. Maybe if the plot of the movie was that she fell off a boat. Even then I wouldn’t want her to have any dialogue. And it would have to be a super awesome boat. Like, super super.

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. Keep your eyes peeled for more on this legend Wednesday and Friday.

If there’s anything our humble website has consistently supplied, it’s wicked band names. Peruse the site’s archives and you’ll find any number of stage-ready esoteric idioms referring to manimals, animen, lake monsters, alchemists and bigfeet. And today, I’ve got a good one for you, so all you pale faces with the triangle haircuts and emotional hematomas listen up: Indrid Cold. Or “Blood Roof.” There’s no story behind Blood Roof, though. I just made that up now. Indrid Cold, on the other hand, is a name that was telepathically whispered into the jittering mind of a petrified man named Woodrow Derenberger (terrible f***ing band name) as he stared into the black eyes of a creature unlike anything he had ever encountered.

Before we get there though, you need to hear about these two snot-nosed Jersey kids. The year was 1966. The place: Elizabeth, New Jersey. It was the beginning of October and James Yanchitis and Marvin Munoz were heading home after a long day of whatever. (Let’s say walking the local railroad tracks to stick-prod a corpse and, as a result, come of age.) As they turned onto Fourth Street, the topic of conversation probably turned from girls onto the recent reports of nearby UFO sightings and a rumor that, earlier that same evening, a tall green man had chased one of their neighbors down the very road they were travelling. As the talk turned back to how much a girl’s boobs would bounce if she were being chased by a tall green man, the boys saw something that befuddled and terrified them – standing behind a sizeable wire fence, which separated the residential streets from the steep hill leading up to the bustling Jersey turnpike, was a giant, looming figure decked out in shiny green coveralls.

According to the boys, the man guy thing, who was bald and beady-eyed and well over six feet tall, turned toward them and pulled his lips up into a gargantuan smile. Needless to say, they made like bananas and split. And then they made like bloggers and didn’t stop blathering on about the “crazy thing that happened to them today,” which is how they attracted the interest of a journalist named John Keel. Keel, who met with the boys three days after the incident and heard all about the mystery man’s giant black belt and apparent lack of ears and a nose, had recently undertaken a massive, nationwide study of UFOs and related paranormal phenomena. Soon after chatting up the Jersey boys about the hulking brute of a weirdo that Keel dubbed the Grinning Man, the journalist met with West Virginian Woodrow Derenberger, who supplied him with a different moniker for the smiling interloper.

Want more Grinning Man? Find him AFTER THE JUMP!

(more…)

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. Matt broke down the basics of the legend Monday and see how the legend was used to thwart Hitler on Wednesday…

That the classic tale of the vanishing hitchhiker took a bizarrely (pseudo)prophetic turn is, if not shocking, wholly unexpected; that this turn quickly veered religious seems inevitable. Really. How long could these regional tales of localized disaster survive as viable urban folklore? As the predictions often dealt with the short-term timelines of specific upcoming events (1933 World’s Fair, WWII, etc.), most of the prophecies, true or not, were rendered moot within a five-year time period. Also, doomy as they were, the random prognostications were missing what, to me, are the whole point of confabulating horrific future visions in the first place – specific lifestyle directives. (Perhaps the World’s Fair catastrophe rumors were meant to keep people away from the exhibition, but the prophecies themselves don’t indicate as much. I’m talking about something a bit more obvious.) Right? If you start a rumor that a town is going to succumb to a week-long hornet frenzy, you should build in a self-serving “unless…” Unless the townspeople buy x brand of pants (where x = company you own). Unless the residents build a windmill (where you stand to win $200 in bar bet that said town will construct a windmill). Unless people adhere to the tenets of x church.

Where x = the Church of Latter Day Saints.

The 1950s through the 1960s saw a preponderance of hitchhiking Nephites. For those of you who are a little bit rusty on your Book of Mormon, the Nephites (meaning followers of the prophet Nephi) are essentially Jesus’ personal assistants, and have been left to hang out on Earth until JC returns. Traditionally, the Nephites help out the Mormons during times of stress or upheaval. Accordingly, the stories of Nephite hitchhikers indicate struggles… struggles of a most interesting variety.

Read about how the wayward auto-prone ghost legend became an ominous portent for the end of the world AFTER THE JUMP… (more…)

Jason has killed a lot of folks with a lot of different tools. His victims may wonder, “Who is this man? And why is he murdering me?” Meanwhile, we the viewers want to know, “What is that tool he’s using? And what’s its history?”

Wonder no longer.

Today: Fireplace Poker

As used by Jason in: Friday the 13 Part III; Friday the 13th (2009)

Victim(s): Chili; Officer Lund

The history of man’s dominion over every non-shark thing on Earth hinges upon one thing: the creation of fire. It’s what sets humans apart from the firemen. After discovering the three elements needed to make fire (oxygen, an ignition source, a police car), man created three additional elements to maintain that fire – the spade, the tongs and the poker. The poker is used to push and pull logs around so as to moderate and distribute the fire’s airflow. If we compare the power structure of these three tools to that of an animal crime fighting team where there’s a lizard that can teleport, a dog that can push and pull flaming logs around and an eagle that can fire a gun with its beak, the poker is most like the eagle because it’s the leader of the team. If we compare the abilities of the tools to those of the same team, I guess the poker’s more like the dog, though I don’t see why the Eagle couldn’t just shoot the logs into place.

TRUTH BUSTERS TRUE CRIME ATTACK! In 2008, 71-year-old realtor Ann Nelson was beaten unconscious with a fireplace poker and then burnt to death. Her killer, Illinoisan sex offender James Hole, received life in prison. BOOM! That’s a justice sandwich with Coke and a side for just $4.95. No napkins, extra mayo. (Sound of jail door closing.)

Did you call my firestick a stoker? More True Crime Attacks! AFTER THE JUMP…

(more…)