ROGER CORMAN and CHEESE, part II: "The Unborn" and Motor City Pizza Co. 5 Cheese Bread

Corman is always credited for giving a lotta now-famous talents their first gigs, and certainly that's true: many crew members and actors broke away from the Drive-In and onto The Red Carpet. 1991's The Unborn is a colorful mixed bag of such talents - and fortunately that's not its sole source of pride. 

Brooke Adams plays Virginia, a seemingly infertile woman who undergoes an experimental fertilization procedure that does indeed put a bun in the oven. But is the bun actually bad? The whole second act is made up of that very suspense, full of not so much clues but instead graphic set pieces that depict what a horrible time all the other previous "test mothers" are having. Once movie logic locks in and Virginia is as certain as we are that there's an evil fetus in her body, it does become effectively unnerving - less Rosemary's Baby, more Alien. For a movie produced by Roger Corman (though uncredited) it relies largely on mood and mystery and less on nudity and gore, and it does so pretty effectively; cinematography by Chris Nolan's go-to DP Wally Pfister and music score by Gary Numan are doing a decent bit of the heavy lifting, but Brooke Adams and her ambitious performance is mostly what we take away from this film... That, and a very early acting gig from Lisa Kudrow, whose scenes are cut and framed in such a way that the movie almost seems aware that she'll become a big star. 

A cheesy bread sounded like a somewhat lighter option to pair with the insemination movie about mutant child birth. Truth is this "bread" is as hardcore as any pizza - and just as good if not better. We've tried "three cheese" this and "four cheese" that and "a hundred cheese" whatever and quite frankly the cheeses all start to taste the same when you mix 'em together, but the thing that elevates this above some dipping appetizer is that there's a layer of parmesan sauce between the bread and the cheese, which not only places it alongside the superiority of a traditional pizza, but the inclusion of a tangy cream dressing gives it that extra credibility for snacking during a gross-out pregnancy flick. 

The Movie: B

The Pizza: A-

STATIC SHOTS

READ THIS: Tender is the Flesh

   Nearly everything that I sought out from horror movies has disappointed. The gore, fear, nightmares, it doesn't exist anymore. Even the highly anticipated Longlegs was merely cute. The experience has since left me and I remember nothing except for some T-Rex needle drops. Imagination and practical effects are dead. Just look at Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Praised by Michael Keaton himself for going old school with its puppetry and make-up, but all I could see was the eye wincing uses of CGI, never mind the shit script and ahem, poor direction. So I've turned to books instead. My twisted imagination is dark and twisty enough to entertain for a lifetime. I've gone so far as joining some horror and psychological thriller book Facebook groups to get the goods. And man, do they deliver.

   The general consensus was that the Argentinian-English-translated novella, "Tender is the Flesh", by Agustina Bazterrica, was gross. Set in a future where every animal, excluding humans, have been killed by a virus, and people have turned to cannibalism, but in a very bleak and regulated way. This is all seen through the eyes of one man, sadly in a position of having to keep things in the "meat industry" moving swiftly and cleanly, bearing witness to every heinous act against a person, and unfortunately becoming desensitized to the whole orchestration.

   Our tired, and grieving main character walks us through every factory doorway and businessman's home, showing us penises being consumed as delicacies, pregnant women running scared through the woods as targets for sport, and the "human slaughter." It's puke-inducing and hurtful. And sadly, this story is not at all implausible, which is probably its most terrifying core. 

   This work of fiction is an abomination and affront to God and I thank it dearly for ruining me the way art should. In fact, I am now a vegetarian, not able to look at flesh for food the same way again. I goddamn anyone that turns it into a movie. It will either be completely shred and stripped of its evil and carnivorous content or so unbelievably disgusting that it will be unwatchable. 

   Funny thing though, I sought this literature out from my library, a valuable resource to me, as I discovered I can typically read a book every few days, which would undoubtedly put us in the poor house if I were to purchase so frequently. I noticed when I was pinged at its arrival that it was sent from a local library's "Young Adult Section." I didn't think much of it until after I was done reading it, and then I was nervous to return it. Due to its short length, I felt strongly that the library shuffled it away to the incorrect spot. What if this book accidentally landed in the hands of some eleven year old, unaware of what he/she/they was getting into to? I felt responsible. I wanted to contact the library and warn them, but would that make me a Karen? This was plaguing me, but ultimately I just returned the book, and left it up to fate. So shall it be.  

- Babes

When Food Goes Bad

Movies glamorize everything - even when they're condemning or satirizing, all that Lights, Camera, Action can throw a glitzy sheen on the most troubling circumstances, no matter how cautionary the tale. So even when they try to depict something gross (like, say, some unappetizing food) it can still look somewhat attractive to me. Except in the following instances...

You know I love movie food and sexy depictions of food and eating while watching and just generally and openly fetishistic about food porn, so when they manage to make eating look disgusting you know they're doing it well. Here's 5 particularly unsavory moments. 

- Paul

Spaghetti

Se7en

This is an easy one - no one's in the mood for pasta because they just watched Se7en, but it stands out to me personally because there actually was an occasion when I had just casually rewatched the movie and then had spaghetti shortly thereafter - like same day - and it really hit me at the wrong angle. 

Greta's guts

A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child

On paper (and on the VHS cover) this scene plays a whole lot scarier and grosser. I used to look at the back of the video box when I was little and see Greta's giant cheeks and thought it was just depressingly horrifying. In the movie it's played for laughs (bitch) but the sequence is forever linked to that queasiness I felt as a kid. 

Dinner of Doom

Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom

This whole movie is gross to me, and not in a fun way which is why I rank it so low in the franchise and for Spielberg, and this scene is one of the big reasons. The eyeball soup is cartoonish enough to be like whatever, but the snakes and bugs and brains bum me out more than the actual animal scenes in any Italian Cannibal movie. 

Hotdogs

Nothing But Trouble

Here's another movie I don't like - not because it's gross (even though it is) but because I think it sucks. One thing it does get kinda right is its disgusting absurdity - it's like the slimier parts of Eraserhead stretched into a feature (though these hotdogs are way more detestable than any little chickens). 

Sardines over pretzels

The 'Burbs

I'll be honest, I always thought this combination looked kinda good -- so much so that, yes, I went ahead and bought a tin of sardines and attempted the Klopek Stacker. I think what it comes down to is you gotta be at least somewhat partial to tiny fish steeped in oil to really get any enjoyment out of this hors d'oeuvre beyond its cultural reference. In other words, it's no Peanut Butter & Onion Sandwich. Zero stars. 

ROGER CORMAN and CHEESE, part I: "School Spirit" and Freschetta Naturally Rising Crust Pepperoni

Welcome to the inaugural entry in our new series in which we get a frozen pizza from the grocery store and watch a Roger Corman movie while we eat it. In his 70-year career, Corman worked on approximately 500 films - as a director, a producer, a distributor, an actor, and sometimes in some secret uncredited capacity, and it is that lengthy library from which we choose, and hopefully we find just the right pie to perfectly pair with the picture. 

For this first installment we started soft: a College Sex Comedy from 1985 called School Spirit. Tom Nolan plays Billy, a college jock who gets killed in a car accident during a late night condom run. Once his soul leaves the operating table he meets up with the ghost of his dead uncle, and through a long stretch of exposition that we didn't really pay close attention to, Billy is granted some extra time on Earth - long enough to engage in the "Hog Day" party that closes out the film. So as a ghost, Billy can still walk around and interact verbally and physically as though he's alive, but he retains the power to make himself invisible, granting him access to girls' dorms and locker rooms and even harassing his pompous nerdy nemesis by dumping his lunch and tying his shoes together. These hijinks are the marrow of the movie, but they don't become monotonous (sadly) because there's a whole lotta plot forced in about Billy finding true love and the college receiving money and how that's being jeopardized - all leading up to the big party climax that features a topless slip 'n' slide and some dazzling optical effects that add an extra thirty bucks to the production value. It gets real dull in the middle, but it starts and finishes with a lotta energy. The cast is mostly likable even when the characters aren't: the standouts are Marta Kober (from Friday the 13th Part 2) as the dean's daughter, and Brian Frishman whose pleasantly chill disposition places him amongst the ranks of Jeff Spicoli, Bill S. Preston, and Michelangelo. Roughly 20 minutes into the movie we forget entirely that Billy is a ghost, largely because he's just another character in the cast and it's rarely addressed. Still, it's a more compelling story about the afterlife than Beetlejuice 2.

We've fallen for "rising crust" before and just took whatever they gave us - but this shit was risen; we can usually put away one pizza each but these were bulky enough to make it a struggle. The consistency was airy and a little like school lunch pizza but not in the best way: slightly too dry and coagulated. Also the edges burned while the center remained underdone. Nevertheless, nostalgia wields its sorcery and magically moistens our mozzarella just enough to put a smile of reminiscence on our face, and suddenly we're in the 1980s eating reheated pepperoni and watching a movie with, like, a hundred boobs in it. 

The Movie: C+

The Pizza: B

STATIC SHOTS

TOYS ARE US : Mega Gross Minis

I'll never not be ambivalent to brag about how cool a lotta the stuff was when I was growing up - movies, television, and, of course, toys. (This is not a millennial thing, this is a characteristic of every post-Depression generation.) And I'd say (and you'd say, and pretty much everyone does say) that there was a noticeable spike in gross out playthings in the 1990s and they were all a direct footprint left by Madballs, Garbage Pail Kids, Fangoria, Ghostbusting culture, and all the other putrid pioneers of the previous decade; slime sells, and the corporate realization of that fact was perfectly aligned with my youth. 

I was never a fan of the messy stuff - I was too lazy to participate in the "cleanup" portion. What I did find attractive during this trend were the blatantly morbid moods that they infused into mainstream make-believe; snot and bugs aside, there was a lotta death and decay as a general theme and everyone was cool with it (us kids especially). Not that we had a preoccupation with dying, but like Heavy Metal and Halloween these kindsa toys were my age group's tangible connection to the Horror genre. And so we ended up with a lotta skulls and corpses and body parts, and I know I personally didn't care about the context: it all just looked so cool to me. That's why, for me, the most attractive thing to come out of this craze was Topps Wacky Packages. 

Predating Garbage Pail Kids by nearly 20 years, Wacky Packs reared their ugly, smelly, slimy head again for a minute in the mid 80s and again in 1991 (as I fondly recalled in detail here) and they awoke in me a lustful appreciation for the beauty of commercial art - and green barf and brown stink clouds. And it's because of this adoration that I had an immediate attraction to Zuru's Mega Gross Minis.

Distributed in plastic spheres at $10 a shot, Mega Gross Minis contains "5 barf worthy surprises that will have you feeling green." Though within the one I purchased there were 3 "parody minis" accompanied by a tiny magnifying glass and a condiment packet full of green slime (presumably to drizzle directly onto your prizes), so I'm feeling like the tool and the topping come standard and we really only get the 3 toys.

Wacky Packs have done similar things -- releasing little three-dimensional rubber reproductions of their two-dimensional artwork -- and they're just delightful. These Gross Minis are sorta the real deal though: articulate but durable sculptures that seamlessly resemble the products they're parodying. My very subjective complaint is that the modern products (and their respective labels) are often as accurately boring as they are in real life - though a few accents of vomit make them much more alive and colorful.

I don't know that I'd keep up with these, mostly because I don't have the space or the stamina to amass even more tiny plastic pieces of shit. I do really want that "Snotverse" sneaker that seems to be the leader of the pack, and of course there are chase variants like glow-in-the-dark versions and "stinky scented" surprises that stimulate my collecting gland a bit, but a $10 addiction seems risky right now. Though Zuru has already announced a "Series 2" that seems to double down on the yuck, which gleefully leads me to believe that current generations are just as down with the sickness as I was and continue to be.

- Paul

Bennett Media's TOTALLY DISGUSTING HALLOWEEN PUKE PARTY!

Hey sickos! Who's ready to barf?! Do you like eyeballs and guts and bloody veins and pus? How about cannibalism, sexual perversions, and unnecessary surgeries? Whatever grosses you out is our bread & better this season as we celebrate Bennett Media's TOTALLY DISGUSTING HALLOWEEN PUKE PARTY! We might be revisiting some of the sick flicks we never really wanted to see again, and we might even look at some of the stuff we never really wanted to witness in the first place. And to add chaos to the carnage, there will be snacks - lots o' funky food and beverage intake because what's the fun of nausea on an empty stomach? So look forward to throw up. And entrails and boogers and toxic waste and frothy yellow discharge and ectoplasmic residue. It's gonna get wet.

NAME THAT MOVIE!

Okay one more of these before the big show starts, so don't take too long with this because we're about to switch gears in ways that will demand the entirety of your brains and your guts. The last round was left incomplete so no pressure - feel free to join in before it starts to smell nasty in here. See you on the other side, Ray.

EASY

FAIR

DIFFICULT

GROOVE APPROVED