Raw/Nerve VS. Cult Ritual – some house in Elgin – 06.20.09

The following nonsense transpired at a weird house show with Raw/Nerve and Cult Ritual in the northwest burbs on an uncomfortably warm summer night right by a casino that no one went to afterwards. Click on any photo to engorge it.

Raw/Nerve

Cult Ritual

All photos copyright ©2009 absurdandobscure.com
Ask for permission to use any of the above.

You Are Already Excited About the Rerelease of Fist of the North Star

Discotek is going to release a long overdue North American version of Fist of the North Star (aka Hokuto no Ken) this May. Though they’ve done well with previous asian oddities (Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs, Burst City), I’m holding my breath to see just how good or bad the quality of the release is. Having just recently watched a clean VHS copy of the English dub, I’m very aware that anything could be better than what original western audiences were subjected to years ago, but here’s hoping that the countless limb severing and head explosion scenes in this version cause my TV to bleed through my carpet.

For those who are in the unfortunate position of having never seen the feature-length film before, other than pleading with you to watch it, I don’t know what else to say to you besides, “This franchise is such a big deal that at one point, you could (can?) even get Hokuto no Ken instant ramen.”  What started out as a comic written by a guy whose name sounds like a Japanese person saying “Bronson” made it’s way past the world of video games with the hopes of entering your stomach.

More images of manly, hyper-violent noodles can be found here. If you’re reading this long after this post has been made, you can check out Discotek’s news page for updates and availability.

Incredible Nagisa Oshima Retrospective at the Siskel Center

All this month – and next month if you can believe it – the Gene Siskel Film Center is showing an astounding twenty films from extraordinarily influential Japanese director Nagisa Oshima. Unfortunately I dragged my heels on posting this, assuming that anyone who reads a&o probably wouldn’t watch any of these…though I suppose that was an unfair assumption on my part. Either way, whether you’re a cinephile or not, you should definitely watch as many of Oshima’s films as you can – especially in an incomparable theater setting like the Siskel Center. It’s very possible that you’ll never get a chance to some of these films (with English subtitles) ever again, and you certainly won’t get a chance to see so many of Oshima’s films at once. 

All show times for the films listed below can be found at the Siskel Center site, or you can give them a call at 312-846-2600.

A TOWN OF LOVE AND HOPE  (1959, 62 min.)
BOY (1969, 105 min.)
THE MAN WHO LEFT HIS WILL ON FILM (1970, 94 min.)
THREE RESURRECTED DRUNKARDS (1968, 80 min.)
DEATH BY HANGING (1968, 117 min.)
DEAR SUMMER SISTER (1972, 95 min.)
PLEASURES OF THE FLESH (1965, 90 min.)
IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES (1972, 95 min.)
THE CATCH (1961, 97 min.)
MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE (1983, 122 min.)
GOHATTO (1999, 100 min.)
EMPIRE OF PASSION (1978, 106 min.)
CRUEL STORY OF YOUTH (1960, 96 min.)
NIGHT AND FOG IN JAPAN (1960, 107 min.)
VIOLENCE AT NOON (1966, 99 min.)
SING A SONG OF SEX (1967, 103 min.)
THE SUN’S BURIAL (1960, 87 min.)
DIARY OF A SHINJUKU THIEF (1968, 94 min.)
THE CEREMONY (1971, 122 min.)
JAPANESE SUMMER: DOUBLE SUICIDE (1967, 98 min.)

a&o’s newest byproduct: mind-rot.com

With the new year comes a new project by the fine folks of absurdandobscure.com; a site driven by completely unoriginal content not unlike what you would find at a&o. Rather than writing new content, the new site will be a constantly updated collection of content provided by others. It is my esteemed pleasure to introduce to the world…mind-rot.com.

I’m excited about the new project/site/portal to nonsense that will cover the work of innumerable scourges of the Earth at as rapid of a speed as possible. There’s no reason you shouldn’t be excited about it either, especially if you frequent this poor excuse for a blog/site/sounding board of relatively disreputable schlock/sheer awesomeness.

As of today, mind-rot.com is obviously still in the process of becoming completed, but the finishing touches aren’t far off. I’ve wanted to get this thing together for months, but because of reasons too boring to go into, both the new project and a&o had to suffer. I’m sure you pulled through these past couple of months though…just a wild guess from the 13,000 views that absurdandobscure.com received last year. Speaking of, I want to sincerely thank every single person that checked this site out last year. We’re hoping things will be significantly different this year, especially when it comes to digging into the depths of the worst acting caught on film, the best hardcore bands you keep ignoring for the dumbest reasons, brain melting foreign oddities and other indescribably engaging ephemera.

So be sure to check out both sites whenever you get the chance…you never know what absurd and/or obscure stuff might get the honor of being uncovered.

Monsters & Nonsense: “Useless” Japanese: Part 3

Trudging on to the latest installment of my attempting to pull out words/phrases/exclamations from a not-so-randomly selected installment of Daikaiju Battle Ultra Adventure , I present to you the following “useless” Japanese. I use the quotes, because honestly, if any of what you see below were truly useless, you’d never use any of it. Though, I can’t help but think that I’m going to have to talk about escaping, or even ultrasonic light waves…eventually (and quite possibly in the same sentence…hopefully?).

As I’ve tried to make resoundingly clear before, these translations are correct so far as I can tell, and the pronunciation for everything is written so that no prior knowledge of Japanese is required. Either way, giant monsters still rule and so does learning Japanese so that you can read comics about them.

what it means	how it’s pronounced	how it’s written
to suffer damage / to be deceived	yah-wah-ray-rew	やられる
ultrasonic light waves	cho-ohn-pah-koh-sen	超音波光線
Of course!	yap-pah-ree	やっぱり
attack (e.g. a signature move; a noun, not a verb)	koh-gek-key	攻撃
to say	“E”-ooh	言う
to consider	nahn-gah-“A”-rew	考えてる
concentration (not a verb; e.g. “to concentrate”)	shoe-chew	集中
or / or else	so-ray-toe-mo	それとも
systemic absorption	tie-nai-“Q”-shoe	体内吸収
to hit	ooh-tsu	打つ
to escape	knee-geh-rew	逃げる
to surpass	mah-sah-rew	勝る
Wow! / Awesome!	sue-goy	すごい!
to be exhausted	tsu-kah-ray-ha-tay-rew	疲れ果てる
gently	soh-toe	そっと
to creep up on	she-no-bee-yoh-rew	忍び寄る
friendship	you-koh	友好

Google Translate and rikaichan are at it again. To tell you the truth, at this point it doesn’t even matter to me whether or not anyone else finds their blatant errors amusing, but I’m still putting them up here regardless.

使(つか)う気(き)だ	came out as	Use (or) dental care (music).
尻尾攻撃(しっぽこうげき)	came out as	Tail attack (tail this pep talk)
わかえるんだ	came out as	Each frog I
くそっ	came out as	Baloney
そうだ　ガンQも　いたんだ！！	came out as	Q is also likely to get cancer!

Considering this post is the final blow in my look at Daikaiju Battle Ultra Adventure and goofy translations in general (at least for the time being), try not to sulk for weeks on end about it. Chances are there’ll be more soon. Until then…じゃあね.

Heavy Metal Parking Lot: Metalhead Idiocy Immortalized

It’s movies like this that I have to insist on everyone watching at least once; assuming that they’re somewhat in touch with stuff that doesn’t suck.

Before YouTube, before anything close to what people commonly refer to as viral videos, there were irredeemable pieces of shit being shown at theaters across the country for decades. Sure there were diamonds among the sludge, but so much of the rest of that schlock had nowhere near as much appeal as Heavy Metal Parking Lot; and it never even had a proper theatrical release! Heavy Metal Parking Lot as a concept isn’t really that extraordinary, but the results certainly are. Watch it

This Month at the Siskel Center: September 2008

Quite possibly the “biggest deal” out of all the films being screened in the entire city of Chicago this month are part of a series entitled “Les Sixties” playing at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Film nerds would rightfully be quick to guess that the series covers films from the French film genre, La Nouvelle Vague (also known as the French New Wave). This series includes all of the following films: Contempt, The 400 Blows, Two or Three Things I Know About Her, Jules and Jim, Le Doulos, Six In Paris, Last Year At Marienbad and Cleo From 5 to 7.

Other series playing this month at the Siskel Center cover world cinema in the ’30s, abject expressionism, Russian cinema (of which the infamous Battleship Potemkin is a part of) and a handful of Derek Jarman films.

There will be weeklong runs of Kagemusha (directed by Akira Kurosawa), Viva and Beautiful Losers (directed by Aaron Rose and Joshua Leonard). According to the Siskel Center, co-director Aaron Rose will be present for audience discussion, but only for two screenings.

In addition to all that, the Siskel Center will also be doing special, limited screenings of Hollywood Chinese and Johnny Dodgeball.

Check out siskelfilmcenter.org for info and showtimes. Check out the internet for info on any of the films mentioned above.

Kids, cops, coloring and a crossword puzzle!

With activity books like this it’s no wonder why young kids don’t take cops seriously. Even if I was five years old today, if some cop, parent, teacher, librarian, babysitter or other authority figure gave this to me as a means of educating me about this type of nonsense, I can imagine that I would be thinking the five-year-old equivalent of, “Are you fucking serious right now?” Which would probably translate to something like, “I could be on the internet or whatever right now. I don’t wanna color this dumb police lady book. I’m not a little four-year-old baby. I play Xbox 360 now and stuff.”

The thing that doesn’t make any sense is that I got a hold of this pretty recently from a booth at a small community event/get together/thing. I’m sure that all the tax money burned on making copies of this assemblage of junk could’ve amounted to some cop somewhere buying a totally sweet, not at all practical fantasy knife.

Could this have come out any worse? I’m pretty sure computer design and printing technologies have far surpassed the line art vomit on the cover of this activity book since whenever this image was actually created. It’s not 1985. Totally unacceptable.

Telepathic communication while on the phone with a cop? I’m lost. Does this mean cops can read children’s minds? Or is it the other way around? And if it’s really an emergency, then why is the kid so casual about the emergency situation? His toast/kitchen/food supply are going to be irreversibly fucked if he doesn’t do anything about the situation…and he’s calm? I’d be losing my mind. All I’d be thinking is, “Fuck, I’m gonna be grounded forever,” over and over again.

Also:
-How can a toaster catch fire when it’s both unplugged and has a slice of white bread not even all the way in it?
-Clearly, if you can see a remote/identify it, then it isn’t lost is it?.
-How is a kid going to fly a kite when there isn’t a piece of string attached to it long enough to allow that kid to gleefully frolic through an open field or beach?

Thanks for confusing and lying to America’s children.

Someone’s gotta color this and send it in.

Again, someone needs to finish this and send it in or leave an image of the completed puzzle as a comment. Creative answers are obviously encouraged.

Martin Wong Fully Endorses Stephen Chow

The above list of Stephen Chow movies was scribbled down in an incredibly short amount of time by Martin Wong after a Q&A that the two editors of Giant Robot (Martin Wong and Eric Nakamura) did when they came to Chicago last April. Somehow I managed to both hold on to this scrap of paper and not get this short list up here until now, but I still feel like these movies are worth checking out, so…

Stephen Chow is most famous in America for Kung Fu Hustle, but he isn’t as big of a deal here as he should be. I hadn’t seen much of anything that he had done, but saw God Of Gamblers II a few months prior, so I asked Martin if he had any recommendations. What you see above is what he provided. A lot of these movies are pretty hard to get in the U.S., but that doesn’t mean they’re impossible to find. If worse comes to worse, you can always go to yesasia.com.

Keep in mind that just because this list was written on a random envelope as fast as possible doesn’t mean that you can’t take these recommendations seriously.

Giant Robot features Stephen Chow in their 53rd issue. Just sayin’.

Not LEGO, MEGO (or maybe it’s more like ME-go?).

Loving The Machine author Timothy N. Hornyak recently brought to my attention a little site called MegoMuseum.com…and honestly, I’m a little pissed I forgot to tell (re-tell?) the world about it right away. Why wouldn’t you want to look at a site that’s full of awesome crap like what you see below?

Also, be sure to check out Mego 8″ Super-Heroes: World’s Greatest Toys!, a book devoted to Mego toys from days gone by.