I’ve written elsewhere on this site that one of the most significant discoveries I made late in life was making chicken stock. A couple of years back, I experimented with making several different whole roast chicken recipes and learned to make stock while doing so.

Every time I roast a chicken now, I make stock. Typically, I use an onion with the skin on (or half an onion depending on how big the onion is), a carrot, a celery stalk, and some parsley.

Last night, when I prepared the stock, I found out I had no carrots, celery, or parsley. I decided to make the stock anyway. I put the chicken carcass in the crock pot, covered it with water, and put in a small onion (skin on), a radish, a bay leaf, four peppercorns, and half a teaspoon of celery seeds. I cooked it overnight on low and poured myself a cup this morning. I threw in a bit of salt and was blown away by how good it was for something so dead simple. Like other stocks, I’ll freeze the rest for other dishes, as the homemade broth always makes meals taste better.

I probably cook a chicken once a month, and there is no practical way not to buy store-bought stock for all the cooking that gets done, but it’s still a great way to use the entire bird and also get another tasty treat that can be used alone or for other meals.

Tim did a lot of work getting this site functioning correctly again, so I thought I’d do a quick post about what I’m looking forward to here in the last stretch of summer. After this week-ish, I have a vacation with my wife, and then I have to shift gears to get ready for work again.

I’ve been working on a script/movie idea with a collaborator for about a year and a half. We had a lot of ideas and ran into even more dead ends trying to figure out just what the story was, and finally, in the past two weeks, some pieces fell into place, and it looks like it is going somewhere. I’m excited about this because it is a cool idea.

I had also hoped to set up a Bandcamp landing page for some music/sounds I’d written, but… that may happen sometime in the fall/winter? I don’t know… I guess that is in the wings. I have the music; it’s just a case of setting up the page.

Finally, I hope to finish a book of mermaids I’ve been reading while concurrently watching mermaid films. Splash, by the way, is a bizarre film but a true testament to the acting chops of Tom Hanks. John Candy is funny, and Daryl Hannah plays the fish out of water mermaid quite well – but wow – the film moves from fantasy rom-com to full-on farce at points. The world of the mid-80s was very different than today’s. I’ve yet to compile my top 5 best mermaid films, but maybe Splash would make it to give the list variety.

This morning I got some BDs I ordered way back at the top of the summer today. I also got a free copy of Showgirls; I don’t know why; maybe it’s my lucky day.

In closing, the video game that has defined my summer is Mordhau, which is as inspiringly insipid as it is addictive. My time would be better spent on Diablo, but that’s how these things sometimes go.

On record – Roger Ebert’s review of David Lynch’s Dune (1984) is one of the more damning statements about the film. In a populist way, it’s arguable that Ebert’s sentiments lay part of the bedrock for the decades-long debate of whether or not Lynch’s Dune is a misunderstood masterpiece. Ebert complained about its story, undeveloped characters, effects, and dusty look.

Dune is not the 80’s sci-fi/fantasy wreck like, say, Krull (1983) is, but neither is Dune without flaws. The first hour and a half of the movie are easy to follow, and I say this with the inability to recall any of the first novel. It does, however, fall down and apart in the last 30+ minutes, which feels like a highlight reel of plot points.

By some ’80s Lucas or Spielberg standards, maybe the effects are subpar, but they also have a dreamy, at times, hyperreal quality to them, which is unique. The sets have also aged better than they may have been received, with steampunk vibes and lots of gold and slime greens. Kenneth McMillan’s Vladimir Harkonnen is truly crazed, and I always forget people like Patrick Stewart, Brad Doriff, Sean Young, Max Von Sydow, and Sting with his doofus grin are in it. Virginia Madison’s preamble to the story is also truly one of the weirder opens to a film, where she fades in and out a number of times as she sets the stage for the story we are about to experience. When she fades back in over the star backdrop for the last, she apologizes with an, “Oh, yes. I forgot to tell you,” like she’s some absent-minded narrator.

My own childhood memory of the film is that it was murky, but memory is tricky. When I watched the new 4k transfer of the film put out by Arrow, I was taken aback at how good it looked. Yes, it’s ‘dim,’ but Lynch has never been a fan of the brightly lit.

Lynch disavowed the movie after its release, but he’s come back out of the woodwork recently and voiced an interest in doing a director’s cut. If he does, I hope there is more pug footage.

Evil Toons is another film that isn’t soul-like, though there have been moments in the soul series that I’ve felt are spooky, and the “spooky” line delivered by Madison Stone (who plays Roxanne) was my favorite bit.

Clip and review below.

Evil Toons (1992) – 1/4 – Though the second half of its name is ‘Toons’, due to budget restraints, there are only about 90 seconds of so-called cartoonery in the movie. It does star thee – “Who appears in the film slightly longer than the amount of animation in it” – Dick Miller and pays homage to him along with a nod to Bucket of Blood (1959), directed by Roger Corman¹. Bonuses: David Carradine has a killer entrance at the end, and the cast-credit sequence is aspirational.

Demons (1985) and Demons 2 (1986) are not Souls-like, but there was a moment in Demons 2, where a group of bodybuilders is trying to escape a demon horde and they go down a spiral staircase.

If you played any of the Souls series, the phrase “a spiral staircase moment” most likely conjures an image of something, such as Havel the trashcan. I was going to try to make a GIF of the effect, but it didn’t work; however, in the process of trying to capture the staircase moment, I inadvertently got this photo, and it struck an even deeper chord with my experience of playing the game(s) with friends.

Reviews of Demons and Demons 2 beneath the meme¹².

Reviews

Demons (1985) – 2/4 – A horror movie that turns into reality and attacks the audience. There is a WWF-style demon-zombie vs. moviegoer brawl, a motorcycle & katana head-chopping scene outdone moments later by a helicopter head-chopping scene, and an apocalyptic ending where the preppers survive. Don’t say Nostradamus didn’t tell you so.

Demons 2 (1986) – 2/4 – Best watched hot off the heels of Demons (1985).

Posted on Tuesday morning.

Last night, I watched C.H.U.D. (1984). As kids, my brother and I saw it or C.H.U.D. II (1989), the latter featuring the ignominious Bud the C.H.U.D., and we identified something noteworthy enough in the films to continue referencing them in various ways over the years. Before revisiting it, I couldn’t recall anything from either film besides their names and basic premises. The first installment is entertaining in that so bad it goes back to good way, and it also has a strong cast, which helps. At turns, its plot – when not wholly laugh-out-loud falling down – wouldn’t have been out of place reworked into an X-files episode.

I don’t think there is any real connection, but at a couple of points in the film, I was put in the headspace of a Souls game and made this GIF. The resolution is lousy because to make it, I used images of the T.V. I shot with an iPad, but the same lack of fidelity could also be fittingly Souls-like; i.e., now its time to adjust your T.V.’s brightness/darkness until you barely see whatever it is you are to witness.

Review

C.H.U.D. (1984) – 2/4 – The best part of this movie is that the reveal is with the acronym that has stood for one thing most of the story, but conspiratorially indicates something else, and my resultant uncertainty if this new information changes my understanding or experience of the events that transpire in the film as a whole.

As indicated above, the disc reader on my PS5 broke. Game over, it’s now the big sleep, and the disc reader is in dirt nap mode pushing up daises. I’m upset by this because I’m one of those rare people who was very excited to have the ability to watch BD and 4k discs on it. And the unit is now out of warranty, and I don’t see myself sending it back to Sony for repairs.

I read countless articles on Sony’s site and off; I viewed a playlist’s worth of videos, even one featuring a person who was overly pumped about explaining how to wipe your PS5. (He came across like the process was virtually alchemical, and once you’d followed his instructions, a new PS5 would rise up like a phoenix from its old husk.) I did everything I could to troubleshoot the issue, from clearing various caches to reinstalling the operating system; nothing remedied the problem. Multiple discs, games, and films, flipping things every which way to tomorrow — bottom line, it’s still broken AF.

I will say that the reinstall of the OS was pretty easy. I lost some of my game save information, but with any new game, my save points were all downloaded from the cloud fine. I did, however, lose all the pictures and clips I’d saved from gameplay. This was irritating, as I could have easily kept that information if I had remembered. But, on the flip side, now I have a reason to grab all new tourist-styled pictures of my exploits in Demon Souls. Here’s one of my new ones, right after I found a ring in some hell hole bog of blood, bits, and despair. The purpose of the ring I found? It lets you run quicker in bogs (novel), and now I can speed around in an even grosser bog that might be more accurately described as a dimly lit swamp of turds.

Back to the main point; the PlayStation is only a little over a year old. I’ve gone through some controllers in that time, which I expected, but I did not anticipate the disc reader getting toasted. I have film distributors, like Vinegar Syndrome and Arrow, that I’m a big fan of, especially their meticulous treatments of older media, and it was a lot of fun watching some of their BDs and 4Ks on the system. The last film that graced my PS5 was Righting Wrongs (1986) with Cynthia Rothrock and Yuen Biao. Spoiler Alert: Everybody dies at the end of that film; for a Hong Kong action film, it ends on an uncharacteristic downer note, but maybe that’s also fitting if your disc reader is going to go that way as well.