Apeshit Over Movie Endings

These two heads are from the first two modules in my Head & Hands class. The older one shows some lines alittle too prominently on the nose and chin/neck. I like how the younger one turned out. Yeah, his beard is really that long.

Classes aren't going too terribly badly right now, although it is the beginning, so we'll see how well I keep up.

For those of you not checking BoneDaddy Comics until after this one, I just posted a new page of Golden Brown. We are finally getting back to the main story!

What am I Watching?

Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things- A group of theatre actors travel to a 'burial island' and attempt to exercise a little witchcraft--mainly a ruse perpetrated by their director as an excuse to scare everyone and have a party. The director, we find out, is actually an asshole who likes to bully his actors and lord his power over them. The actors are ironically portrayed by people who can't act. Anyway, the witchcraft somehow works, the dead come to life, and we find our actors trapped in the former caretaker's house in a Night of the Living Dead situation. Let me stop and tell you at this point that these actors are the reason I HATED drama kids in high school. They dramatize simple sentences with bad inflection and overactive hand gestures, and they are prone to singing random verses from whatever musicals they've acted in. I wanted them dead from the beginning, and was happy when the ghouls finally came to claim their gamey meat. The best character was Orville, a corpse who once was a caretaker and was dug up by the director for his rituals. He was kept by the director (who with his forced actor's laugh and speech reminded me of Brueckner) at the house and subjected to all the bad acting. Little wonder, then, that after the director ran up the stairs (after throwing a crazy chick to the horde) and locked himself in the bedroom, Orville was there, slowly rising up to claim his giant hotdog (the director was all lips & assholes). The ending was great. Everybody died and the zombies start piling onto the boat to sail away.

Planet of the Apes- Yeah I know, how did I go so long without this classic? I recall having seen it once a while back, but after watching it again, I'm baffled at how relevant this movie must have been back in the '60's. A group of astronauts crash land on a planet and after some exploring are captured by a civilization of apes. They find that the ape civilization is much like their own, even with a set of laws based on religious beliefs. One astronaut is shot and killed, the other undergoes some funky brain surgery, and the third, Taylor, is caged and tortured. He finds a captive human girl and falls for her, befriends some apes from the younger, more open-minded generation, but he poses a problem for Dr. Zaius, who thinks he came from beyond the forbidden zone, where Zaius believes more of his kind reside. He escapes, helped by the younger apes who become guilty for 'scientific heresy'. They are found by Dr. Zaius and prove to him that there were, in fact, humans who had the capacity for speech and possibly were not used as pets or slaves for the apes, thus setting up concepts of evolution. All throughout the movie, Dr. Zaius comes off as a religious fundametalist, but towards the end we start seeing that he seems unsurprised by much of this information, and makes further attempts to suppress this information from the rest of ape civilization. He lets Taylor go, but warns that he won't like what he finds. And, of course, we know what Taylor finds. It was a very cool movie that cleverly (for its time) played on racial issues, as well as religious and scientific debate.

Beneath the Planet of the Apes- This movie takes off right where the first one ended. Taylor throws a world class hissy fit because he's been on earth all along (oops did I spill the beans?), then he and Nova (the hot quiet chick from the first one) ride around on a horse. Some stuff happens, and they get seperated. In the meantime Brent crashlands his ship. Nova happens upon him and they try to search for Taylor in the Forbidden zone. They discover a cult of humans advanced beyond speech that worship an atomic bomb. They have a long-standing feud with the apes which mounts to a pretty good battle. Brent, Nova and Taylor are reunited, some more stuff happens, and Taylor gets shot. He is refused help by a pissed off Dr. Zaius, and as he falls dead, he hits a button detonating the atomic bomb. Once again, everybody dies.

For some weird reason, the movies this week have all been well-focused on pay-off endings. And those pay-off endings have made the movies worth watching, even that first one.