Horror and sci-fi veteran Lance Henriksen (Alien, Near Dark) takes you through a fascinating look at the history of the American horror film, examining the earliest monster movies of the silent era up to the scariest modern-day masterpieces. Highlights include interviews with genre masters Roger Corman, John Carpenter and George A. Romero, plus clips from classic films like The Exorcist, Night of the Living Dead, Friday the 13th, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Hostel, Rosemary’s Baby and many more!

Not ready for the full purchasing commitment but still want to watch it? It’s available on demand and for download in numerous places including Amazon Video On Demand, iTunes, and perhaps your local cable provider.

First, the original from the movie Despicable Me. Then, The Internet gives us its take.

Surely by now you’ve heard of the odd phenomenon that is “Icing Bros.” At nearly two months old, it is has hit the long tail of late adopters and has generally fallen from popularity. It seems silly to write about it at this point, but today was the first day I was ever Iced. Or, supposed to be Iced, I should say. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

The basics of the activity (I will refrain from calling it a game) are relatively straight forward: if a person is surprised by the presentation of a Smirnoff Ice from another person, they are forced to take a knee and drink the bottle on the spot. However, it’s more complicated than that. Well “complicated” is perhaps a strong word. “There is another thing that’s not just that.” The rules are as follows:

You cannot refuse an Ice. If you refuse to drink the Ice, you are instantly excommunicated and shunned, and thus can never Ice another bro or be Iced.

If you are Iced by another bro, you can Ice block. When presented w/ an Ice, you can pull out an Ice of your own and reverse the Ice on your bro. The ultimate Ice insult.

Weeks ago I put up a wall against Icing. I explained to a friend that if anyone tried to Ice me, I would proceed to smash the bottle on the ground, embarrassing myself and everyone around me. I’m not the only one to think it’s a dumb activity, but enough of my friends have been doing it that I needed to be on my guard.

I tend to think the trend is not a viral marketing campaign from the Smirnoff company, but rather evolved naturally. I can’t help but image that the original persons who created the game were named Brent Peterson or Tad Williams. Having received their Bachelor’s degree in business, and newly started in the work world of a medium sized financial firm named after some old white men, Brent and Tad wanted to relive their frat days. Over sixteen Miller Lites one evening, Brent and Tad started making fun of Tad’s girlfriend, who was drinking a Smirnoff Ice. “Huuh, hey Tad. Tad. Drink that Ice! I dare you! Are you a bro or not?!” Tad, who always succumbed to peer pressure back in college, decided what the hell. As the liquid contents of flavored malt beverage passed over his tongue, Brent shouted out that his bro had been iced, bro.

The next weekend, Brent and Tad were having out with Cooper, and Tad whips out the single leftover bottle of Smirnoff Ice that had been sitting in the fridge since the previous Saturday. “Now you have to drink the Ice, bro!!” Cooper laughs and by laughing commits himself to finding this an amusing practice, opening himself up to be the butt of the joke in the coming days. The practice spreads among their group of friends and Cooper does it to somebody who works with him on Capitol Hill. Thus, Icing Bros gained traction through the unspoken agreement that it’s funny to make people drink “girly beer”.

But there’s another part of this that’s necessary for it to have become as popular as it did. Cooper’s friend Rachel iced her friend Jonathan who in turn Iced his old friend from high school Morris. But Morris wasn’t interesting. “What the fuck, man? You gotta drink it,” implores Jonathan. Rachel goads him on. “Yeah, drink the Ice! You have to!” “I don’t have to drink shit,” says Morris, sticking to his convictions. “Fine then,” responds Jonathan, “you don’t ever get to Ice anyone, then, and you will forever be known as a bag of douche.”

This fictional tale leads us to how we might have arrived at the corollary to the first rule. “If you refuse to drink the Ice, you are instantly excommunicated and shunned, and thus can never Ice another bro or be Iced,” implies that the incentive for playing the game is the ability to play the game. Bro Icing establishes a temporary magic circle of play where the participants must all subscribe to the same rule set.

As a participatory activity, it only works if the person being Iced understands the implications of the activity. Imagine if someone came up to you and told you to drink something just because you heard them telling you to drink something. Thanks to the Internet, learning the rules and bearing witness to an Icing in action no longer required direct experience. The activity spread virally through YouTube videos, a title and titular website, social medias, and numerous news articles describing the activity. Its wide distribution enabled those who had not been involved in public Icings to know what it was, and it thrived on an unspoken agreement that so long as you knew the rules, you had to play along.

The issue with the activity of Icing Bros is that it’s not a game, it’s peer pressure. It only functions properly if all involved agree to participate. But unlike the common college drinking games which take place in an existing context of imbibing, Bro Icing is about the element of surprise. Sure, you can Ice someone at a party. But is it more fun than getting them at the office? Or on stage at a concert? The shower? Your wedding?

And while its amusing to witness the humiliation of a person taking a knee and chugging a lukewarm gross alcoholic beverage, the fun is really in the dynamic of execution. Hide the Ice in a pizza box. Put it in a sock drawer. Hide it under a newspaper. The execution/consumption process reminds me of cutscenes in videogames: play something fun and get “rewarded” with a movie.

Accepting and refusing aren’t the only options, though. The Ice Block, as described by the second rule above, allows the Icer to get reversed Iced by the Icee. If presented with an Ice, the Icee can pull out their own Smirnoff Ice to force the presenter to drink the original Ice. Hoisted by their own petard! The Block is an insidious creature, however. The end result of Blocking is the same as refusing: you don’t have to drink anything. But what Blocking does is involves you directly in the game such that you cannot refuse in the future and are forever bound by its tenets.

Out of this rule, we see gameplay emergence. Ice Blocking can set off a chain reaction: Ice someone with one bottle, then when someone Ices you thinking you used up your defense, you present them with a Block and force them to take a knee too. Even Bernie De Koven would find this a well-played game. Except that the situation that leads to this is inconvenient to execute and results in an Ice Arms Race. There is something to be said for the playful nature in which an Icing can be executed. It is a rare occasion of people at play. It’s almost a kind of social game like mafia or  werewolf for the frat and professional crowd. I’m stereotyping here, of course, though drinking games do often appeal to a very specific group of people. Perhaps I would enjoy it more if there wasn’t a mean-spirited goal associated with the humiliation of the Icee.

But in spite of, or despite, my general distaste for the whole practice and the rules that govern it, I couldn’t help but chuckle at an Icing today. My friend Adam, who knew of my general refusal of the game, attempted to Ice me anyway. We packed up the cooler today and went down to the pool with two of our other friends. As we were laying out our towels on chairs and slathering up with sunscreen, my friend asks if I wouldn’t mind grabbing his sunglasses for him, which were wrapped in his towel.

“No no, I’ll get it,” says my other friend Jasper. He picks up the towel, brings it to Adam, and proceeds to unwrap it a bit. Though Jasper was in on the Icing, he failed to see Adam’s plan and ended up unfurling the package such that he presented the Ice to himself. “What did you do!?” hollers Adam as he motions for Jasper to take a knee and chug the warm drink. We all had a laugh, but I couldn’t help but thanks Jasper for accidentally taking one for the team. After all, Icing me would have resulted in a bottle smashed on the deck of the pool and I would prefer not to be evicted from my apartment.

So Andy Inhatko proposed something similar sounding in name but quite different in practice: International Talk Like Paul Lynde Day. Those in the know remember Paul Lynde‘s signature voice as he played bit parts on shows like Bewitched and took residence in the center of Hollywood Squares. He played Ann-Margret’s father in Bye Bye Birdie, singing What’s the Matter With Kids Today. Younger audiences might know his voice as Templeton the rat from Charlotte’s Web. Still younger audiences might only recognize his voice as mimicked by the character Roger the Alien on Seth Macfarlane’s American Dad.

Paul Lynde’s iconic voice is the perfect subject for its own Talk Like day. I marked my calendar back and September and the day is finally here! So go out into the world and give it your best Paul Lynde.

When you really get to know a field, author, filmmaker, artist, or subject, you begin to notice patterns, begin to piece together details that at first may not make sense. Ten years of buying (and frequently reselling, sometimes at a considerable profit) DVDs made me notice trends in who was publishing and distributing which films. Sure, there are well-known holdings–most frequent TCM viewers can probably rattle off all of the pre-1950 studios for which the network owns broadcasting rights–but other arrangements escape ready understanding. Several years ago, I noticed that the company once resolutely known as “Anchor Bay Entertainment,” who had started out in the VHS era but had attained critical mass in the middle of the past decade, was regularly publishing idiosyncratic films from a variety filmmakers who often made their work under independent circumstances. They have since been swallowed up by Starz and tend to release mediocre fare that seems direct-to-video or otherwise poorly received. Genre director William Lustig, who was behind many of their best releases, jumped ship for Blue Underground, a “boutique” label who now own many of the best properties once tended by Anchor Bay. In its heyday, filmmakers like George A. Romero, Alex Cox, and Michael Nesmith had licensed their work to ABE. Though ABE had licensed some titles in the early part of the decade from major studios (namely MGM), they also handled titles by “mini-majors” who had disappeared at some point in the 1980s or 1990s, such as Vestron Pictures and New World Pictures (one of Corman’s companies, before New Concorde). They had released many, many 1980s horror films, plenty of art pictures (most importantly, Werner Herzog’s celebrated films of the 1970s), and tons of (s)exploitation (anybody wondered who owned the DVD rights to H.O.T.S. [1979]?) In short, nearly everything that they’d released was at the very least interesting. Most of it had flown under the radar, and just about all of it appealed to my “obscure treasure-hunter” impulse. The chase was on.

Once DVD came to maturity as a format–without looking at any statistics, I’d guess that its ascendant years were 2004/2005, before the new formats had widely debuted and before the economy totally tanked–it became clear that publishers would have to find interesting ways to market, or just plain unload, their back catalogs. While the most common tactic today seems to be to dump product to wholesalers (for example, MGM has needed cash for years, and has been hemorrhaging DVDs to companies like Big Lots, who turn around and sell them for $3 a pop), some companies have done well with repackaging. To this end, I think that Anchor Bay Entertainment was really on to something with their “Fright Packs.”

In Fall 2005, they released “Fright Packs,” which their promotional materials describe as: “Unique, Eye-Catching 6-Pack Foil Packaging & Convenient Carry Case Makes Fright Packs a GREAT IMPULSE BUY!” I can vividly remember ordering the “Walking Dead” set (pictured above with City of the Living Dead [1983], Nightmare City [1983], and The House by the Cemetery [1981] facing out) at launch, intrigued by the value, strangeness of the films, and hilarious packaging. As someone who counts beer and horror films among their top passions, this was it–this was how it was supposed to be done. The discs themselves were individually sealed and had been originally minted a few years prior. It became clear to me that the company was trying to find something to do with what seemed to be a warehouse’s worth of obscure and semi-obscure horror films. I was happy to help them out.

Cut to a few weeks ago. With the end of school either in sight, I was taking a break from the writing of papers with a quick trip to a second-hand book/DVD store. Behind the check-out counter, next to some of their bigger-ticket items (oversize Taschen books which cost nearly $200, CD boxed-sets, etc.) was a strange little cooler with the Anchor Bay logo on top. I asked to look into it, and it turned out that it housed the only “Fright Pack” I didn’t previously own, “Campy Classics,” probably the least thematically specific of the sets and the only one that is still easy to find in-print. The set was nice to have, but what really blew my mind was the cooler. This, it turned out, was a promotional set given out to retailers with information about the product line.

The set itself was still sealed. Beneath it was a little packet of Beer Nuts (I’m sure they’ve putrefied, but I’ll leave them sealed) and a promotional flier discussing the products. It explains “pre-book” information and contains bar-codes. As a former video store employee, I can recall some “cool” promotional items (the video game industry always seemed to do it better), but this pretty much tops the charts for the DVD format.

I am by no means a heavy Mountain Dew drinker, but I do appreciate it in much the way I appreciate a craft beer. It’s the one soda that’s constantly trying new things. My all-time favorite is the first-release of Pitch Black, the grape “expression” (to steal a term from Scotch whisky distillers), which they mucked up on second release by making replacing the smoothness with a sour kick. As I peruse the list of Dews on Wikipedia, I realize that I’ve tried every soda (excluding Slurpees and energy drinks) since 2001.

So, of course I ran out to try the new flavors in the 2010 Dewmocracy competition. And what do I think? Well, it depends on the criteria. If American Idol is a competition not for finding the best singer, but for producing the best pop star, then Dewmocracy is about choosing the soda that should end up on the shelves. Thus, I render my DEWtermination.

Mountain Dew Typhoon. Typhoon reminds me of Code Red mixed with Pineapple soda. Sound gross? It’s not. Pineapple soda is underappreciated and underserved. Want to know the popular opinion of pineapple soda? Check out this definition from Urban Dictionary: “Urine, Piss. Basically telling someone to drink piss.” Now now, that’s not fair. Perhaps tempering pineapple soda with Code Red is exactly what the world needs.

It’s a tasty soda. It’s like a special kind of fruit punch—the kind you only can get in gallon jugs as a store brand. The kind of punch that mom’s bring to their kid’s school, or frat guys find to make jungle juice for a party. Don’t let that scare you off. Remember, you have generally fond memories of your elementary school and no memories of that frat party.

Does it deserve to win? Nah. It’s good, not great. Too sweet for the everyday. It’s a nice change of pace, but not the best. B+

Those who know me well know that I love lime. It may very well be my favorite flavor of anything. I’ve even jettisoned my self-respect into space, choosing Bud Light Lime as my go-to drink of summer afternoons (I just pretend it’s not beer and that makes it all okay). Want a little Virtual Fools archive in your life? Check out my top ten sodas and notice that 20% of them are lime flavored.

As a fan of lime, Mtn Dew Distortion is awesome. However, I can recognize that it’s probably the weakest of the three offerings. The issue is the lime is too subtle. Distortion is regular Mountain Dew playing up the lime, as opposed to some new distinct flavor. First you taste the Dew, then the subtleties of the lime come out. And I do mean subtleties. I chugged my first bottle of Distortion, excited at the prospects, but on second tasting I came to the realization that Distortion doesn’t realize its full potential. C+

Alright, country. You’re right. White Out leads the Dewmocracy polls online and for good reason. This is the Dew that belongs on shelves. Not because it’s the most innovative, but because—and I hate to say this—it has drinkability. I could see myself getting a fridge pack of White Out to have on hand. I could drink it with a meal. I could have it as a special treat. It’s got flexibility.

White Out describes itself as “smooth citrus” and at first taste seems like it might be just a weak version of regular ol’ Dew. But after a few pulls on the bottle, the grapefruit flavor comes forth. It’s like drinking a Squirt with that signature Mountain Dew kick. There’s something else tropical in the bottle, too, that I can’t quite put my finger on but that fits in with the tropical limes and pineapples of the other offerings. Perhaps it’s like Baja Blast with grapefruit instead of lime. The soda doesn’t take a lot of risks, but it excels at being an everyday Dew. A-

The verdict has been rendered: White Out is the flavor that should stick around. Of course, if I had my way Mountain Dew would make all their flavors available year round. Or, how about they just scrap everything and make Pitch Black their only offering. That wouldn’t be so bad, would it?

May. The beginning of summer, the portal onto the new horizon of excessive temperatures, indeed the retreat into the bowels of windowless, brazenly air-conditioned rooms. A time for immediate reflection, but for people still lucky (unlucky?) enough to be on a university schedule, also a time for the stoking of new projects.

My spring was busy. But first, I’m happy to report that my book (Ken Russell: Re-Viewing England’s Last Mannerist) has received some attention. There is a short “Recommended” review in May 2010 issue of the American Library Association’s publication Choice. You can view it via their free trial, or through a library’s databasing service. There is a thorough review in the April 2010 issue of the Journal of British Cinema and Television. A preview can be viewed here.

The conspicuous lack of material on VF can at least be partially attributed to the other little bits of writing I’ve done for diverse venues. A few are fully and freely accessible online. I reviewed the recent anthology A History of Visual Culture: Western Civilization from the 18th to the 21st Century, edited by Jane Kromm and Susan Benforado-Bakewell (Berg, 2010) for the Southwest Journal of Cultures. I wrote a lengthy, comparative review of James Chapman’s War on Film (Reaktion, 2008) and Tony Shaw’s Hollywood’s Cold War (Edinburgh UP, 2007) for Scope. Though written two years ago, it emerged in issue 16, and can be viewed here.

I reviewed John C. Tibbetts’s highly commendable book All My Loving?: The Films of Tony Palmer (2009) for the above-mentioned April 2010 Journal of British Cinema and Television. I have two short pieces in the May 2010 issue of Film & History, one about the film The London Nobody Knows (1967), the other a review of Robert Shail’s Seventies British Cinema (2008).

The Last Word: Live!

One of my big projects for this summer is a live, improvised/sketch show based on the Va Gazette (Williamsburg, VA-area newspaper) column “The Last Word.” This column, now in its 25th year, is a forum which prints anonymous comments from the local community. By turns earnestly personal and maddeningly vitriolic, these statements provide easily adaptable material for what promises to be a gut-wrenchingly amusing performance. The show is June 18th and 19th (a Fri. and a Sat.) at the Kimball Theater in Williamsburg, VA. Ticket information, including preorder, is on their calender. The whole shebang is brought to you by 1693 Productions.

Plenty more to come. Many projects, original VF shorts, and reviews of diverse items of diverse media in the pipeline.

The Problem

I pay for cable TV, I pay for Netflix, I pay $50 a year for Xbox Live Gold. And while I almost never watch TV (that’s the domain of my girlfriend), but I feel beholden to my Netflix and Xbox because I’ve committed money to them. If they were free services, I might not give them as much attention (I’m looking at you, PSN). And that’s precisely what the web is.

We’re used to getting things for free one the Internet because that’s always how it’s been. We put up with ads because we don’t have to reach for our wallets. But I rarely feel a sense of allegiance to websites because I can always go elsewhere for similar information. Granted, there are cases where I read a site specifically for its writers (aka Giant Bomb and Tested), but usually Autoblog is as good as Jalopnik.

This is one reason I still like magazines. Think of having a magazine delivered to your home versus looking at the table of them at the dentist’s office. When I subscribe to Wired or Car and Driver, I’ve made a decision on what to read and have limited my choices. When I’m in the dentist’s office, I stare blankly at the table before a) picking something I already know or b) picking at random. I read an article and get called back to the chair with no sense of satisfaction. Sure, I’ve taken in the information, but it never really sticks with me.

The Experiment

Turning back to the web, what if I used a financial commitment to narrow my consumption? What content would I subscribe to? How much would I be willing to pay? In the case of this thought experiment, I’m assuming that I would be able to enjoy the rest of the Internet, but that I would always start with my subscriptions first and they would take up most of my time.

Content I Would Pay For

TWiT Network, $5/mo

I’ve been listening to This Week in Tech since episode 20 or so. Leo Laporte’s little empire has a broad enough range of content that I don’t even think about subscribing to other podcasts. I listen to TWiT and MacBreak Weekly regularly, and tune into some of the other shows on occasion. But these two shows alone are worth the monthly contribution. In fact, TWiT already has a recurring monthly contribution system setup, making this a natural first example.

The Mike O’Meara Show, $10/mo

I grew up listening to talk radio. Not like political talk radio, and not NPR, but the kind of radio often described as “Guy Talk.” You know, talk radio epitomized by shocks jocks Howard Stern or Opie and Anthony. The kind of talk radio that is basically dead on terrestrial stations. Say what you want about most of the shows, I will defend to the death the Don and Mike Show. They were on the air together over twenty years, and after Don Geronimo left the airwaves, Mike O’Meara picked up the mantle with the rest of the cast to start the Mike O’Meara Show. After a solid year’s run, their station switched formats and they were out of work. But they came back a few months later with a daily podcast and have slowly been gaining momentum on the iTunes charts. The podcast is five hours of good content a week from a group of really talented people. My higher subscription price reflects my desire to support their effort.

Whiskey Media, $5/mo

It probably goes without saying, but between Giant Bomb and Tested, there’s enough content that one could get rid of their television. I’ll admit that I don’t care much for This is Only a Test, but I’m your typical Jeff Gerstmann apostle, following him about and spreading his Word. The Bombcast is my favorite piece of media and I put everything else on hold to listen to it. The Whiskey Media sites are all about depth—the kind of minutae I can really sink my teeth into. While I have no interest in anime, comics, or (upcoming) movies, I’m really looking forward to the Tested wiki. It’s encouraging to know that these sites are run by passionate people with no interest in selling to a megacorp that will control their product coughcnetcough.

Ars Technica, $15/yr

I actually prefer Ars to its sister site Wired. Between tech, games, and science, their tagline might as well be “Stuff Bobby Enjoys.” Unlike other tech blogs, they’re not caught up posting every little cell phone announcement and they don’t earn their pageviews through the rumormill. The writing is good and the coverage has just the right depth. Ars already offers a $5/mo subscription, but I’m not as much interested in their perks (like the PDF library and forum access) as I am their regular content. My ideal subscription price is more like that of a magazine.

AOL / Weblogs, Inc., $5/mo

Say what you want, it’s hard to deny that Weblogs, Inc. has a good slate of blogs. While Gawker is intolerably bad (save for some posts on Lifehacker), I enjoy Engadget, Joystiq, Autoblog, and TUAW.Like Ars, it has a slew of categories that appeal directly to my interests. The writing isn’t always the best, but these blogs certainly have good coverage as a group. I’d feel better about supporting them if I knew that writers got paid more to contribute, but this hypothetical discussion is about the selfish task of reducing my media consumption.

So, then, now that that’s covered, which websites’ content would you pay for?

The Virtual Fools are proud–and just plain excited– to be returning to Magfest (now in its 8th iteration, though this is our 7th). The event takes place at the “way too nice for a motley crew like us” Hilton Mark Center in Alexandria, Virginia. The imported Italian marble in the lobby contrasts sharply with grown adults dressed as Mega Man.

We are busy this year, just as busy (or busier) than in years past. [Note that I am still working off a "not finalized" schedule in posting this--for updates, follow @bokista on Twitter in case things, god forbid, get moved or delayed].

The whole caboodle kicks off tonight, with an “epic party” inclusive of Shael Riley & The Double-Ice Backfire and Virt concert performances, as well as a pervasive Goldeneye 007 theme.

Our guest/panelist contributions start on Friday. At 5pm in “Panels 1,” we present Game Studies 101, a comprehensive, hour-long introduction to the study of the videogame. We intend to introduce this nascent field and provide scaffolding for the various ways in which scholars discuss games. Then, starting at 6 pm, VF teams up with/against members of X-Strike Studios and PBC Productions in a majestic, bout of theatre-sports moderated improv! Come see your favorite goofballs compete against other goofballs. Time permitting, we’ll also do some long-form.

The Low Score Podcast with Bobby and J (special guest, me) will likely be podcasting on Friday and Saturday, at least once in public, so stop by and find us if so inclined. We’ve got a (thankfully) lighter day on Saturday, but will be made busy by all the great festivities–a definite highlight of which is the Sid Meier “keynote” at 1 pm.

Things get super busy again on Sunday. We are taking part in an illustrious “Gaming Intellectuals” panel from 12-2, with Ryan Soloby (ex of Chromelodeon), Tim Macneil, Robert V. Aldrich, and Shaun Cashman (believe it or not, a schoolmate of mine from NCSU)! In this two hour discussion, likely moderated by Aldrich, we’ll discuss game narratives, providing, hopefully, widely divergent views on their success, usefulness, and evolution.  Shaun’s got a “gaming immersion” panel right after, and the X-Strike Studios “premiere showcase” can surely tide you over until…our Password: Videogame Edition at 6 pm. Hey, remember Password? Need a refresher? We’ve resurrected this red-headed-stepchild of the game show world. Much like last year’s successful Match Game, we’ll be giving many contestants a chance to compete for some pretty nice prizes. There will be fun, jokes, celebrities, quips, zings, voices, impersonations, highs, lows, agonies, defeats, and triumphs.

So that’s what we’ve got planned for you. But there is much, much more. Take a peak at this semi-complete schedule, check the official site for the final deal, come to the convention, greet the New Year with force.

Stay tuned for more Magfest announcements, including a full schedule of our events and guest appearances.