Iran, not a fan of the U.S. since ELO were in the Top Ten and bellbottoms were unironically fashionable, is combining the worst of both worlds: amateur talent competitions and state-approved propaganda. This bastardization comes in the form of the Marg bar Amrika (“Down with America”) contest, sponsored by “conservative” Iranian news agencies and television stations. As opposed to all of those progressive, independent, free-thinking media outlets that fill the Iranian landscape.

Oh, wait….

Anti-American posters have been a common sight in Tehran since the late ‘70s, even though city officials have ordered the removal of recent posters implying that President Obama’s diplomatic overture is just an excuse for the U.S. to attack Iran.

Iran has been unequivocally clear about how much it despises the U.S. and everything about us. Thanks to the burned flags, charred effigies of American political figures, explicit placards, angry demonstrations, bitchy speeches, celebration (November 4th) of the 1979 attack on the U.S. embassy in Tehran, and the ever-present “death to America” and “down with America” chants, the message hasn’t exactly been lost on anyone.

And now a grand prize of $4000 will be awarded to whomever designs the best photo, cartoon, or article linking the U.S. to “oppression and lying” and blatantly illustrating what choads we are. A secondary prize of $1200 is for documentaries, hymns and blog posts. Could interpretive dance, video installations, performance art and haiku be far behind?


 

Simon Cowell and the usual talent-spotters will not be involved in this judging event. Instead, according to The Daily Mail, “Hardline conservative illustrators and artists from Iran will judge submissions, including cartoonists Maziyar Bizhani and Mohammad Hosein Niroomand, both of whom have been published in the Keyhan [conservative] newspaper.”

Here are the writing prompts for aspiring propagandists keen on entering the contest:

Why do people say ‘down with America’?
Why is the US is not reliable?
The US and broken promises
The US and self-conceit
The US and human rights
The US and oppression
The US and Islamophobia
The US and Iranophobia
The US and global Zionism
The US and neo-colonialism
The US and democracy
The US dictatorship
The US and freedom of speech
The US and the Occupy / 99 per cent movement

Al Jazeera: Iranians react to U.S.-Iran meeting:

 
It’s surprising that someone at U.S. Games Systems hasn’t reissued the obscure Astronomia card deck, an astronomically themed Victorian Georgian card game published in 1829. Surely someone should have turned it into a Tarot deck or children’s educational video or board game by now. Zazzle sells clocks, iPhone covers, Nook decals, handtowels, notebook covers, and other items featuring the Luna card image, but not the actual cards. Mostly intact decks cost thousands of dollars, but curious as I am, I don’t want to learn how to play the game that badly.

 

 

 
The George Glazer Gallery describes an available $2400 deck:

A highly sought-after astronomically based card game, Astronomia, with beautiful illustrations by Henry Courbould, was created by F.G. Moon in 1829. Deck of educational astronomy cards pertaining to the solar system. Zodiac constellations, planets, the sun, comets, and asteroids are decoratively and scientifically rendered in shades of black and white as if the night sky were being viewed through a draped window flanked by pillars.

Bonhams Auctioneers described a similar lot in a catalog listing, which sold for $903 two years ago:

An attractive and scarce pack of cards on an astronomical theme. The pack is divided into the four seasons: Summer (pink, Autumn (yellow), Winter (white) and Spring (blue). The zodiacal sign cards of or a greater value than the other cards. The suits are made up as follows: Spring- Aries, Luna, Jupiter, Saturn, Herschel, Tellus, Venus, Mars, Mercury, Pallas, Juno, Ceres, Vesta. The remaining suits are composed in the same way, except for the first two cards: Summer: Cancer, The Sun; Autumn: Libra, The Comet; Winter: Capricorn, The Orbits.

More scans of the cards can be seen here.

 
We’ve all been there, right? You know, gettin’ ready for a funeral consumed with sorrow and... takin’ a selfie ‘cause you’re having a good hair day and WANT SOME ATTENTION.

Why should the dead get all the attention on funeral day? Pfft! They’re dead.

If you can relate to this, then you’re going to love Selfies at Funerals. And if you can’t relate, you’re going to throw up a little in your mouth.
 

 

 

 

 
Have you ever received a letter from a friend you haven’t heard from for a while, or even an email? And then you wanted to respond right away but you wanted to do it right, not just dash something off, so you put it off a day, and the next time you thought of it, eight days had passed, and it became a thing where too much time had passed for you to write the reply straight, and you felt awkward about it, so you put it off some more, and then every day that passed made it harder to respond forthrightly? And then it turned into this odd kind of guilt, and you found yourself actually harboring hostile feelings towards your friend for having put you in that position in the first place?

Has anything like that ever happened to you? Because something quite like that happened to Harlan Ellison on the most colossal scale imaginable. The nightmare was primarily of his own making, and he didn’t handle it at all well.

Before we get into this, Ellison is a tremendously talented and accomplished guy, and nothing I write here is intended to gainsay that premise. He’s also known for being kind of a difficult guy, and well, this story has a bunch of that.

Strangely, this story revolves around a set of books that can be thought of as a kind of precursor to Dangerous Minds—the title of the project was almost identical. In addition to all of the tremendous short stories Ellison penned, one of the most impressive accomplishments on his C.V. was his involvement in publishing two highly influential and successful sci-fi anthologies. The first one was called Dangerous Visions (1967) and the second one was called Again, Dangerous Visions (1972). The debacle came when Ellison attempted to publish the third volume, which was to be called The Last Dangerous Visions. It was supposed to be published by about 1974 or so. At least 100 and maybe as many as 150 prominent and not-so-prominent sci-fi authors submitted stories with the expectation that something like that would happen.

They’re still waiting—the ones who are still alive, anyway. Actually, truth be told, they’re probably not expecting anything to happen. In short, The Last Dangerous Visions became something like the Moby-Dick of science-fiction circles for a decade or two at least.

In the 1960s something special was brewing in the world of sci-fi. After having been a ghetto for dime-store practitioners for a generation or so (with a few exceptions), science fiction was on the verge of crossing over, breaking through, becoming real literature with a grown-up audience to match. The first Dangerous Visions featured talents as notable as Carol Emshwiller and J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick and Roger Zelazny and Samuel R. Delany and, of course, Ellison himself. It was a massive critical and commercial success, a true turning point for the genre. Five years later, Again, Dangerous Visions was also a hit, featuring Ursula K. Le Guin and Kurt Vonnegut and Piers Anthony and Ray Bradbury and Andrew J. Offutt and James Sallis and so on. By this time the Dangerous Visions books had entered the culture—they had an authentic audience who was eager to hear the details of the third volume. The literary brouhaha that would ensue wasn’t something that took place among a mere coterie, which gives the whole affair that much more bite.
 

Dangerous Visions, 1967
 
The events surrounding the massive and ever-delayed third volume, to be called The Last Dangerous Visions, were described with great vitriol by Christopher Priest, a British sci-fi writer who was just starting his career around the time The Last Dangerous Visions started to be a thing, in a 1987 pamphlet called The Last Deadloss Visions (it was later published by Fantagraphics under the title The Book on the Edge of Forever, an allusion to Ellison’s Star Trek episode “The City on the Edge of Forever”). Priest submitted a story, and then at some point withdrew it from the anthology. For writers whose pay depended on the royalties from anthologies, one of the main undercurrents of the The Last Dangerous Visions affair is that the many stories Ellison collected for it were essentially trapped as long as he had them—the writers couldn’t really shop them around anywhere else, as they grew more dated and less relevant with every passing year.

The Last Deadloss Visions has existed in a couple different forms, but suffice to say that it’s very long and impassioned and well argued (you can read it on the Internet Archive).
 

Again, Dangerous Visions, 1972
 
I’ll leave you to read it yourself—it takes an hour or so, and is well worth it—but I’ll divulge a few basic facts about it for those who don’t want to delve. What makes the situation surrounding The Last Dangerous Visions so jaw-dropping was the sheer scale of it—as many as 150 writers submitted stories, and by some calculations the number of words that the third book would have featured swelled as high as 1.3 million—this is twice as many as in War and Peace, or the same as perhaps an armful of regular-sized novels. According to Priest (his documentation is meticulous), Ellison on many occasions released statements to the effect that publication was just around the corner, he had “just dropped it off to the publisher” and so forth—none of which appears to have been true, and all of which had the effect of stringing the contributors along for another agonizing year or two. Ellison seems not to have behaved well in the affair, bullying, haranguing, and generally manipulating people, and even by 1975 or so—just three years—The Last Dangerous Visions had become something of a joke or an object of fascination in the sci-fi community. It’s the science fiction equivalent of Elastica’s second album, if you remember that length of that wait, although at least that album eventually was released. Lastly, I mentioned the death toll—which quickly became an index for the incredible time The Last Dangerous Visions was taking—by now the project is in its fourth decade, and the number of writers involved who have passed on to a different plane (according to Wikipedia) is forty-three.

Remarkably, Ellison, who today is 79 years old, has stated as recently as 2007 that he intends to publish the book.

It still hasn’t happened.

Below, Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison and Gene Wolfe discuss science-fiction writing with Studs Terkel and Calvin Trillin on a program called Nightcap: Conversations on the Arts and Letters in 1982:

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Harlan Ellison: Don’t Fuck With the Quote

 
I can’t put my finger on what it is exactly that I find so off-putting about Woody Allen in a series of commercials for Seibu, a Japanese department store. Cinematically, the appeal is very Warholian—watching a celebrity in a sparse setting, engaging in simple, mundane activities. It’s just that in this case, they’re very Japanese activities. Maybe it’s the idea of Woody Allen representing a brand? I like some of his films, but frankly, I’m never going to buy something because Woody Allen told me to. My distaste for celebrity endorsement aside, he’s not a guy many would ask for shopping tips outside of Zabar’s.

Maybe it’s weird because it’s a Japanese brand, and Woody Allen seems so uniquely culture-specific. Large swaths of Middle America don’t even like Woody Allen, but in Asia he was hawking the Japanese equivalent of Bloomingdale’s? From what I can tell from Seibu’s original press statements, Japan wasn’t even particularly aware of Woody Allen at the time! Seibu’s executives said they wanted someone who was an “adult” to represent their brand. One said “being good-looking is not enough.” You’ll note that Allen’s name is never mentioned in the spots. It’s amusing to wonder if he was hired more for being a “funny looking white guy” than for being Woody Allen.

Did Seibu break Woody in Japan? If so, what do they like better, Annie Hall or Love and Death? How does Woody Allen translate?  I simply must know more!
 

 
Everything about the fleeting post-punk project ART was conceived as an angry provocation or some sort of a put-on. Indeed, everything about ART really reeked of the Sixties, up to and including their appropriation of the “Yippies” in one of their song titles, but that wasn’t even really a song. Somewhat like The Normal, they put out but a single 7-inch but also contributed two entries to the 1983 compilation The “You’ll Hate This Record” Record that also featured two tracks from G.G. Allin. Apparently they also produced a live cassette called ART: Live at Carnegie Hall, but there’s very little information about that one, you can find it on eBay and Gemm.com occasionally.

In his review of Public Image Ltd’s September 26, 1982, show at New York’s Roseland Ballroom (which is likely to close in April), Robert Christgau drew attention to the first band on the bill: “The opener was Art, which bills itself as ‘the only band in the world.’ PIL isn’t arguing. Laurie Montana, who mimes Art’s songs for the hearing-impaired, is a known associate of Keith Levine.” Believe me, this band was totally made to open for PiL. If they hadn’t existed, John Lydon would have had to invent them.

The bulk of their output consists of the three or four tracks, depending on how you count them, on their 1980 7-inch The Only Record in the World. Consistent with their aggravating ways, side A was pretty much normal, featuring a single “song” called “Ugly People with Fancy Hairdos.” Side B was wiggier, divided into two completely separate left and right channels. The left channel offered “Give Me Nuclear Power” and “I Don’t Want to Hold Your Hand,” and if you played the right channel only, you would hear “ART Gets Thrown Off the Stage While Playing for the Yippies.” As if to pre-empt listener annoyance at being forced to fiddle with the balance knob (remember that thing?) to enjoy the music, ART typically added the following text to the instructions on the back cover: “Hard? One must make sacrifices for ART.”

Speaking of that back cover, it featured one of the shorter artistic manifestos in human history—it went like this:
 

THE ART MANIFESTO

White people can do things, too. The difference between an object of beauty itself and a simple arranger of beauty is the difference between a flower and a florist. The creative combination of chemicals into something useful and healthy as opposed to a simple distributor of those chemicals is the difference between a drug and a druggist. We are not artists. We’re ART.

All of the aforementioned songs except the Yippie one are long, convoluted, exasperating, and not without musical merit. However, far louder than any musical note is the sheer obnoxiousness of attitude. Every nanosecond is dripping with contempt for the audience and impatience with anyone who might interfere with ART’s right to express themselves in any way they pleased. Or maybe not—was it all ironic? A put-on? Yes/no. Both/and.

The A side, “Ugly People with Fancy Hairdos,” featured some spoken agitprop/dada verses by a female vocalist, which are periodically interrupted by a male voice shouting “NO!”—it eventually resolves into something resembling a groove, with the chorus “We’re all boat people!” “I Don’t Want to Hold Your Hand,” which apparently boasts the (unprinted) parenthetical addition “(I Just Want to Beat You Up),” is all over the map but takes the time to poke fun at a bunch of songs that had recently been popular, including M’s “Pop Muzik,” the B-52s’ “Rock Lobster,” Blondie’s “Heart of Glass”—I may have missed some. The crime that these acts committed, it seems, was to be excessively interested in being popular.
 

The Only Record in the World, back cover

The main guy in ART was a fellow named Mykel Board, whose bio (see the YouTube pages linked below) is littered with phrases like “Yippie,” “1968 Democratic National Convention,” and “anarchist newspaper.” He recently published a memoir about Mongolia called Even a Daughter Is Better Than Nothing, the title of which (he explains) is a Mongolian expression that means, roughly, “half a loaf is better than none” and was explicitly chosen to be attention-getting.

The music couldn’t be more of its time, or actually ten years earlier, but it’s amusing and not altogether horrible to listen to. For those whose curiosity about ART is insatiable, there’s some more stuff (in German, alas) on this website, but also images of all the album art and liner notes, and that stuff is all in English, obviously.

I doubt that you’ll hear back, but according to the back cover of The Only Record in the World if you want you can write the good people of ART a letter at One Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10001.

“Ugly People with Fancy Hairdos”

 
“Give Me Nuclear Power/I Don’t Want To Hold Your Hand”

 
“ART Gets Thrown Off The Stage While Playing For The Yippies”

Previously on Dangerous Minds:

 
A couple of years ago, a Dutch talk show on the Nederland 3 channel called De Wereld Draait Door (“The World Keeps Turning”; can also mean “The World Is Going Crazy”) tried an experiment, broadcasting for 12 weeks a soap opera in which all of the characters—and actors—have Down syndrome. The show is called Downistie (punning on Dynasty; this may be obvious but I didn’t really get it); each episode lasts three minutes.

The show has been both popular and controversial, according to reports. De Wereld Draait Door has been described on Wikipedia as a talk show with “news, information, television bloopers and general entertainment,” plus “every day there’s a live performance of a band in the studio.” It sounds a little like The Daily Show. So perhaps, even if Downistie is meant “seriously,” it’s a little as if it appeared at the end of, say, Conan. Boosters have touted the fact that the viewership is as high as a million people per episode—no mean feat in a country of 16 million people—but it’s unclear how many of those people were already watching De Wereld Draait Door anyway.

According to the Greetings from Holland blog, the actress who plays housewife and mom “Vicky” is named Sara van Ketel. She says (translation cleaned up a little):
 

I didn’t have to do auditions, I simply can act. I just want to be famous. I have always wanted it. I am already, a bit. In the supermarket or in the subway, people ask me, “Were you on TV?” And then I answer, “It is possible” ...  I think it is great that I act only with other people with a handicap. They are all my friends. Maybe other people think this is a crazy project, but I think it is quite normal. And we cannot do anything to change the fact that we have the Down Syndrome, right? I have suffered from bullies, mostly kids, who scream on the street: “mongoloid!” But I do not scream anything back. ... I do not kiss during the footage. I think it is not appropriate. I only kiss my real boyfriend in my real life. I have already watched some scenes on the television. I am enormously proud of myself.

 
The idea of a show with only people with Down syndrome is rather charming. What ends up being a true mind-bender is that it posits a world in which everyone has Down syndrome—all doctors, everyone at the gym, and so on. In this world, it’s the norm. Insofar as people without Down syndrome find the show humorous, part of the mirth may arise out of the depiction of such conniving, venal, and spiteful activities in people who are not generally depicted as partaking in such emotions. The show is nothing if not self-conscious—in the subtitled clip, the prognosis of an expected baby who may not have Down syndrome is treated as a crisis. Now that’s radical. 
 
Here’s a trailer, jammed with drama:

 
Here’s an episode with English subtitles:

 
After the jump. two episodes without subtitles….

 
It’s outsider music’s Greatest Story Ever Told: at a visit to a palm reader, the mother of Austin Wiggin, Jr. was told that her son would someday marry a woman with strawberry blonde hair, have two sons after she (the mother herself, not the strawberry blonde) died, and that his daughters would form a celebrated band. Once the first two things actually came to pass, Austin hustled (or strong-armed, to hear some tell it) his teenaged girls Dot, Betty, and Helen into a band called The Shaggs, despite their showing little prior interest in or aptitude for music performance. Much money was spent on instrument lessons, voice coaching, recording studio fees, and pressing, all to realize The Shaggs’ wholly incompetent 1969 debut album, Philosophy Of The World.

This doesn’t happen very often, so when it does, it’s a thing to cherish. Sometimes, artists who have no idea what they’re doing and no conventional artistic gifts can still make profound, enduring and enchanting work, simply by being themselves.

Thanks to the cheerleading of folks like NRBQ, Frank Zappa, and Dr. Demento, Philosophy became a phenomenon years after its very quiet release (the label owner absconded with all but 100 copies). If you’ve somehow missed out on it, understand that this great album is in no typically understood sense a good album. Instruments and lyrics careen around each other, lurch into each other, fracture each other, and generally do everything except sync up. And yet, the Wiggin sisters’ ineffable and completely unaffected cheer and charm elevate it tremendously. Certainly, plenty of people listen to it and hear nothing more than the clatter of inept kids, and I will not deign here to invalidate that viewpoint. But those of us who hear magic in it - myself ardently included - swear by that album. Zappa famously hailed The Shaggs as “Better Than the Beatles,” and one can hardly imagine most of the K Records roster existing without them. The entire album is here:
 

 
Or if you don’t have a half hour to spare, just check out the representative (and legendary) single that launched a thousand ‘90s emo-chick tattoos, “My Pal Foot Foot.”
 

 
When their father died in 1975, The Shaggs called it quits, but now, 38 years later, The Dot Wiggin Band has emerged with a new album, Ready! Get! Go!, on the Alternative Tentacles label. The musicianship - to answer what must surely be the first question to cross a lot of minds - is perfectly competent. Seasoned players like Jesse Krakow and Laura Cromwell appear throughout, but they keep things much, much simpler here than in the work they’re otherwise known for, allowing Wiggin’s undiminished charm to show through. The album includes previously unrecorded Shaggs songs “Banana Bike” and “The Fella With A Happy Heart” along with new material, and culminates with a fantastic cover of Skeeter Davis’ “The End of the World.”
 

 
The long and the short of it all is that maybe The Shaggs weren’t just some flukey accident of naive dumb luck; if you liked them, there is so much to enjoy in Ready! Get! Go! that one has to be open to the likelihood that this is simply what Dot Wiggin sounds like, that she essentially possesses a tremendous uncontrived appeal. As she’s been a relatively anonymous wife and mother for decades now, this is not a comeback anyone would have expected, but it is most welcome.

This too-brief promotional documentary has some great clips and sound bites from the people involved in bringing Ready! Get! Go! to fruition. Enjoy.
 

 
One of the most enticing things about delving into fringe culture is finding both the gems and scraps that even the underground tries to nudge away with their boot. Nick Zedd, one of the most notable underground filmmakers to have emerged in the past 30 plus years, has created a number of short works that still play film festivals and merit academic criticism. Titles like War is Menstrual Envy and Police State are often bandied about like a seasoned musician’s greatest hits. (Which is not a snark, since both are worth merit.) One Zedd film that is the unloved B side to his better regarded work is 1983’s Geek Maggot Bingo or The Freak from Suckweasel Mountain. The title alone is so gloriously brain damaged or drain bamaged, that it already is going to weed out the less slackful of the art house crowd.

Don’t be fooled by the play on words, since Geek Maggot Bingo has about as much in common with the teenage-surf masterpiece, Beach Blanket Bingo, as The Deer Hunter. The film begins with a quote, featuring lines like “If you cut a face lengthwise, urinate on it and trample on it with straw sandals, it is said that the skin will come off.” It’s attributed to Hagakare, Yamamota Tsunetomo’s centuries old text about the code of the samurai. Unless there’s a hidden metaphor in the film that I missed, this also has about as much to do with Geek Maggot Bingo as any beach or Vietnam war film. But, hey, that is part of the dark ride from Mars journey you are about to go on.

 
Like any cinematic carnival ride worth its salt, there is a fabulously macabre host and it does not get much more terrific than the cool ghoul himself, legendary horror host Zacherley aka John “Dinner with Drac” Zacherle. For all of you monster kids, this should be a name that holds a dark, cobweb infested place in your heart. Looking at least twenty years younger than his actual age, Zacherley laughs, mugs and says some intentionally ridiculous dialogue like “Suckweasel Mountain…That’s in Brooklyn I presume!” with warm-hearted yet sarcastic relish.

After that, there’s a colorful beginning credits sequence involving some striking art portraying each character in the film, all courtesy of Donna Death who will pop up later. In true ham-boned 1950’s sci-fi/horror style, we meet the formerly esteemed and currently mad Dr. Frankenberry (Robert Andrews). You’ve heard it before. The brilliant but insane Doctor is obsessed with not only reviving dead tissue but with creating a new super race of enlightened beings. His boss, Dean Quagmire (Jim Giacama), is fed up with Frankenberry’s (groan) “unholy experiments.” It gets better, when the Dr. pulls out the evidence that his research has been fruitful. This “evidence” ends up being one Quasimodo Residue, an adorable white & beige kitten with magic marker markings on its dirty looking fur.

Does such cute proof win the Dean over? Absolutely not, though this leads to the Dean’s best line, where he goes on about how “that poor cat has been humiliated for no reason!” Fantastic.

Fresh out of a job, the Doctor puts an ad out for an assistant, a position quickly filled by Geeko (Bruno Zeus), a new wave looking hunchback with a rich history of assault and murder. Naturally, the Doctor loves Geeko’s resume and he quickly puts his new hire to work. “Do you know anything about prostitution?” segues into Geeko dressing up as a flea bitten hooker, luring a john that fell right off of the “night of the living dorks” truck. Instead of an evening of diseased hunchback loving, Geeko hacks away at the man & takes pieces of the “fresh specimen” back to the Doctor.

 
Meanwhile, the Doctor’s tarted up daughter, Buffy (comic singer Brenda Bergman) is nagging him about the basement. More specifically, what exactly is he up to in the locked room. She finds out quicker than you think, since Geeko comes back from his kill in record time, causing the bleach blonde harridan to pass out shrieking.

The average person’s libido would be more than likely quelled after getting a faceful of severed limbs, but Buffy is not your typical All American girl and is quickly sneaking her beau, Flavian (Gumby Spangler, real name), in the castle for some full on starkers, limp noodle soft core shenanigans. But of course, Geeko has to ruin Buffy’s fun and scares the bejeesuz out of Flavian, to the extent that he jumps out of a window?! Running in the woods, still completely nude, he has the misfortune of running into Scumbalina (Donna Death), a Morticia styled vampire who makes lunch with the Warhol-bewigged “actor.”

The Doctor decides to fully satisfy his daughter’s curiosity and has Geeko bring her to the lab. There’s a method to his madness and he goes on a long speech (a specialty of the mad Frankenberry’s!) ranting about how he needs her seamstress skills for sewing up the parts of his creation. He actually convinces her but she sees the monster, who is off screen, screams and passes out. Not catching a break, Buffy is later on visited by Flavian, who bites her but doesn’t fully turn her into a vampire. Just yet. Realizing that a potential vampiric epidemic is on the rise, the Doctor decides to work on his maddest creation yet: The Formaldehyde Man. Along the way, the alcoholic Rawhide Kid (Richard Hell) shows up and in an even stranger twist, so does the the Dean. Will the Doctor be able to save his daughter and the rest of humanity from Scumbalina? Will the Dean find his son? Will the Rawhide Kid find more booze?

 
Geek Maggot Bingo is like one living, creature feature themed Mad Lib. The plot makes sense in only the foggiest of ways, the set and props toe that line between expressionist absurdism and a 3rd grade play and the acting ranges from hammy to laughable. It is these elements that have garnered this film some pretty bad reviews over the years, however, it is actually one of the things I enjoy about it. It’s not only goony, but it knows it is goony. In fact, it thoroughly revels in its ridiculousness, with lots of loving nods to everything from 1960’s sexploiters to B-Horror films from the 1950’s. The special effects, especially with some of the gore and monster design, courtesy of noted effects craftsmen Ed French (Riot on 42nd St, Terminator 2), Tom Lauten (Class of Nuke’em High, King Kong) and Tyler Smith (Tales from the Darkside), are actually quite good, especially taking the uber-low budget into account.

 
The cast is a fun, hot mess. Andrews is endearing as the crazed and highly verbose Doctor. He manages to inject some gravitas into his live-action cartoon of a role. Zeus makes a great, pervy assistant and while he doesn’t come into the film until it is halfway over, Hell is pretty funny as the Rawhide Kid. If you ever wanted to see a respected DIY legend in writing and music sing cowpoke songs that lyrically are more on the side of Dada than Will Rogers, this is your film. The fabulously named Gumby Spangler is horrible and is often out-acted by his wig, which is quite terrific. Donna Death doesn’t have a whole lot to do, other than look pretty-menacing.

There’s also a cameo by original Fangoria editor, Robert “Uncle Bob” Martin, doing an impression of one of the magazine’s former writers that is about as accurate as anything else in this film. (I’ll save that surprise for anyone who makes it to the end credits.) Of course, I would be remiss if I did not mention the glory that is Zacherley. The legendary horror host is as great as he always is here. If you need further proof, seek out his slack-laden appearance on the Uncle Floyd Halloween special or his voice work as Aylmer in Frank Henenlotter’s Brain Damage.

Geek Maggot Bingo is deliriously stupid and plays out like a strange, acid-laced make out session at your local carnival’s dark ride. It might not be one of Zedd’s more heralded works, but it is a lot of fun and even if you loathe it, you cannot say it is dull.

 
A miniature record store made entirely of LEGO bricks by Ryan Howerter (AKA eldeeem). This is so damned adorable it’s adorable.

The blue milk crate at the bottom is a nice touch.

Via KFMW