Tag: Lovecraft

Time to bust some puffs

Late last week, some mysterious crop circles appeared in Japan. And by Japan, I mean underwater crop circles off the coast of Japan. WoooOOOOOooOOOOoooOOOOooo. Does this mean that deep in the dark waters, aliens visited and made elaborate patterns as signals for target strike zones? Were they created by some Lovecraftian monstrosity?

Nope. Turns out it was just a male pufferfish.

A Japanese television film crew discovered that a single, solitary pufferfish created the entire design. All in the hopes of getting laid. Presumably. You see, our scientists tell us that reason, but how do we know that it’s not actually a signal from the pufferfish to their animal brethren to commit a horrible atrocity? We just can’t trust them. The safest and most reasonable course of action is to eliminate those beasts and with haste.

MasterChugs Theater: ‘The Burrowers’

It was once almost universally true that any film that went straight to video was bad. The obvious reasoning was generally sound: If it were any good, it would have played in theaters.

But over time, movies have gotten easier and cheaper to produce, which means more of them are being made, which means it simply isn’t feasible to release them all theatrically. This has led us to the current situation, where many legitimately entertaining films are premiering on DVD rather than at your local multiplex. The only hard part is identifying them, since a lot of garbage still goes the straight-to-DVD route, too.

The Burrowers, a tense Western-horror hybrid, is a fine example of a DVD premiere that doesn’t deserve the DVD stigma. It has an R rating and no major stars, and it isn’t a sequel or remake. It has no stringy-haired Japanese ghost children crawling out of bathtubs. It would be slaughtered at the box office. It is an utterly fantastic hidden gem.  Continue reading MasterChugs Theater: ‘The Burrowers’