I Can't Believe I've Never Seen It Till Now!: House (1977)

An updated-in-2020 version of the following blog post can be found in If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You: The Movies and TV Shows Some of Us Regretted Not Catching Until Later. The 2020 book was written and self-published by yours truly. Get the paperback edition of If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You now!

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This is the 13th of 15 all-new blog posts that are being posted on a monthly basis until this blog's final post in December 2017. I know I said "monthly basis" all through 2017, and instead, there ended up being two posts this October and three back in August, but I guess I discovered that in August and now October, I found plenty of shit I wanted to write about before I call it quits. "I Can't Believe I've Never Seen It Till Now!" is a series of posts in which I reveal that I never watched a certain popular or really old movie until very recently, and that's largely because I'm Filipino, we're always late to the party and that's how we do.

Director Nobuhiko Obayashi's 1977 Japanese box-office hit House is the kind of film that, had it been made in 2017, would have ended up being the subject of various audience reaction videos by YouTubers who want to show how confused and bewildered the audience members look while trying to process the extremely weird shit they're watching. Not to be confused with the 1985 American horror comedy of the same name and the long-running Hugh Laurie vehicle of the same name, Obayashi's J-horror oddity was largely unknown in America until 2010, when Janus Films introduced the Toho Studios flick in theaters to American film geeks and the Criterion Collection released it on Blu-ray. Both a Phil Chung blog post for YOMYOMF (his post is basically "I don't know what the fuck I saw, but I loved it!") and a Trailers from Hell commentary track for the film's 1977 trailer made me want to see House.



House is definitely the most unconventional haunted-house movie I've ever seen. I was expecting a Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky-type bloodbath with a bit of a Battle Royale-style attitude about not giving a fuck about brutally killing off so many innocent-looking Japanese teens.

What I got instead was something stranger than Riki-Oh. I believe I have a clip of myself reacting to every scene in House:

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (04/24/2013): Out There, Apollo Gauntlet, The Cleveland Show, Bob's Burgers and Dogsnack

This new collection of Michael Landon's memoirs will sell like hotcakes.

Every Wednesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated shows. The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired.

It took me a few episodes to adjust to Out There's more gentle brand of humor--though 20th Century Fox Television co-produced the show, former South Park director Ryan Quincy's creation is far less brash and flashy than what I usually expect out of an animated series that's co-produced by Fox--but right when I feel like this cartoon about awkward adolescence in the '80s has started to gel, the show's 10-episode season on IFC concludes with "Ace's Wild." The season (or series) finale covers--in one whole episode--an arc that Freaks and Geeks, one of Out There's spiritual ancestors, would have explored with gawky Bill Haverchuck in the second season that Paul Feig and Judd Apatow never got to produce: what if Bill became a jock and began to spend more time with other jocks? Would his best friends Sam and Neal resent Bill and his new clique or would they remain loyal to Bill like Millie did with Lindsay even though she disapproved of Lindsay's new friends from the "freaks" crowd?

In "Ace's Wild," Chad, who's always longed to belong and not be so invisible to everyone else at school, is the one who falls in with a new crowd: the cool kids in charge of yearbook. Style-conscious yearbook editors Amy (Sarah Silverman) and Amber (Ellen Page) are so entertained by Chad's classroom doodle of their biology teacher reimagined as a walrus that they recruit him to draw similar caricatures for their yearbook. Chad recognizes that his best friend Chris is beginning to feel jealous about all the fun he's been having outside of class with the yearbook committee, so he makes sure Chris doesn't get left out of his new activities by persuading the aspiring daredevil to promote himself to the committee as a candidate for the yearbook's "Voice of the Wild Man" page.

Amy, Amber and an overly pretentious yearbook photographer named Cedric (Jason Schwartzman) are enraptured by Chris and snap several photos of his antics for the yearbook. But Chad realizes that Amy, Amber and Cedric aren't laughing with Chris. Instead, they're laughing at him and are intending to make him and many others around school--like the crying drunk girls at a popular clique's party whom Amy tries to capture photos of at one point--the laughingstock of the campus in the pages of their yearbook. The yearbook staff is basically the TMZ of Holford High School, before there was an Internet or a TMZ: they're a petty, shallow-as-fuck crew of parasites with no journalistic integrity whatsoever. All that's missing from the yearbook staff is an oddly conservative contempt for rap music.

Chad won't stand for the yearbook staff's treatment of Chris, so to get even, he and Chris secretly devise a prank that's their most elaborate and entertaining one yet. Meanwhile, in a B-story that ties into the finale's themes of plotting behind the scenes to help out someone who's been wronged and trying to improve one's social status, Jay wishes for a new bike for a BMX race he wants to participate in, but Wayne refuses to spend so much cash on a new bike. Rose, who was the youngest in a family of 12 kids and was always stuck with hand-me-downs that were given to her from her older siblings, sympathizes with her youngest son's dissatisfaction with receiving hand-me-downs from Chad like his old bike, so she secretly dives into her own savings and gets him the new bike.

But Jay's new ride is the ugliest thing on two wheels before this ride existed, and when Jay winds up in last place at the end of his first race, the spectators ridicule him, especially for his lame bike. Infuriated by their jeers, Rose takes to her garage late at night, demonstrates previously unseen body shop skills and pimps Jay's ride all by herself. In a great little twist, the badass refit--newly christened "the Black Rose"--doesn't improve Jay's speed overnight. He still ends up dead last in his next BMX race, but thanks to Rose's efforts, the other racers and the spectators are so impressed with the Black Rose's design that they ignore his lousy performance and want to pal around with him after the race. If there's any character on Out There who's evolved a bit over the season, it's Chad and Jay's previously unassuming church organist mom. Rose started out as a cipher whose lines consisted largely of typical June Cleaver-esque dialogue like "Here are your lunches, boys." She's been given a pulse in these last few episodes and has turned into the kind of mom every viewer wished they had: Paul Teutul Sr. in a pink housecoat.

The B-story expresses a tinge of sweetness that Out There has only occasionally shown because the show has primarily been about Chad and Chris' misery within the high school that Chris likens in "Ace's Wild" to a turd farm. If IFC doesn't renew Out There, I'm grateful for how all 10 episodes brought us a view of high school that I identify so much with and hasn't really been seen on a comedic series since the days of Freaks and Geeks and Daria: high school is unpleasant, largely boring and ultimately worthless, and as Chad observes in the final line of perhaps the entire series, which sums up so well both the episode and Out There as a whole, "Visibility is overrated. The people you give a shit about will always see you clearly."

Stray observations:
* Chad, on the artsy yearbook room: "I felt like I just walked into an exotic city, maybe Istanbul or Reno."

* Silverman's character crosses off half of the yearbook photo caption of a creepy classmate she dislikes and replaces it with a fake quote of him admitting to being a bedwetter, which is funny because the title of Silverman's 2010 autobiography is The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption and Pee.

* Chad: "Are you from England?" Cedric: "I wish. Morrissey would be the best dad."

Ain't that a kick in the head: Bruce Lee and Enter the Dragon still amaze

Throughout this year, I'm posting older material--like non-Blogspot posts from a few years ago, unpublished writing I've kept hidden in my computer and transcripts of Q&As from A Fistful of Soundtracks' terrestrial radio years.

Because it's Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, I've dug up a 1998 article that I wrote for the UC Santa Cruz publication Primer to celebrate what was then the 25th anniversary of a pivotal movie in the history of Asian American cinema, as well as one of the few martial arts flicks I like (just because I'm Asian doesn't mean I have to be a fan of the martial arts genre). Some hardcore martial arts genre fans will argue that Enter the Dragon shortchanges Bruce Lee or that it's too Hollywood and too derivative of the 007 franchise, but because I'm not a hardcore martial arts fan, I don't have the same gripes as they do.

Okay, maybe I'm with them on the "What the hell is John Saxon doing here?" thing. ("America had no idea that [Saxon] was also a practicing martial artist... He first became involved in the martial arts when he was 15 years old, initially studying judo and then taking up karate," wrote author John Little in the Enter the Dragon: The Making of a Classic Motion Picture book that Warner Home Video included in the 1998 Enter the Dragon VHS and DVD gift sets.) But otherwise, Enter the Dragon never fails to entertain, and it features the most badass score ever written for an Asian American action hero: the frequently sampled score by Lalo Schifrin, whose Mission: Impossible theme was one of Lee's favorite pieces of workout music.

*****

Ain't that a kick in the head: Bruce Lee and Enter the Dragon still amaze after 25 years

By Jimmy J. Aquino

Bruce Lee made only five films and the then-unfinished Game of Death before he died from a mysterious swelling of the brain (or died from a curse or was assassinated, if you believe the conspiracy theorists) in Hong Kong on July 20, 1973, but 25 years later, fans are still flocking to his movies and kneeling at the church of jeet kune do, Lee's revolutionary kung fu technique emphasizing "the way of the intercepting fist."

Lee's female admirers make pilgrimages to Hong Kong. Men of all colors want to be like Lee, who taught martial arts to students of all races, creeds, genders and backgrounds, unlike his kung fu teacher elders, who were opposed to teaching students who weren't Chinese.

The first martial arts superstar, Lee was a genuine fighter and a charismatic actor (I'm not saying Lee was De Niro, but his "emotional content" speech in Enter the Dragon has more soul and passion than what passes for acting in Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal movies). Not even charismatically challenged poseurs like Van Damme, the faded Seagal and David Carradine could erase the memory of the lightning-quick legend nicknamed the Dragon, a pioneer in Asian American cinema who sought stardom on his own when racist Hollywood spurned him because producers didn't think an Asian man could sell tickets or rack up Nielsens. (Van Damme, the post-Under Siege Seagal and Carradine are to martial arts what Vanilla Ice was to hip-hop. Put these has-beens in a room with Lee, and he'd automatically win the throwdown, with moves like the 13 punches he could throw in half a second.)

Enter the Dragon made Hollywood put its foot in its mouth. Released a few weeks after Lee's death, the film was his most popular work, and it made him the first Asian male sex symbol. (Bruce's son Brandon also found stardom posthumously, with 1994's The Crow.) To mark its 25th anniversary, Warner Bros. re-released Enter the Dragon in Lee's birthplace, San Francisco, and put out a highly anticipated DVD. The movie still holds up well today. The script is standard kung fu B-movie material, but Lee is at his most charismatic, the production values are stunning and the martial arts choreography is legendary. As SF Weekly's Michael Sragow said, Lee makes his choreographed moves look spontaneous. Lee's fighting style is, as his character describes it in the film, "the art of fighting without fighting."

Primer dedicates this page to the man who once said, "The end of heroes is the same as ordinary men. They all die and gradually fade away in the memory of man." Famous last words from someone whose memory has hardly faded at all. (To the managers of the Nickelodeon or the Rio, if you're reading this, please bring Enter the Dragon to Santa Cruz or we're gonna have to get kung fu on your asses!)

AFOS: "Funk in the Trunk" playlist

Airing this week on the Fistful of Soundtracks channel is the 2008 Fistful of Soundtracks: The Series episode "Funk in the Trunk" (WEB92). jim.aquino.com is no longer online, as are all the pre-WEB97 playlists I posted on that site, so I'm reposting each playlist as each pre-WEB97 ep reairs.

1. Lyle Workman, "Flashback Party Weekend," Superbad, Lakeshore
2. Lyle Workman, "SuperWhat?," Superbad, Lakeshore
3. The Four Tops, "Are You Man Enough (End Title)," Shaft in Africa, Hip-O Select/Geffen
4. Quincy Jones with the Don Elliot Voices, "Money Runner" (from $), The Reel Quincy Jones, Hip-O
5. James Brown, "People Get Up and Drive Your Funky Soul (remix)" (originally recorded for Slaughter's Big Rip-Off), Motherlode, Polydor
6. Lalo Schifrin, "Main Titles (Alternate)," Enter the Dragon, Warner Home Video
7. Antonio Pinto, "O Polígamo," City of Men, Lakeshore
8. Lyle Workman, "Evan's Basement Jam," Superbad, Lakeshore
9. Curtis Mayfield, "Superfly," Superfly: Deluxe 25th Anniversary Edition, Curtom/Rhino
10. Gladys Knight & the Pips, "On and On" (from Claudine), Funk on Film, Chronicles/PolyGram
11. Ennio Morricone, "Allegretto Per Signora" (from The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion), Mondo Morricone Revisited, Royal Ear Force
12. David Holmes, "S***! S***! S***!," Ocean's Thirteen, Warner Sunset/Warner Bros.
13. Theodore Shapiro, "Two Dragons," Starsky & Hutch, TVT Soundtrax
14. Flight of the Conchords, "Business Time," The Distant Future, Sub Pop

Repeats of A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Series air Monday night at midnight, Tuesday and Thursday at 4am, 10am, 3pm, 7pm and 11pm, Wednesday night at midnight, and Saturday and Sunday at 7am, 9am, 11am, 1pm, 3pm and 5pm.

AFOS: "The Wonderful World of Covers" playlist

Airing this week on the Fistful of Soundtracks channel is the 2007 Fistful of Soundtracks: The Series episode "The Wonderful World of Covers" (WEB91), which contains film and TV theme covers from all over the world, including a slammin' cover of Beyonce's Goldmember track "Work It Out" by the U.K. soul band Speedometer. jim.aquino.com is no longer online, as are all the pre-WEB97 playlists I posted on that site, so I'm reposting each playlist as each pre-WEB97 ep reairs.

1. Speedometer, "Work It Out," This Is Speedometer Vol. II, Blow It Hard
2. Los Straitjackets, "My Heart Will Go On," The Velvet Touch of Los Straitjackets, Yep Roc
3. The Lovejoys, "Streets of San Francisco," And You Don't Stop, Langusta Entertainment
4. Barry Adamson, "The Man with the Golden Arm," The Murky World of Barry Adamson, Mute
5. The Civil Tones, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV Theme)," Vodka and Peroxide, Pravda
6. Euroboys, "Enter the Dragon," Jet Age, Sympathy for the Record Industry
7. Laika & the Cosmonauts, "Get Carter," Laika Sex Machine, Yep Roc
8. Green Day, "The Simpsons Theme" (from The Simpsons Movie), Reprise
9. Jimmy Smith, "Walk on the Wild Side," Walk on the Wild Side: Best of the Verve Years, Verve
10. Pressure Cooker, "Space: 1999," I Want to Tell You, Pressure Cooker
11. Triology, "For Love One Can Die," Triology Plays Ennio Morricone, Reverso/BMG Classics/RCA Victor
12. Laika & the Cosmonauts, "Psyko," Laika Sex Machine, Yep Roc
13. The Lovejoys, "Streets of Sao Paulo," And You Don't Stop, Langusta Entertainment
14. Renee Geyer, "Do Your Thing," It's a Man's Man's World, RCA
15. Speedometer, "Work It Out (Beatfanatic remix)," Freestyle Remixed, Freestyle

Repeats of A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Series air Monday night at midnight, Tuesday and Thursday at 4am, 10am, 3pm, 7pm and 11pm, Wednesday night at midnight, and Saturday and Sunday at 7am, 9am, 11am, 1pm, 3pm and 5pm.