Everything you need to know about what happened in Michigan this week.

 Gallons of (virtual) ink are being spilled by the Michigan political punditry this week to try to explain how the Democratic Party gained control of the governorship, attorney general, secretary of state, and the legislature for the first time in decades, and why they didn't see it coming.

It's not nearly as complicated as they're trying to make it seem.

For the statewide offices, here's what happened:

1.People want to control their own bodies. People like the nice lady who helped them do that over the last six months. They also like her friends who did the same.

2. People like the nice lady who tried to keep them safe from Covid. They also like her friends who did the same.

3. Promise made, promise kept. The damn roads are getting fixed. Michigan was awash in orange barrels and road construction projects this summer. Everybody I talked to about it said essentially the same thing, "It's a pain in the ass, but isn't it great that the roads are getting fixed?"

A ton of work and money went into getting out the message on these points. but a ton of work and money doesn't matter if the message doesn't resonate with people. That message resonated. The only surprise is that political pundits were surprised by that.

As for the legislature, establishing a nonpartisan commission to draw legislative districts worked. After decades of GOP gerrymandering, the partisan results reflected the actual votes that people cast.

Kudos to all my friends in politics who have worked so hard over the years to get us to this point. (A few kudos to me, too, even though I wasn't directly involved in this election that finally put us over the top.)

What do I expect next? More roads getting fixed and more policies that help actual people. If the Democrats now in office deliver on that, they'll have another good year four years from now.

I watched 13 terrible movies in October

I watched 13 terrible movies in the run up to Halloween. Usually I try to mix in at least a few genuinely good horror classics while they're scattered about the movie channels in October. But I've seen just about all the genuinely good horror and sci-fi classics. And so what's left? The anti-classics.

It was fun. One of the great thing about watching terrible movies is that you go into them with low expectations. If the movie turns out to be terrible, well then, what did you expect?

I guess what you should expect is a little review from me, so here we go.

Here's the list, in the order that I watched them:

• It Came From Outer Space (1953)
• Slither (1973)
• The Beast Must Die (1974)
• The Beast of Hollow Mountain (1956)
• Yongary, Monster from the Deep (1967)
• The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) 
• Queen of Blood (1966)
• The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (1964)
• Creature with the Atom Brain (1955)
• The Thing with Two Heads (1972)
• "My Son the Vampire" originally titled "Old Mother Riley Meets the Vampire" aka "Vampire over London" (1952)
• The Return of the Vampire (1943)
• Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957)

Here are my reviews:

It Came From Outer Space (1953) *** Spaceship crashes in the desert and aliens begin taking over the local townfolk. Pretty entertaining, plus young Russell Johnson (the Professor from "Gilligan's Island") in a small role. 

Slither (1973) *** Doesn't at all belong on this list. I assumed it must be some weird thing with snakes, but it turned out to be an oddball 1970s action-comedy movie James Caan, Sally Kellerman, Peter Boyle, and a terrible title. It's good, tho'. Worth a watch.

The Beast Must Die (1974) ** "World's Greatest Hunter" gathers werewolf suspects at his remote English estate for the world's greatest hunt, if only they can figure out which guest is the werewolf. Bonus cheese points for the "Can you guess the werewolf?" break at the end.

The Beast of Hollow Mountain (1956) ** Just the usual Tyranosaurus Rex eating cattle in a Mexican canyon 1950s Western. Kinda fun, especially once T.Rex shows up.

Yongary, Monster from the Deep (1967) ** A Korean ripoff of Godzilla, but without the expensive special effects and production values. Mostly for kaiju completists, but sort of fun if you've seen a lot of Godzilla.

The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) ***1/2 Vincent Price at the top of his game as a Spanish Don going mad. Directed by Roger Corman, also at the top of his game here. This is a good one.

Queen of Blood (1966) ** Green vampire woman from Mars set loose on a spaceship. Best for the amazing cast, which includes John Saxon, Basil Rathbone, and young Dennis Hopper, plus a great otherworldly turn by Florence Marly as the Queen of Blood herself. Not great, but more entertaining than it should be.

The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (1964) *1/2 This was a pretty forgettable mummy movie from Hammer studios. Picks up a bit of momentum in the second half, but not much.

Creature with the Atom Brain (1955) */**1/2 This sci-fi/gangster flick steps into "so bad it's good" territory, which makes it watchable and kind of entertaining. But it's not so bad that it's truly great. It did, however, lead to this great eponymous 1981 song by Roky Erickson and the Aliens:

Creature with the Atom Brain (Roky Erickson and the Aliens)

... which led to this dandy 2018 cover by Quintron & Miss Pussycat that landed on the Dr. Demento Covered in Punk album, which is how both the song and the movie came to my attention.

Creature with the Atom Brain (Quintron & Miss Pussycat)

The Thing with Two Heads (1972) */**** A classic of the genre, that genre being "terrible sci-fi movies in which the head of a racist doctor played by an Academy Award winning actor is transplanted onto Rosie Grier's shoulder." Also features a crazy-ass motocross chase that is firmly rooted in the early 1970s. Monique called it "the strangest movie I've ever watched" and we've watched Jodorowsky's "Holy Mountain" (1973).

"My Son the Vampire" originally titled "Old Mother Riley Meets the Vampire" aka "Vampire over London" (1952) Zero stars - Just terrible. Do not recommend. For masochistic Bela Lugosi completists only. I suspect, however, that a good movie might be made about the making of this unwatchable thing, a statement I feel compelled to explain, since I dug around a bit to see how this awful thing came to be.

This is the final installment of 14 British "Old Mother Riley" comedies. The Old Mother Riley character was played by a guy named Arthur Lucan in drag. He had developed a vaudeville team act around the character with his wife of 30+ years, Kitty McShane, whom he met and married when she was a 15-year-old singer. To make things even a bit weirder, Kitty played Mother Riley's "indiscreet" daughter, an item that undoubtedly demands Freudian analysis. The previous 13 installments of the Mother Riley movies included Kitty, but #13 was a bit of a train wreck because they were in the midst of a bitter divorce and had to film their scenes separately. That left Arthur Lucan without half his act for the next movie in the series. 

Meanwhile, aging and alcoholic Bela Lugosi had come to London to star in a theater production of "Dracula" that fell apart when the producers went bankrupt, leaving Lugosi unpaid and without enough money to get back to America. A friend of Lugosi's somehow managed to put him together with Arthur Lucan and the sinking Old Mother Riley franchise so that Lugosi could earn enough money to pay for a ticket back to America. There is also a robot involved in this script for reasons that I don't understand but that probably amount to, "We had an extra robot costume in the studio." 

I think the producers were hoping to create something along the lines of the infinitely better "Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein" (1948) but instead they created this unwatchable mess. This movie is just terrible and unfun, perhaps because somehow through the terribleness on screen you can feel the vibe of various lives falling apart behind the screen. There's a good drama about the making of this mess by B-List entertainers whose best days were behind them -- an elegy to the fading fortunes of the vaudeville and theater performers who had a good run onscreen in the 1930s and 40s. But this movie isn't worth your time.

The kicker: This terrible disaster of a movie would have sunk into total oblivion if singer-comedian Allan Sherman hadn't had a hit record with his 1962 album "My Son the Folksinger." For some reason this inspired an American distributor to rename this mess of a movie "My Son the Vampire" and ask Allan Sherman to create a song called "My Son the Vampire" that they could use for the title track in hopes that it could combine with some marketing as "Bela Lugosi's final movie" to give it enough traction to work the back-end of some double features. And so, nine years after it sank to the bottom of the British movie market this movie sank again to the bottom of the American movie market. From there it oozed onto late-night TV in the 1960s and gained a bit of notoriety for its general terribleness.

Allan Sherman's song is a pretty good Halloween novelty tune. This movie is terrible.

"My Son, the Vampire" (Allan Sherman)

P.S. Does it seem like I used the word "terrible" a lot of times in this review? That's because this movie is terrible, and not in a good way. 

Terrible.

The Return of the Vampire (1943) *** This is a surprisingly good effort by Columbia Pictures to grab some of the Universal Pictures horror audience. It was intended to be a direct sequel to the original Dracula (1934) but after a copyright squabble they had to change the name of the vampire and shift the plot around a bit. However, after the clunky introduction with backstory, it turns out to be one of Bela Lugosi's better turns as a vampire and a surprisingly good watch.

Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) */**** The King of the All-Time So Bad They're Good Movies. I won't replicate all that has been written about this debacle of a movie. It was famously created by Ed Wood to fit a test clips of Bela Lugosi filmed shortly before Lugosi's death. Its making was immortalized by the infinitely better Academy Award winning movie "Ed Wood" (1994). So here's the thing you need to know: in 2020 Turner Classic Movies gave it a high-end digital transfer in its original 1.85:1 image ratio. This terrible movie has never looked so good. I hadn't seen it in ages, so I was wondering if it would still be fun. It is! Check it out. No, really. Check it out. Everybody should see this terrible movie at least once.