Did everyone have a happy holiday?? Is anyone reading anything today?? I have to go back to work in a few hours from when this publishes…. : ( BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO work!!! BOOOOOOOOOO BOOOOOOOOOOOOO BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! Anyway – so – did you have a good XMAS? Did you eat a Christmas Goose? Did you warm your cockles by the fire? Did you make snow angels while nekkid??? (Pics please) I love this time of the year – except for the last few years when it’s been all icy and frozen – and I like that everyone is generally happy – so I hope everything went well for all of you. A couple of weeks ago, MRS THE IPC went out of town and one night I was sitting here all lonely, working on a big SHITFEST post and I popped on the TV. There wasn’t much on so I went over to the premium movie channels (NO – NOT THOSE MARK) and flipped around and 8MM was getting ready to start. I remember seeing this in the theater with my old friend Hosack (that’s really his middle name) and when we came out of the theater we were both – “FUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCKKKKK…….. I feel dirty…..” and that’s not because we did something like make out mano y mano – it was because we both felt like this:
I mean – you’ve all seen this, right? Nic Cage is trying to figure out who the “lead” was in a snuff film some old, dead, rich bastard had hiding in his wardrobe. His investigation takes him to some nasty, nasty, filthy, pieces of shit involving porn and S&M and shitty shitty shitnasty shit. People die grisly deaths and other people beat their meat and shit just gets 1000 kinds of dirty. This is how I felt watching this for the second time:
Here’s another true life story: I have actually had my life threatened. Around the same time this movie came out, Hosack, my girlfriend at the time and I went to this bar situated near the restaurant we all worked at. After only one, maybe two beers, I had to piss and went to the bathroom. On my way out I hear someone saying “Isaacs! Hey Isaacs!” and I look around and it’s a group of some friends I use to run around with, back during the acid days of college. “HEY!!!” I say to CP and TN and BT. And we start talking and this and that and CP asks me why I’m still working in that fucking restaurant because I have a teaching degree and and I was maybe or maybe not drunk and I acted like I would slap some dumb kid and slapped CP. I apologized like crazy and he was fine with it so I left and went back to our table. Me – apologetic:
So we’re there, sitting and minding our business over one, maybe two beers and suddenly – mind you, this is a bar full of, maybe 100 people (or more) and we hear someone scream “EEEERRRRRRIIIIIICCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC!!!!!!” And, just like in a movie, I turn my head, the entire bar stops making any noise (all we needed were some tumbleweeds to blow in) and I see TN standing there pointing at me from a second tier piece of flooring. His eyes are fucking black and he’s POINTING AT ME, his face contorted in rage. “YOU JUST FUCKED WITH THE WRONG GUY THIS TIME!!!!!!!” He screams. Hosack is all – “What’s going on Eric??” and the girlfriend is all “What the fuck, Eric???” and I’m all “(TN) it’s OK, be cool, (CP) and I are all good.” and he screams “I’M GONNA FUCKING KILL YOU!!!!!” and the bar gets all murmurmurmurmurmurmurmurmury and I’m all “Dude – it’s OK we’re good” and he screams “YOU FUCKED WITH THE WRONG GUY!!!!” and pauses and then mean-guy whispers “i’m gonna take you to the greasy side….“
I’m all “Oh fucking Christ” and get up to go deal with this situation and probably get knifed and shanked and my dead body desecrated by a short, Asian fellow when two dudes from the next table get up. They’re fucking giants of men and I’m all “oh thank the gods of the west” and “they’ve got my back” when they yell out that they’re off duty cops. So I shit my pants a little bit again, thinking I was going to go spend the night in jail with an Asian guy who wants to kill me and fuck my dead body when they tell me to sit down and they’ll handle it – they didn’t see me do anything wrong. In the end, they escorted him out without a scuffle and we finished our one, maybe two beers and one, maybe two shots and eventually headed out into the night around 2:00 am.
The point of all of that is that, at one brief point in my life, I thought I was going to get brutally beaten and killed – on The Greasy Side. And I think that’s where this movie lives – The Greasy Side. It’s actually a rather well done movie for the likes of Joel Schumacher, and the acting is decent enough – but, if you haven’t seen this – and decide to, you’ll probably want to go take a shower afterward. Or have one, maybe two beers to forget about it. Or seventeen.
