pumpktoberfest #4 - in da house.

pumpktoberfest #4 - in da house.
film: hostel
beer: southampton publick house pumpkin ale



at some point over the last decade, filmmakers decided that horror film = doing crazy shit to people or making them do crazy shit to each other. call it the tarantino effect, call it the final destination or saw effect, call it what you will, but if you took a group of people, put them in outlandish situations & killed them off in a series of creative ways, you had beaucoup box office bank. one such film was hostel, which came out in 2005 as one of many "presented by quentin tarantino" films. in it, a group of americans decide to backpack around europe. they end up travelling to slovakia & staying in a hostel. people start disappearing. gruesome "horror" ensues. in fact, it's so gruesome that the film's restricted in some countries. it's directed by eli roth, who if you saw inglorious basterds, you know as "the bear jew." he & tarantino must be tight.

i first saw the film back in 06, during the few months when i was living in watertown. i'd been laid off a few weeks earlier, so it was just me & hostel in the middle of the day chillin round the apartment. i'm not usually that freaked out by horror films, but this one freaked me out. as it is, i'm not a fan of hostels. i've only stayed in a hostel once in my life & if i wasn't sharing a private room with a friend, i never would have done so. communing with strangers is not for me. to make matters worse, my roommate & a few of my friends were preparing to take a trip to europe for oktoberfest, so there were a bunch of travel books strewn about the coffee table & for some reason, that made the whole "travelling around europe" aspect of the film way too real. if i actually remembered my dreams, i probably would have remembered nightmares for weeks.

as far as buildings go, i'll take a pub (or "publick house" for long) over a hostel any day of the week. our fourth pumpktoberfest beer, the southampton publick house pumpkin ale, is named for a pub/restaurant way out in southampton, long island. it's been around in various forms since the 1800s & over time, has served both average joes & famous peeps, peeps like babe ruth & clark gable. the latest incarnation of the publick house came into being in 1996, when they fixed up the restaurant, added a brewery & started pumping out beer. over the years, they've won a ton of medals at the annual great american beer festival, so they must be doing something right.

the pumpkin ale is one of their seasonal brews, an amber colored beer made with pumpkin, spices & vanilla extract. out of the four pumpkin beers i've tried this pumpktoberfest season, this one is the best of the bunch. when i opened it & gave it a good whiff, the vanilla stood out & when i drank it, it made a nice complement to the pumpkin taste. that's right. unlike with the other three i've tried thus far, for once you could actually taste a little bit of pumpkin in the beer. up until this one, the pumpkin beers had done nothing to dispel my notion that pumpkin beers are nothing but a bunch of spices, so this one was a pleasant surprise. like i said, they're doing something right. southampton's in da house!

pumpktoberfest #3 - JAW'D!

pumpktoberfest #3 - JAW'D!
film: jaws
beer: arcadia ales jaw jacker



seriously. don't go in the water, yo. there's a mofoin man-eating spielbergian shark in there. believe me, you don't want to go anywhere near it or its trademark fin. if you should choose to ignore my advice & go frolicking in the water, don't come running to me asking me to help get your leg reattached. my reaction will be one of complete indifference. you'll probably bleed to death while i tut tut about how i warned you & how you should have at least noticed the jaws theme song playing whilst you surfed. roy scheider wasn't man enough to handle the shark, so they had to call in richard dreyfuss to help out! that alone should've kept you out of the water.

i mean, didn't you see the film when it came out back in the summer of 1975 & essentially created the idea of a summer blockbuster film? me either, since i was only born the previous november, but i've seen it a bunch of times since then. it's freaky. maybe it's part of why i never go to the beach. that shark is friggin huge & mechanical & oft-implied & he's been known to hang out around the waters of martha's vineyard amity island eating people. that's pretty close to where i grew up & a shark's gotta eat, so why wouldn't he one weekend decide to head north to try out some tasty new hampshire grub? my luck, that'd be the weekend when i'm at the beach. anyway, the film's like a classic & stuff, not like all this crazy gory stuff from nowadays, but still with a good amount of blood in the water. if you haven't seen it, pumpktoberfest's a perfect time to check it out. it's too cold to go in the water this time of year anyhow.

um, i'm actually more scared of the arcadia ales jaw-jacker than i am of the shark in jaws. i'm not talking about the beer though. from what i can tell from the label, the "jaw-jacker" is a scarecrow with a shark-toothed jaw enhanced pumpkin for a head. if i run into a shark in the water & he eats me, that's one thing. it happens to people every once in a while. if i meet my maker at the hands of a jaw-jacker, that's F'D UP. i don't know what kind of crazy nuclear-kellogg's creatures they have running around up in the fields of battle creek, michigan (arcadia's home), but that's some actual horror movie stuff that i'd much rather not be involved in.

the beer's not as scary. you'd think that something with a name like "jaw-jacker" would have some bite to it, but nope. as a beer, the taste is fine, but as a pumpkin beer, the closest it gets to being pumpkinlike is the slightly orange/amber color. it's made with cinnamon, allspice & nutmeg & those spices dominate the flavor. we're now three-for-three this holiday season as far as meh pumpkin beers go. hopefully i haven't awakened the spirit of the jaw-jacker by insulting its beer. if they find me dead tomorrow with an odd set of bite marks about my body & fresh pumpkin seeds splattered on the walls, please point the authorities to this blog entry. thanks kindly.

pumpktoberfest #2 - whoa, man.

pumpktoberfest #2 - whoa, man.
film: evil bong
beer: wolaver's will stevens pumpkin ale



i'm an ardent supporter of the tv show weeds, but as far as marijuana-themed movies go, they're pretty hit or miss. dazed & confused, pineapple express, friday and harold & kumar go to white castle worked because there's a lot more going on in those films besides weed. i've yet to see half baked or how high. smiley face was only occasionally funny. i don't think i've ever watched a cheech & chong film & if i did, it was when i was ten & it was on local tv, so i didn't get whatever drug references trickled through the censoring. in 2006, before cheech & chong reunited last year, tommy chong "starred" in a "hilarious" marijuana-themed horror film called evil bong.

the film centers around alistair, a nerdy type who moves into an apartment of stoners. shortly after he moves in, one of the stoners sees a crazy bong for sale in some magazine, decides he must have it, orders it & it arrives a few days later. it's huge & oddly shaped, but they go to town with it. one day, one of the dudes smokes off it & gets sucked into a weird strip club universe, where he's killed. this keeps happening to people & as it does, the bong keeps changing shape until it develops the face shown on the dvd cover. in case you're wondering, the answer is "yes." the bong is voiced by michele mais, who plays justice in the broadway production of rock of ages.

tommy chong doesn't show up til near the end & it's revealed that he's the original owner of the bong. that's when the real evil happens. as crazy as it is, the least believable aspect of the film is this one scene where it's the middle of the day & they're all sitting around wanting to smoke, but one of the dudes is all "i'm out. we'll have to wait til tomorrow." really? a room full of stoners in the middle of the day are out of weed & can't remedy that situation? suspension of disbelief GONE. if you like the sort of films they show at 1am on usa, you'll like this film. as for me, evil bong was ok, but i'm probably not going to bother checking out the sequel--evil bong II: king bong--which came out on dvd in july. that's just too much bong, even for me.

since it's from vermont & they totally like bongs up there, i'm pairing the film with a wolaver's will stevens pumpkin ale, which is part of the "farmers series" of beers put out by wolaver's organic beers, an otter creek beers brand. it's apparently the "first & only organic pumpkin beer." who says pumpktoberfest can't be progressive? you're probably thinking "as long as you're not paranoid & don't have an evil bong, i bet this film would probably go well paired with a couple of massive bong hits." you wouldn't believe how well the two go together. like pumpkin pie & whipped cream, i tell ya. regardless, massive bong hits are neither a drink nor a snack, so they have no place as part of a pairing.

...so wolavers has will stevens' recipe for pumpkin ale. he's apparently the farmer who grows the pumpkins & his beer is "brewed with pumpkin & spices." the spices are the most prevalent part of the taste, but there's a faint trace of pumpkin in it. it's better than our first pumpktoberfest brew, the shipyard pumpkinhead. after two beers though, i've yet to try anything mindblowing since pumpktoberfest began & nothing that lives up to the standard set by the pumking on pumpktoberfest eve. hell, even evil bong was more mindblowing than the first two beers i've tried. sorry, will stevens. i'm sure you're a very nice guy who grows outstanding pumpkins, but you need to tell wolavers to put more of your pumpkins in their beer. more money for you. more taste for us. everyone wins next holiday season...just think about it.

pumpktoberfest #1 - maine is HORRORible.

pumpktoberfest #1 - maine is HORRORible.
film: maximum overdrive
beer: shipyard pumpkinhead



the great state of maine has produced a lot of fine talent in its day, from judd nelson to patrick dempsey to dan fogelberg, but horror writer stephen king's arguably the most famous maniac. with a resume that includes way too many books for me to bother counting them up, he's basically become the most famous horror writer of at least this past century. dude hasn't had any of his stories turned into a worthy movie yet this millennium, but through the years, a good number of his books have been adapted into classic horror films.

maximum overdrive isn't exactly a classic, but it was the first film that he directed himself (as he's all too happy to tell you in the trailer) & it's one of his more hilarious films. as the plot goes, a comet goes shooting through the sky & the machines all become homicidal at some truck stop. once the trucks start acting up, people are screwed. it stars a young emilio estevez from back when being emilio estevez actually meant something. in short, if you're looking for the maximum amount of hilarious, machine-based horror this pumpktoberfest season, look no further than maximum overdrive. after all, it's also the last film stephen king ever directed.

the first beer of the pumpktoberfest season is a shipyard pumpkinhead, brewed out of portland, ME. it's a wheat ale brewed with cinnamon & nutmeg & it's only available for two months out of the year, roughly equivalent to the amount of time non-pumpkin farmers care about pumpkins on a yearly basis. based on the front of the label, it probably would've gone perfect with pumpkinhead or sleepy hollow, but neither of them are in my top sixteen horror films, so they can suck it.

the pumpkinhead's nothing special. i enjoy shipyard's beers, but the pumpkinhead was a perfect example of your run-of-the-mill "toss some spices in a beer & call it a pumpkin beer" pumpkin beer. as i suspected, compared to that pumking (pictured behind it) that i killed the other night, it was B-O-R-I-N-G. not HORRORible, but i'm hoping there are some better ones amongst the pumpkin beers i've assembled in my fridge. if not, it's going to be a loooooooooong pumpktoberfest season.