pumpktoberfest #14 - finally.

pumpktoberfest #14 - finally.
film: final destination
beer: shipyard smashed pumpkin



i friggin love final destination. i'm indifferent towards final destination 2, final destination 3 & the final destination, but the first film in the series was just plain awesome. the film opens with this superstitious high school kid named alex getting ready for a class trip to paris. the next day, he gets to the airport & boards the plane, but while waiting for the plane to take off, he has a premonition of the plane exploding & freaks out. in the process, he, a teacher & a handful of students are removed from the plane & it takes off without them. when the plane actually does explode in midair, the horror begins, as those left behind discover that they've cheated death & death will stop at nothing to fulfill his plans. oh death. you're such a little scamp. their final destination...death. ridiculously convoluted death.

first, one of the students "accidentally" strangles himself in the bathroom & people think it's a suicide but alex is all "nuh uh. it's death trying to carry out his master plan." everyone else is all "nuh uh. you're crazy" but then another one of them gets hit by a bus & people start believing his annoying ramblings. he eventually figures out that death is killing people in the order they would've died on the plane, but despite his findings & everyone's efforts to thwart death, those left behind keep dying in more & more intricate "freak accidents."

my favorite's the one with the teacher. she's killed when she puts on a john denver record, boils some water on the gas stove & pours herself a mug of it but then throws the boiling water on the floor when she notices that it's a mug from the high school. she instead decides to get some vodka from the freezer & pours it into the same mug. the quick change in temperature cracks the side of it, but she doesn't notice & carries it all the way across the room, leaving it on top of the computer. the vodka drips inside & shorts out the computer, which starts smoking. when she goes to check it out, it explodes, shooting a shard of glass into her neck. as she flails about the house with blood gushing from her neck, the computer continues to spark, starting a fire that follows the trail of vodka back to the kitchen & blows up the stove, igniting her entire house. SO convoluted.

finally finally finally. thirteen pumpkin beers into the pumpktoberfest season, the shipyard smashed pumpkin has finally come along & proved that somebody other than southern tier can make an outstanding pumpkin beer. i've had myself 2.1 of these over the last month. i say "2.1" because last week, i totally spilled almost all of the third one all over creation, aka my apartment. it was just an awful, awful turn to the evening & i'm still coming across occasional sticky reminders of the event. the smashed pumpkin is the second shipyard beer of the pumpktoberfest season, but it's leaps & bounds above the first beer i sampled this month, the shipyard pumpkinhead. i mean, that one was aight, but this one is a high-class beer...& at $8-$10, it's well worth paying as much as you'd pay for a stupid bottle of wine.

watch me gush now...for starters, the presentation is tres swanky, from the gold foil over the cap to the quality of the paper on the label. when i first cracked it open, i gave it a good whiff & man, does it smell absolutely delish. it's spiced with nutmeg & i think there's some cinnamon & probably some other junk in there too. the pumpkin flavor's quite prominent & not in some lame ass pumpkin pie way either. overall, the taste is surprisingly smooth considering the alcohol content. that's the other bonus. it's 9.0% alcohol & comes in a big 22 oz bottle. that's largely why i was so disappointed at spilling almost a whole bottle's worth last week. i was so about to get drunk on a thursday & fate was all "nuh uh. you lose." regardless, i give the smashed pumpkin seven thumbs up!

tomorrow! my #2 horror film & another pumpkin beer! til then!

pumpktoberfest #13 - so board.

pumpktoberfest #13 - so board.
film: witchboard
beer: st. ambroise pumpkin ale



as a thirteen year-old boy, when i first laid eyes on tawny kitaen in whitesnake's 1987 video for "here i go again," i was hooked. she had big rocker hair & rolled around on the hoods of cars to the sounds of metal guitars & wore a white see-thru dress. you could totally see her underpants! at that age, she was totally my kind of chick. i didn't see her performance in bachelor party until some time in the 90s, but in 1986, she'd starred in a movie called witchboard, which i came across soon after first seeing the whitesnake video. cable tv was sort of a new thing in our house & my dad had started taping movies off of showtime. when he wasn't paying attention, i'd scan through them. that's when i came across witchboard. i fell in love with it & it TOTALLY had nothing to do with the fact that there's a scene in it that represented the first time i ever saw a specific part of the female anatomy...courtesy of tawny kitaen.

in the film, she plays a woman who becomes terrorized & eventually possessed by a ouija board because she keeps using it alone. obviously, the spirit terrorizing & possessing her (this dude named "malfeitor") is evil, so people start dying in hilarious 80s horror ways. there's a sweet impaling, a dude who gets crushed when something falls on him, all that good stuff. if you head over to youtube, there's a short montage of scenes from the film, perfect for some quick guffaws. overall though, it's a pretty spooky film. to this day i'm not so cool with using ouija boards. based on my recent dating record, i'm just as frightened of the other things i saw in the movie as well.

lucky spooky 13! our thirteenth beer of the pumpktoberfest season is the st. ambroise pumpkin ale, from our good friends north of the border in montreal. i found it late one eve/early one morn at a bodega about some twenty blocks down fifth ave from my apartment. on my evening rides home, i've been hopping off the train quite often & treating myself to the healthy/gourmet wonders they have there, from local macro vegetarian dumplings to fresh fruit to amy's teriyaki wraps to vosges chocolate bars. they also have a pretty good beer selection & on one of my pumpkin beer excursions, i came across this one completely out of the blue. with every other beer i've tried this pumpktoberfest season, i'd read about it online & was keeping an eye out for them. with this one, i was all "a canadian pumpkin beer? well i've never!"

it's actually not that bad. it's a light, smooth, orange-colored ale with a prominent cinnamon taste & smell and a light pumpkin flavor. for some reason, even though i've been beaten over the head with a number of pumpkin beer spice explosions for most of the month, i enjoyed the wealth of cinnamon in the flavor. the bottle smells like a scented candle! i give it a sept point trois! tres bien! & with that, only three more beers to go!...& my top three horror films! it's going to be a pumpktoberfestastic finish to the month! stay tuned!

pumpktoberfest #12 - legendary horr-raw.

pumpktoberfest #12 - legendary horr-raw.
film: the blair witch project
beer: elysian night owl pumpkin ale



after college, even though i'd never been camping, i wrote an unrealized masterpiece screenplay about a group of friends on a weekend camping trip. the title--"into the woods." i had dreams of making the film while on an actual camping trip with the cast & crew. we'd spend a few weekends in the woods, bond & make a film all guerilla style. a year later, i read about a film called the blair witch project. from what i gathered, it was a film made up of found footage by three filmmakers who went into the woods of maryland to film a documentary about a local legend--the blair witch. they never returned. i was intrigued, so i went to the film's website (a great early example of online film marketing) & read up on the backstory behind the film & legend. from what i could tell, shit was real.

with all the website folklore i'd absorbed floating around in my head, i caught the film at a packed kendall sq cinema on the second night it was out. when i left the theatre, i was in complete shock, walking the streets of cambridge like a zombie, feeling like i'd just seen three people's final days but saying to myself, "that wasn't real...right?" even though it wasn't, i immediately put my plans for "into the woods" on hold. i'm very susceptible to believable ghost stories. i had a high school friend who told me that on multiple occasions he'd seen his grandfather wandering the halls of his house in the suit he was buried in. now every time i think of that guy, that's the first thing that comes to mind & i still get the occasional chills from it.

as for blair witch, i went back & watched it today & while i now know that it's not real, watching those people lose their minds in the woods still made me extremely uneasy. the film does a great job of creating a believable reality. a sequel about three boston filmmakers investigating the maryland disappearances came out the following year. i never saw it, but as legend has it, it sucked. now, ten years after the original release, they're working on a new one. since folks will already know that it's not real, i don't see how a new one can be as effective as the original, but i wish them luck...milk that cow.

every pumpktoberfest season, a frightening creature from the underworld roams the streets of seattle's capitol hill looking for prey. as legend has it, back in 2003, a group of five university students were out one evening, walking down pike & celebrating pumpktoberfest when from out of the night sky an enormous bird, the elysian night owl, swooped down, mauling four of them before letting out a deafening hoot & flying off, leaving the fifth to tell the tale. since then, he's returned every year to feast on the blood of the hip capitol hill citizens. in an attempt to appease the satanic strigiform, seattle's elysian brewery developed their seasonal elysian night owl pumpkin ale.

according to the label, each barrel of it is brewed with seven pounds of pumpkin & pumpkin seeds. i'm not sure how big the barrel is, but it sounds like a lot of pumpkin regardless. it's definitely present in the flavor & color. in addition, it's conditioned with a ton of spices (nutmeg, clove, cinnamon, ginger & allspice). they really dominate the flavor, with the cinnamon standing out the most. it was almost too much, but there was just enough pumpkin flavor to balance out the spices. i'd heard a lot of raves about the beer beforehand, so i was sort of expecting something amazing, but to be honest, while i thought it was well done...it wasn't anything legendary.

pumpktoberfest #11 - you little punk!

pumpktoberfest #11 - you little punk!
film: child's play
beer: dogfish head punkin ale



over the years, i've dated a number of girls who were seriously creeped out by dolls & more specifically, dolls with lifelike characteristics. i never saw what the big deal was. it's not as if those lifelike dolls were going to one day come to life & murder us in our sleep like something out of child's play, the 1988 horror film about a killer "good guy" doll. the film came out at a time when cabbage patch, teddy ruxpin & my buddy dolls were all the rage. i was fourteen when it came out, so for me, it's always been more hilarious than scary, but it still has a handful of moments that make you jump.

the film opens with a cop chasing a crook into a toy store. after the cop shoots the crook a couple times in the chase & the crook realizes he's going to die, he does some voodoo shit on a good guy doll, transferring his soul into it. days later, he winds up as some little kid's birthday present, a good guy doll named chucky. the good guy dolls, based on a fictional tv show, are supposed to be loveable companions for little boys, with catch phrases like "hi, i'm chucky. wanna play?" & "i'm your friend to the end. hidey ho. ha ha ha." since this one's possessed by a criminal, he adds phrases like "you stupid bitch! you filthy slut! i'll teach you to fuck with me!" to the mix & kills people with his good guy hammer.

throughout the film, we get lots of doll on human violence as chucky learns that if he doesn't transfer his soul into the little kid's body, he's going to become the doll. they made four more child's play movies, including the hilariously awesome bride of chucky & seed of chucky, featuring jennifer tilly as the voice of chucky's bride. in an attempt to reboot the franchise, there's a remake of the original scheduled to come out next year. whenever it comes out, i'm totally there on opening weekend.

so far, i've loved every single dogfish head beer that i've tried. the delaware brewery puts out a vast line of uniquely crafted beers, beers made with saffron or green raisins, ones made in barrels built out of palo santo wood, brews with rich, often complex flavors. their dogfish head punkin ale, brewed exclusively for the pumpktoberfest season, made its debut fifteen years ago at delaware's punkin chunkin, an annual delaware event (now in its 24th year) where people use machines to see who can chuck pumpkins the farthest. at the time, dogfish head wasn't even a brewery yet.

it's a brownish/orange beer brewed with "pumpkin meat," brown sugar, allspice, cinnamon & nutmeg and like the rest of their beers, it has a nice flavor to it. i'm pretty sure that the main thing i'm tasting is pumpkin, but it's blended in well enough with the spices that it's hard to tell. regardless, it's tasty & not too bitter & one of the better pumpkin beers i've tried this pumpktoberfest season. since i love dogfish head as much as i do, i might be a bit biased, but after suffering through my last pumpkin beer, the dogfish version is like drinking sweet nectar from the teat of a goddess.

pumpktoberfest #10 - and we all shine on.

pumpktoberfest #10 - and we all shine on.
film: the shining
beer: jack's pumpkin spice ale



man, jack nicholson used to be such a friggin awesome actor. easy rider? loved it. five easy pieces? outstanding. one flew over the cuckoos nest? batman? the shining? all brilliant performances. with nicholson, the last film of his that i can stand him in is a few good men. everything after that can suck it. i don't care if he won an oscar for as good as it gets or was uproariously funny in anger management. he's been a caricature of himself for some time now, giving us more of a "jack crazy" shtick than actual acting. i find it kind of sad, really. he used to be so good back when he didn't feel the need to tear down the curtains to make a scene work.

the shining, released in 1980, is our second steven king film this pumpktoberfest season & arguably the best film out of all that have come from king's books. it's a good story, but it helped that the film was directed by stanley kubrick, who for the most part rules & that jack nicholson didn't suck yet. in the film, he plays jack torrance, a writer & the husband of a family acting as caretakers at a hotel for the winter. we learn that their son has something called "the shining" that lets him see into the future & past & because of it, he sees a bunch of murdered people at the hotel. eventually, jack goes crazy because they're holed up in the hotel & he tries to murder his family. it's got creepy kids, an elevator with a bunch of blood in it & lots of "jack crazy," but in a good way...a classic horror film.

have you ever thought about what it might be like to have somebody take a leak right into your mouth? i hadn't either, but then i tried jack's pumpkin spice ale, put out by michelob & i got a pretty good idea what the experience would be like. this stuff is just absolutely awful. as a pumpkin beer, i just...i mean did they even try to make it taste like pumpkin? there are definitely spices in the beer, but they're very weak. as it is, michelob is an awful beer. it's just plain terrible. they could've put a TON of nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger & clove in & tried to mask the pure evilness that is tasting a michelob, but they didn't.

i guess i can't fault michelob for trying to come out with different beers, but i'm baffled as to how they could have thought that somebody would drink their pumpkin beer & go "wow. this tastes really good." it's just unfathomable. since they realized that people sometimes like it when their beer tastes good, michelob now brews almost twenty different kinds of beers, including a seasonal series (which the pumpkin atrocity is part of), a marzen & a dunkel weisse. i've tried their shock top wheat beer & that at least tasted like a wheat beer, so i guess there's a chance that one of their other beers is worthy of drinking, but after trying the pumpkin spice ale, i'm not holding my breath until i find it.