pumpktoberfest #9 - ghost in the machine.

pumpktoberfest #9 - ghost in the machine.
film: poltergeist
beer: smuttynose pumpkin ale



growing up, my parents wouldn't let me see films with anything higher than a PG rating, meaning that i missed out on a lot of cool films. at the same time, until 1984, there was no PG-13 rating, so there were a number of PG films put out that probably should have been rated R. one such film was steven spielberg's poltergeist, which was originally rated R, but was then re-rated to PG even though it's clearly way too scary for a PG rating. um, a swimming pool full of skeletons is PG? a boy-eating killer tree is PG? as it was, i only got to see the broadcast television version & at 9-10 years old, even that version gave me the willies. i sort of still believe in ghosts, but at the time, i REALLY believed in ghosts. casper, one-eyed willie, jesus, all of em.

the film centers on the freelings, a family whose little girl carol anne starts talking to ghosts through the tv. she was only a few years younger than me, so when i first saw it, i was all "maybe i shouldn't sit so close to the TV when i'm watching cartoons." long story short--the ghosts are trapped between dimensions & think carol anne can help them get out but there's a beast who's using carol anne to distract the ghosts & keep them there. eventually she gets sucked into the other dimension & they have to call in a freaky spiritual medium lady to get her back. after a bunch of crazy ghost shit happens & they bring her back, the beast makes a last ditch attempt to kick ass, but totally gets ghosted. why'd all this happen? get this shit. they built the house on an ancient indian burial ground. i can see bulldozing wetlands for more condos, but you have to draw the line somewhere. whooping cranes can fly someplace else. dead people can't. if i was those ghosts, i would've sucked that lil girl into the tv too.

i don't mean to sound bitter, but the freelings sort of had it coming to them. oh! speaking of bitter, i had a smuttynose pumpkin ale tonight. smuttynose brews out of portsmouth, NH & since i'm from NH, i've tried most of their beers. overall, they put out solid beers, but with the exception of their spring hanami ale, none of them really stick out as memorable in my mind. this one's one of their seasonal beers & according to their website, it's their "homage to the craft and heritage of america’s brewers" because colonial folks apparently used to put squash & whatnot in their beers. we new englanders love paying homage to colonial folks.

like the rest of their beers, the pumpkin ale doesn't really knock my specially-crocheted pumpktoberfest socks off. it has an orange color to it, so you'd think there's some pumpkin in there, but i can't taste any at all. it's apparently made with pumpkin puree & spices, but to be honest, i can't taste the spices either. i only notice them in the smell. i guess that means that as a pumpkin beer, it's a FAIL. as an IPA though, it's a well-done beer. too bad i'm not really a fan of bitter ass IPAs. sorry smuttynose, but your pumpkin ale sort of gave me heartburn. is that any way to treat a fellow new hampshirite? i think not. thanks for the beer, but that's totally not pumpktoberfestian of you, yo.

pumpktoberfest #8 - coming home to roost.

pumpktoberfest #8 - coming home to roost.
film: the birds
beer: blue moon harvest moon ale



when animals attack! killer animals have played a major role in the history of the horror film, from cujo & jaws to the mosquito & the piranha. king kong was the original. if you believe that giant lizards are an animal species, godzilla is technically one. have you heard about the birds? oh. i thought everyone had heard. it's a hitchcock film & it totally has killer animals. in it, a san fran socialite (tippi hedren) runs into a man at a bird shop & even though she's never met him before, she decides to drive all the way up the coast to a small town (bodega bay) so she can play a prank on him by bringing him two lovebirds. because she does this, the local birds start tweaking (tweetking?) out & attacking the residents of the town.

when you take a good look at it, the film's pretty ridiculous. whereas most hitchcock films feature characters driven to do things as a result of their dramatic circumstances, the characters in the birds (including the birds) have little to no stated motive for anything they do. this is one of the major issues critics have with the film. if you can get beyond this fact, it's a good film. i like it. my favorite scene is when tippi's at the town diner hiding out from the birds & the gathered town residents are discussing their bird problem. there's a bible-quoting drunk, an snooty-sounding ornithologist who gets cut off every time she tries to dispel bird knowledge & a frantic woman whose kids are worried that the birds will eat them. eventually, the birds attack a guy filling up his gas tank outside the diner & gasoline spills all over the place. from inside, the townsfolk watch as another guy drives up, gets out of his car & lights a cigar, causing a super-awesome explosion. it's the perfect mix of hitchcock's comments on society & hilarious bird-induced violence.

the time for seeing a harvest moon may have passed a few days back, but the time for drinking a blue moon harvest moon ale is totally right now! get to it! please note that if you are reading this in december & you're all "i really want to try that!" you're out of luck. the time is no longer now. you missed the boat. seasons change, so you'll have to settle for their full moon winter ale instead. that's how it works with blue moon. they put out a different beer for every season. there's the full moon for the winter, the rising moon in the spring, the honey moon for the summer & the harvest for autumn. that means that harvest gets to be their beer for two major holidays--thanksgiving & pumpktoberfest. lucky beer.

the harvest ale's made with a few of your standard pumpkin ale spices--allspice, nutmeg & clove. they provide most of the flavor. according to the label, there's also "vine-ripened pumpkin" in there, but i'll be damned if i noticed it. it's not crappy or anything, but the flavor's even less dramatic than that of a regular blue moon. basically, the best thing about the beer is the fact that it's a twist off. the website suggests pairing it with sweet potatoes, beef or turkey. i suggest pairing it with another pumpkin beer. it also goes well with killer birds, but that's pretty much all because of the killer birds.

pumpktoberfest #7 - it's just a thriller.

pumpktoberfest #7 - it's just a thriller.
film: jacob's ladder
beer: saranac pumpkin ale

if there's one type of horror film that really gets inside my head, it's the "psychological thriller." back in the day, hitchcock made a career out of them & nowadays, it's why people fall in love with m. night shyamalan's (obnoxious) films over & over. back in 1990, adrian lyne (who also did fatal attraction, flashdance, lolita & indecent proposal) came out with jacob's ladder, starring tim robbins as a vietnam vet/postal worker (jacob) who's seeing things & whose life is all flashbacky crazy. when he returns from vietnam, where he was bayonetted & his entire unit went nuts, strange things start happening to him. over the course of the film, the story moves between him in vietnam & him in a couple scenarios home in NYC.

i was sixteen around the time it came out, so while it left me seriously disturbed, i didn't really understand the story until years later. everybody in vietnam was killed & his kid (an uncredited macaulay culkin) is totally dead & jacob's having major flashbacks & freaking out & having to take ice baths to avoid dying. there's this one scene where he's in the bergen st F stop & he walks onto the tracks as a train's coming. at the last minute, as he gets out of the way, he looks at the passing subway cars & sees ghostly figures pressed up against the windows. freaky. there's another scene where he's being wheeled through a mental hospital & there's a dude repeatedly smashing his head up against a window to the point where a pool of blood has formed on the glass. also freaky. anyway, the film has a sweet pyschological twist. i won't say anything about it other than that biblically, jacob's ladder is the ladder to heaven. didn't know that? huey lewis & the news knew it. so should you.

today's pumpktoberfest quaff is the saranac pumpkin ale, made by the matt brewing company, a utica, ny based company that's been around since way back a few years after the civil war. i actually had one of these the other night & my first impression was "meh," but their pumpkin ale has a SUPER SPOOKY pumpkin on the front of the label & utica's the "second chance city," so i decided to give it a second chance tonight. my taste buds must be in a better mood tonight than they were when i first tried it, because i sort of enjoyed it the second time around.

it's a brownish brew & as far as pumpkin beers go, it's slightly better than tolerable. in addition to the pumpkin, it's brewed with cinnamon, allspice, cloves, ginger & vanilla. you'd think with so many flavors in the mix, it'd be a clusterfuck pumpkin mess, but the spices aren't ridiculously overwhelming & like with many of saranac's beers, even if the flavor's nothing thrilling, it at least has some flavor to it. the pumpkin flavor's sort of noticeable & with this beer, that was enough for me. maybe i was just hallucinating the pumpkin taste because of all the other flavors, but i swear i tasted it. it was there, man. i'm telling you. i'm not crazy. somebody's following me. ask my vietnam buddies. they're following them too. you've got to believe me. the pumpkin was there, man.

pumpktoberfest #6 - you smell like fish.

pumpktoberfest #6 - you smell like fish.
film: i know what you did last summer
beer: fisherman’s pumpkin stout



can we discuss jennifer love hewitt for a moment? she started out on disney's kids inc., but i was never a disney nut, so i was first introduced to her as younger sister sarah on party of five (which was all about neve as far as my hormones were concerned). midway through her run on the show, she starred in i know what you did last summer, the horror film that acted as her breakout role. then she was all cutesy hot in can't hardly wait, did an i know sequel (which i STILL haven't bothered to see) & launched a music career. i still have the first issue of maxim she was in, before they basically declared her "hottest hottie to ever be hot" & she started looking mad skinny & her boobs started to look abnormal & she went on a date with peter griffin. now she has some show where ghosts whisper to her & in her spare time, she plays liz in the garfield movies. seriously, her career arc's more abnormally curved than her boobs are.

...so the horror film that made her into hottie #1, i know what you did... she was 18 by that point, so i (at age 23) could legally feel less creepy in thinking she was cute hot. the film stars her & hottie sarah michelle geller, who'd just started doing buffy...oh & ryan phillippe & freddy prinze jr are in it. i guess they're hot, but not what i'm looking for, unfortunately. basically, they're out partying one night & they run over a drifter. since they're in the middle of nowhere, they dump him in the ocean & take off. a year goes by. jen-hew's home from college for the summer & receives a letter that reads "I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER." then a fisherman with a hook who kills people starts showing up & they run around trying to not get killed. OH THE HORROR! i saw it in the theatre & the best part is at the end, when j hew's showering & they totally set up the sequel. so yeah, the boobs + horror combo...once again victorious. 

today's pumpktoberfest brew is the fisherman’s pumpkin stout. it's put out by cape ann brewing, out of gloucester, MA. since gloucester's on the coast, they apparently have a thing for fishermen (hopefully the non-murdering, non-hook having kind), because they've named their friggin beers after them. when i first picked up their pumpkin beer, i was in a frenzy, attempting to gather up as many pumpkin beers as humanly possible, so i hadn't really paid attention to the fact that unlike all the other pumpkin beers i've tried, this is a stout. that fact made a ton of difference.

since it's a stout, it has a dark complexion & it's largely because stouts typically have more flavor than ales do, but there was definitely more going on with this one than there was with my previously-sampled pumpkin beers. with this one, the spices were less subtle & it wasn't all about bombarding your mouth with pumpkin pie flavors. with that sort of subtleness, there was definitely room for the pumpkin flavor to come into play. i wouldn't say that it's as good as the pumking, but it was better than the southampton. let's put it this way. this is one blogger who could get HOOKED by this FISHERMAN. wocka wocka wocka.

pumpktoberfest #5 - i cast thee out.

pumpktoberfest #5 - i cast thee out.
film: the exorcist
beer: punk'n harvest pumpkin ale



the seventies was definitely a hay day for directors, as peeps like coppola, bogdanovich, scorcese, depalma & lucas essentially reinvented the film industry, clearing a path for the thousands of film schools & independent films that have come since. william friedkin was among this group of maverick directors, with efforts that included the french connection in 1971 & the exorcist two years later. in the next decade, he went on to direct cruising (1980) & to live & die in l.a. (1985), but he hasn't done much memorable in the last few decades, unless you count 2000's rules of engagement. if you do count it, you should probably rethink that stance.

so yeah...holy head-spinning horror, batman! he followed up the french connection with the exorcist, which has become an iconic horror film & his most famous film, making over $400 million at the box office & winning two academy awards. the main plot revolves around a little girl (linda blair) who's possessed by a demonic spirit. eventually, after the little girl starts levitating & shit, her mother (ellen burstyn) decides to call in two priests to perform an exorcism. long story short, whatever's possessing her claims to be good ol satan himself & one of the priests ends up dying whilst performing the exorcism. the other priest, in a last ditch effort, commands satan to leave the little girl & enter him. satan's all "enter a priest? hellz yeah!" & leaps into the priest, who then leaps out a window. it's ok though, because the little girl is cured.

our fifth beer of the pumpktoberfest season, the punk'n harvest pumpkin ale, is totally possessed by weakness. it's an orange-colored beer made by four+brewing company, which is based out of utah. i wrote about one of their other beers, the "rype orange tingled wheat beer" last december & it was just as weak tasting. within the punk'n, i guess that it's a pumpkin beer, but there's no more than a faint taste of both pumpkin & spice (nutmeg? cinnamon?) in there, so it's hard to tell. quite disappointing.

when i first wrote about four+brewing's beers, i noted the low alcohol content & assumed that it was because utah's possessed by mormons. it turns out that in the state, beers with a lower alcohol content are taxed less, so by keeping the alcohol content below 4%, you make more money. so yeah, it's not because mormons think that alcohol is satan's brew or something & have decided to exorcise those evil spirits. from what i can tell, mormons don't really perform exorcisms. if they think you've got the devil in you, they'll just come to your house week after week & have D's with you until you're cured enough that you can wear their special undergarments.