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.

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.