Posted inSaturday Morning Cartoons

The Cat With Hands by Robert Morgan

Maybe you wouldn't call this a cartoon, but I don't care, because you need to see this. The Cat with Hands (2001) is an awesome short film by award-winning British filmmaker Robert Morgan, mixing live action and animated wax in a very uncanny and disturbing way. Film Threat magazine called it "mandatory viewing for anyone who wants to write a horror movie. Not because of what Robert Morgan does, but because of what he doesn’t do." True. But I'd say what he does accomplish in this film is also just as brilliant. Morgan's latest film is Bobby Yeah (see review…
December 15, 2012Posted inSaturday Morning Cartoons1 Comment
Posted inDictionscary

phlegm

Phlegm rhymes with gem, stem, and them...words that sound normal enough. In fact, it wouldn't be such a disgusting word if it weren't for that perfectly placed letter "g" -- that most mucousy of consonants that we can only sound out by constricting the back of our throats. Yet it's also the one letter in the word we do not pronounce -- as if we DARE not pronounce it. For if we ever did, green sputum would gurgle from between our lips like something vile burping up from a sewer drain. It is a perfect word. Perfectly disgusting. It's very…
December 14, 2012Posted inDictionscary
Posted inSaturday Morning Cartoons

Mark Twain’s “Mysterious Stranger” — a Claymation Terror

Still in your jammies and slurping cereal in front of the tube? Then click through to this week's Saturday Morning Cartoon... "The Mysterious Stranger" was a scene in the 1985 film The Adventures of Mark Twain, in which Tom, Huck, and Becky get a visit from a very familiar character...who teaches his lesson through an apocalyptic nightmare. You can learn more about this story on Wikipedia or even read the complete (but I believe unfinished) novel on The University of Viriginia's e-text server.
November 17, 2012Posted inSaturday Morning Cartoons
Posted inSaturday Morning Cartoons

The Mystic Order of the Koo-Koo-Ma-Hatcha!

Good morning. Let's turn on the time machine and watch an original nightmare cartoon from last century's Depression-era cultural dreamscape: "Bimbo's Initiation" (1931). This classic animation from the great Max Fleischer is a surrealist haunted house story as much as it is a edgy, pre-Hays Code, Betty Boop classic. Join the Mystic Order of the Koo-Koo-Ma-Hatcha! "Bimbo's Initiation" is currently featured on the Fleischer Studios front page -- or you can catch it on YouTube If you like this kind of thing, you'll also dig Fleischer's "Swing You Sinners," which transpires in an uncanny graveyard. Both films are detailed in…
October 20, 2012Posted inSaturday Morning Cartoons1 Comment