For whatever reason, Shudder uploaded a bunch of Australian horror movies about a month ago. I’ve watched a few of them (like Coda, 1987). That brought to mind the classic episode of The Simpsons where the family goes to Australia so Bart can apologize for a prank phone call:
Well, that brought to mind another Australian flick I watched recently, The Loved Ones (2009). I would really classify this flick as a “dark comedy,” but it made for a compelling watch.
After last week’s review of a summer blockbuster, your portly is undertaking a complete reversal to an obscure horror film. In fact, it’s an obscure Welsh horror film, in the incomprehensible Welsh language, and funded by the short-lived Welsh Film Board. The Welsh Film Board, it seems, was a body dedicated to the revival and preservation of Welsh language—in other words, the preservation of cramming as many consonants together as possible (today, there exists Ffilm Cymru Wales; why is it that every nationalist movement and/or organization in the British Isles is inevitably just woke internationalist globohomo garbage in a language that pre-dates the Roman Empire?).
The film in question is Blood on the Stars (1975), which one reviewer on Letterboxd called “a fever dream.” That is an apt description of this weird little relic of the glorious Welsh 1970s.
Yours portly ventured to his local cinema last week. One of the glories of summer vacation is that I can go see the movies at 11:40 AM on a Thursday morning, which is exactly what I did when I went to see Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025).
Why such an early showing? Well, the movie—and this point is my chief complaint about it—is nearly three hours long. Like every major film release these days, directors seem incapable of shooting and editing a film that is under two hours. A small handful of super long films don’t feel long, and I welcome their three-hour runtimes, but those (like Goodfellas [1990]) are very much the exception to the rule. What happened to the tight, 90-minute flick?
M:ITFR gets a bit of a pass because it is the final (allegedly) film in a franchise that dates back to 1996. Think about that—this franchise pre-dates the birth of Dr. Fiancée by two years. I was eleven when the first film released; I’m forty now. It is a testament to Tom Cruise‘s longevity, dedication, and fitness that he was able to play Ethan Hunt for so nearly thirty years. Cruise famously and frequently performs his own stunts; seeing a man of his age (he’s 62; he’ll turn 63 in July) perform them is impressive.
The flick was filmed back-to-back with its predecessor, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023), but the writers’ strike delayed production of M:ITFR until 2024. That means Cruise played Ethan Hunt for twenty-eight years—dang!
But I digress. Is the impossible length of this film worth accepting the mission?
Scandinavians (and, in this case, Poles, too) make some good horror films. They also tend to have some kind of improbably lesbian relationship at the center of them, but The Ugly Stepsister (2025) is a welcome exception. It still has a feminist message, but that never really takes over the compelling and gruesome story.
Apparently, yours portly has MP3 players strewn about—well, at least two. I’m wondering if I might stumble into a third. At one point, I had an MP3 player with a whopping 64 MB of storage space. I have no idea where that one is now, but I remember listening to it on repeat my freshman year of college to drown out the sound of reruns of The Golden Girls that my roommate would listen to to fall asleep at night (he also recited the dialogue in his sleep). I could squeeze maybe eighteen songs on there, depending on the bit-rate of the MP3s, and I would periodically trade songs out for new ones.
But I digress. Here are some recent pieces on the two MP3 players I do have in my possession (and which I am selling—here and here):
Happy Sunday!
—TPP
Other Lazy Sunday Installments:
On 2 May 2022 I purchased the legendary Zelda Game & Watch by Nintendo (that link is an Amazon Affiliate link, which means I receive a portion of any purchases made through that link, at no additional cost to you). It’s a small, handheld device that has the first Zelda games, as well as the Gameboy’s classic Link’s Awakening. It also functions as a clock, which is kind of cool, too.
I wrote a very long post about the unit back on 31 May 2022, lovingly detailing the wild nostalgia trip the unit sparked. Honestly, 2022 seems like the distant past, and it was only three years ago! Regardless, I still have the unit, and while I am clearing out a lot of my old technology, I don’t have any immediate plans to sell this bad boy.
If you’re a gamer and you appreciate the classic Zelda games, I highly recommend you grab the unit. It’s currently $53.93 on Amazon (again, that’s an affiliate link), but it’s worth every penny. Considering most video games now are at least $60 brand new, that’s a steal.
Or you can live vicariously through this massive reblog for free.
With that, here is 23 May 2024’s “TBT^2: Zelda Game & Watch“:
Last week I wrote about an old MP3 player I’d used for years (and which you can buy). In digging around in my Drawer of Forgotten Technology, I found another MP3 player, this one a Centon MP3 Player that doubles as a USB stick/storage device (you can buy it, too)!
I apparently never really used this one all that much, but I did find ten recordings from a Christmas Concert that my old group, Brass to the Future, played on 20 December 2009 at the Sumter Opera House. Since I can’t figure out how to remove those files (apparently, I can’t just delete them from the file folder in Windows), whoever purchases it will get those recordings (which, despite my apparent inability to delete them, I have managed to copy onto two external hard drives).
Today’s movie is not a movie, but rather a two-season miniseries that aired on the BBC from 2013-2014. In the Flesh consists of nine total episodes (three in season one, six in season two), and aired during the Silver Age of Zombie Films (during the great revival of the genre, when it seemed that zombie films, like their subject matter, were inescapable).
In the Flesh introduces a bit of a twist to the traditional zombie formula: it takes place after a zombie uprising, known as “The Rising,” took place, and a treatment—not a cure—for zombification has been found. With a daily dose of medicine, former zombies (called “the Risen” or, derogatorily, “rotters”) can live as humans. That said, they are not human—they cannot eat or drink food without getting violently ill, for example—and can revert to their “rabid” state if they miss a dose—or if they take an illicit street drug called “Blue Oblivion” that, for some reason, a quasi-terrorist organization called the “Undead Liberation Army” (ULA) distributes to its fanatical members.
Shudder seems to be featuring horror and/or psychological thrillers based on analog or early digital technology quite a bit lately, and I love these movies. Granted, I have a personal fascination with and memory of some of these technologies, so that lends these flicks an air of nostalgia. Indeed, one of them isn’t intentionally nostalgic (Tesis, 1996), as it was made featuring technology that was, at the time, cutting edge:
Happy Sunday! And, please, be kind and rewind.
—TPP
Other Lazy Sunday Installments:
I’m back with more ancient alien technology. This one is a bit interesting in our world of endless streaming—an old MP3 player (I’m selling it on eBay, by the way):
This device is a SanDisk Sansa c250, which boasted a whopping two gigabytes of flash storage. To put that into perspective, my very first MP3 player—which I received for my eighteenth birthday in 2003—had a mere 64 megabytes of storage. In high school, a friend of mine had an MP3 player that sported an actual hard drive, and he kept it in his truck to play tunes; it was too big to carry around regularly!
This Sansa c250 likely came out when the iPod was getting going, and was a non-Apple competitor. The music industry in the early 2000s was still trying to figure out how to monetize the digitization of music, and I know for a fact a number of the tunes on this device were rips from CDs or recordings I’d made using crude digital methods. I know for a fact I owned the CD the song in the picture comes from, and I believe I still do.
But it was a golden and/or dark age of intellectual theft and copyright infringement, depending on one’s perspective, and these devices were quite popular for listening to music on-the-go without the need for a bulky Disc Man.
The Portly Politico 