Beauty vs Beast: The Dream Team

JA from MNPP here, gleeful to say tis the season for spooky shenanigans, aka my favorite time of year - the trees are turning, the Moon is creeping out earlier every day, and the shelves of the local drugstores are stuffed with those beastly orange and purple Peeps - Happy Halloween-time, everybody! Y'all ought to know by now I'll take any chance I can to cram horror up in here, so here's the deal: we're gonna spend the next few ocassions leading up to The Big Night using our weekly "Beauty vs Beast" poll to face off some of our favorite Final Girls and the Big Bad Nasties they've faced off with.

This week we're getting the ball rolling with Wes Craven's classic A Nightmare on Elm Street, which celebrates it's 30th anniversary next month, to give you the choice between the police chief's haunted daughter Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) and the man in the tattered fedora slicing and dicing up everybody's dreams, ol' Fred Krueger (Robert Englund)...

poll by twiigs.com

You have only seven days to sleep on your decision, so be wise about it, and do try to wake up in time. (And as an aside, a happy birthday to Jsu Garcia, who played Rod in the movie and gave my teenage self a real appreciation for the art of rocking tighty-whities.)

PREVIOUSLY Last week we shook and shimmied our business across the high and low-end stages of Las Vegas, attempting to answer one of life's most existential quandary: is it weird not having anybody cum on ya? No, not that. I mean Stardust or Cheetah, of course. In a battle of Showgirls' veteran diva versus the hard-knocks ingenue... we went Diva, natch. Cristal levitated above the competition with 67% of the vote. Said brookesboy:

"Gina Gershon is an actress of such uncanny resourcefulness she can find inspiration from a fried chicken leg or, here, drugstore nail polish. Gotta go with Cristal (trashiest spelling EVAH!)."

Beauty vs Beast: Camp Goddess

JA from MNPP here, one-thumbing it Vegas-or-bust for a brand new edition of "Beauty vs Beast." Last week if you can believe it marked 19 years since we first slid into the passenger seat beside one Miss Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley), just an eager-eyed Pollyanna coming from "different places" on her way to a name written in lights - Paul Verhoven's Showgirls, the most epic ode to g-strings and cheeseburgers and the women who love them that's ever graced the silver screen, electrified... well, not a lot of people at the time actually, grossing only 20 million dollars in theaters. But I was there at my little local movie theater on opening night - I've told this story more times than there are beads maliciously strewn across the Goddess stage but as the lights went down on that first Midnight showing of Showgirls the scattered crowd of older men (they were all older men) sitting around my best friend and I broke into an impromptu chant of the word "Tits!" and I knew I was in for something special. It didn't disappoint.

It has of course gone on to become a camp sensation, inspiring books and musicals and countless more Midnight screenings, where I have no doubt the word "Tits!" will be chanted for time eternal. But the question is... how do you like having 'em?

poll by twiigs.com

You have one week to vote, and I don't want to see any write-ins for Janet Jackson or Paula Abdul. (But if you wanna toss a vote to a Penny, née Hope, that'll be okay.) Now bring me some brown rice and vegetables.

PREVIOUSLY Have you all finished your milshakes? Have you drunk them up? Did you ever - Mr. Daniel Plainview rode an oil spurt high above the competition with last week's poll, clobbering poor Eli Sunday's brains in once again. Said Carmen Sandiego:

"I voted for Daniel Plainview. They are both horrible wretched people, so I might as well vote for milkshakes! W00t! #teammilkshake"

Lady Gaga's "Applause"... In Which She Won't Stop Encoring

This will likely be the only post on the VMAs... and it's barely that. Yet the opening performance by Lady Gaga last night at MTV's annual fundraiser for the eradication of old people (anyone over, say, 28?) reminded me that I hadn't written about her "Applause" video yet and I wanted to.

But first a truth: As it turns out, a big white singing nun's outfit with giant square head is not a good look for anyone. Who knew?

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Did You Gag on "Killer Joe"?

My screenings these past two weeks -- cram session! -- to complete year end business, have been like one wild tonal shift after another swinging as they have from meta rib-nudging (Seven Psycopaths) to the hormonally twee (Take This Waltz), severely depressed (Oslo August 31st) and on through the defiantly stiff and self-medicated (The Deep Blue Sea)... I can't possibly write about them all. But I did feel the night to blurt out (choke out?) a few sentences on William Friedkin's Killer Joe based on the play of the same name by Tracy Letts.

Friedkin and Letts aren't quite joined at the hip as collaborators go despite the Oscar winning filmmaker taking the cinematic reigns on both Bug and Joe. Letts most acclaimed play August: Osage County went to another filmmaker though it's fascinating to think what Friedkin might have done with the material. He is, after all, at least as willing as Letts to attack his material with edgy flair, wicked humor and artistic abandon... for better and worse.

[NC17 madness and two SPOILER images after the jump]

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Twins: "You and I... we're exactly the same"

Since we're celebrating twins until the stars move on from Gemini, I wanted to give a shout out to the figurative kind as well.

Due to sad circumstances offline I'm way behind on "Hit Me With Your Best Shot"  though I did watch Joan Crawford in Possessed recently to catch up. Crawford's camp icon status got me to thinking about the best camp masterpiece in the past 25 years, one that we already covered in the first season of the best shot series. (Showgirls is hard-wired into my neural pathways so it's very easy to access). The legendary so-bad-it's-good movie pits "Goddess" superstar Cristal Connors (Oscar-worthy Gina Gershon... and I'm 100% sincere) against naive crazyperson Nomi Malone (Razzie winner Elizabeth Berkley). Cristal insists repeatedly that they're one and the same, virtually identical. Nomi vehemently disagrees but the movie itself is in Cristal's headspace through and through.

The best shot from the movie? Cristal, Nomi, and Nipples after the jump...

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