Unmasked Part 25 (1989)

NOVEMBER 8, 2019

GENRE: COMEDIC, SLASHER
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

I remember reading about Unmasked Part 25 (aka Hand Of Death) in Fangoria as a young teen, wanting very much to see it but not being able to find it at any of my video stores. So over the years I kind of forgot about it, until Vinegar Syndrome announced they would be releasing it on Blu-ray for the first time, accompanied by a DVD copy since it never hit that format either (at least not in the US). And it had been so long that I had forgotten everything that Fangoria article (or review?) said that made me want to see it, so it was a nice blend of "I really want to see this movie" and "I have no idea what this movie is" - a pretty rare feat.

Luckily it's not a "go in blind" type so I can tell you what it is: a satirical take on the masked slasher movies of the '80s, in particular Jason Voorhees. Our killer, "Jackson", wears a hockey mask that doesn't really resemble Jason's (it kind of looks like the one on the *poster* for New Beginning though) but it's quite obvious he and he alone is the chief inspiration for the character here. They even set the events of the climax on Friday the 13th to hammer it home, ignoring whatever potential jokes they could get out of taking the piss on Freddy or Leatherface. Anyway, he's a Jason-like guy doing his Jason-like thing, but he's getting bored with it - he feels like he's in a rut and only killing randos because that's what is expected of him. But during his latest murder spree he meets a blind woman named Shelly, and rather than kill her (since she can't see, she's not instantly frightened of him) he strikes up a conversation with her and the two fall in love.

From then on it's kind of like Red Dragon's scenes with Reba McClane, as you're left with the rather uneasy feeling of kind of wanting this guy to find peace at last while also constantly worrying that he's going to kill this innocent woman we've gotten to know as opposed to the all-but anonymous jerks he usually offs. But the key difference is that director Anders Palm and writer Mark Cutforth find the humor in the concept, such as when she asks him to engage in rough sex with her and he's quite prudish about it, or when they go to a costume shop and he gets insulted by the idea of her wearing a mask (liking it to how she'd feel if he was pretending to be blind). Eventually his murderous urges start coming back and he feels compelled to do his thing, but for the most part, it's like a weird rom-com bookended by gory slasher scenes.

And yes, GORY. This was notoriously when the MPAA was at their worst for the slasher movies, leaving the likes of New Blood and Jason Takes Manhattan virtually bloodless, and this one was edited for release as well, but the difference is, the producers/studio didn't lose everything like they did for those F13 flicks, allowing Vinegar Syndrome to restore/release the film completely uncut. It was almost kind of disorienting to see how bloody it got at times, because I'm so used to everything from this era being sanitized, and as a bonus the splatter is actually quite well done for the most part, with lots and lots of prosthetics and blood bags doing their heroic duty as Jackson lays waste to two separate groups, with the occasional isolated murder here and there for good measure.

To be fair, the comedy is a bit dated, but it's important to keep in mind that the whole "meta horror" thing hadn't taken off yet. It's not a "spoof" of the films - there are no sight gags or even direct references to the movies we love (even the name Shelly is probably a coincidence, since it was used for a male character in F13 3 - wouldn't they go with Alice or Ginny?), it's closer to a "What if?" kind of scenario, one that might have worked even better if they straight up licensed the Jason character and used him this way. One thing that didn't quite work is that it takes place in London, with Jackson stalking someone's flat in the opening sequence, as opposed to the woods or an isolated home (he does go to one of those at the end, however - though it's more like "we have a really big yard" as opposed to "no one is around for miles"). So it throws off the "let's imagine Jason is getting tired of doing his thing" when he's completely out of his element - he should be kind of excited about the change of pace!

Basically it's a sillier version of something like Behind the Mask, where your love of slashers - and familiarity with their tropes - plays a big part in how much you're enjoying the film. I mean if you absolutely hate "body count" movies (or worse, never saw one) you'd probably find this unbearable, unlike something like Scary Movie which can appeal to a wider audience - this is as niche as it gets. Even the lo-fi look (it was shot on Super 16, swoon!) and plentiful gore lend it credibility that even some straight slashers (especially modern ones) don't bother to earn, and yet it's all in service of a funny (if slightly worn thin by the end) joke. Vinegar's Blu looks fantastic and comes with a pair of commentaries, one with Palm and the other with Cutforth (both moderated by writers), plus the trailer that kind of misleads what the film is ("it's a movie, within a movie, within a movie!" - huh?) and also spoils the ending for some reason - below is a scene instead so you can get an idea of the humor without having the story spoiled. At any rate, it's a nice package for a film that fans - and the curious - would have been happy to finally have at all. No, it won't be for everyone, but if you're a fellow slasher enthusiast like me you'll certainly appreciate the effort.

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Zombieland: Double Tap (2019)

OCTOBER 18, 2019

GENRE: COMEDIC, ZOMBIE
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

I've long been baffled by Hollywood's unwillingness to cash in the zombie trend; the original Zombieland made a boatload of money and a couple years later, World War Z somehow managed to become Brad Pitt's highest grossing movie ever despite well documented production troubles. And yet, there have only been a handful of major zombie movies since, as if the studios all decided to let the indie scene (and AMC TV of course) handle things rather than cash in like they usually do when there are two hit horror movies in the same sub-genre. Still, I still assumed Sony would have been quicker to finally get Zombieland: Double Tap going, as it's been a full decade since the original - might as well be a hundred years for a horror property. A big franchise can take that much time off and make its return an event, but not a fresh one like this - they really should have been on Zombieland 4 by now.

But since it took so long, they must have a ton of new ideas and a really good hook that got everyone to finally commit to making a sequel, right? Well... not so much. While there are a few fresh ideas, such as an advanced zombie that is nearly impossible to kill (bullet to the head doesn't work) and some fun new characters, it unfortunately feels like so many other comedy sequels, in that it's closer to remake than "next chapter", hitting a number of the same beats and more or less sticking to the same pattern of action scenes - a slo-mo driven opening set to Metallica and a big finale with a swarm of undead advancing on our heroes who are in an elevated position, with a few scattered and brief fights in the middle somewhere. It got to the point where I almost wished it DID have evil human characters (the lack of which was a big selling point for me in the original) to at least mix things up a bit.

So what IS the story here? Basically, after holing up in the White House for a while, we see that Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) and Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) are more content with their life than Little Rock (Abigail Breslin) and Wichita (Emma Stone), and after Columbus tries to spice things up my proposing to Wichita, the two women bail. However, when Wichita makes a surprise return a month later, she tells the boys that Little Rock in turn ditched her in favor of a new group of friends (hippies, some of whom are actually in her age group), and thus the trio set out to find her to make sure she's OK and maybe convince her to stick with her sister.

Things are slightly complicated by the presence of Madison, a ditzy blonde played by Zoey Deutch. Columbus found her in the mall, learning she had been holed up in a Pinkberry for years, and as he had just been dumped by Wichita (and Madison in turn had been without any human contact for years) the two quickly hop into bed, leaving Wichita both jealous and annoyed when she returns. So basically they have the ingredients for a new dynamic (while checking in with Breslin every now and then with her hippie pals), but the script seems in a rush to retreat to more familiar scenarios and character interactions, so her role is a strictly supporting one, not a "full fledged new member". Other new characters show up, but most of them are only in it for a few minutes before they're turned into zombies and removed from the proceedings, which isn't enough time to give the film as a whole its own identity.

It also lacks the surprising pathos that helped make the original such a winner. Columbus discovering his parents were dead (and, specifically, Tallahassee being the one to shield him a bit from the news), the true nature of Tallahassee's "puppy"... there's nothing like that for either our returning characters or the new ones, making it feel even more weightless. This along with the limited zombie action (and even appearances; despite a number of wide shots of their car traveling, there's never any stragglers just kind of wandering around nearby - the things apparently only work in groups) has it almost feel like there's no actual danger in the world, let alone any psychological turmoil such a scenario would leave on them. Sure, Madison is funny enough, but would it have killed them to establish any sense of humanity for the character? Or Rosario Dawson's Nevada, who we know even less about? I kept thinking about how well Last Man on Earth (RIP) handled this sort of thing; you'd be laughing at Will Forte in a dinosaur suit one minute and nearly left in tears the next. Considering how much they recycle from the original - why drop one of the best things?

Especially when, you know, it's not that funny either. It's got a few laughs for sure, but rarely anything laugh out loud-worthy (one of the few exceptions: using Madison the idiot to pitch an idea we actually do have in our world - but not in theirs since things stopped in 2009 - summing up how fairly stupid it is when you think about it), and when they recycle things that were so great in the first film - like a driving montage where the seating arrangements keep changing - it just reminded me how much fresher the first one felt. Things truly reach their nadir with the arrival of Luke Wilson and Thomas Middleditch as a pair who act/talk just like Tallahasee and Columbus (Middleditch's character has "Commandments" instead of "rules", and we watch the two compare their minor differences for what seems like an eternity), leaving me actively annoyed instead of merely kind of bored.

As for the zombie action, it's fine. There's a pretty great one take sequence where our heroes fight off a pair of the new "T-800" zombies (so-named because they're just as hard to kill), and the finale, while brief, has some solid crowd-pleasing moments as a Monster Truck is used to wipe out an entire swarm. But apart from one brief chunk of the climax, no one ever seems in any real danger - including the random hippies who stupidly decided to melt all of their weapons. There's like two dozen of them, most of whom never even speak, so it baffles me they couldn't at least heighten the tension by letting the countless zombies actually get a few of them, especially when there's not even a "we don't need weapons after all" point to be made, as a (smuggled in) gun ends up saving the day anyway.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not expecting a grim drama like Walking Dead or Day of the Dead, but the first film managed to keep things light while reminding us on occasion of the real tragedy and danger at play - Double Tap just focuses on the laughs, and half of them either don't land or are just recycled from the first one. It's amusing enough, but after ten years I can't help but feel disappointed that they didn't come up with any new ideas of note - perhaps the long delay had them wanting to play it safe? God knows there are enough people out there who fear change, so it's possible that they are the target demo here, getting more of the same and only the bare minimum of new material so that it doesn't qualify as a remake. They'll love it, I'm sure, but me, the best I can say is that it more or less held my attention and gave me a few laughs, but I'd be hard pressed to remember much about it by this time next week (I've already forgotten Middleditch's name, in fact). It's nice to spend some time with these folks again, but that can only go so far - eventually there has to be a solid reason for their return, and I never found one here.

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Ready Or Not (2019)

AUGUST 22, 2019

GENRE: COMEDIC, SURVIVAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

I'm not sure how they differentiate behind the scenes, but to the average moviegoer, a Fox Searchlight movie is traditionally less commercially minded than the stuff that comes out from the traditional Fox label. Grim subject matter (12 Years A Slave), taboo topics (teen pregnancy re: Juno), Batrachophilia (Shape of Water)... it's easy to see why they might not want these things starting off the same way as Home Alone or Night at the Museum. So when you hear that Ready or Not is a Fox Searchlight movie, you're probably thinking it's disturbing or psychologically driven (they did Black Swan, after all), right? Wrong. It's actually the most fun genre movie of the summer, possibly all year.

If you've seen the trailer you know the premise (and, alas, a few of its surprises): a woman named Grace (Samara Weaving) gets married to a man named Alex who belongs to a wealthy family he has largely distanced himself from, and is made to join them for their "new family member" ritual of a game night, where the game is chosen by a mysterious box that dispenses cards with the game name printed on them. When Grace takes the card and sees that it's Hide & Seek, she laughs at the idea of adults playing such a silly kid's game, but everyone else clearly takes the matter very seriously. She goes off to hide, and her new in-laws grab crossbows and axes - if they find her they mean her very serious harm. Since this is not a short film, she gets privy to their plans and decides to fight back, with only minimal support from her husband.

As I said, the trailer does give away some things I wished it hadn't (at least two major moments in the trailer, with plenty of context offered along with them, are from the film's last 15 minutes), but the interesting thing about the movie is that the filmmakers seem to be aware everyone will know the premise already, and it gives the first 20 minutes or so some bonus comedy for the audience. When her husband suggests they just elope ("I'm giving you an out...") she just sees it as him having jitters or whatever, but everyone in the audience is laughing because they know he's really trying to possibly save her life. Likewise, there's no big dramatic reveal of their murderous intentions - patriarch Tony (Henry Czerny) just starts handing out the weapons to his wife and children as casually as he might deal the cards if they were playing poker.

Which leads me to one of the film's odder weak spots - the fact that it's ONLY Hide & Seek that means someone will be hunted and sacrificed. A few of her fellow "married in" in-laws reveal their games ("I got Old Maid at mine - what the hell even IS that?" says her husband's brother-in-law) and someone notes that it's been ages since they had to play Hide & Seek, but they don't do a thorough job of clarifying that, apparently, those who play Old Maid just play the game and go to bed - there's no high stakes for that or checkers or whatever else the card might say. So I was watching for a while thinking that the Old Maid guy and others did indeed go through this ordeal and "win" (survive), making the family's repeated "if we fail we're all dead!" claims confusing for a bit.

But that sentiment is offset by how damn fun it is. Czerny is one of those actors who is always just a delight to watch and truly excels at playing villainous assholes (when they killed him off on Revenge, I stopped watching the show as he was the last good thing about it), so seeing him get to get more manic as the film goes on was truly a gift. See, they only have until sunrise to find/sacrifice Grace or they'll all die (per the backstory of his great grandfather, who started this tradition after making a deal with a mysterious man in exchange for their good fortune for their business dealings), so as time winds down he panics more and more, while his wife (Andie MacDowell in rare form) does her best to keep him focused.

The real MVP, however, is Adam Brody as Alex's brother Daniel. An alcoholic who is said to always be hitting on Grace, he is clearly growing disillusioned with the family traditions and isn't sure if he should continue to assist them, making him a bit of a wild card. At one point he finds Grace accidentally (he was just looking for a drink) and allows her a ten second head start before alerting the others, though he seemingly can't bring himself to become a full blown accomplice. So part of the fun is wondering when or if he will truly turn sides, as well as the realization him hitting on her was probably his own way of trying to get her to leave on her own accord and save her life, without having to actually turn on his family. Brody gets some of the film's best lines (including one near the end I obviously can't repeat, but if you see it you'll know which one - the phrase "for a week" is involved), and it cements my post-Jennifer's Body belief that the actor is truly at his best when playing in horror comedies.

That said, everyone is doing fine work; they're all playing in-law stereotypes (ditzy sister and her clueless husband, Brody's wife is an ice queen, etc) but they walk on the exact right line between horror and comedy - it's not a movie meant for scares, per se, but it delivers on the suspense even if you're never far from another laugh, and the cast keeps it from ever veering too far into goofy comedy. And Weaving dives right into the physical demands of the role, including an accidental fall into a pile of decomposing bodies and a gnarly "hand through a nail" bit - all in a wedding dress! (She does change her shoes into something she can run in though; sorry, Jurassic World fans.)

Fun: that's the keyword here. It's a goofy premise played straight as can be, with enough blood/violence to justify its R rating (the F-bombs would have sent it there anyway) but not so much that it starts feeling like a torture flick. The climax is that rare mix of jaw-dropper and crowd-pleaser, and - even though I deplore the habit in real life - it's got the best use of a "now I need a smoke" moment in who knows how long (ages, since people almost never smoke in movies anymore). Ultimately its only real flaw was that the trailer gave away so many of its secrets, but since knowing the premise before the protagonist gave it some bonus humor, it kind of evens out. Don't let the "buried at the end of August" release date fool you - this one's a winner.

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The Dead Don't Die (2019)

JUNE 14, 2019

GENRE: COMEDIC, ZOMBIE
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive was one of my favorite movies that year, and remains an easy title to name-check whenever someone asks for a solid vampire movie they might not have seen, so I was hoping that The Dead Don't Die would follow suit, with Jarmusch applying his trademark deadpan outlook (and... let's say "casual" approach to plotting) to the zombie film. Alas, very little about it worked for me, and since horror is not his forte I truly hate the idea that someone who might be interested in the filmmaker trying his hand at genre at this later stage in his career might see this (it's his first ever wide release) and be turned off from checking out Only Lovers, thinking it would be just as interminable.

If you've seen the trailer, you've basically seen everything the movie has to offer - a lot of fun people (Bill Murray! Adam Driver! Tilda Swinton! Tom Waits!) shrugging their way through a Romero-esque zombie outbreak, a joke that's mileage will vary depending on your personal preferences. For me it wore thin rather quickly; the zom-coms that work best (Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, etc) all eventually have the heroes get a little more proactive and balance the tone so that it feels like a fully satisfying ride, but here Jarmusch is content to keep it at an energy level barely hovering over zero. Even when heroes Adam Driver and Bill Murray finally do spring into action (a sequence highlighted in the trailer as if it was a third act kickoff, but is actually the film's final scene) there's an air of glibness to it that just didn't work for me.

The plot, such as it is, is at least grounded in some kind of good idea. Unlike Romero's films (Night is name-checked; more on that soon) we get a legit explanation for the undead rising from their graves: polar fracking has caused the Earth to shift on its axis, resulting in any number of side effects such as animals getting confused, the day/night cycle getting screwy, etc. in addition to the zombies (sure, why not?). News reports inform us that it's happening everywhere, but our focus remains on a generic small town and its sleepy denizens. Some of the actors, particularly Chloe Sevigny and Danny Glover, seem to think they're in a real zombie movie and act appropriately (concerned/scared), others, like Driver, just sort of stare blankly at it. And Murray just does his Murray thing, albeit laid-back even by his standards - it's hard to describe a Bill Murray performance as, well, a "performance", really, but relatively speaking it might be the laziest I've seen from him.

In fact, at one point I even pondered if the actors were on the same page as to what kind of movie this was, when the movie itself answered me with a "probably not". Throughout the movie, Murray and Driver occasionally lapse into some fourth-wall breaking by commenting on the movie's theme song by Sturgill Simpson (who appears as a zombie) and whether or not they are improvising through some dull backstory. For their final one, Murray asks Driver how he knows that "things won't end well", a phrase he keeps repeating, and Driver tells him that it's because he read the script. Murray then laments that "Jim" only let him read his own scenes, and whether or not it's true doesn't matter - the point is I felt that I was watching a movie where no one was aware of what anyone else was doing, and here was the movie confirming that was very likely.

In fact I almost considered walking out at one point, and not because it was "the worst movie ever made" or anything like that - it just became clear that I had already seen everything it had to offer after by the halfway point, and reading even a very thorough wiki synopsis would have had the same effect in a tenth of the time. The final straw was when I realized what the zombies were REALLY saying. See, these ones talk, but only one word each, and I thought it was just them talking about the last thing on their mind before they died; for example, the first two we meet just keep saying "coffee" over and over, and it's clear that they died in some kind of vehicle accident, so maybe they were on their way to get coffee when they got hit, right? Nope - later on we meet some that are saying things like "Siri" and "Xanax" and I realized that Jarmusch was making the same joke Romero did FORTY YEARS AGO in Dawn of the Dead, and doing a lesser job to boot. Yes, the zombies aren't much different from the "living" people who are driven by consumerism. Very clever.

(In case you still don't get it, Waits' character spells it out in a film-closing rant.)

This is where I lost what little hope I had left for the film; Night got name-checked a few times (Selena Gomez drives the same car Barbara and Johnny had, and every character that sees it notices) but apparently he never got around to watching Dawn (he would have referenced it too, right? Especially since he's making the same point?), and we have to suffer through 105 minutes of proof. I really only stuck around for Driver, whose deliveries were amusing enough (plus I generally like the guy), and Swinton, who is having the most fun out of anyone playing a Scottish mortician who gets all Michonne on the zombies while walking around like a video game character (when she walks across the street and up an angled pathway, it kind of looks like Pac-Man navigating a maze - it's really quite impressive physical work from the actress). Everyone else's role was too erratic to care much about; Jarmusch's films have always had dropped subplots and out of nowhere resolutions, but the ensemble nature (as opposed to the compact cast of Only Lovers) makes the film feel like its runtime got cut in half by removing scenes at random. Someone will be fine, and then they'll be a zombie the next time we see them - what happened?

Thankfully, I didn't care much - if anything I'm grateful that just meant the movie was shorter. A few scattered laughs and a halfway decent "why" were not nearly enough to make this worth my while; it was neither funny enough to be a good comedy or exciting enough to be a good zombie movie. Maybe if Jarmusch took the anthology/vignette approach of many of his older films and showed each character's story as a standalone segment before rewinding to show another (instead of cutting back and forth between them with no real rhyme or reason), it might have felt less aimless, or at least had larger chunks that worked instead of fleeting moments here and there. But every time it felt like it might pick up a bit, the energy deflated again, and while that tact worked for some (a few of my BMD cohorts loved it), I found myself wishing I was next door watching Dark Phoenix or Men in Black 4 instead. Better to walk out of a lazy franchise entry saying "yep, just as forgettable as I figured it would be" than to walk out of an original thinking of all the other movies that did the same thing better.

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FTP: Full Moon High (1981)

APRIL 17, 2019

GENRE: COMEDIC, WEREWOLF
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

Like any good horror fan, I was sad to hear the news that Larry Cohen had passed away a few weeks back. Not because we would be denied more films, as he seemed to have retired from filmmaking anyway (his sole directorial effort in the past 20+ years was his Masters of Horror episode, thirteen years ago), but because he was such a fun storyteller for Q&As and commentary tracks, and it's sad knowing he won't be able to contribute one again. Luckily he was still in good spirits and health when he sat down (with King Cohen director Steve Mitchell) to talk about Full Moon High, and it's one of his better tracks - his memory is vague on a few things (naturally; I mean, it's been 35+ years) but he's got plenty of fun anecdotes and "from the trenches" tales of indie filmmaking, making the track just as entertaining as the film.

Or perhaps more so? It's not a BAD movie, but for a comedy it's oddly low on big laughs until the last twenty minutes, when Alan Arkin shows up as the world's worst psychiatrist. Until then, it's got a sort of breezy charm that keeps it watchable, but overall it lives up to the standards set by the other early 80s glut of spoofy horror movies (Class Reunion, Student Bodies, Saturday the 14th, etc), i.e. you're better off rewatching Young Frankenstein than tracking them down. Unless, of course, you're a particular fan of their individual filmmakers or stars and are seeing them out of curiosity - indeed, the only reason I bothered with this was because I hadn't seen it yet and wanted to listen to Cohen tell some stories to celebrate his life (and also because it's been in the pile for well over a year now so it made a good candidate for this column).

The weirdest thing about the movie is that it's a PG-rated sex comedy. Adam Arkin plays a high school football star who is bitten when traveling with his horndog father (Ed McMahon!) and becomes a wolf with a penchant for biting victims on their butt. He also becomes a conquest of sorts for a few of the local women, including Happy Days' Roz Kelly, so we are treated to more sex scenes than I've ever seen in a PG movie (hell, it technically has more sex than Basic Instinct). Add in the coach (who seems to have designs on his players as opposed to the cheerleaders) and some other supporting characters' own inhibitions, and you have a super horny movie that is also hamstrung by its rating, which makes it feel neutered, never getting as outrageous as it often feels like it should be.

One thing that does work is the time jump; as an immortal, Arkin's character leaves town and does his thing elsewhere for 20 year or so before coming back, posing as his own son and re-enrolling at school. Some of his friends (including Kelly and the coach, played by Kenneth mars) are still around and aged up, and his school has gone to total shit over the years, so Cohen does a pretty good job at establishing the two time periods despite his usual low budget and some iffy actors. One of my favorite gags was during this passage of time montage, which was partially explained by replacing the photo of the current President: Eisenhower to Kennedy, Kennedy to Johnson, etc. After just swapping the photos for a bit, Cohen tosses in some gags: Nixon's photo is angrily shattered first before being replaced, and Ford's is placed but not actually hung, letting it instantly drop to the floor - heh.

That and a few other inspired gags are spread out between what for me was just a lot of mild smiling. If this was a straight up horror comedy, that might not be such a big deal - as long as the horror element was working, the dud jokes wouldn't hurt all that much. But this is a full on comedy with a werewolf in it, much closer to Teen Wolf than American Werewolf in London, so the jokes need to land more often than they do, even when taking into account that some of the humor is no longer in vogue. I suspect it has a number of fans who saw it for the first time in the early 80s, but seeing it for the first time now, sans nostalgia? It doesn't quite hit the mark. Still, Cohen ropes in some of his regulars, and Alan Arkin's performance is right in line with the stuff Michael Moriarty was doing in his best collaborations with the filmmaker, so it still at least satisfies on that level. Cohen's made worse movies, certainly, so as a tribute viewing I guess it turned out OK. But I'll miss him more than I'll miss this disc when I trade it in, for sure.

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