In Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, Jesus gets hauled into an open courtyard and whipped by Roman soldiers who carry on their task with a laughing gusto that goes, to put it mildly, beyond the call of duty. The flagellating weapons, some made of cane, some of leather tipped with metal, don’t just leave the usual red streaks. They tear through Christ’s skin — tear it wide open — so that his entire body, front and back, limb and torso, becomes latticed with bloody crevices, reduced to a raw and ghastly crisscross of quivering pulped flesh. Read More...
At the very end of the first Pee-wee Herman Show, Paul Reubens' original early-1980s stage revue, the hero finally gets his one true wish: to fly. As he zips through the air courtesy of intentionally cheesy special effects, the campy mood suddenly turns unexpectedly touching. "Wow," says Pee-wee in genuine awe, "I'm the luckiest boy in the world!" He might still be, if Reubens hadn't walked into that adult movie theater on the evening of Friday, July 26, 1991. Read More...
If Samuel Beckett had grown up in South Park, he might have penned a play like this: Abandoned by Mummy and Daddy a decade ago, 28-year-old brother-and-sister twins Presley (Alex Draper) and Haley (Lynn Hawley) are hollow-eyed poster children for arrested development. Subsisting on various forms of chocolate and sleeping pills, the creepy and unattractively pale duo lead a whiny, childlike existence — that is, until Cosmo Disney (Alex Kilgore), a strutting cabaret performer, and his masked sidekick, Pitchfork Cavalier (Brandt Johnson), enter. Read More...
