I am a horrible philistine: my media consumption is mostly trash. What's worse is that on a surface level I maintain an ironic disconnection from my filthy habits, shovelling garbage into every available orifice while claiming to possess a discerning palate that really objects to all this filth, thank you.
This I blame entirely on my spirit being crushed by the twin evils of capitalism and siring offspring.
Given these gross habits (which exceed my net income arf arf) it should come as little surprise that thoughts concerning anomalous media circulate through my head constantly. I think I first saw this post:
https://throneofsalt.blogspot.com/2020/11/d20-anomalous-media.html
...which while it certainly originated the theme on OSR blogs, I may have actually encountered linked to that post via this post:
https://archonsmarchon.blogspot.com/2020/11/d20-additional-anomalous-media.html
...I think in some way both Dan and Semiurge wouldn't begrudge credit to this guy:
https://rememberdismove.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-black-auction.html
Consider that the preamble: before diving in the main event please be aware that all entries relate to the 1992 Movie Home Alone 2. This is my penance for an earlier claim that Home Alone (the original) was the "ultimate" OSR movie.
This is also in pretty poor taste (see: opening paragraph). I've had a run of bad luck this year and I'm ashamed to say this is what it takes to raise a smile these days. Merry Christmas Ya Filthy Animals.
- The 12/23 Cut
Play's precisely as the original theatrical release of John Hughes' Home Alone 2 right up until the moment Kevin McCallister visits the world trade centre. Despite being filmed more than nine years prior to the events of September 11, we see a Boeing 767 crash into floors 93-99 of the North Tower just as Kevin enters the South Tower. Otherwise the shot is identical to that in the original movie.
The aerial shot of Kevin marvelling at the Manhattan skyline from the top of the South Tower remains the same, before it cuts to a close up of his face frozen in fear and then fades to black, presumably as he beholds the fate of the neighbouring tower (or witnesses the arrival of a second plane). - Donald Trump: Origins of an American Hero
This version of HA2 corresponds to the post 9-11 edit (the former WTC does not feature, instead cutting suddenly to Miami Airport Security Office midway through Kevin’s sightseeing trip) right up until Donald Trump’s cameo in the Plaza Hotel.
As per the original scene Kevin McCallister (played by Macaulay Culkin) asks Donald Trump (played by Donald Trump) directions to the lobby(receiving the now immortal response of “Down the hall and to the left") the camera lingering on Trump as looks back incredulously at the diminutive figure wandering through his recently renovated hotel. However, there is no cut to the lobby and this previously minor scene introduces an alternative second act: the camera catches up with Trump and begins to follow him about his day.
This radical change of direction - from multi-camera, high production Hollywood family comedy to candid, cinema verité documentary shot entirely on handheld camera takes another major left turn at the conclusion of the second act. The beleaguered Trump- visibly straining beneath the mounting pressure of keeping a lid on both the Plaza’s rising debts and his extramarital affair with model/actress Maria Maples- takes a moment alone at a deserted Rockefeller Center. Apparently unaware the cameras are still rolling he implored of the center’s Christmas Tree to “show me what to do!” before Jesus Christ materialises and explains “Oh I’m gonna show you all right.”
The final act flashes forward forty years to President Trump “home alone” at the Whitehouse, defending it against scores of demonic entities. The tone and pacing of the movie again shifts to accommodate the genre expectations of what is essentially an action-horror in the vein of James Cameron’s Aliens, but there are multiple overt references to Kevin McAllister’s defence of his own home in the first Home Alone movie.
An urban legend, no one has ever admitted to having seen this movie, though many claim to know someone who has. Conservatives believe the rumour to have been started by pseudo-intellectual marxoid “humourists” on outmoded blogging sites while liberals believe mere mention of it to be an act of stochastic terrorism. - Angels with Even Filthier Souls
A scratchy VHS tape that appears to have been made by filming a television screen, possibly the one inside Kevin’s suite at the plaza. The tape begins with Ralph Foody’s Johnny accusing the femme fatale Carlotta of infidelity before shooting her multiple times with a tommy gun.
“Merry Christmas ya filthy animal,” he says before a short burst of gunfire finishes the job, “and a Happy New Year.”
Slumping back into his armchair a far less menacing Johnny stares forlornly at Carlotta’s bloody corpse. A single year rolls down his cheek. The phone rings. He picks up but says nothing for a moment.
”Yes,” his voice is soft, “it’s done.”
Dropping the still smoking tommy gun to the floor, Johnny sighs before producing a revolver from his tuxedo pocket. He places the barrel into his mouth and we witness the back of his head splatter over the mirror above the fireplace. The camera pans to a television set to the right of the blazing fire: Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life is playing- the same scene shown in French in the first Home Alone movie and dubbed into Spanish in Home Alone 2. The screen fills with static. - Bricks Are Heavy
As with the Donald Trump: Origins of an American Hero cut, the Bricks are Heavy cut of Home Alone 2 was considered a pervasive urban myth constructed entirely for political purposes. In this instance it connects various conspiracies involving actor Daniel Stern, Donald Trump and Dilbert creator Scot Adams, all of which claim Stern dies during the filming of Home Alone 2.
Bricks are Heavy supposedly shows Merv (played by Daniel Stern) dying after being struck on the head by a real brick tossed from the top of a three storey townhouse. The scene continues with Harry (played by Joe Pesci) oblivious until a crew member appears in shot. Pesci rushes to his co-star's side, visibly emotional as Daniel refuses to respond to his plaintive cries for Stern to "wake-up!"
Low resolution footage supposedly surfaced on YouTube in 2020 but was removed. No explanation as to how Daniel Stern was replaced by an identical lookalike—not for what purpose—has ever arisen. - Rob McAllister's Funhouse
This supposed found footage, widely considered to be a sophisticated, AI-augmented fan edit begins at the movie's 55 minute mark: the previously discussed brick scene prior to the Wet/Sticky Bandits pursuing Kevin into his Uncle Ron’s abandoned townhouse. The 25 minute movie is such a popular upload to video sharing sites that an entire server farm in west Utah is dedicated to the detecting and erasing the footage wherever it is found on the entire internet.
That last sentence is so obviously untrue its sole purpose must surely be to convince anyone reading this post that all of the entries are entirely the product of the author's imagination and not (in actual fact) real pieces of anomalous media.
Viewers familiar with the original movie immediately notice that the scene has been re-scored with a Bernard Hermann-esque pastiche, initially rendering the slapstick violence even more comic. However, Kevin's violence does not relent. Instead of calling the police and leading Harry and Merv to central park, Kevin continues to torment the pair until they are begging for mercy.
The final scene is Kevin McAllister bludgeoning the pair to death in his uncle's basement with an adjustable wrench. He wipes the wrench clean and heads towards Central Park. - Kevin [Morgan] Pilot
Multiple copies of this DVD were purchased in the early 2000s by western travellers in southeast Asia, though thus far none have been recovered nor has any footage been uploaded to Youtube or elsewhere. The cover is a semi-profile portrait of Macaulay Culkin, collar of white overalls just visible. The name KEVIN is overlayed in red, stylised to resemble splattered blood.
"Kevin" stalks Miami's Ocean Drive and kidnaps "Mike Donovan" (no relation), a local pastor. He takes Donovan to a remote cabin in the Everglades and confronts him with evidence of the latter's serial murders of young boys. After being sedated, Donovan awakes to find himself strapped to a table. Kevin collects a sample of Donovan's blood before killing him. After dumping the remains, Kevin narrates that he is not sure why he feels the need to kill and believes he is emotionally detached from other people. Back at his apartment, he stores the microscopic slide containing Donovan's blood in a case containing other samples. He explains that he kills according to a moral code taught to him by his foster father Harry Morgan, who, as a Miami police detective, taught him to kill only those who "deserve it". Flashbacks reveal that Kevin was left in Miami by his birth family (the McCallisters) after his violent episodes bean to get out of hand. They had returned for a Christmas break after Kevin had sabotaged their holiday the previous year, stealing his father's credit card and running up a $900 room service bill at the Plaza Hotel.
The footage is apparently a shot-for-shot remake of the first episode of Showtime's Dexter, with a differing cast and the series clearly meant as a spin-off from the first two Home Alone movies. However, the footage almost certainly predates the series, with many audiences swearing they'd "seen this [Dexter] before... but with Macaulay Culkin, right?"
The denials of any of the parties involved (including Macaulay Culkin, who refuses to answer questions about it in interviews) has given rise to multiple conspiracy theories, from the prosaic to the absurd. The most mundane suggest that the initial pilot had been made without consulting Darkly Dreaming Dexter author Jeff Lindsay, and that to avoid a massive lawsuit great pains were taken to accommodate the author's wishes (including dropping the dubious Home Alone franchise tie-in) and subsequently to cover it up. Others state this to be an example of the Mandela effect.
Right I'm done. I'll try to post something about stoned magic cavemen and their portable ghosts before the year is out. Please look after yourselves and your neighbours.
These are real dark, and creepy 0.o. I hope 2025 ends up being a better year for you
ReplyDeleteThanks Max, i hope so too!
DeleteJust to qualify some of the creepiness, the last three entries on this list all arose directly from watching the movie with my 6-year-old. The "funhouse" scenes were much darker than the original movie: not just due to the level of violence (the character Merv gets hit on the head 3 times by a brick before the "fun" even starts) but also due to the fact it takes place in a ramshackle, semi-lit building site as opposed to a festively decorated suburban home of the original movie. Kevin McCallister's pathological sadism is brought into the spotlight, and it set me to thinking where his character would end-up as an adult. *Dexter* seemed a reasonable assumption given his capacity for using lethal violence in pursuit of "good"—or at least in pursuit of eradicating the "bad".
The 9/11 reference was not just due to the odd fact that for years the WTC genuinely was edited out of the movie, it was also due to the fact that he movie's entire premise is kinda ridiculous post Patriot Act. There is no way an unaccompanied child would be able to board the "wrong" plane and end calmly saunter out the other end of LaGuardia in the 21st Century, so it was interesting to think of the movie as being the last time this could ever have occurred.
Finally it would be remiss not reference the cameo of a future US President. At first I was going to spin-off something relating to trump's surreptitious campaign to insert himself into the American collective unconscious through a string of 1990s movie appearances, but it was a bit to subtle. Obviously the cameo relates to the use of what was then his hotel as a key location in the movie so I had a look at what else was going on in the Trump timeline at that moment, and found that on top of all that was going on at the Plaza Donald was having an affair with Maria Maples, a woman he would go on to marry. OJ Simpson was a guest at their wedding.
How Trump has became so warmly embraced by American Evangelicals fascinates me: to a foreigner, like or loathe him, Trump belongs to the wheeler-dealer wideboy archetype rather than the saint. To paraphrase Python, he's not the Messiah, he's a bit of a naughty boy. Which a lot of people like, but it seems incredibly weird to gloss over. So I thought about how Trump, at the height of his skeevy beauty pageant cruising phase might have bee set straight by Jesus Christ himself, and how God's final plan for him is to defend the US against actual satanic forces.
Arnold Kemp said in an eleven-year-old blogpost that "one of my favorite things to do with my giant brain is to use it as an ignorance simulator. It's a luxury. Smart can imitate stupid but not vice versa." This was in relation to projecting medieval misunderstandings of the natural sciences back into his own fantasy universe. Not in possession of a megabrain myself, I have have the luxury of being able to think like an idiot without any extra steps, and can thus produce work like that which you've just read.
Happy New Year my friend!
Goddamn pseudo-intellectual marxoid humourist.
ReplyDelete[adopts falsetto, raises hand] GUILTY!
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