Kids in the Hall Saturday

Classic Sizzler and Sizzler ... you PRICK!

Kongo

Kongo

I've been recording jungle movies, looking for ideas to add to Thunder Island, and I came across this 1932, pre-code movie, staring Walter Huston (father of John and grandfather of Angelica) and a remake of a silent film called 'West of Zanzibar'. If it weren't for the tacked on happy ending, this would have qualified as one of the bleakest movie I've ever seen.

'Deadlegs' Flint is a petty tyrant in the mold of Col. Kurtz  or Doctor Moreau. Through trickery and manipulation of the local tribes, he controls a territory hundreds of kilometer wide deep in the Congolese Jungle called the JuJu Circle. On his orders, the only white people allowed in the circle are Flint and his small band consisting of a thug, a cook and a woman.

Crippled, scarred and twisted, not much is known about Flint beyond the fact that he is obsessed with a man called Gregg, an equally vile human being who controls the adjacent territory.  Gregg crippled Flint in a fight many years before, and though it is never specifically said, the fight seems to have been over the fact that Flint's wife ran away with Gregg.

Seeking revenge, Flint somehow stashed Gregg's young daughter Ann in a convent school where she grew up surrounded by safety, cleanliness and kindness. When she turned seventeen, pulls her out of the school and dumps her in a 'Night House' in Zanzibar, where she is kept captive for about two years. When she is utterly broken, abused, sick and drunk, he brings her into the JuJu Circle to use her in his final confrontation with Gregg. Complicating matters is a drug addled Doctor who shows up in the Circle and develops feelings for the wretched Ann. Flint wants to treat his paining back and legs, so Flint cures the Doctor's of his cravings by burying him neck deep in the swamp overnight to be sucked dry by giant leeches.

The funeral custom of the local tribe (and encouraged by Flint) is that when a man dies, his closest female relative is thrown, alive, onto the funeral pyre. Flint's plan is to reveal Ann to Gregg, and then have him killed, condemning Ann to the gruesome fate. To cement his plan, Flint has a sniper hidden somewhere in the nearby jungle with orders to kill Gregg if he steps out of the cabin. 

The final twist is that Ann is not Gregg's daughter, she is Flint's. The movie (almost) ends with Flint fighting off the entire tribe while Ann, the Doctor and the remains of Flint's small crew flee into the swamps with "a one in a thousand chance". Had it ended there, the movie would be a near masterpiece on the futility and cancerous nature of revenge. The tacked on happy ending of (the now clean and smiling) Ann and the Doctor joking about getting married feels like it fell out of  another movie and just goes to show that studios have been screwing with that sort of thing since the dawn of the medium.

A jungle tyrant obsessed with a Machiavellian plot that may or may not have anything with the party, is DEFINITELY going into Thunder Island. He will also have a loyal, but vicious chimp.  

 

Kids in the Hall Saturday

We interurrpt the regular KitH bcause I am currently sitting in a trailer on the harbour front. The wife volunteered to help with the Tall Ships festival. I did not offically volunteer, but went with her to check it out, and somehow I am now running the wi-fi trailer for ship crewmembers who want to check their emails. Since they gave me a decent laptop, here are some things that intrigue me...

When aliens invade Craggy Island:

and Red Dwarf X!

Comic-Con Gallery

I'm honestly torn about whether or not I'd ever want to actually go to Comic-con. On one hand you hear about the horrendous lines, the price-gouging, the endless lines, diminishing products, the pointless lines, overcrowding and the lines to get into other lines.

But then again, it would be something awesome to see!

Gallery from TESTED

Leonard + Jimmy = Awesome

Kids in the Hall Saturday

Haven't posted much over the past few days because I went back to work last Monday and this weekend we had a blow-out garage sale to dreg up some must needed copper pieces. Do-de-ot-en-dot-ten-day!

SW Behind the Scenes with Princess Leia

via Retronaut

 

 

 

Happy Birthday to Blog!

I was looking in the blog setting and realized that this Blog is One Year Old today! More to come about the direction I’d like to take it in the future, but for now I’d like to show off the BLOG Birthday Gift my beautiful wife game me (okay, it was sheer coincidence, but I appreciate the effort) a set of STORY CUBES, which are actually pretty amazing. The LEGO guy is just there because a minifig in a bunny suit never stops being awesome.

Say what you want about Bale, THIS would be such a better movie!

KaMB Minis!

There are Kobolds Ate My Baby minis?! Why was this not on the national news!

Swords into Bananas

Click HERE for many more.

Roll-a-Genre

I was watching Father Ted and for some reason, I started thinking about what parts you could use in a game (Burping Sheep?). This got me thinking about TV shows in general and more out of boredom than anything else, I decided to pick my twenty favourite(ish) Books, Movies and Television shows; group them into three lists; roll once on each chart and hit puree to see what I came up with.

Random Roll: 13-20-5

•Time Bandits, Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, Freakazoid

When earth is destroyed in a freak accident involving the CERN Collider and a foil-wrapped potato in the staff microwave, the few survivors (the PC party) are bathed in strange radiation and gain bizarre cosmic powers. Soon after, they are recruited by an ancient civilization known only as the Mentaloids and trained to become members of the Galactic Secret Security Service (The SSS). But the evil Warlord Zho has used the Bridge of Time to go back in time to learn how Earth was destroyed so he can use the knowledge to build the Ultimate Thing and conquer the universe!

Random Roll: 7-19-1

•Silverado, Beowulf, Transformers

On a frontier planet menaced by an alien threat known only as the Grendel, the party discovered the ruins of an ancient vessel. Inside are a group of giant robots that they can use to fight back!

Random Roll: 15-16-7

•The Day the Earth Stood Still, Conan, Red Dwarf

It has been ten years since the Emperor Klaatu came down from the heavens in his silver star-ship and with his men of metal conquered the known worlds. The last of the free people are a few small mobile barbarian tribes lurking at the fringes but the Mad Emperor has turned his metal armies on them and they to were soon facing domination, until the day the PC party too arrived from the stars with the promise of freedom. It’s too bad they only came down because they were running low on beer, but are you going to tell the nice men with the big axes that?

Random Roll: 10, 11, 19

•My Neighbour Totoro, At the Mountains of Madness, Max Headroom

In the near future the environment is ruined by global warming and most people spend their time online in a VR environment known in street slang as the Headroom. Lately, a new form of avatar, that appears in the form of giant, cuddly creature has been seen by people in the Headroom. At the same time, people have been mysteriously disappearing. Does the party dare risk their sanity by following the giant creature into a part of the Headroom that was not created by humans?

MOVIES	BOOKS	TELEVISION
1          Monster Squad 2          The Godfather 3          Ghostbusters 4          Raiders of the Lost Arc 5          Tron 6          The Black Hole 7          Blazing Saddles/Silverado 8          The Seven Samurai 9          Mystery Men 10        My Neighbour Totoro 11        Mad Max 12        Clash of the Titans/300 13        Back to the Future/Time Bandits 14        Who Framed Roger Rabbit? 15        The Day the Earth Stood Still 16        Rocky Horror Picture Show 17        Big Trouble in Little China 18        Buckaroo Banzai 19        This is Spinal Tap 20        Godzilla	1          Calvin and Hobbes,       by Bill Watterson 2          The Arabian Nights 3          The Hunger Games,        by Suzanne Collins 4          The Jungle Book,        by Rudyard Kipling 5          The Gaea Trilogy,        by John Varley 6          I, Claudius,        by Robert Graves 7          The Chronicles of Master Li and Number-Ten Ox,        by Barry Hughart 8          The Dying Earth,        by Jack Vance 9        Villains by Necessity        by Eve Forward 10        John Carter of Mars,        by E.R. Burroughs 11        At the Mountains of Madness,        by H.P. Lovecraft 12        Musashi,        by Eiji Yoshikawa 13        Peter Pan,        by J.M. Barrie 14        Where the Wild Things Are,        by Maurice Sendak 15        Conan,        by Robert E. Howard 16        Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,        by Jules Verne 17        Neuromancer,        by William Gibson 18        Watership Down,       by Richard Adams 19        Beowulf 20        Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,         by Douglas Adams	1          Transformers (I wanted something with big robots) 2          Baian the Assassin (Ken Watanabe series about an acupuncturist/assassin) 3          Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes 4          Invader Zim 5          Freakazoid (goofy animated series about an insane superhero) 6          Father Ted (Irish sitcom about priests on a remote island) 7          Red Dwarf (The adventures of the last earthling, his cat, his dead roommate and a neurotic robot) 8          Sons of Anarchy/Breaking Bad 9          Mad Men (the sixties will never die!) 10        Community (genre bending comedy at its best) 11        The Sandbaggers (a gritty British spy show) 12        The Mighty Boosh (surreal comedy with dream-like logic) 13        Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace (probably closer to most people’s games than they’d like to admit) 14        The A-Team/GI Joe Renegades (framed for a crime they didn’t commit they go in the run, yadda yadda yadda) 15        The Pirates of Black Water (cartoon about pirates on an alien world) 16        Blake’s 7/Farscape (escaped criminals on the run from an Evil Space Empire!) 17        The Walking Dead 18        Robin of Sherwood (my favourite take on Robin Hood) 19        Max Headroom (the first cyberpunk show) 20        The Muppet Show

Seriously, if you can ever track down a version of  Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace I can't recommend it enough. You'll never look at your PC party the same way again.

Kids in the Hall Saturday

Ah Gazebos, will you ever stop being funny?

Adventure Time! Icelops

Icelops are giants who inhabit frozen and high mountainous regions. They often adorn themselves with elaborate camouflage that imitates plants and even animals and gives them an 80% ability to hide in snowy environments.

A cold climate relative of regular Cyclops, Icelops look fearsome but often have a more child-like demeanour than their cousins and can be easily distracted by sweets, toys or boisterous play. With the lack of depth perception penalizes them with -2 to all attack rolls. Blinding them reduces the roll by -5. They rarely use weaponry but can hurl rocks and snowballs up to 200’ and 3d6 damage.  

Icelops

Labyrinth Lord

No. Enc.: 1

Alignment: Chaotic

Movement: 90’ (30’)

Armor Class: 5

Hit Dice: 13

Attacks: 1

Damage: 3d10

Save: F14

Morale: 9

Questamundo

Rank: 6-11

Body: 17

Mind: 2

Spirit:  5

BP: 50

Alignment: Neutral

Damage: +7,    Thrown Snow-boulder +10

Armour: -7

Special Abilities: Hide in snowy/mountainous environments. Q+10 to Spot.

Imperial Throne Room

from The Hand that Feeds

HAPPY CANADA DAY from CAPTAIN CANUCK!



Go ahead, call him Captain Hoser, I dare ya! 

Created by writer Ron Leishman and artist/co-writer Richard Comely, the original Captain Canuck first appeared in Captain Canuck #1 (July 1975). The first Captain Canuck patrols Canada in the (then) futuristic world of 1993, where "Canada had become the most powerful country in the world." He was the costumed agent of the Canadian International Security Organization (CISO).

Since the original there have been two newer incarnations of the Canadian icon; the first was set in the then present of 1993, featuring a new Captain Canuck who fought a global conspiracy. In the third incarnation, yet another man adopts the guise of Captain Canuck, to take on a biker gang called the Unholy Avengers.

The character has been in limbo since 2008 when the last mini-series concluded, though some sporadic compelation collections have been published.. (via Wikipedia)

11 Pictures of Canadians doing Awesome things!