"The Dead Don't Die": By-the-numbers Zombie Apocalypse with some gay subtexts and Josh O'Connor nude

 

Link to the NSFW review

The problem with Movie Night is, I'm asked to choose something from the "new selections" on Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime,  and MAX, with no research, just a cover blurb.  Then, if it turns out to be awful, I get blamed: "You picked this!"  

Last night I selected The Dead Don't Die on Hulu, because it starred Bill Murry and it was about zombies in a small town.  I was wondering if anything new could be said about zombies after so many years of being blasted by Zombie Apocalypses.  

No. Other than a few absurdist touches, like characters being aware that they're in a movie and an alien spaceship that appears out of nowhere, picks up Tilda Swinton, and vanishes, it's the standard. Due to..um...fracking?,,, day and night get mixed up, cell phones don't work, and the dead re-animate.  

They crawl out of their graves, fully corporeal,  even though some have been dead for centuries -- and eat the living in a small Pennsylvania town.  Maybe everywhere in the world. The only suspense is wondering who will get eaten next.

This movie needs an editor.  Cop #1 enters the diner to look at the two zombie-eaten waitresses. We see one, then the other, with their innards turned into spaghetti.  Cop #2 enters to look.  We see one, then the other again.  Cop #3 enters to look.  We see one, then the other a third time!  

But on the bright side, there is no hetero-romance, and we see many gay subtexts.  Probably unintentional.

The main zombies and zombie-dinners are:

1.-3. Three big city hipsters:Austin Butler, top photo; Luka Sabbat; and Selena Gomez.  They stop for gas and for some reason decide to stay overnight in the town's decrepit hotel instead of continuing on to Pittsburgh. Selena flirts with every guy in sight, even when she doesn't want to get something from him, but there's no indication that she's dating either of the guys.

4-7. Police officers Bill Murray and Adam Driver, second photo.  Adam asks the female police officer at the station for a date, and Bill had an affair with town drunk Carol Kane.  But the two end up together, with a sort of buddy-bonding going on before they are killed.

8-9. Neither racist farmer Steve Buscemi or cat-loving hotel manager Larry Fessenden have wives at home, mention dead wives, or flirt with the gals at the diner.

10-12. Caleb Landry Jones, who runs the gas station/horror movie memorabilia shop, seems to have a crush on delivery  driver RZA.  He almost asks him for a date, but loses his nerve. Later he is trapped in a hardware store with Danny Glover, and almost grabs his hand before they are eaten.

13-14. Iggy Pop, who was famous a long time ago, is a hippie zombie who, along with a girlfriend, invades the diner, kills the two waitresses, and drinks coffee.

15. Sid O'Connell, a guard at the juvenile detention center

And the survivors:

1-3. Jahi Winston, an inmate at the town's juvenile detention center, keeps hanging out with two girls.  The guards punish him for it and ask if he wants to be a girl.  We can conclude that he's gay, hanging out with a lesbian couple.  The trio actually survives, or at least we don't see them being eaten.

3. Tom Waits is a grizzled old hermit who watches the events through binoculars, and ends the movie with an annoyingly self-rightous diatribe about how it's our own fault for...um...having stuff like tv sets and cell phones?

I thought the movie was a lengthy commercial for Sturgill Simpson's song "The Dead Don't Die."  It plays on the radio like twelve times, and everyone stops their zombie-fleeing to comment "This is a great song!"  They latch onto CDS as if they are the Holy Grail, even stealing them from zombies.  But it turns out that Simpson wrote this song for the movie, and only released it as a single, then an album, when fans started yelling for it.

So what's the point of everyone lapsing into orgiastic ecstasy over it?

My Grade: B

Nude photos of Iggy Pop, Caleb Landry Jones, and Jack O'Connell on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends

Nude New Orleans: Eight Cajun cocks and bulging backcity boys for your crewe

  

Link to the Cajun cocks

So many of my recent profiles have been of guys from New Orleans that it seemed apropos to post a photo collection. I've been three times, once for spring break, once for a conference at Tulane University, and once for Halloween, so I've actually met two or three of these guys.  I'm not saying which.

The Halloween visit was my favorite.

I'm interested in the Afro-Caribbean religions, the religions that enslaved West Africans brought with them and kept hidden under their forced Christian practices.  When they were forced into Roman Catholicism, as in New Orleans and Haiti, they found a lot of statues of saints that could be used for venerating their orishas.  The result was what we now call voodoo.

But avoid the tourist-trap voodoo shops.

An actor, mostly in local theater.  He's not nearly as big as his photo suggests.

More after the break.  

Jacob Sartorius: Femme teen idol into heterosexism, cowboys, and frontal nudity

 

Link to the frontal nudity

I had no idea who Jacob Sartorius was, just that Kelton Dumont knew him, before I started the research.  According to Google, he's an American media personality and singer, born in October 2002, shoe size 5. 

Whoa -- 23 million followers on Tiktok, 12 million followers on Instagram, 1.5 million on X, 1.1 million on Facebook. Apparently a lot of people have heard of him.

"Sartorius" sounds like a pseudonym. It's a long, narrow muscle running across the front of your thigh.  Or he may have been thinking of sartor, "tailor" in Latin, as in the famous novel by Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus.

I don't do Tiktok, but Jacob the Muscle or Jacob the Tailor's Instagram is loaded-down with femme imagery.  Here he appears to be coming out as trans, or maybe showing trans solidarity.

Nice chest, girlfriend, and I dig the hot pink coffin.  You'll make a fabulous vampire.

Jacob the Muscle or the Taylor is so femme, one assumes that he's gay, but fan comments disagree:

"Jacob is not gay!  Haters gonna make these vicious accusations!"

"Why does everybody hate Jacob Sartorius? Jojo Siwa is a gay icon."

"Jacob Sartorius admits that he's gay."

"Jacob Sartorius is gay! 100% proof, real,  not clickbait!"

"Are you gay?   That's so awful, who's even gay anymore? You're just following a trend!"

More Jacob after the break

Miss Peregrine's Home for Heterosexual Children

After he is bullied by some mean kids, 16-year old drugstore employee Jake (Asa Butterfield) received a telephone call from his raging, delusional grandpa, Abe Portman (Terence Stamp).

His deadbeat father, who doesn't have a job, can't get off work, so his boss drives him over. 

It's mid-afternoon when they leave but the middle of the night when they arrive, although in other scenes Abe lives close enough for Jake to bicycle over. 

Have you had enough inconsistencies yet?  Good-- we're just getting started.

They find Grandpa dead, with his eyes gouged out.  But he lives long enough to tell Jake to go to the Home.

Flashback to Grandpa babysitting the 5- and 10-year old Jake, and telling him about his childhood.  He lived in Poland before World War II, where there were "monsters" about, so his parents sent him to Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, on an island off the coast of Wales, where he would be safe.

Ok, I get it.  Grandpa was Jewish.  Repeat:  Jewish. It's a perfectly legitimate word.  Why is everyone afraid to say it?

The Peculiar Children all had bizarro powers:
1. Emma was lighter than air.
2. Olive could start fires by touching things.
3. Fiona could make plants grow.
4. Millard was invisible.
5. Hugh (Milo Parker, left) was full of bees.
6. Horace (Hayden Keeler-Stone, below) could project his dreams onto a screen, like a movie (how did he ever discover that one?).

Abe left the home in 1941 to join the army, but he stayed in contact with the Headmistress, Miss Peregrine. 

Back to the present: Jake tells the whole story to his therapist, who suggest that the Peculiar Children were actually mentally ill or physically disabled or something.  Since Miss Peregrine is still alive -- she would be well over 100 -- why not pop over to Wales and check? 

So Jake and his dimwitted loser Dad drop everything and fly to a tiny village in Wales, where Dad pays some local boys to hang out with the mortified teenager.  They take him to the Home, in ruins since it was bombed by the Nazis in 1941.

Why would the Nazis bomb a children's home in a tiny town in Wales?

By the way, Dad (Chris O'Dowd) is writing a book on birds, and the tiny town has some interesting specimens.  We get the idea that the bird book is a pipe dream, something he is writing endlessly but will never finish. 

He's also amazingly neglectful:  "I see that something is troubling you.  If you want to talk about it, call your therapist.  I'm busy."

No wonder Jake later drops out of the family without a moment's hesitation.

Back to the House: somehow Jake takes a step to the right, and the Home is still there, with Miss Peregrine and the children the same age as they were in 1941  After some shenanigans and missteps, they explain: they're in a time loop, reliving the same day over and over.  Every night, just as the bomb falls, Miss Peregrine resets time 24 hours.

And there are similar time loops all over the world, where other Peculiar Children are kept safe from monsters by reliving the same day over and over.

These time loops are presented as marvelous paradises, but can you imagine how horrible it would be to live 70 years with the same 11 people, never growing up, no movies, no tv, nothing to do all day, every day?  They don't even take classes.  They play, eat giant carrots for dinner, watch Hugh's dreams on a movie screen (here's hoping he doesn't have an erotic dream), and then go outside to watch Miss Peregrine reset time as the bombs fall.

And there are monsters, eyeless creepy things who are  trying to regain their humanity by eating the eyes of Peculiar Children.  I think.

It's all completely muddled and nonsensical, a mishmash of Harry Potter, Lemony Snicket, H. P. Lovecraft, and nonsense.  Plus two -- count 'em -- two hetero romances.

1. The morose teenage Enoch, who hates Jake on sight, finally gets the gumption (after 70 years) to tell Olive that he is in love with her. They walk off hand in hand.

2. Jake falls for Emma, his grandfather's girlfriend.  After the adventure is over and the eyeless monsters subdued, Grandpa Abe (alive again for some reason) tells him "Go to her."  So the 16-year old drops everything, including school and his parents, and rushes to the ship and kisses her. 

Oh, I forgot.  The Peculiar Children raise the Titanic or something.

I don't know what was more annoying, the incessant heterosexism or the fact that the MOVIE MAKES NO SENSE.

By the way, the top photo is the hunky Bryson Powers, who is listed in the credits as "Surfer Boy."  I don't remember anyone surfing in the movie.