broidoj-2 Reviews

Masters of Horror: We All Scream for Ice Cream (2007) Season 2, Episode 10

Haunted by inconsistency

[5/10 · 16 January 2007]

My wife and I did enjoy this episode, for the acting and direction were excellent, as is usually the case with this series, but we are both consumed by the inconsistency and incompleteness of the story. I will list our objections in no particular order.

1) Buster seemed more emotionally disabled as presented than retarded. After all, he could drive, make change, put on his makeup, juggle, etc.

2) Why did Buster have no nose and why wasn't this mentioned more than once?

3) If Buster died when run over by his own truck, why did he have a corporeal body and why was he able to be killed again when Layne made his own effigy out of presumably inferior ice cream and bit off its head?

4) If the other members of the "club" were killed by transformation into the best ice cream in the world, why couldn't their ghosts come back to battle Buster's ghost?

These are questions which scream for answers. Does anyone have any ideas? Is this just a matter of proper exposition being left on the cutting room floor? Regards, Jeff & Barb

Mr. Wizard (1951–1972)

Mr. Wizard

[19 June 2004]

When I was roughly eight years old, in 1955, Don Herbert changed my life. I watched the show religiously at a neighbor's apartment as my father (quite rightly) was convinced that if we had a television, we'd all stop reading books. One day, the project was making an alcohol lamp using a milk bottle. One poured a little alcohol in the bottle, made a slit in the wax paper lid and pushed a string down through the hole to make a wick. We were supposed to allow the wick to become thoroughly saturated with alcohol, but my mother and I were a bit impatient (or we hadn't absorbed that particular step in the procedure) and we lit it prematurely. The bottle was in the kitchen sink at the near edge and, when it exploded, it blew out the kitchen window with such force that we found that bits of wood had traveled the breadth of the vast lawn of our garden apartment house and had smashed into the front of the home across the street, some 200 feet distant. The only reason we weren't killed was that the near vertical face of the deep sink reflected the blast away from us. One day, when I was a Freshman at Ithaca College in 1966, I told this story at dinner and my friend, Doug Lane, said quietly that he had been "Little Dougie" on the show!

The Neverhood (1996 Video Game)

Fanciful game for Windows done with Claymation

[10/10 · 17 November 2001]

The Neverhood is, in my humble opinion, the best puzzle game for the IBM PC platform ever developed. It was developed by Doug TenNapel and company and took years to produce. There is mischief but very little violence. It is most definitely not a shoot-em-up, nor is it tame. The music, which reminds one of Leon Redbone on Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, is worth the effort of finding a used copy of this long out-of-print title from 1996.

High Fidelity (2000)

Tortured aspects of relationships examined first person.

[10/10 · 2 April 2000]

Wonderful cast, wonderful script, wonderful direction. This is a sweet, quiet, satisfying film unusually told in the first person by the protagonist, Cusack. The only defect was the film's length, but the particularly uncomfortable theater seat might have contributed.