Kurt Pankau Dot Com

🛏️ Sweet Dreams are Made of This... The Crime: Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare The Guilty Party: Robert Englund, mostly Overview: Freddy Krueger evolves into his final form, a half-hearted high-camp imitation of himself, for what was supposed to be a final outing. Why I Hate It... It's hard to overstate how big of a deal Freddy Krueger was in the 80s. On the elementary school playground we would pretend to be him and recite the series' nursery rhyme and listen to slightly cooler kids (read: kids whose parents were a bit looser with what they'd allow the progeny to rent) regale us with details of the plot and the many inventive murders. He was an existential threat with a terrifying gimmick--seriously, what 8-year-old isn't afraid of nightmares already?--but one that was inexplicably cool-looking and laced with dumb jokes and the knives on your hands. Not only was he iconic, but he was fully-formed right out of the gate, unlike his contemporary Jason Vorhees, who...

I'm Your Boogie Man, That's What I Am... The Crime: Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas The Guilty Party: Honestly, I'm gonna put this one on myself Overview: I just didn't get it Why I Don't Completely Hate It... Getting this out of the way up front: this is not  a bad movie, it's just one that I happen to not like. It might even be a great  movie, but for reasons I'll get to below, up until very recently I would have been hard pressed to call it a "good" movie. I just... I didn't get it. All I could see were the blemishes, but I never connected with the characters, and I couldn't really understand why people were so into it. Not that I thought those people were stupid or had bad taste or anything like that. Hell, I married  one of those people, so I at least know she has excellent taste in men. [TODO: insert gif of Rodney Dangerfield straightening his tie]   Regardless, there are things that it unquestionably does well, so why...

👻 Slip My Hand from Your Hand, Leave You Dancing with a Ghost... The Crime:  Ghostbusters  (NES) The Guilty Party: Activision Overview: Weird mechanics and an unplayable ending make what could have been a good game idea decidedly un-fun. Why I Hate It... It is a truth universally acknowledged that video games based on movies are broken rush jobs trying to cash in on IP and they will only break your heart.* But this was not widely known in 1984. Oh wait! It was totally well-known in 1984, because this was just two years after the video game industry had completely crashed after the disastrous release of  E.T. , a game that was thrown together in just six weeks so it could ship for Christmas. It is the stuff of legends now, one of the worst-received games ever made. Millions of copies were buried in a hole in New Mexico. It was the Glitter  soundtrack of 1982, with the added bonus that it nearly cratered an entire industry. So you would think that said industry--...

⛪ He's the Son of the Original G... The Crime:  Hell's Bells: The Dangers of Rock 'N' Roll The Guilty Party: Eric Holmberg Overview: Real cultural anxieties are shoehorned into a fallacious critique of pop music and youth culture that fails spectacularly to understand either.  Why I Hate It... Just a heads up, this is another one where I get a little more open about my complicated history with religion. Albeit, it's a little kinder than my annual nativity post . And also, don't Google the epigraph from your work computer. The economics of Christian pop art can get really weird. There's not usually  enough demand to get placement in big box retail stores outside of very niche product lines like Precious Moments  that have cross-over appeal. So you end up relying on Christian bookstores (what I referred to as "Christian propaganda and paraphernalia stores" when I was working for one--good lord, I had weird sense of humor even then) to push your wares...