Today I decided to take the subway down to Brooklyn to check out the MORBID ANATOMY MUSEUM, located at 424 Third Ave, in Brooklyn, at the corner of 7th Street. For months I've been dying to check out this place, hearing about it online that it was amazing. Well, this was a waste of my $8.00. This place was a YAWN. There is nothing morbid about it. I walked in and paid my 8 dollars. Staff was very polite and sweet. You walk in and you are right in the gift shop and towards the back is a cute coffee shop. I got my yellow ticket and went up the stairs to the museum Exhibition: DO THE SPIRITS RETURN?: FROM DARK ARTS TO SLIGHT OF HAND IN EARLY 20TH CENTURY STAGE MAGIC.
So I gave my ticket to the nice girl behind the desk and walked around in the small space and checked out the life and work of Howard Thuston. Mostly posters of his magic shows, some photographs, some props and that was it for that small living room size exhibition. YAWN!!!!!!... Then I headed to the small back room which is the research library, which is suppose to hold all this amazing specimens, artifacts, 2,000 books, etc., as the online website mentions - well it was just paper mache skeleton dolls, some skulls, paper mache skulls, taxidermy small animals, dentures, prosthetic teeth, broken saints, dust bunnies, broken virgin Mary, toy skulls, silly putty stuff what they call wax embryological models, and whatever tired junk they called morbid, and about 300 books on anatomy, some about movies, nothing much to say about the books.
This is what I thought the Morbid Anatomy Museum was going to be about: the history of death, caskets, dead bodies in photos, in film, etc., tombstones, real skulls, Voodoo Dolls, witchery, bigger taxidermy dead animals, clothes of the dead, anatomy stuff, and just crazy MORBID stuff wall to wall, room to room full of morbid stuff - Well I thought wrong... Ain't nothing morbid about this joint.
You want to see morbid stuff take a walk to one of the local Botanicas in your borough or take a walk inside the local cemeteries and you see things that will be morbid or close to it, and is free. Or let me know you can get a free tour of my apartment, you get to see morbid, cool stuff I have been collecting for years including my dead grandpa's dentures or
my dead uncle dentistry teeth collection from the 1970's.
MORBID ANATOMY MUSEUM should be ashamed charging 8.00 per person for a two room exhibition of tired objects, props and junkets. 8.00 Dollars not worth the price of admission.
This place gets ZERO stars from me.
HOME MOVIE (2008)
Written and Directed by Christopher Denham
Starring Adrian Pasdar, Cady McClain, Austin Williams and Amber Joy Williams
Opening shot - flies swirling around a bloody dead animal, as we see the hands of a child picking up the dead animal in a trash bag, and placing it in a radio flyer wagon. While someone is video taping it. And so it begins a found footage, cinema verite style shot with a home video camera and the wickedness of two deadly, creepy kids - brother and sister, Jack and Emily Poe (Austin Williams and Amber Joy Williams) causing sick mayhem in their perfect family setting.
Sweet parents David (Adrian Pasdar) and Clare Poe (Cady McClain) are doing everything to have fun with their children and make them happy by celebrating the holidays and each video taping each happy momentum. David follows the family around with the camera to capture the family, joyous memoirs. David is a pastor and his wife Clare is a doctor.
The creepy kids are silent, mute, expressionless, giving dirty looks constantly to their parents. In one scene, in the backyard of their house, David plays catch with a ball with his son Jack. Jack instead throws a rock at his dad. Another scene - Thanksgiving, the family is sitting around the table. As David starts to pray, the children pick up the eating utensils off the table, in purposely they toss the items to the floor. David goes back to praying again, the children pick up the food plates and they toss it to the floor. The horror continues with the torturing of frogs, putting their goldfishes in a sandwich, and the house cat getting crucified on a Christ cross on the wall.
Clare takes the video camera and explains that her children behavior is a psychic pathology. Things start getting worse when Clare bust into their kids room, finding the kids sleeping next to David, the kids get up from the bed full of multiple bleeding bite marks found on their torso and arms. Clare suspects is David who did this to the children. But the kids say the man in the closet did it... One day the kids go to school and they bite the hell out of one of their classmates... David thinks their children are possessed by some demonic force, so he takes the children, ties them up and start to exorcise them... Two months later, the children are all sweet and cuddly, talkative, outgoing. Clare has been giving them pills to relax them. But when you think everything is going to end all sweet like the perfect, sweet family - well the children got something up their sleeves for their parents...
Jack and Emily are as deadly as the fucked up killer kids in the cult classic THE DEVIL TIMES FIVE (1975) and as twisted as the nasty, little kid monsters from David Cronenberg THE BROOD (1979)... The film acting performances is top notch; at times the film left me a bit confuse because who was behind the home movie camera at times, I didn't know who was video shooting in certain parts of the movies. But I seen many films that the whole found footage does not work, but for Christopher Denham direction and videography, it truly worked. I give this film THREE STARS out of FOUR STARS.
