Friday Links: Pixels, Ancient Giants, and The Invaders

It's been a long, draggy sort of week, but you made it to Friday!  Let's celebrate by looking back on what happened over the last several days:

• Martin Lastrapes did a podcast with one of my favorite people in horror, the inimitable Jasper Bark.
• At the always-readable R'lyeh Tribune, Sean Eaton analyzed my favorite Lovecraft story, The Shadow Out of Time: "Its broad panorama of Earth’s existence in time and space, combined with its well-wrought depiction of the Great Old Ones and their interaction with human destiny form the basis for all kinds of interesting narrative possibilities.  Had the author survived the late 1930s, The Shadow Out of Time would have made an excellent starting place from which Lovecraft might have launched additional novel-length projects."
• The Film Connoisseur reviewed Pixels: "What this movie is though is a nostalgia bomb. If you were born in the 80’s and played video games in arcades the way I did, you will feel a shot of nostalgia in your system. I have to admit it was cool seeing a giant Pac-Man eating up taxi cabs and city streets, especially since I’m such a Pac-Man nut! It was awesome seeing a giant King Kong throwing barrels at Adam Sandler, and then there’s this scene where they simply throw as many old video game characters on the screen as they can, so you’ll see Frogger, Q-bert, Paperboy, Centipede, Galaga, Space Invaders…and that’s without counting all the other characters from 80’s pop culture that show up in the film like Max Headroom, Ronald Reagan, Madonna and Hall & Oates."
  
• In Detroit, a statue depicting Baphomet, the Prince of Darkness, was unveiled: "Ultimately, the Satanic Temple hopes to have the statue placed permanently next to a sculpture of the Ten Commandments monument now in place near a state courthouse in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, or outside Arkansas’ Statehouse in Little Rock, where a Ten Commandments monument also is planned."
• Nev Murray reviewed Adam Cesare's novel Mercy House at his Confessions of a Reviewer!!: "Our main characters in this book stand out big and tall for varying reasons. Harriett is nuts. There is no doubt about that. Her son Don and his wife Nikki are doing the best they can for her. She doesn’t see it like that. When the “thing” happens her level of nuttiness multiplies by a million. She goes on a horrific rampage with only one mission. Get Nikki."
• Zombos' Closet belched out an awesome pressbook from the 1959 film The Rebel Set.  
• John Kenneth Muir reached back into the 1960's to bring us that classic TV show The Invaders: "In this case, the series depicts a WASP-y figure of the establishment (David Vincent) suddenly introduced to the new America of the mid-to-late 1960s; the sub-culture or emerging counter-culture. Through his "radical" belief in an alien invasion, Vincent finds himself shunned by figures of the American ruling class (co-workers, government officials, the wealthy, and so forth) and even hunted by them (particularly the police force). These individuals now view Vincent with disdain because he has forsaken his safe "role" in white, middle-class American society for that of a prophet...a doomsayer warning of planetary emergency."
• Jim Mcleod himself reviewed the horror movie Scream Machine at his Ginger Nuts of Horror: "Scream Machine could be viewed in one of two ways, it could be looked at as a loving homage to the works of Troma, or it can be viewed as a pile of steaming shit.  I would imagine that some of it will come down to just how much you like Troma  films. However,  I don't think that the filmmakers' mothers, after drinking a potion of kindness, could view this film as anything other than a pile of steaming shit."  Read the whole thing to get the full effect.
• Ghost Hunting Theories may have found proof of ancient giants in the Grand Canyon: "We also have a legend of ancient giants being found in a cave in the Grand Canyon, hiding from a catastrophe with an inventory of all their seeds and animals and treasures by a man named Kinkaid in the early 1900s."
• Here, I talked about the new masculinity and pointed you to a review I wrote of Alan Rodgers's novel Fire.

Illustration by Tom Sullivan for Call of Cthulhu's S. Petersen's Field Guide to Cthulhu Monsters.