Six Damn Fine Degrees

Six Damn Fine Degrees #150: Serial killings

Matt4 Comments

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

When Alfred Hitchcock made Psycho in the late 1950s, did he ever consider that his film, that most classic of slasher movies, would spawn four sequels (one of which would ignore its two predecessors to then be ignored in turn by Psycho IV), a shot-by-shot remake, and a five-season TV series focusing on the young Norman Bates? Then again, in the world of horror movies, that’s not all that impressive: there’ve been six Scream films to date, and a seventh is in the making. There’ve been three Exorcist films followed by two versions of the fourth film (one by Paul Schrader, one by Renny Harlin, obviously two directorial peas in a pod), and a new trilogy is about to launch in a week or so with The Exorcist: Believer. Everyone’s favourite homicidal doll Chucky got his murder on in eight films so far. Freddy Krueger has ruined teenagers’ dreams nine times so far. Bad, bad things have happened to vulnerable bodies ten times in the Saw franchise. Michael Myers (no, not that one!) has folded, spindled and mutilated the folks of Haddonfield and beyond in (wait for it) thirteen films. (Okay, that is not 100% correct, but that is something for another post, and probably not one written by me.)

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #149: Psycho III

Alan Kuhl Graham4 Comments

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

You’ll almost certainly have seen Psycho. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 early slasher horror classic. And you’ll also probably have seen enough horror sequels in your time to know the score that, if there is one thing that virtually all such follow-ups are guilty of, it’s predictability. The studio will have realised that there’s a market for a certain type of terrifying carnage so they’ll cut and paste those visceral thrills into the sequel. 

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #148: Memories of murder… of sorts

Matt4 Comments

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

I was a teenager when I first watched Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic Psycho – though at the time I’d already picked up much of the plot through cultural osmosis, including that twist. As a result, there was little in Psycho that surprised me, except for this: even with me knowing who’d get killed how, why, and by whom, the film was still supremely tense. And that’s still true now, dozens of years later: as much of a cliché as the shower scene has become, for instance, it still works. It’s still one of the best scenes of its kind, and it’s difficult to top.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #147: The Exorcist, Too!

samlinder6 Comments

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

An Ennio Morricone-scored movie that exists in a variety of versions? When reading Alan’s latest insightful piece on the many cuts initially made to Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, I couldn’t help but be possessed by my teenage memories of watching that infamous sequel to a great horror classic, Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) and learning about the many different re-edits it had gone through – to no avail: The movie was a massive critical and commercial failure and, despite releases of all kinds of versions, has found few friends since.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #146: Once Upon A Truncated Time In America

Alan Kuhl Graham5 Comments

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

There’s a lot that gets written about lost Director’s Cuts. Original versions of films that the studio took, re-edited, ruined and then released to mostly audience indifference. Many film fans would queue around the block for a chance to see Billy Wilder’s original version of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes or David Lynch’s original take on Dune. But occasionally there’s another version of a film that’s the tricky one to find. The maligned, original studio cut.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #144: Barbie

Mege3 Comments

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

I was wrong about Barbie. I should have been right. First off, it was Great Gerwig directing it, also writing the screenplay together with Noah Baumbach, which should have been the first sign that things would not be all pink plastic and brainless banter. And I don’t think Margot Robbie has the heart to say yes to any even mediocre project. I am still not entirely sold on Ryan Gosling, but Robbie is so very good in I, Tonya that she cannot do much wrong anymore in my book.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #143: How “Wednesday” puts the extra ‘d’ in Addams Family

samlinder4 Comments

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

It might somewhat seem like a bit of a short stretch from Alan’s previous piece on the long-term writing of author Douglas Adams, but here’s a chance to gush about a Netflix series that puts more than that extra ‘d’ into the famous family name: Wednesday, released late last year, puts the Addams Family daughter front and center of eight episodes and gives fresh blood to a cultural phenomenon that started over eighty years ago.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #142: Douglas Adams’ “Last Chance To See”

Alan Kuhl Graham4 Comments

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

The early ’80s were a great time as a kid to discover Douglas Adam’s Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy. I saw the BBC TV series first, then I caught the BBC Radio series – recording each episode onto cassette for future enjoyment. And then I discovered the books. I devoured the first novel: it was like the adaptations but with more jokes. Same with the sequel The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, which was possibly one of the first “proper” books I read in a single day. Life, The Universe and Everything felt a little different, even threatening at times to tell an actual story. But still enough lunacy to keep me happy.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #141: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to reading in other languages

Matt3 Comments

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

Here’s a puzzle for you: who has two thumbs, an English mother, but his mother tongue is German? This guy!

Okay, okay, that was not very good, even worse than the usual “two thumbs” jokes – but it’s true. My dad was German, my mother English, I was born and raised in the Swiss German-speaking part of Switzerland, and the language I learnt first was German, not from my dad (who, like most fathers of his generation, was much less present) but from my mother. She did try to teach my sister and me English, but… well. Let’s say she was partly successful: we learnt how to understand English, but when we were small we’d always answer in German. Once we did start learning English in earnest, it was admittedly easier for us, but even though I talk and write English much more than any other language these days, I would not call myself a proper native speaker. Half-native, maybe, which sounds like a weird term from 19th century literature; Kipling, maybe, or Joseph Conrad.

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