Q

aka Q - The Winged Serpent

The movie starts with a window washer on a high rise getting his head torn off by a giant flying lizard creature and it only gets weirder from there. Michael Moriarty is the main character, I think. He certainly gives the biggest performance. He plays a rambling ex-con, ex-junkie, piano playing screw up who stumbles out of a heist and into the nest of the monster. If you thought he was something in The Stuff, then you will love him in this movie. David Carradine's character is a sarcastic tough guy cop and Richard Roundtree is barely in the movie. It's a weird movie that really isn't focused enough but it's also an enjoyable watch.

Rating: 61%

(Image from IMDB)

House (1977)

This Japanese haunted house movie from the 70s won't scare you, per se, but it is sincerely the most surreal piece of nightmare fuel I've ever come across, including Jodorowsky. The plot is your average high school girls on vacation to a house haunted by the ghost of a woman's loneliness who wants to eat them type fare. It is 40% surreal humor, as when a cat dances and meows a song, 40% surreal terror, as when a girls severed fingers play the piano that bit them off, and 1800% weird nonsense. Toho studios told the director, an art director known for nonlinear experimental films, that they were tired of losing money on comprehensible films, and asked him to make something incomprehensible. Success! I've got to recommend this movie with full marks, since you'll never see anything else like it in your entire life.

RATING: 81%

Piano Concerto No. 4 by Prokofiev

Prokofiev's 4th piano concerto is written mainly for the left hand, which means there are a lot of low notes. Some may say that sucks where's all the high notes, and others may say high notes are for scary movies and children's songs, or scary movies featuring children's songs, which is basically all of them. Reminiscing about the early part of this review, I can't help but regret not making a masturbation joke or an R3 joke, but at least I didn't live my whole life artistically oppressed by Stalin only to die on the same day as him, am I right?

RATING: 89%

Piano Concerto No. 3 by Prokofiev

Sleeping is a thing that most of us tend to do at night unless you are a vampire or witch in which case the gig's up, buddy. Sometimes you can accidentally sleep for a couple minutes during the day if something super boring is happening, like work or chess or Sergei Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Major. A famous philosopher once said "I never sleep because sleep is the cousin of death," but that's bull puckey because if you never slept you'd probably be irritable and wouldn't be able to operate heavy machinery, and who can go through life like that, because I sure can't.

RATING: 57%

Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations

I'm not much of a "serious" music buff, but there's something wonderful about Gould's performance of Bach's piece(s). The piano is so named for its dynamic possibilities, and Gould demonstrates precisely why. Never noisy, never busy, just a marvelous musical texture from beginning to end. If unbridled praise is the mark of the dilettante, then I'm guilty as charged, but no one should go to their grave without listening to these at least once. I like to watch Gould's mouth move and try to imagine the electrochemical fireworks that must have been going off in his brain as he played.

RATING: Off the chart%

(Image from drewhewitt.co.uk.)