Tom Baker

Joined June 2018

855 stories

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Author of Haunted Indianapolis, Indiana Ghost Folklore, Midwest Maniacs, Midwest UFOs and Beyond, Scary Urban Legends, 50 Famous Fables and Folk Tales, and Notorious Crimes of the Upper Midwest.: http://tombakerbooks.weebly.com

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Best Top Music Videos of the 1980s Part 3
Cult Films and Midnight Movies "From High Art to Low Trash" Vol 1 by Tom Baker Note: Due to my being confused about the titles of parts one and two, I just decided to combine them. So now it's: "Best Top Music Videos of the Eighties, Part 3".
By Tom Baker3 years ago in Beat
Best Videos of the Eighties Part 2
Cult Films and Midnight Movies: "From High Art to Low Trash" Vol. 1 by Tom Baker 1. Pete Schilling - "Major Tom" Ye gods, this video (which clearly continues the saga of the mysterious astronaut "Major Tom," first begun by the late David Bowie who likewise chronicled the space explorer turned junkie in the two songs--"Space Oddity" and "Ashes to Ashes") is as quintessentially 1980s as it gets. Here we have footage of the Apollo Moon Landing, rocket take-offs, and orbits around the Big Blue Marble, juxtaposed with roller-skating outer space carhops bringing you a coney dog full of celestial goodness while doing their thing in a place where dry ice fog is clinging to the ground like pebbles on the surface of Le Luna. And that doesn't even begin to mention how great the song is. No one has heard from Pete Schilling since this song's release, so I assume he's Out There, Somewhere, "sitting in a tin can," with "Earth below us, drifting...floating weightless."
By Tom Baker3 years ago in Beat
Alien
Watching Alien, the mega classic science fiction horror blockbuster from 1979 that spawned a slew of sequels and is probably one of the most watched films in history, is a grueling, terrifying, sometimes sickening experience. I compare it a little to being lost in the bowels of some fossilized insect, the doom proffered by the Alien "Mother" lurking around every dark, dripping, desiccated, or, alternately slime-corroded corridor. It is dark, white-knuckled terror at the end, reminiscent of Scott's later Blade Runner (1982) wherein Harrison Ford must contend with his own personal Alien Queen Mother--in the form of Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer).
By Tom Baker3 years ago in Futurism
Top Music Videos of the Eighties
Looking back at the 1980s is a serious nostalgia trip for me. Being eleven years old or so at the nexus of MTV and the music video revolution (in an era before the world had been brought into the wild west of our looming, dystopian, cyberpunk future--though it was on the cusp) was a real mind trip. YouTube has thankfully provided the avenue in which an aging member of Generation X can look back on the pre-Grunge days when POP (in both the literal and figurative sense; i.e. Pepsi and Coke fueled the career status of so many fading into oblivion singers and artists of the era) ruled the video airwaves.
By Tom Baker3 years ago in Beat
Existential Nihilism, Or: You Don't Honestly Believe in Comic Book Dualistic Bullsh*t, Do You?
"The State sanctifies its violence as law. Yours it calls crime."--Max Stirner. DeepAI has officially designated me an "existential nihilist." I suppose that's correct.
By Tom Baker3 years ago in Journal
Clive Barker's "Salome" and "The Forbidden": Two Short Films (1973)
It is hard to reconcile the young, chipper, handsome Clive Barker, the horror author and film fantasist of an undeniably boyish countenance, who held the sway of even the venerable Stephen King (who declared him the "future of horror" in the late 1980s) with the ravaged, haggard figure we see in contemporary photographs. Barker, despite whatever health problems and personal demons he has wrestled with over the decades, has maintained an output often bordering on brilliance; a steady, if underappreciated oeuvre of chilling depictions of man's possession by infernal forces, his exploration, and capitulation to these dark shades of desire and pain; his seeking out of doorways into Hell, pathways into darkness parallel to our own.
By Tom Baker3 years ago in Horror
Phantasm
"You play a good game, Boy! But the game is finished! Now you die!" --The Tall Man The cadaverous visage of the late actor Angus Scrimm, a man whose very name is as perfect for a supernatural horror villain as any I could conceive, holds forth as the menacing, extraterrestrial cum supernatural dream demon the "Tall Man, " in the original Phantasm, a film so perfectly perfect that it is hard to determine if the director was blessed by the Fates or simply made a pact with the Devil to turn out a picture I have seen repeatedly, and never failed to delight at.
By Tom Baker3 years ago in Horror
Fantastic Planet
I first saw the images of Fantastic Planet (French: La Planete Sauvage; literally, "The Wild Planet") while watching "Night Flight," the old i980s variety show that ran for two hours on Friday and Saturday nights on the USA Cable network as a child. The film left an indelible impact on me, or at least, what I could absorb of it at the time. The sage of the blue, gargantuan "Traags" and the diminutive and oppressed "Oms" (who are kept as pets when not killed outright, was still waiting for me to see the whole thing, many years in the future.
By Tom Baker3 years ago in Futurism
Lost Highway
"Dick Laurent is dead." This is the cryptic message delivered to the haggard Fred Madison one mysterious morning that opens up the even more inscrutable cinematic classic that follows. This is via intercom, and by the end of the film, it will be revealed why. But the meaning of it all will remain, essentially, a mystery.
By Tom Baker3 years ago in Horror
The Man Who Took a Log as a Wife. Top Story - July 2023.
Once, there was a foolish, raggedy man who entered a village. He quickly set himself up in business as a costermonger, but soon became lonely for the comforts afforded by a wife.
By Tom Baker3 years ago in Fiction
Dementia (aka "Daughter of Horror", 1955)
"You, you out there. Do you know what horror is? Smug, confident, because you're sane!"--Opening Narration. When a film is put out by "Exploitation Productions," one rarely has to wonder what to expect. Or, maybe not.
By Tom Baker3 years ago in Horror
The Doctor and the Dead Girl . Top Story - June 2023.
We slip into this life unannounced, and we wander until the sands run out of our personal hourglass. We lose everyone we ever come into contact with, and then we just as mysteriously depart. And do we tread the floorboards once again, with different, subtler feet? Some believe we return. Some, that a troubled soul can never leave. At least, not without its duty rendered, its commission expired, its purpose fulfilled. Or, its torment ended.
By Tom Baker3 years ago in Horror

Tom Baker

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Best Top Music Videos of the 1980s Part 3

Best Videos of the Eighties Part 2

Alien

Top Music Videos of the Eighties

Existential Nihilism, Or: You Don't Honestly Believe in Comic Book Dualistic Bullsh*t, Do You?

Clive Barker's "Salome" and "The Forbidden": Two Short Films (1973)

Phantasm

Fantastic Planet

Lost Highway

The Man Who Took a Log as a Wife. Top Story - July 2023.

Dementia (aka "Daughter of Horror", 1955)

The Doctor and the Dead Girl . Top Story - June 2023.

Stories (855)