Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  Back on a proper schedule and this is going to be a normal week of new items, so let's take a look at some of the random stuff I found this week and why.

So a few weeks ago, the How Did This Get Made? podcast featured this movie.  I would never recommend actually seeing it.  It's a middling sequel to a movie that was the rare time Stephen King sued over a movie that had his name attached; they changed his story, which was about a Pan worshipper mowing lawns and sacrificing homeowners, and slapped the King name on a stupid story about a mentally challenged landscaper who gets turned into a genius by an evil scientist.  King quite reasonably objected to having his name attached to something that wasn't his work and the courts agreed.  

So imagine my surprise when I'm in a Goodwill, browsing the LPs and laserdiscs, and find this little gem in ridiculously good condition.  I'm still planning to start hanging framed laserdiscs on the walls, and I have just enough taste for schlock to include this on here.  Besides, check out that version of "the internet" on the back there; I love older movies that insisted that the inside of computers had to be so representational (see also the VR section of Disclosure, which spends way too much time showing people waving their arms around and peeking through virtual file cabinets; it's just so goofy).

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Emily Loring was a very prolific and popular US novelist of the first half of the 20th Century.  This, published in 1945, appears to be one of her better-known titles these days.  Going by the back-cover copy, it's a combination of a romance story and also about black-market speculators stealing beef from their ranch that's supposed to feed US Army soldiers (or, as the copy put it, "Double-H beeves," which took me a bit to figure out because I've literally never seen that plural of beef before).

Loring died in 1951 and after her death, her sons published 20 more books under her name.  I kind of wonder if this, along with the example of V.C. Andrews, was an inspiration to people like Harlan Ellison and Terry Pratchett, both of whom made it very clear that any unfinished/unpublished work left after their deaths was to never be published, if not destroyed (Ellison in particular had made noise about having it all burned in a chest on his back lawn).  Thankfully, Pratchett's daughter has been very vocal that she will be following his wishes; Ellison did not have any children, but J. Michael Straczynski is taking on the massive job of being his and the recently deceased Susan Ellison's executor and JMS isn't the kind of guy to ignore a wish like this.

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Look, I have a sickness for one-season wonders of shows, especially if they're genre of some sort.  So discovering this at a Dollar Tree, a series about a werewolf in Toronto who has to go back to her ancestral home because of family drama and mysteries, is just my sort of catnip (or wolfsbane?)   Laura Vandervoort has been a fun presence on genre TV since Smallville as well as the remake of V, which was almost good enough that I was sad it didn't last longer. 

But here's the thing!  This isn't a one-season wonder!  It apparently ran for three seasons on Space (the Canadian equivalent of the Sci-Fi Channel here in the USA) and was quite popular for a Space series.  Based on a series by Kelley Armstrong, an author I know is popular but I just haven't gotten to, it has some fun looking plots so I'm definitely going to give this a a try and see if it's worth continuing with.  And hey, if not, I'm out one whole dollar.

Not to mention, I was briefly excited to see Mark Strong is in the cast.  That is not British character actor Mark Strong; that is Canadian character actor Paulino Nunes.  My mistake in mistaking one handsome, bald character actor for another.

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Did I grab this just because of the Chorus Line connection?  100%, not to mention it's a weird cover.  But I've become more intrigued as I read more about James Kirkwood, who adapted this from his own play, the last piece he wrote before Chorus Line (and I had kind of forgotten just how acclaimed CL was at the time, with all the Tonys and winning the drama Pulitzer that year).  Kirkwood, from what I know of his work, had a acerbic but also playful sense of humor and I'm kind of interested to see if this something I'd like.  (Kirkwood, sadly, died in the worst days of the AIDS epidemic in 1989.)

Plus, said cat is named Bobby Seales in the book and after having recently seen Judas And The Black Messiah, this tickled me.

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If you're a fan of a certain type of comedy, this is something you've probably already seen.  If not, I do want to recommend you check this out.  It's about a small improv troupe in New York City, doing your stabard shows in small spaces to 10 people, when one day two of the members get invited to try out for this world's version of Saturday Night Live.  Tensions ensue as there are jealousies also coupled with your standard "you're selling out by being that successful," as well as suspicions that the one person who was hired is mining the improv teams work for his own characters on the TV show.   It's a very, very appealing set of comic actors who also get to stretch their dramatic chops (in particular, Gillian Jacobs here is delivering some very good work).  Sadly, this isn't currently included with any streaming subscriptions in the USA, but you can rent it in all the usual places.