Fright Night, Fright Night, Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, Black Swan

Alright internet, lets get this ball rolling. I am finally done being a human pin-cushion, which is nice. I was a test subject in a  research project at UMass Amherst, wherein they worked my left leg until it was a useless noodle and then drew six vials of my blood for a week while tracking its healing progress. Needless to say, this kept me exhausted all week. Capping it off I started Seroquel a few days ago, so more reason to be tired. Having been tired for most of my adult life, this isn't too new though I guess.

Well, enough of the personal life updates, lets talk horror movies. A classic, a remake of the that classic, a structural reversal of an American slasher, and a modern blockbuster that took everyone by surprise. Sounds like fun, but I will keep my rambling to a minimum in the interest of catching up still.

Classic horror poster right here!

Fright Night is just one of those iconic 80's horror movies that you either grew up loving or you just missed the boat, so to speak. It has a master Vampire setting up shop next to our intrepid young hero and horror fan, and of course people start to go missing. Our hero begins to become suspicious and draws a bit too much attention to himself and those around him. Cue disaster and epic showdowns.

Its a fun movie, even now years later. Some of its moments are a bit strange, the sexual frustration of our teenage male hero because his teen Girlfriend won't put out is a bit creepy to watch, and more so when the aged vampire makes his advances on her as well. Sure hes an immortal creature of evil, but hes still being a bit of a pedophile at times with that thread. Otherwise the annoying friend, disbelieving parent, and washed up professional character types are timeless and enjoyable to watch.

"Maybe we should wait to have sex..."

It can slide into static moments of nothing going on at times, but tends to get back on task fast enough. The final showdown in a mansion of the undead is intense and very watchable, but toward the final moments can drag on. The master vampire takes a whole lot of abuse before finally falling, and they smash more windows then any basement should reasonably have. Its a classic movie, and any fan of the genre would be remiss to not have seen this at least once.

You can imagine, seeing just how classic it is, that I was a bit hesitant to see the Fright Night remake. I shouldn't have been, because it may actually be better then the original in many ways. The character updates make for a much tighter movie in the end. The annoying friend is no longer annoying, but rather a sympathetic figure who was abandoned by his friend. Our hero is a geek looking to find more social acceptance, and so his friend is shunned and ostracized as sacrifice for the position.

He is so awesome in this, you have no idea.

When his former friend comes to him for help and starts the suspicion for our hero, it actually personalizes the future action so much better. The friends acceptance of the vampires offer is directly the fault of the hero, rather then being merely something that happens. It raises the stakes much more efficiently. All the characters are effectively upgraded really, and unnecessary ones are dropped. Its just a tighter more focused story all around.

The best upgrades through and through are David Tennant and Colin Farrell, as the vampire slayer and the master vampire, respectively. Farrell brings such a smug and powerful presence with him in every scene he is in. He makes for one imposing and hypnotically likable master vampire. As great as he is though, no one compares to Tennant's performance as an egocentric and drunk coward of the occult. He steals every scene he is in with ease, even when all hes doing is complaining about the effects of leather pants on ones balls. Again, the character is improved upon the original by changing his motivation from that of a wash-up to one of a running coward with personal investment in the situation.

Gotta have faith.

If you are a fan or not of the original is irrelevant, this movie is just a damn good time anyone can enjoy. I saw it in 3D, but I also didn't have a choice in the matter. The 3D was fine, not too distracting, and only campy in a few select locations. I still tend to hate 3D, so see whichever you prefer.


Tucker and Dale vs. Evil is a movie I have been consistently excited about for so very long. I think its been close to a year since I first saw previews for this movie, and I'm so happy it finally got some distribution. The wait was worth it, because its every bit as amazing as I had hoped it would be.

Hunt this down and see it, you will thank me.

We have covered a number of movies where some teens enter some backwoods and find terrible fates at the hands of some hillside hicks/mutants. Its basically horror movie Americana, if your in the backwoods, then you are also within five miles of a murderous killer, almost certainly one with a red neck. Tucker and Dale is all about spinning that on its head, reversing the expectations. The backwoods rednecks are the heroes, and they are just trying to enjoy the good life in a summer home by a lake.


Of course the necessary truck full of teens arrives and think they are creepy killers right off the bat. When one of the girls almost drowns, Tucker saves her and brings her back to their cabin, leading the teens to believe they are going to kill her. They then begin hilariously disastrous rescue attempts, which always end in their own deaths. Teens hurl themselves into wood-chippers due to mistimed tackles, impale themselves on branches while running away, and shoot themselves because guns are confusing.

"Officer, these kids have been killin' themselves all over my property!"

It all culminates in a very fun reveal you would expect in a movie like this, "my god, I'm related to the killer!," style moment. The most aggressive teen becomes our disfigured killer in the final moments, and its up to our redneck heroes save the girl. The writing is witty and filled with little nods to the forefathers of the genre, the deaths are all hilarious and well done, and the pacing is spot on.


This movie loves the genre, and it shows. Its a brilliant horror comedy, and its damn well worth your time to watch. Check it out.

More to it then a lesbian sex scene.

Black Swan made a great deal of noise this last award season, and for good reason what with Darren Aronofsky directing it. Tricking everyone by calling itself a psychological thriller instead of a horror film, it took everyone by surprise. First of all, this movie is incredibly beautiful. The cinematography is masterfully done, every scene is composed in just the right ways, and draws exactly what it needs out of you.


On some levels, I love Black Swan as much as I do for personal reasons. The anxiety and paranoia that comes with passion can be terrifying. The need to do one thing perfectly can be all consuming, and the breakdown of reality can be subtle and damaging. Then you add in the outside world, the pressures of family, the scrutiny of those better then you, and the fear of being replaced can tear you apart at the seams. The movies subtle growth from merely unstable to unhinged when it comes to our protagonist is well done to say the least.

Those of you with anxiety and sleep disorders know how scary this can be.

Minor background objects distort at first, and soon you and the star are both unsure if what you just saw was real or not. By the end you don't even know which characters are real, what has actually happened, or just how sick this drive is making our protagonist. With light touches of the surreal and more then a few toes dipped in the outright horror pool with mocking pictures and paintings pushing our heroine deeper into madness, its a trip of a movie.


Of course all this self destruction builds to a head, and we end with the strangest production of swan lake you could imagine. I love Darren Aronofsky, so I of course suggest this to anyone who likes the stranger end of the movie spectrum, where your never quite certain whats going on.

She must be, like, so high.

I will now resume being forever tired and trying to keep my head above the water. For more reviews and the full list of movies: The 150 Days of Halloween.

150 Days of Halloween: Wrong Turn and Hatchet

I have a guilty pleasure. Campy, over the top, American slasher films. Born from the bloody puddle left behind by Jason in the woods of Camp Crystal Lake, these are some of my favorite movies to watch. The acting is often terrible, the gore is out of control, and everyone making the movie is in on the joke and a fan of the genre. Most of the time that take a page out of Texas Chainsaw Massacre's book and set it in the deep south with deformed and inbred killers. New England is the land of ghosts and cults, but the deep American South is for grisly murders by wannabe Elephant Men. Holywood is terrified of the south. Its a shame too, the south, particularly the Cajun sections, have incredible ghost stories and legends. Robert E. Howard knew what it was all about.

Oh well, the average Hollywood directors fear of a Deliverance like encounter aside, I forgive the setting for the ridiculousness it provides, and provide it does. Wrong Turn and Hatchet are both totally over the top, Wrong Turn tried to be serious, while Hatchet gleefully pokes fun at itself and drops any pretense to being anything other then a messy good time.

The poster doesn't want you to have to wonder who will make it to the end.

 Lets start with Wrong Turn, which tries to take itself seriously despite the three mutants who giggle through the whole film. Well, really only one does, but hes the best one. Trying to take itself seriously is a bit of a shame, and can be a bit disrespectful in some ways. Hatchet is like a love letter to the creepy swamps and Bayous of Louisiana, while also poking fun of the false Voodoo shops and tours that spring up wherever the college Mardi Gras culture does down there. Wrong Turn, on the other hand, isn't having fun with it. The killers are not vengeful ghosts that died because they were killed for their deformities, they are inbred cannibals. While Hatchet can be a love story to the ghost stories of the area, and a send up to over the top slashers, Wrong Turn just feels afraid of the South.

We get the standard here for this kind of story. A bunch of kids exploring the woods have their car wrecked by a trap, and soon after a young doctor crashes into the car as well. Stranded, they start walking down the road looking for help. Cue anyone who stayed behind being picked off, to make sure you know they will die, they have sex and smoke pot. Yep, they sealed the deal. If I ever think I might be in a horror movie, I will immediately give up all all substance and swear off the opposite sex, I know the score.

This is why you don't date your sister.

The main group, meanwhile, find the killers shack and find the evidence of the cannibals. Thus we enter the second act as the killers arrive back at the house as well. Our heroes flee into the woods, and the inbred brothers begin to hunt them down one by one. Once we are down to the Lone Female and the Savior Male, we hit the cliched final act. Lone Female is captured and the Savior Male dramatically fights back to save her. They apparently kill all the Bad Guys and drive off into the sunset in each others arms because we need a Romance of Convenience. Oh, then cue the sequel hook, of course.

This right here is why Cold Prey was so damn good. The killer had a decent back story, the characters were all believable, the scares were top rate, and they ditched the tired and vaguely sexist cliches of the genre. The Lone Female was replaced with an actual Strong Female, she reassured the frightened people around her. She kicked the killers ass and make all the plans. She was a legitimate bad-ass, Ripley would be proud. Not so with Wrong Turn, which was apparently afraid to defy genre conventions.

"Dinner!"

Aside from the retread of old memes, the acting is decent, the prosthetics for the killers are well done and interesting to look at, and they manage some good tense moments with fights in tree tops, chases in wide open spaces, and moments of silent hiding in close quarters. If you want a good movie, stick with Cold Prey, but if you want a generic American slasher that still manages to be fun, give this a go. As long as you are not in a horror movie yourself, consider some friends and substance for added fun.

Now for the real gem of the night. Hatchet knows better then to take itself seriously, and lets you know the score right at the open. How does it do that? By having Robert Englund, horror legend and Freddy Krueger himself, open the movie as the first death. If a movie has Englund in it, its a movie by fans, for fans, the man is an icon and a fan himself. If you ever wonder why the Nightmare on Elm Street remake sucked, this guy not being in it is a big part of that.

So much fun.

Anyway, this time we have the deep south setting again, but without it being as totally disrespectful to the area as Wrong Turn. It pokes fun at the invading tourist industry, the cast has a female native who is also a bad-ass, and the killers deformities are not due to inbreeding, nor does deformity automatically make him a killer. It changes the tone a bit, the setting itself is no longer the villain.

So, following the death of our legendary cameo, we join a group of party goers at Mardi Gras. Two of them break off, one unwillingly doing it to make his newly single friend feel better, to go on a sketchy haunted swamp tour. They join the con artist running the tour, a touristy middle aged couple, a sleazy man filming two girls for a Girls Gone Wild style video, and the daughter of the man who died at the open, out looking for her Father. Not before another legend has his moment, Tony Tod, Candyman himself, is the man who sends our two party goers to the tour.

Thank you Image Search.

The movie has fun all the time, characters ham it up at all times, the horror is totally over the top and often a joke itself, some of the lines are only barely delivered with a straight face. Its just a good time all the way through. The movie drops subtlety in favor of total lunacy, the killer sprints in and tears people apart in the most literal sense. Heads are pulled apart, limbs go flying, blood hits the scenery by the bucketful. Its glorious if you love the genre, its just having a good time, and your invited.

Anyway, the obviously expendable cast members die in increasingly over the top ways until we are left with the obvious survivors. Trouble is, we have three, the recently heart broken dude who is hilariously awkward. The daughter out for revenge, who is the clear love interest for our awkward hero, and his best friend who provided most of the snarky and clever lines. Trouble is, the awesome best friend character is black, and hes in a horror movie. Yeah, hes fucked.

Drink it all in.

So we have our exciting final encounters, the last minute surprises and kills, and the sequel hook. Hatchet is a winner for anyone who loves over the top horror, for the gorehounds, and the genre junkies. Its just as big a fan as you are, and it shows. I know I had fun.

All in all, a nice little double feature of slasher goodness with these two. Wrong Turn could have been better, but it manages to do some interesting things, and Hatchet is a glorious blood bath. Tomorrow brings totally different fare, check out The 150 Days of Halloween for the films coming up and for past reviews. Now that Steam has ended its Summer Camp event, I am free from its spell, so hopefully no more late reviews.

150 Days of Halloween: Ravenous

I have work in the morning, so this will have to be a brief one if I want any chance to try and get some sleep.

Tonight was Ravenous, a period film set during western expansion that falls very comfortably into the Black Comedy realm of horror comedies. This may actually explain why I liked the movie as much as I did. The tone of the film subtly fluctuates between a somber tale of a man trying to live with his own cowardice and shame following his experience in the war, to a borderline slapstick tale of cannibalism and the Wendigo myth. Imagine if Cannibal the Musical were to try for a more serious film, but didn't want to lose all the fun of its comedic tone.

I know it looks like a serious horror movie poster, but its much lighter then it appears.

I know that sounds like it shouldn't work, but it really does. I laughed half the time and quietly considered the implications of the actions on screen in regards to the protagonists inner struggle the other half. Guy Pierce has yet to do a bad job of acting in a movie, and he certainly didn't in this case. The supporting cast did a great job as well, particularly the ever antagonistic Robert Carlyle, whom some may recall as Begbie from Trainspotting. He really owns the role of a man possessed of a need for human flesh, ranging from borderline crazy lunatic to a slick wolf in sheep's clothing.

The story follows Captain Boyd after he manages to take an enemy outpost from behind enemy lines. While this is received as a heroes act, he is shamed to admit to his superiors that it was cowardice that won the day. He hid among the dead to survive, and only after hours of laying beneath a pile of dead, blood dripping down his throat, did he emerge to take the commanding officer by surprise. He is quietly shipped off to the frontier to save face.

"Wait, do I have something on my face?"

When he arrives he is greeted by the various other cast-offs at the edge of the Americas, old timey pot heads, drunks, failed missionaries, and just those with no prospects or drive. Life goes on until a haggard man collapses in camp and tells a grizzly tale of survival and cannibalism in some cave miles away. It's at this point that the movie really finds its voice and pacing, and unsurprisingly, starts to really get good.

So, to keep this short and to keep the surprises intact for you, that's all I'll say in regards to the plot today. Its an interesting movie, and that's why I like it as much as I do. It takes a unique stance on its tone; its period while also having some light mystical undertones with the Wendigo myth. Its somber while it exposes a mans inner demons while a man smokes some weed in the next room. This mixture makes for a genuinely interesting experience that I find I desire from my movies more and more. I want new experiences, stories I haven't heard before and styles I haven't seen before. Its getting to the point that a movie that has problems, but a unique aesthetic, will be super exciting for me to watch. Meanwhile a perfectly made movie that retreads the same old stories and ideas will just bore me.

"Aw, hey buddy, did you fall down and get a boo boo?"

I have always liked the strange movies, or even just the ones that take some chances, I think I am finally starting to understand why. I once saw a movie called The Dark Backward on late night TV, and this movie has stayed with me for years, vivid in my mind for how utterly bizarre it was. Thinking back though, I can't remember nearly any other movies half as well, even the ones I have seen many times. It says a great deal about the staying power of a unique and interesting world, regardless of budget or star power. Give me interesting over mediocrity anytime.

Well, that was a bit of a tangent. Anyway, if you like the darker side of comedies and want to see a movie that blends a few disparate elements together well, then check this one out. I was pleasantly surprised, and I think you might be too. As always, check out the full 150 days of Halloween schedule and links to reviews HERE.

"OH GOD THIS IS AWESOME!"

150 Days of Halloween: Stay Alive

Well this was a complete departure from the rest of the list. So far the schedule has been fairly decent movies, sure Let Me In was a pointless remake that missed the mark, but it wasn't awful. Likewise, Inside was an intense ride, but lacked originality and failed to really take full advantage of its premise. Stay Alive is the game changer, the first laughably bad movie we have seen, but certainly not the last. Seeing as how this is a terrible but funny movie, I'll be a mite bit more informal with my review and just rant at will. Mostly about the story and the way they portray games. Oh, I won't proofread it either!

"If you die watching this, no refunds!"

The idea behind the movie is that a video game has popped up in the lives of the characters following the mysterious deaths of some friends. These people are what Holywood see as gamers, so they of course grab the game from the backpack of their dead friend and start to play, which is a healthy mourning response apparently. The hook for the movie is that players that die in the game, die the same way in real life. Kind of a poor mans The Ring that gets confused often.

This movie has nothing going for it, not a thing. Acting is laughably bad all around, with Frankie Muniz of Malcolm in the Middle fame managing the best performance followed by the creepy dude from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. The effects are all terrible, be it the 3D nightmare that is the game world, or the cherry flavored blood people get covered in from time to time. Tying it all together is a script that loses track of whats happening and contradicts itself randomly, and editing that goes out of the way to make inserts look as obviously misplaced as it can. Seriously, the editor must have been of the opinion that no one can speak without the audience seeing their mouths. They will jump cut to a dude for a simple one liner response to a conversation, then jump back and continue talking.

"Yes, I am indeed the best part of this movie."

The movie jumps between the game, the real world, the ghost story of the real world, and in the last act it adds romance just for kicks. Its a clusterfuck, which makes it fairly hilarious to watch if you openly mock it the whole time. I won't waste much more time with the story, but I do want to touch on the many ways it doesn't make any damn sense. First off it mangles the real story of Countess Elizabeth Báthory, who is possibly the most prolific serial killer of all time and certainly the most prolific female serial killer. For this movie she somehow resides in America on a plantation, and was also a witch now, while sprinkling actual tidbits of the story around, such as the fascination with blood and her habit of taking baths in the stuff. How she became a witch is a good question on its own for me, but the bigger question is how did a dead woman from the late 1500's design a multi-platform video game? Don't wait for an answer, they never address that bit. The writer must have been listening to someone tell him the story of Báthory right up until the violent car accident robbed him of his brain.

If you happen to enjoy video games, then I encourage you to play a game if you watch this movie. Keep track of how many different controllers people use to play the game. Also keep track of how many systems and computers they play it on with those various controllers. Its like video games are some magical device that work everywhere and with anything to these people, someone plops the game into a PC and picks up an Xbox controller. "That's fine," I think to myself, "I do that too, nothing wrong with that." Then, hearing my thoughts and wishing to profane them, the camera pans to the next player as he picks up what I swear looked like a Dreamcast controller, and another person with what must have been an N64 controller. This is bad enough, but then we also have them playing with someone online who is in another building. Oh sure, plenty of games have multiplayer I hear you say. Well they only had the one disc of that game, which all seven people play on different computers and home consoles. I want to live in this magical land where one CD works on everything, with any controller, and all of my friends can play it online with me without the need of a lobby or a server!

Aw look, they are just as confused about the plot and mechanics as the rest of us.

If you ever find yourself contemplating watching this disaster, do it with friends. For extra fun, do it with a drink in your hand or a bong hit in your heart. So long as you are laughing at this movie, it can't hurt you, and it really is a better comedy then it is a horror movie. Also enjoy Frankie Muniz, who plays six different nerd stereotypes rolled into one speed addicted package, every time he walked on screen I knew my suffering at the hands of this movie would slightly diminish.

Alright! Tomorrow is Last House on the Left, the original version of course. I have also made a few list edits, the major one being the dropping of Child's Play since I have seen it roughly nine hundred times, and the addition of Hobo With a Shotgun. While not pure horror, this grindhouse tribute is something I really want to see, so that's Sunday.

Go on, drink it all in. Glorious, I know.

For the full list with links to reviews, check out The 150 Days of Halloween.

Diggin' Deep.

A bit about Terraria. For those of you who played Minecraft, the general concept is going to be very familiar. You are in a massive world that is randomly generated and populated by creatures both good and bad, and you can both destroy and construct with and around the environment. Night is dangerous and means you really need to consider shelter, while day isn't 100% safe, but certainly safer then night.

The sun goes down and out comes THE HIDEOUS GIANT EYE OF DEATH!

After that, Terraria becomes a beast of its own. As you build your house, and your house becomes a town, NPCs will move in and offer services for money. Merchants will sell you things, a nurse will heal, and a demolitionist will give you all the means and opportunity to kill yourself you need for a nominal fee. The world is also more alive then in Minecraft, various environments offer unique enemies and drops, and you can also find and explore dungeons that hold amazing treasures. Equipment offers various stat boosts, and full armor sets get set bonuses, encouraging players to get enough materials for the whole collection. You can also equip various accessories, like rings of regeneration, grappling hooks, or mystical artifacts that protect you against fire.

You can also cast magic spells, which you find deep in the corrupted zones in shadowy orbs guarded by soul devourers. Thus far I have a magical vine spell that pierces enemies multiple times, and an orb of light that keeps the darkness at bay as I mine for hellstone in... well, hell. I then proceeded to flood hell with water out of spite.

WHATS WRONG HELL? TOO WET?!

Why do we need all this stuff? Well, that's the big difference between Minecraft and Terraria, in Terraria you can and WILL encounter massive bosses to defeat, or your home will be overrun with the living dead, or goblins will invade your kingdom. The world is alive with terrible and mystical threats, and you will not be able to meet them all and live unless you go out and "level up" your character.

Thus far I have built a few big castles/mansions/long houses with friends, battled massive eyeballs and world consuming worms, explored the corrupted lands and searched for meteor impacts, and tunneled into the very depths of hell. I am currently building a massive tower into the sky where I will mount a search for some of the forgotten cloud kingdom's floating islands, and I want to venture out and find the entrance to a dungeon and fight whatever horrors lurk within.

The game has the open world of Minecraft, where you are dropped wordlessly into a beautiful and foreign environment to forge your life in, but it has a unique life to it. You and your friends will create narratives as you defend your homes and explore the labyrinthine cave systems under the ground. You will retell stories of the time you made a massive underground city, only to break into the underside of a lava pool and watch it all sink under molten rock. I love this game because it marries Dwarf Fortress with Minecraft and the baby was adopted and raised by A Link to the Past.

It is very much worth your time.

I'm not a doctor, but I do play one on the phone.

Last post I mentioned that I try my best to make it on my own, and that's true, but it means that I am often incredibly broke. To compound this fact I am pretty deeply in debt from my school loans, granted I am now $20,000 less in debt after playing a game of fiscal chicken with an evil company who co-signed a private loan with me. I'll tell that story next post, that way if I ever turn up dead via some mob-hit, you all know exactly why it was I was beaten to death with pipes.

For now I will talk about one specific example of the other means I undertake to meet rent. A small job I took on under the pretense of answering an anonymous Craigslist ad that I assumed would be a dirty joke. This post is about how I impersonated a doctor on the phone for $100.

It is also the post where I start using pictures that I lazily Photoshop for the posts!

The creepiest doctor on Google Image Search.

When I am bored or feeling particularly insane I will jump on Craigslist and reply to any and all job ads that look like scams. Most of them ARE scams, and I have whatever fun I can with them, pester them until I get a phone number to call and proceed to call and ask inane questions until they threaten me. The golden ones though are the creepy gigs that could end up being some kind of 65 year old pervert, because those always make for good stories. One day I stumbled onto what I thought was the grail of creepy pervert ads.

"100$ for 30 minutes of work. I need you to make a phone call."

That is all the ad said, and it was perfect. I pictured some man in a dalmatian suit panting into the other end of the phone, requesting I bark at him, while instead I sing twinkle twinkle little star in a falsetto voice until he hangs up sobbing. I was very excited for what I anticipated to be a hilarious moment. So I e-mailed the poster and waited excitedly for the fun to begin. It all started like I imagined it would, questions about who I was and what kind of person I was, the question about whether I could affect a professional tone was readily greeted with a hearty laugh due to my assumptions. Finally the poster gave me a number to call, he wanted to hear for himself what my voice was like, and that's when he explained what he needed.

The poster, we will call him Andrew, was a psychiatrist who specialized in patient interactions in a research setting. He was applying for a new position, a position that required five professional references, and he only had four he could use. He needed me to be the fifth doctor, and I saw no reason not to jump into my Tardis and help him out. You can't blame me for the Dr. Who joke, you saw that "fifth doctor" line and thought about it too!

This stranger just asked me to do something immensely unethical, not to mention illegal for both of us. So if you are reading this and happen to represent any legal organization, let me just say that I reported him to the authorities immediately and that the rest of this post is all just some grotesque fantasy.

I immediately agreed, quickly seeing this as one of the few opportunities to earn money doing what I do best; talking in some fake accent and lying. Andrew provided me with the name of a doctor he used to work under and couldn't use as a reference, along with the name of the center and the years he worked. He was confident that was all they would ask for, and gave me the phone number to call along with the Google Voice number he listed on the application in the event they asked for my number. This should have been a red flag: he couldn't use the person I was impersonating, and he went ahead and made a Google Voice account in anticipation of this moment.

$100 appeared in my Paypal though, so I ignored that detail and went to work.

In my best Midwestern doctor voice I introduced myself to the woman on the other end of the phone and began giving my glowing recommendation. Yes I'm Dr. Stern, Andrew worked for me at Mercy for two years, was a real pleasure having him on the team. I silently congratulated myself as I prepared to return a goodbye, but instead she had questions for me. Lots and lots of questions.

Was he independant? What kind of learning style would you say Andrew had? Did he work well in a team enviornment? How did he interact with patients? In your opinion, did his personal life ever interfere with his work? On and on the questions went, and I just kept painting the picture of some super doctor.

Whoops, looks like my x-ray vision causes massive tumors.

Toward the end it almost felt like she was trying to lead me to some conclusion she wanted to hear, until the last question finally rolled around. "Anything else you think we should know about Andrew? Be it in the work environment or otherwise?" That was a weird one, so I just let her know I didn't interact with him outside of the professional environment and bid her a good day.

Andrew was incredibly pleased with my work after I told him about the call, but I had to know what was up with those last few questions. Why did this woman seem like she wanted me to say something specific?

"Oh, yeah, Jennifer is just a huge bitch, she found out about my DUI and that's why she actually called all of my references. It's why I had to use someone else for Dr. Stern, I was working for him when it happened, but I just an intern at the time. Only 19, you know?"

Oh. So for $100 I just made it possible for a psychiatrist with the moral compass of a Disney villain to land a job wherein he will be interacting with patients in a research environment. Good to know.

Most of that money went toward paying my rent. The rest however, that went toward easing my conscience.

That's why they make the stuff, after-all.