Episode 19: Man-Made Monsters

Join the Beast Duels Radio Hour as we talk about the world's most nefarious man-made creations. We talk Frankenstein and one of our favorite Korean flicks, The Host. Then we put the Host up against two unworthy adversaries in this week's Beast Duel. We cap it all off with our Top 5 Man-Made Monster Scenes Ever.

Don't forget to subscribe on iTunes, email us at BeastDuels@gmail.com and check us out at facebook.com/BeastDuelsRadioHour for honorable mentions and more info on the show!

Five Reasons the Cleveland Torso Murders Were Mob Hits

Between 1935 and 1938, twelve dismembered, decapitated torsos were found in the Cleveland Flats. A few different suspects were tossed around at the time, but still today, there is no concrete evidence of who committed these crimes or why. After reading up on the case, I see it as a series of mob hits. Here are five reasons why I think so.

1. Unidentifiable Victims

Twelve corpses are considered to be the work of the same man or woman. Of those twelve, ten of them remain unidentified either because parts were never found or because what was recovered was a mess. That sounds like the mob’s MO to me. The mob originated things like cutting off the head and hands so if the corpse was discovered they wouldn’t be identified which would remove the link to the killer and the motive. It’s also a lot easier to transport and dispose of a body one piece at a time.

2. Hidden Pieces

The limbs, heads and bodies were discovered in lakes, swamps, boxcars and trash cans. “Hiding spots” have been used by the mafia for years. It’s a good strategy, make the pieces hard to find so maximum deterioration and decomposition can make a corpse unrecognizable. This is the second part of preventing identification, allowing the murderer to escape without anyone being able to track them.

3. Even More Bodies!

So I mentioned that there were twelve victims credited to this killer above. The truth is, there may be as many as forty victims stretching from Cleveland, through Youngstown and into Pittsburgh, all places where the Cleveland Mob operated during the time of the murders. Detective Peter Merylo says that some of these other twenty-eight victims may be prey of the same killer. Say a bigger man is spotted in the area where some of the corpses were discovered, why not send him to take care of some work in another town for a little while? He wasn’t updating his facebook status that the boss was sending him to take care of some factory workers back east.

4. Mob Problems

1935-1938, the timeframe of the twelve canonical murders of the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run was a very tumultuous time for the Cleveland Mafia. Not only was then current Don, Frank Milano fleeing to Mexico to avoid tax evasion charges, but his successor, Alfred Polizzi ended up being indicted on the same charge by the middle of the 1940’s. Could some of these victims have been used for small errands and hit jobs, then taken care of to avoid any loose lips or snitches?

5. Why Not?

for tours and sell out days in advanceIt’s fun to think everything is mob related. Come on, we live in America. We’re obsessed with the mafia here. Every year movies, television, comics and songs are made glorifying and vilifying the seedy underbelly of America’s Crime Families. If it wasn’t for our infatuation with the mob, Geraldo wouldn’t still be on television and Alcatraz Island wouldn’t charge thirty bucks a tickets .

Episode18: Mob Bosses!

The gang unleash the new studio with their episode on Mob Bosses. Join in as they talk about the best mob bosses in cinema, their strengths and how to defeat them.

Then, in this weeks Beast Duel, the guys figure out who would rise to the top first: Vito Corleone, Tony Montana or Frank Lucas.

Finally, the guys talk about their Top 5 Movie "Hits" Ever; those scenes in which people have pissed off the wrong guys and end up getting whacked. And we introduce our Hall of Fame pick this week with a legendary hit from The Godfather.

Bonus Episode: Most Absorbed Part Deux!

It's part 2 of 2 of the bonus episode where Cir and Nick talk documentaries, albums, movies, and then slip into five minutes straight of Swingers quotes. Take a listen, because it's your last chance to hear bad audio quality before we unleash the new Beast Duels/On The Rocks Studio next week.

Top Ten Movies of 2012, Part 2

No time to waste. It's part 2 of the best 10 movies from last year.

8. Skyfall

I have been critical of Sam Mendes in the past, particularly of his vapid and self-indulgent (yet Oscar award-winning) family drama American Beauty. Mostly because that movie is fucking terrible. But the fears I had of his helming the most recent project involving the worlds most beloved spy were assuaged when I saw Skyfall.

Again starring the blonde Bond Daniel Craig, Skyfall immediately has the vibe of a departure from the Bond oeuvre as we witness 007 get shot and apparently fall to his death. Mendes succeeds here in mixing great action with acting and character development, elements often overlooked in similar successful blockbusters. And while the Asian/French female of the two Bond girls in the film is wasted and essentially meaningless, we are introduced to Eve, a sexy rookie spy played by Naomie Harris of 28 Days Later fame. Craig again shines as the smooth yet tortured Bond, and is successfully joined by Academy Award winners Judi Dench and the intensely creepy Javier Bardem.

In addition to wondrous action scenes, the film also includes sly references to other films. When we're introduced to the primary villain, he slowly and methodically walks down a forest of computer machinery, akin to the final scene of Welles' The Third Man.

And earlier, when Bond gets an impromptu visit from a lovely young lady, they share a sexy asexual moment reminiscent of Angie Dickinson and John Wayne in Rio Bravo.

But most importantly, the way Mendes excels here is in creating a fun action film which finds a way to be emotionally compelling and artistically stunning.

7. Django Unchained

In 2003, Quentin Tarantino released Kill Bill Part I, in which an unnamed female assassin played by Uma Thurman begins her revenge on her former colleagues who had previously attempted to murder her. Later, in 2009, Tarantino took his revenge fantasy one step further with Inglourious Basterds, a retelling of World War II in which young soldiers are on the hunt for Nazi scalps. In 2012's Django Unchained, Tarantino's latest feature film, he again delves into revisionist history and revenge thrills, this time on behalf of the black slaves in America.

Django Unchained re-teams Tarantino with the  Oscar-winning star of Inglourious Basterds Christoph Waltz (in another film that netted him an Academy Award) and introduces Tarantino to two successful young actors in Leonardo DiCaprio and Jamie Foxx. While it lacks the rhetorical panache which opened the film Inglourious Basterds, Django combines majestic cinematography, quick-paced and witty dialogue (primarily by Waltz) and two of the year's most vile characters in Calvin Candie and Stephen. In the particularly brutal Mandingo-fighting related scenes we see the depths of the depravity, and Tarantino shows us the extent of what is truly at stake in this movie.

Stay tuned to the Beast Duels Blog for numbers 1-6 from 2012 soon...

Bonus Episode: Most Absorbed Part 1

It's another Beast Duels Bonus episode. Join Nick and Cir as they talk about the things they absorbed the most; those movies, TV shows and books they re-visited hundreds of times until they knew them by heart.

Also stay tuned at the end for a brief sneak peak at the new Beast Duels/On The Rocks Studios.

When Can We Have Ray Guns?

I love Science Fiction. Who doesn’t, right? So, like many, many other people out there, I would love to have a raygun or a personal space ship or a virtual environment that I can step in to and experience amazing things. Now, I realize that these things are entirely fictional and stand no chance of being made available to the public, or being developed at all.

That’s the bad news.

I know, the government having no desire to make moving at the speed of sound and instantly vaporizing mountains is a bummer, but some good has come from the pages of comic books and old novels with unevenly cut pages.

For instance, did you know radar was actually invented while trying to create rayguns before World War II?

Boring. I know.

Experiments into making lasers into high powered weapons has made some headway though. Science and engineering have figured out how to destroy objects with lasers and blind people with them (not a joke, there is actually a UN protocol on blinding combatants with lasers), but the major issue out there is making a portable power source capable of deploying the lethal beam.

So if there are any of you junior scientists out there, working on lasers won’t give us rayguns any fasts. What we really need you to be developing tiny batteries that contain the force of a thousand white hot suns.

©2013 DEDWIN HEDON

REVIEW: THE MONSTER THAT CHALLENGED THE WORLD

Hello my scholars! Can't get enough of the California desert? Have you been wondering what else could possibly be lurking in the Salton Sea? Wouldn't you be delighted to know there's a classic 1950s monster movie with the perfect combination of atomic absurdity and realism?

MST3K smarty-pants fanboys might think they know everything about The Monster That Challenged the World, but lemme tell you, they are dead-ass wrong. 'Monster has everything you could want: badass cars, useless children ruining things, very official sounding SCIENTIFIC theories, the dilemmas of being a working mother, the plight of small-town museum owners, and an only slightly Freudian mollusk monster spraying toxic mucus. 

It's streaming, I don't know what you're waiting for.

Top Ten Movies of 2012, Part 1

Well, it's the middle of March which means it's time to take a look back at the best films from 2012. Yeah, we're not very punctual on the Beast Duels blog, but for chrissake it's free so cool your jets. Anyways, here are the first couple of films that cracked the top 10.

  10. Secret World Of Arrietty 



In the year's best animated film, the legendary Studio Ghibli of Japan released their 16th feature film. Based on the children's book The Borrowers, Secret World of Arrietty takes place in... well, the secretive world of Arrietty. Arrietty is a plucky and adventurous teenage girl who lives with her parents in the countryside of Japan. Arrietty is sweet, likable, and so small that she's barely larger than a sugar cube. Arrietty and her family are borrowers, diminutive people who live among us. They "borrow" household items from us under the cloak of night, creating their own fully-developed world within our own. Voiced by Atonement's Saoirse Ronan in the UK and Bridgit Mendler of Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakuel fame in the US, Arrietty is accidentally spotted by one of the people living within the house. Fortunately, her fear is assuaged when she learns that the boy who spotted her is, despite being a hundred times her size, her own age. The two form a sweet friendship that verges on romance, were it not for the prejudices held by their families and huge discrepancies in stature. The relationships formed in this movie are wonderfully developed, but what makes this a true Studio Ghibli film is the world it fashions. Arrietty's home is fully-formed and imagined with intricate detail, a beautiful look into the holes in the walls within our homes.

  9. Cabin In The Woods



There have been a number of self-referential horror movies in the past, most notably 1996's Scream and more recently Tucker and Dale versus Evil. But no film has managed to deconstruct the entire genre as intelligently or as funnily as Drew Goddard's Cabin In The Woods. We meet the protagonists early in the film, a redhead, her blonde friend and her boyfriend, his jock friend and the token pothead. They travel to the titular Cabin In The Woods for a weekend vacation and to get off the grid. What follows is a laughably absurd barrage of horror movie tropes, from the (not-so) virginal protagonist to inexplicably splitting up to cover more ground when danger strikes. In sending up the slasher flicks, what director and co-writer Joss Whedon accomplish is a hilarious descent into well-worn cliches. They offer an explanation for audiences' reactions for decades as they've shouted at their TVs "don't do that! Why are you doing that???" Their film is half-homage and half-mockery of the genre, constantly reminding the audience that they are indeed watching a film. They repeatedly ask of the audience why it is they attend and enjoy horror films, while simultaneously celebrating the genre. With Cabin, Joss Whedon again proves he can be relevant in a post Buffy and Firefly world. That and the billion dollars Avengers made.

Stay tuned for numbers 7 and 8 on the Beast Duels Blog.