Editorials
[Ranked] Marilyn Manson’s Albums!
With a history as long and controversial as Marilyn Manson‘s, you better believe that we here at Bloody-Disgusting have taken notice and are gonna show some love. And with Manson’s 9th studio album, The Pale Emperor, arriving this coming January, I wanted to take the time to rank his albums. This was an extremely difficult task- some of you might be surprised to learn what’s number one. What do you think?
8. “Eat Me, Drink Me” (2007)
Of all the Manson albums, Eat Me, Drink Me is the only one to leave me wholly disappointed and angry. It felt rushed, it felt compromised (by Manson’s then-girlfriend Evan Rachel Wood), it was also off-key. While no Manson album sounds alike, this was the first to lack focus, feeling like a sloppy noir-inspired love letter to Wood.
Being that I consider myself a massive Manson fan, I forced myself to like the album. Yes, forced myself. I listened to it until I found things to like – outside of the radio hits “If I Was Your Vampire” and “Heart-Shaped Glasses” – and eventually learned to love the title track, as well as “Just a Car Crash Away” and “Evidence”.
7. “Born Villain” (2012)
Also disappointing, but by no means bad as Eat Me, Drink Me, is Born Villain, Manson’s depressing reflection of the aging rock star. At the time it felt like Manson was struggling to regain relevancy and trying to prove he was still “metal”, “scary” and “weird”. The essence of the album annoyed me, but to hear Manson’s interpretation of a heavy metal album was truly a unique experience.
The biggest gripe is that Manson, who is known for his rock-ready anthem hooks, seemed to throw them away completely. The result was a singular sound that blends together, making the majority of the album completely forgettable. After years of listening, songs like “Children of Cain”, “Born Villain” and “Hey, Cruel World…” have joined my regular rotation with the supreme lead single “No Reflection”.
6. “Portrait of an American Family” (1994)
The mere fact that Portrait of an American Family is ranked so low on this list is a testament of how incredible Manson’s career truly is.
I picked this up the day it hit stores, and played the CD to death (I’ve yet to wear down an album like this). What’s most incredible about Manson’s discography is how different Portrait is, and how much he evolved from it. Portrait is a product of the time, coming out perfectly in the years when Nine Inch Nails and similar bands were dominating the space. Only Manson took it a step further, delivering his own dark and twisted imagery that was a cross between Alice Cooper, David Bowie, and Rob Zombie.
In retrospect, its level of cheese is of legend, but in 1994 Portrait was some dark and weird shit (see “Cake and Sodomy”, “My Monkey”, “Get Your Gun”, etc.). How many bands can you look back at their debut album and say, “That’s not what defined them but it’s what set them on the course to greatness.” See Antichrist Superstar to continue this conversation.
5. “The Golden Age of Grotesque” (2003)
TGAOG is such a wicked cool album, being that it’s the first without Twiggy Ramirez, and the first with Tim Sköld of KMFDM fame. What ends up blasting out of speakers is an industrial metal album – albeit a bit late in terms of the genre’s popularity – that’s hook-heavy and filled with classic Manson chants.
If Antichrist Superstar was stadium rock, this was industrial club rock. TGAOG was also at the height of the Manson parody, delivering cleverly titled jingles such as “mOBSCENE” and “(s)AINT”, while begging fans to stand up and shout with “This Is the New Shit” and “Doll-Dagga Buzz-Buzz Ziggety-Zag”.
4. “The High End of Low” (2009)
After the 2007 debacle Eat Me, Drink Me, it had officially been six years since Manson impressed me (with “TGAOG”). It was also the first time that I had doubted a release, feeling less than enthused about what he would accomplish.
Reuniting (finally) with Twiggy, The High End of Low is one of the most surprising album in recent memory, delivering all sorts of wicked acoustic riffs – in songs like “Four Rusted Horses”, “I Have to Look Up Just to See Hell”, and “Into the Fire” – that build to an explosive climax. It was also a return to his rock-ready form blasting out classics like “Arma-Goddamn-Motherfuckin-Geddon” and “We’re from America”.
And the true gift of High End of Low are the leaked variations that lack production value (in a super good way), giving them a sort of 1980’s metal sound, only with a heavy dose of acoustic instruments. Dare I say they remind me of …and Justice For All?
3. “Mechanical Animals” (1998)
Mechanical Animals was a shock to the system, being that my ears were used to Manson’s heavy metal industrial blaze he set afire across the world. This was a truly defining moment in Manson’s career where he chose to create something unique and different, as opposed to recreating and retreading the success of Antichrist Superstar.
Mechanical Animals is a goddamn masterpiece that’s heavily influenced by David Bowie and Pink Floyd. There’s a beautiful sadness to the album, that feels like Manson’s self-reflection on the drugs, fame and the price of it all.
While most observant fans will remember the album for “The Dope Show” and “I Don’t Like the Drugs (But the Drugs Like Me)”, Animals to me will always be the best of Manson’s bed-time horror stories that are both soothing and mortifying. There’s nothing in his entire collective career that compares to songs such as “Great Big White World”, “The Last Day on Earth” and “Coma White”, all of which are available as alternate acoustic takes that are even more impressive than what’s on the album.
2. “Antichrist Superstar” (1996)
This is where the train falls off the tracks, and you dear readers begin to despise my assertion that Holy Wood is a better album than Antichrist Superstar. While Antichrist is easily my favorite of all of Manson’s work, it’s not the best (although, Antichrist could easily be 1B to Holy Wood‘s 1A).
Antichrist Superstar is Marilyn Manson’s powerhouse masterpiece, an album that announced his arrival upon the world. He was the Antichrist in the sense that he surged through the music world as the negative to the happy-go-lucky crap being custom formed and created by labels (see NSync, Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears).
Completely misunderstood, Manson relished in the negative press, soaking in the religious hatred, while also knocking the socks off various protestors in his well-spoken and thought-provoking television interviews.
For those gifted with the opportunity to experience this album when it came out, then you know Antichrist Superstar delivered pulse-pounding and soul-screaming rock that brewed deep inside your belly and could only be released through vigorous listening sessions. The album took Manson out of the conversation as being “like Nine Inch Nails” (Trent Reznor actually produced the album) to becoming his own entity, an embodiment of modern anthem rock that would fill stadiums from coast to coast.
Easily one of the heaviest albums ever recorded, Antichrist is fueled with teen-bred anger and rage directed against the (religious) system that nearly every kid could identify with. Oh, and it pissed parents off, which only added fuel to the fire…
1. “Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death)” (2000)
Holy Wood is a very personal record for true fans, as it’s the first album released that left the “Antichrist” wannabes in the dust.
Furthering what Manson did with Mechanical Animals, Holy Wood – which is shockingly Manson’s best selling album ever – sounds like nothing I have ever heard before. Instead of retread, Holy Wood keeps the slow-burn elements of Mechanical Animals and adds a horror movie vibe to them, while also bringing back a few stadium rock anthems that would be among his best (“The Fight Song”, “The Nobodies” and “Disposable Teens”).
It’s also the third and final of Manson’s trilogy, which thematically delivers a strong final punch. Even though Manson is still going strong, Holy Wood feels like his true last hurrah that embodies the years of his musical and pop cultural domination.
Twice a month Joe Lipsett will dissect a new Amityville Horror film to explore how the “franchise” has evolved in increasingly ludicrous directions. This is “The Amityville IP.”
A bizarre recurring issue with the Amityville “franchise” is that the films tend to be needlessly complicated. Back in the day, the first sequels moved away from the original film’s religious-themed haunted house storyline in favor of streamlined, easily digestible concepts such as “haunted lamp” or “haunted mirror.”
As the budgets plummeted and indie filmmakers capitalized on the brand’s notoriety, it seems the wrong lessons were learned. Runtimes have ballooned past the 90-minute mark and the narratives are often saggy and unfocused.
Both issues are clearly on display in Amityville Karen (2022), a film that starts off rough, but promising, and ends with a confused whimper.
The promise is embodied by the tinge of self-awareness in Julie Anne Prescott (The Amityville Harvest)’s screenplay, namely the nods to John Waters’ classic 1994 satire, Serial Mom. In that film, Beverly Sutphin (an iconic Kathleen Turner) is a bored, white suburban woman who punished individuals who didn’t adhere to her rigid definition of social norms. What is “Karen” but a contemporary equivalent?
In director/actor Shawn C. Phillips’ film, Karen (Lauren Francesca) is perpetually outraged. In her introductory scenes, she makes derogatory comments about immigrants, calls a female neighbor a whore, and nearly runs over a family blocking her driveway. She’s a broad, albeit familiar persona; in many ways, she’s less of a character than a caricature (the living embodiment of the name/meme).
These early scenes also establish a fairly straightforward plot. Karen is a code enforcement officer with plans to shut down a local winery she has deemed disgusting. They’re preparing for a big wine tasting event, which Karen plans to ruin, but when she steals a bottle of cursed Amityville wine, it activates her murderous rage and goes on a killing spree.
Simple enough, right?
Unfortunately, Amityville Karen spins out of control almost immediately. At nearly every opportunity, Prescott’s screenplay eschews narrative cohesion and simplicity in favour of overly complicated developments and extraneous characters.
Take, for example, the wine tasting event. The film spends an entire day at the winery: first during the day as a band plays, then at a beer tasting (???) that night. Neither of these events are the much touted wine-tasting, however; that is actually a private party happening later at server Troy (James Duval)’s house.
Weirdly though, following Troy’s death, the party’s location is inexplicably moved to Karen’s house for the climax of the film, but the whole event plays like an afterthought and features a litany of characters we have never met before.
This is a recurring issue throughout Amityville Karen, which frequently introduces random characters for a scene or two. Karen is typically absent from these scenes, which makes them feel superfluous and unimportant. When the actress is on screen, the film has an anchor and a narrative drive. The scenes without her, on the other hand, feel bloated and directionless (blame editor Will Collazo Jr., who allows these moments to play out interminably).
Compounding the issue is that the majority of the actors are non-professionals and these scenes play like poorly performed improv. The result is long, dull stretches that features bad actors talking over each other, repeating the same dialogue, and generally doing nothing to advance the narrative or develop the characters.
While Karen is one-note and histrionic throughout the film, at least there’s a game willingness to Francesca’s performance. It feels appropriately campy, though as the film progresses, it becomes less and less clear if Amityville Karen is actually in on the joke.
Like Amityville Cop before it, there are legit moments of self-awareness (the Serial Mom references), but it’s never certain how much of this is intentional. Take, for example, Karen’s glaringly obvious wig: it unconvincingly fails to conceal Francesca’s dark hair in the back, but is that on purpose or is it a technical error?
Ultimately there’s very little to recommend about Amityville Karen. Despite the game performance by its lead and the gentle homages to Serial Mom’s prank call and white shoes after Labor Day jokes, the never-ending improv scenes by non-professional actors, the bloated screenplay, and the jittery direction by Phillips doom the production.
Clocking in at an insufferable 100 minutes, Amityville Karen ranks among the worst of the “franchise,” coming in just above Phillips’ other entry, Amityville Hex.
The Amityville IP Awards go to…
- Favorite Subplot: In the afternoon event, there’s a self-proclaimed “hot boy summer” band consisting of burly, bare-chested men who play instruments that don’t make sound (for real, there’s no audio of their music). There’s also a scheming manager who is skimming money off the top, but that’s not as funny.
- Least Favorite Subplot: For reasons that don’t make any sense, the winery is also hosting a beer tasting which means there are multiple scenes of bartender Alex (Phillips) hoping to bring in women, mistakenly conflating a pint of beer with a “flight,” and goading never before seen characters to chug. One of them describes the beer as such: “It looks like a vampire menstruating in a cup” (it’s a gold-colored IPA for the record, so…no).
- Amityville Connection: The rationale for Karen’s killing spree is attributed to Amityville wine, whose crop was planted on cursed land. This is explained by vino groupie Annie (Jennifer Nangle) to band groupie Bianca (Lilith Stabs). It’s a lot of nonsense, but it is kind of fun when Annie claims to “taste the damnation in every sip.”
- Neverending Story: The film ends with an exhaustive FIVE MINUTE montage of Phillips’ friends posing as reporters in front of terrible green screen discussing the “killer Karen” story. My kingdom for Amityville’s regular reporter Peter Sommers (John R. Walker) to return!
- Best Line 1: Winery owner Dallas (Derek K. Long), describing Karen: “She’s like a walking constipation with a hemorrhoid”
- Best Line 2: Karen, when a half-naked, bleeding woman emerges from her closet: “Is this a dream? This dream is offensive! Stop being naked!”
- Best Line 3: Troy, upset that Karen may cancel the wine tasting at his house: “I sanded that deck for days. You don’t just sand a deck for days and then let someone shit on it!”
- Worst Death: Karen kills a Pool Boy (Dustin Clingan) after pushing his head under water for literally 1 second, then screeches “This is for putting leaves on my plants!”
- Least Clear Death(s): The bodies of a phone salesman and a barista are seen in Karen’s closet and bathroom, though how she killed them are completely unclear
- Best Death: Troy is stabbed in the back of the neck with a bottle opener, which Karen proceeds to crank
- Wannabe Lynch: After drinking the wine, Karen is confronted in her home by Barnaby (Carl Solomon) who makes her sign a crude, hand drawn blood contract and informs her that her belly is “pregnant from the juices of his grapes.” Phillips films Barnaby like a cross between the unhoused man in Mulholland Drive and the Mystery Man in Lost Highway. It’s interesting, even if the character makes absolutely no sense.
- Single Image Summary: At one point, a random man emerges from the shower in a towel and excitedly poops himself. This sequence perfectly encapsulates the experience of watching Amityville Karen.
- Pray for Joe: Many of these folks will be back in Amityville Shark House and Amityville Webcam, so we’re not out of the woods yet…
Next time: let’s hope Christmas comes early with 2022’s Amityville Christmas Vacation. It was the winner of Fangoria’s Best Amityville award, after all!
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