Jacob's ladder effect

There is a movie I have never seen, but I know the twist. Think of it as a really grim Wizard of Oz tale where Dorothy clicks her heals and then the audience realizes she was killed by the tornado.

That got me thinking about how much of the story telling in my beloved b-movies would be first rate if you just latched onto this premise. If you assume the inciting incident in act 1 almost killed the main character, and everything from there forward is a fever dream or the last brain synapses firing before the main character crosses over. With that lens the story telling just got a whole lot better.

Imagine if instead of the script and editing being shite and the directing + acting being inconsistent, unbalanced and paper thin ... instead the cast & crew were students of Descartes' *Meditations on First Philosophy* or Plato's *Theaetetus*. They were purposefully challenging the distinction between waking and dreaming states. As they are soliciting backers, they have a copy of Zhuangzi's "Butterfly Dream" paradox under their arms, or maybe Aristotle's *Metaphysics*. They are setting out to imbue the audience with a profound skepticism about the nature of reality.

Yeah; that jives.

Then, when you watch "Big Trouble in Little China" - just assume that Jack Burton is stabbed to death at the 5-minute mark over his winnings at pai gow, and the rest of the movie shows his final thoughts before they dump his body in the bay. Plato & John Carpenter could have been bros.

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The Thing in the Basement

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As we work our way through Merry Cage-mas, an argument could be made that "Con Air" is a fever dream Nick Cage's character has just before dying during that opening bar fight. 1) Monica Potter has abs of steel and is supposedly pregnant with their daughter. She is so not pregnant looking. So much so that, I do not know how they would have been far enough along to ultrasound the embryo. Additionally, he has just walked off a fishing boat into the bar she works at after getting home from deployment - when was the child conceived? 2) Nick Cage is immediately arrested and sentenced to seven years in prison. During the film he writes & received fully formed letters from this child. In them, he talks about all the things they used to do with each other. When did these things happen? 3) Upon making his way into the titular 'Con Air' plane, Nick Cage has a shrink wrapped bunny rabbit doll he bought for this little girl as a present. Where did that come from? The pri...

Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958) - it is a good deal better than the remakes

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