Just Before The Dawn

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I know this comic doesn’t make any sense. At Shitty Movie night at Josh IRL’s house we watched Mutant Zombie Vampires From The ‘Hood, starring one Mr. C. Thomas Howell. During a particularly unsexy “sex” scene featuring Mr. Howell I yelled out Josh’s lines from panels 2 and 3 above. Those familiar with Howell’s work in Red Dawn should be somewhat less perplexed than those who aren’t. The aforementioned 98% of you that aren’t should feel free to remain confused and keep making that face. Yes. That’s the one.

MZVFTH would be an excellent Shitty Movie Night flick if not for two major drawbacks: 1) The dialog is almost completely inaudible. While this doesn’t normally affect your potential enjoyment of this type of movie, it gets old really quick. Especially because the gun shot sound effects (both of them) are played at ear splitting levels roughly 100,000 times over 90 minutes. And 2) The film does not contain the titular vampires. It seems to contain mutants which could be construed as zombies, actual zombies, and possibly even mutant zombies. But it doesn’t contain any sort of vampire. Though the characters do occasionally refer to the zombies as vampires for no discernable reason. This is just false advertising on the part of the film makers and I won’t stand for it.

Let’s get back to C. Thomas Howell. As a youth he starred in Red Dawn, a film about the Russians attacking U.S. soil at the end of the cold war and being defeated by a rag-tag group of kids, and Soul Man, possibly the only film made after 1948 to feature a main character in black-face. The old saying must be true. Once you go black-face, you never come back-face. Because after Soul Man, Howell’s career took a bit of a nose dive. He didn’t work less, so to speak. In fact the quantity of his output skyrocketed. The quality? Not so much. Though the film he is best known for, Red Dawn, is getting a big budget Hollywood remake for a 2011 release. If you ask me, they should of gone for the gusto and remade Soul Man, but this time instead of a white guy pretending to be a black man they could do a couple of black guys pretending to be whiteOMG WHITE CHICKS THE WAYANSES ALREADY DID THAT BLUGHLBLUGHLBLUGHL. Never mind.

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34 Comments

  1. II saw CTH in a horrible SyFy movie last month called Crimson Force. I think he has talent, but he just keeps choosing horrible movies.

    • When you say "Choosing", you are assuming he has access to non horrible movies. The sadder fact may be the films he books are the best he can do.

  4. More recently, Tropic Thunder also featured a main character in blackface. But nothing compares to "Lethal Weapon 5" (Always Sunny in Philadelphia) with Mac in blackface as Danny Glover's character.

      • On the BBC comedy "How not to Live your Life" (highly recommended) there was a costume party where the theme was famous couples. The main character Don went as the Danny Glover character, while his black boss went as the Mel Gibson character, both wearing makeup.

  5. Hmm, when I think of CTH, which is rarely, I don't think of the film "he is best known for, Red Dawn", but rather a little pic called E.T. Or there was that other one.. what was it called? Oh yeah, The Outsiders.

    Although CTH was stupidly good as an uber-creepy serial killer on Criminal Minds. You know, the one he kills the lead's wife in front of him.

  9. Can't say I've ever screamed anything intelligible as I climax. However, one time, just at the critical moment, the smoke detector went off. I like to think I had something to do with that.

  10. CTH also had the television series based on Vampire: The Masquerade back in the 90s. Kind of fun, actually; and apparently ahead of its time. Unfortunately, the actor who played the main character died before it really established more than a handful of episodes.

  11. From what I gather from interviews and the like, C Thomas Howell is a pretty weird guy who takes acting way too seriously… especially for someone who really hasn't done it that much in anything really good.

    I think someone should build a sitcom around him. He can play himself and just sort of weird-out the neighborhood of 20-somethings trying to get laid.

  12. Good grief Red Dawn is a terrible, terrible movie. I thought it was bad when I first saw it in the 80s but I caught it a couple of months ago on one of those obscure cable channels that's so far down the listings it gets natural light about 3 days after BBC2, and it was even worse than I remembered.
    I was particularly struck ny how the seasons changed from scene to scene even though hardly any time had seemed to pass.

  13. CTH is currently on the best cop show on TV – Southland. I didn’t recognize him at all, but I suck at the “what dis we see him/her in” game.

  14. CTH was on Celebracadabra which was a reality show where showbiz types were mentored by magicians and in competition with each other as they performed tricks and stunts each week. CTH won, beating out the more talented (better at magic tricks) Hal Sparks because he exhibited more showmanship. CTH came across as a bit strange, but it's still hard to forget the beginning of his career when he played the endearing Ponyboy in the Outsiders….despite coming across as the major talent, every other actor in that film had a better career(Rob Lowe, Tom Cruise, Emilio Estevez, Ralph Macchio, Patrick Swayze, Diane Lane,Matt Dillion).

    There was a movie that came out in the late 80's/early 90's where the main character was on the run(from the mob?) and so disguised his identity by wearing whiteface – can't remember the title or the actor….perhaps wearing whitface doomed him to obscurity.

  17. Oh, and kudos for getting a Gilligan's Island reference in. The totality of pop culture is encased in this comic. Nicely done! 😀

  18. OMG lol lol lol lol lol lol, I now want to do that! I really wonder if my wife would kill me or laugh if yelled out wolverines…I mean she usually laughs when i take off my pants…so how much worse could a post ejackulette WOLVERINES be?

    love this!!!!

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