They Live must’ve really given you WTF vibes.
Of course, that movie arguably belongs in this thread on its own merita.
I’ll check it out! I like “weird”. LOL
Not long after that came out, I met up with my sister who had been out of the country for a year. The first thing that she said to me was, “mcgato. Repo Man. See it.” I’m like “OK…”
We still, to this day, make plate o shrimp references.
I was born in '76, and just don’t recall ever seeing anything that resembled the products in the movie. According to the site you linked, they reached their peak in 1983-84 and disappeared entirely by 1988. I was in Germany from 1982-1985 so I missed them at their peak and I just can’t remember seeing them in the grocery stores when we returned to the states. But I wasn’t the one buying the groceries and that might explain why I don’t remember them.
I worked in a grocery store during those years(79-89), and we did have generic products with those labels, but nobody bought them….the one I remember in particular was a kind of Velveeta cheese.
I guess people like familiar packaging.
I remember them. Short-lived fad.
Jewel had generics until at least the early 90s.
My favorite ones were the Generic Novels. They had a science fiction, a western, a romance, and a generic mystery. Here’s the cover of the Generic Science Fiction novel
Here are all four
Marvel published a Generic Comic Book ( I didn’t know til now why they published it). I recommend it.
RE They Live
Minor spoiler- We never find out just what They are or where They come from. While ‘aliens from another planet’ seems the most likely, the film never says. We know They live, and that They live among us. But that is really all we know.
Excision (Prime, 2012) - Stands out for me. I watch weird stuff with the lady all the time, but I saw this almost a year ago and can’t forget it. It has since replaced Gummo as seriously produced film strange as all get out.
Because the mom wanted to get her husband back and killing the kid would do that? Why did he kill those cops looking for his boy though?
I missed that somehow. Here it is
By the way – it sells on comic book vendor sites for about $6. It came out in 1984
“Couldn’t enjoy it any more, Mom. Mmm mmm mmm.”
Blast! So much for my retirment plans.
Mad God was really WTF for me. I watched it and still have no idea of what happened in it.
“The Night Comes for Us”, a Chinese movie, actually has a good plot and some truly moving moments, but it is one of the most violent movies I’ve ever seen. The fight scene in a meat packing facility employs every tool meat packers use, so I’ll let you use your own imaginations to fill in the rest. Virtually everyone in the movie, outside of the extras, dies a violent death outside of the child around whom the conflict revolved and the one adult who spirited her away to safety.
Really doesn’t matter at all. I don’t know if it’s weird to say or not, but Repo Man is one of the few movies I’ve seen that really captures the zeitgeist of L.A. Most movies set in L.A. show what they think people not from L.A. think of L.A. On the other side, L.A. Story seemed really fake and off the mark. A few nuggets of truth, but they were tiny and swamped by the not reality.
Well this was fascinating. From the comments section of a linked blog post, Terry Bisson says…
A little more BG for literary history:
I was editor and copy chief with Berkley /Jove. I thought of the idea
and sold it to Jove. I wrote the copy. The writers got $750 for all rights.
The books got LOTS of reviews in papers all over the country
including the NYTBR
(reviewers loved the idea) but almost no sales. My agent, Susan Ann Protter
and I formed “No Frills Associates” (along with Lou) and briefly
trademarked the generic logo. WGBH in Boston
wanted the No-Frills Movie to produce in video but
Ansen and I turned them down, since we thought digital
was too lo-tech, more the fools us. We coulda been contenders.Nothing was cannibalized and no one wants to do it anymore; the time has past.
Thanks for your interest though!
A sort of similar story: the Coen brothers were working on Miller’s Crossing and were having major writer’s block figuring out the plot. So they took a break to make Barton Fink, a story about a writer having major writer’s block.