Along with all my Halloween horror posts, I’m going to dedicate some of this month’s content to Lou Reed who left this plane three years ago on October 27, 2013. This year we’re also celebrating the 40th anniversary of Lou’s sixth solo album, Coney Island Baby, released in February, 1976. Here are some words from a Pitchfork review published on the album’s 30th birthday…

By 1976, we had already heard Reed do pretty much everything that could be done in a pop song: shoot heroin, suck on a ding-dong, kiss shiny boots of leather. And yet nothing he had done was quite as shocking as the revelation on Coney Island Baby’s devastating title track that he always “wanted to play football for the coach.” But as the song drifts along its elegiac six-minute arc, the idea moves from the ridiculous (Lou as linebacker?) to the sublime (nothing fuels a young man’s burgeoning homosexual impulses like getting pat on the butt by brawny alpha males in tights) to the unspeakably poignant: rock’s reigning iconoclast admitting that he just wanted to fit in all along.

Coney Island Baby was the Lou Reed album that introduced me to the artist’s music beyond “Walk On The Wild Side.” When I was a freshman in college I borrowed lots of music from a friend down the hall in my dormitory. That education included most of Lou’s wider catalog, but Coney Island Baby was my first deep dive, and it’s still one of my favorites. Here’s Coney Island Baby…

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Can you believe it’s been 25 years since the Captain America film premiered? No, I’m not talking about the latest pair of franchise-within-a-franchise films in Marvel’s contemporary cinematic empire. I’m talking about a direct-to-video version of the Steve Rogers story that took liberties with the shield-slinger’s legend to deliver an environmental message back in the days of grunge. Here’s the Wiki…

The film was given very negative reviews, holding a 9% ‘rotten’ rating on the film critic aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes, based on 11 critics (all of whom wrote reviews a decade after release).

In one of the few contemporaneous reviews, Entertainment Weekly critic Frank Lovece wrote, “The movie isn’t merely wrong for kids — it opens in pre-war Italy with a sequence in Italian with subtitles, and a machine-gun slaughter — it’s just all wrong”, and decried the “shapeless blob of a plot” in grading the film an F.

A Blu-ray of the film was released by Shout! Factory on May 21, 2013 as a Collector’s Edition which features a widescreen HD presentation and brand new interviews with director Pyun and star Salinger.

I don’t want to give away plot points, but suffice to say that fans of the hero’s origin story will find this version to be just familiar enough to be baffled by all of the other choices that get made here. As the Shout! Factory release implies, the end results are a trainwreck but not one without its charms, and definitely not anything that could stop our Cap’n! Here’s Captain America (1990)…

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