Retro Movie Alert: MACHETE Opens This Weekend

Robert Rodriguez does it again with a grainy, early-70’s style badass movie, MACHETE.

Machete is a story of deceit and revenge. Like all fo Rodriguez’s work, it is highly stylized and promises to be one hell of a flick. There’s sure to be plenty of blood, guns, knives, violence and laughs. And web sources say that Lindsay Lohan will be mostly naked onscreen, which is A-ok with me.

Plus…
DIG THIS CAST!

Danny Trejo
Robert De Niro
Jessica Alba
Steven Seagal
Michelle Rodriguez
Jeff Fahey
Cheech Marin
Don Johnson
Lindsay Lohan

Yes, I’m not kidding. De Niro in a film with Steven Seagal and Cheech Marin. And Don Johnson. And Lindsay Lohan. And Jessica Alba. And…ok, you get my point.

For you retro style fans, get ready to bask in the orangy faded glow of low-budget funk-era cinema. Taking his cues from movies like Dual, Vanishing Point and Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill! Rodriguez will certainly not disappoint with this period-style flick.

It’s times like these I wish I still had my 1973 Chevy Caprice Classic with the wire caps, dual spotlights, diamond-plate fender skirts and ’49 Packard hood ornament. That low-slung beaut would have been perfect to cruise up to the theater in for this flick.

Here’s the Trailer for Machete, opening this weekend:

And here’s the official site: http://www.vivamachete.com/

-Tiki “Mack the Knife” Chris reporting from the arsenal in the shed behind the Tiki Bar.
Tiki Lounge Talk, the fun Tiki Talk Blog for kats & kittens who dig cocktails and retro groovyness.

Your Weekend Tiki Cocktail: The Blue Hawaiian

As I was driving the convertible into work this morning, Bing’s version of Blue Hawaii came on the XM-band radio. It was like, kismet, man. So here it is, for you laid-back swingers who want to bask in the hot tropical sun,

The Blue Hawaiian

An easy drink to make, this Tiki Cocktail looks kool, tastes great and is very refreshing on hot sandy beach.

1 oz silver rum
 (or kick it up with an ounce of Sailor Jerry or Bacardi 151)
1 oz blue curacao
2 oz pineapple juice
1 oz cream of coconut (Coco Loco)
Cherry
Fresh Pineapple
Orchid

Shake the rum, curacao, pineapple juice and cream of coconut well in shaker with ice and strain into a clear hurricane glass filled with ice cubes. Garnish it up with a sword full of cherries and pineapple, and top it off with the orchid. If you don’t have an orchid, don’t sweat it. Just put one of those little plastic mermaids on the side of the glass.

You can also go a step further and do the more popular frozen variety by adding a cup of crushed ice and blending. Vodka is often substituted for rum in the Frozen Blue Hawaiian, thanks to the efforts of Smirnoff’s marketing department. But who ever heard of Hawaiians drinking blue vodka? Wait…I don’t think Hawaiians originally had rum either. C’est la vie, baby.

-Tiki Chris reporting from behind the bar at Tiki Lounge Talk, the swingin’ tiki blog for tikiphiles and retro-lovin’ hep kats.

1950’s Car Commercials…The Don’t Make ‘Em Like They Used To

A lot of you kats and kittens are big on the MAD MEN series. But are you hip to the ad jazz they were laying down? Here are a few Automobile TV commercials and print ads from the golden era of Advertising.

I currently have a 1953 Chevy in my garage. Have had it for 20 years.

This bat-winged beauty was marketed toward big business presidents and tycoons. It cost more than a Cadillac.

There are few cars more elegant, beautiful and powerful as the 1963 Pontiac. Always wanted one. This commercial makes me want one even more!

For fans of the “little” Fords…I love how they point out “no dog leg”. That’s a reference to the wrap-around windshields popular on GM models (esp Cadillac) through the early 1960’s.

Ah, one of my favorite all-time rides, the 1958 Cadillac. We had one (already vintage) when I was a kid. I will have one again someday.

An here’s some old print ads from ’50s and ’60s magazines (click on each to enlarge):

Hope you kids dug this little trip down memory lane to the days when cars were made of steel and chrome and horsepower meant everything. My my how times have changed. Sorry kids, but after looking at ads like this, how could anyone ever get excited about a Honda Accord? bleh.

-Tiki Chris reporting from the showroom floor of the Imperial dealership down the block from Tiki Lounge Talk.

Go West for Mod Movie Monday - Rio Bravo, 1959

Ask anyone who digs old movies and old westerns about this flick, and the response will be something around the same as if you ask them if they are hip to Miles or Bird…oh, yeahhhhh!

Rio Bravo, 1959

Dean Martin

is a good old-fashioned cowboy movie with a little twist: The cast. Here you have John Wayne leading Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, Angie Dickinson,Ward Bond and Walter Brennan (plus Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez for comic relief). Wow. Add to that some really good writing, some intense scenes where predicting the outcome is almost impossible, and plenty of evil bad guys and you’ve got the makings of a classic flick. Even the side romance between the 51-year-old Wayne and 26-year-old Dickinson are believable and fun.

The story is a somewhat typical cowboy job: Wayne, the Sheriff, is trying to keep his dusty frontier town together while fighting against a cattle baron who, as all cattle barons in old westerns tend to be, is an evil, murdering SOB. His brother murders a cowpoke in a saloon in cold blood and is locked up by the Sheriff. Cattle baron brother sends bad guys to get him out. Wayne is helped only by the recovering drunk Dude (Martin), an aging deputy with a bad leg (Brennan), a very young gunslinger (Nelson), a somewhat crazy chick (Dickinson) and a Mexican hotel owner with a funny way of talking. Oh, and Wayne totes a Winchester Saddle Ring Carbine everywhere he goes. Kookie.

By the way, you get a free song too, a duet with Dino and Ricky Nelson. Whoever thought they’d sing together?

Food & Booze: Whisky. Just Whisky. Or Beer. This is what cowboys drink in the movies. No one really eats anything so why not try an easy chili recipe. There’s this thing out there called Wick Fowler’s “2-Alarm Chili Kit”. It won the 1967 Texas Chili Cook-off and has everything in it you need to make a really good chili except beef, beans and stewed tomatoes. Just follow the directions and you can’t miss. I first used this stuff back in 1987 to make Chili for a Halloween party while watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre II, a really bad movie that had the cannibalistic characters making - you guessed it - chili, with human meat. Funny, huh? Here’s the trailer for Rio Bravo…

-Tiki Chris P. reporting from the Last Chance Saloon, in an oasis somewhere in the middle of cowboy-days Florida

PROOF That Real Pirates Still Roam Key West!

alvas

It’s a drag when someone breaks into a museum, busts up a display and steals a $550,000 gold piece of history, probably to melt down and sell for booze, gas and grass. But when it happens to be a gold bar from a 300+ year-old Spanish wreck in Key West, Florida, well that’s a whole other story.

According to this article in the South Florida Sun Sentinel, two thieves entered the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum, broke the thick acrylic case surrounding the real gold bar and made off with it in the night. The bar was on display in a special enclosure that allowed people to lift and hold the bar, so we could feel the weight and history of it. (I held this bar myself a couple of years ago while on a KW trip). The gold bar was salvaged from the wreck of the Santa Margarita, a Spanish ship that went down off the Keys during a hurricane in 1622. The bar was recovered in 1980 and has been on display for more than 20 years.

Then along came two pirates. I call them pirates because A) these kats didn’t knock over a gas station, they went after treasure, treasure from a Spanish ship that sailed during the heyday of pirates. GOLD treasure. If two real pirates came back to life as zombies, they couldn’t have planned this better. B) It happened in Key West, where a very high percentage of the year-round population claims to either be pirates themselves, or descended from real pirates (or pirate hunters). C) They did it right under everyone’s noses, didn’t care about the security cameras or the alarm, and just took what they came for. And D) because I will bet you any amount of doubloons that there was rum involved.

It is a drag for the museum. Even though they have hundreds (or maybe even thousands) of these bars, it’s still not cool to steal from a place that makes it so much fun for the public to enjoy.

Unless, of course, you’re a pirate.

These guys might be crack-head scumbags. They might be lowlife petty thieves who made a run for the big time. Or they might have had it up to their necks with all the wealth being in the hands of the few while the majority of the world is sweating to make a buck. Who knows. I know one thing: I kinda hope they’re more the Jack Sparrow type of pirates…and I kinda hope they get away with it. At least until the Coast Guard finds their pirate ship and blows it out of the water.

-Tiki Chris reporting from Pirate’s Cove Tiki Bar, in the cavern under the waterfall on Pirate Island.