Faces of the Pro Wrestling Heel # 1 - Screaming Red Velour

The Vault welcomes you to its new series celebrating the pro wrestling heel (the greatest gig in all of entertainment) through the use of hilarious out-of-context pictures. And we're kicking things off with an entry from The Miz and his slick Zap Brannigan style red velour jacket.
 

#1: Be sleazy as fuck, wear a preposterously stylish suit.

#2: Bluster directly into the camera. 

#3: Get laid out by the good guy, making sure the bottoms of your shoes match your ridiculous suit jacket for maximum comedic effect.

This has been Faces of the Pro Wrestling Heel # 1. Shoutout to MGFanJay of the awesomely old school Death Valley Driver Video Review Forums for these fantastic screencaps I stole.

The Top 10 Questions That Need to Be Answered In Season 5 of Breaking Bad

The fifth (and apparently final) season of Breaking Bad - the best show on television, shut up about Big Bang Theory or The Walking Dead or whatever the hell film waste you think is on its level - begins tonight. And if you're a fan of the show, odds are it's all you've been able to think about or talk about for the past two weeks at least.

That's because the story so far of Walter White's transformation into Heisenberg, the ruthless meth kingpin, has left us with a whole mess of unanswered questions. And Breaking Bad is a show that pretty much never introduces a story thread without resolving it. I mean, this is a show that had Walt spend a good portion of Season 2 building a crawl space in the family utility closet pretty much just so we could have this great shot in the third to last episode of Season 4. 

And let's not forget the other slow-burning gems that paid off big in the end, like the pink teddy bear in the pool, Walt's second cell phone, Skyler and "I fucked Ted" Beneke's relationship, and Hector Salamanca the kamikaze wheelchair pilot, among others. 

Because of that tendency to make everything significant, every little detail that has come up over the course of the first four seasons can seem to the obsessed Breaking Bad fan like it will be the key to the eventual downfall of Walt, Jessie, and everyone around them (because you just know they're all gonna go down in the end, and hard). With that in mind, I've compiled the following list of unanswered questions that I believe will factor into the final season in a major way.

Oh, and of course - if you haven't watched the first four seasons of the show, there are massive spoilers ahead, so don't say I didn't warn you.

The Vault Seriously 100% For Real Mourns The Macho Man Randy Savage. Am I Super Sad Right Now? OHHH YEAHHHH! :(

If you were a kid (or even alive) during the 1980s, you lost a hero today. The Macho Man Randy Savage has died. Madness! Randy Savage was one of the greatest pro wrestlers of all time pro wrestling made flesh and the real-life, non-Dos-Equis-commercial version of The Most Interesting Man in the World. He has been a fake fighter, shilled beef jerky, released a rap album, been in the Danger Zone, was Space Ghost's grandfather, got bitten by a snake on national television, and battled Spider-Man in a steel cage, among many other things few mortal men would dare dream about. And yet apparently, despite appearances, he was simply that - a mortal man. There will never be a more bombastically awesome human being on the face of this planet, and he will be truly missed.

Apocalypse predictors: I hope you get your wish in a few months (or tomorrow, whenever the current trendy doomsday prediction happens to be), because frankly a world without The Macho Man Randy Savage is a lot less worth living in. And if the world doesn't end - well we all know who to thank for sacrificing himself to save us.

The Vault Mourns Giant Gonzalez

The colorful world of pro graps lost a legend last week in Jorge "Giant" Gonzalez, a man perhaps best known for being monstrously tall and wearing a furry full-body spandex suit airbrushed with muscles and a butt crack.

Although he left us at the all-too-young age of 44, Gonzalez is not just another tragic early wrestling death, done in as so many others have been by a steroid-enlarged heart tapping out after a (half) lifetime  of coke, booze, and freebasing enough pure dinosaur tranquilizer to kill God. Rather, he seems to have died because he was simply too big for this world. Also, diabetes. 

Countdown: The Top 10 Tunes from Mega Man 2

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

The Top Five Best Things About "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet"

"Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" is one of the best episodes of The Twilight Zone, which is one of the undisputed greatest TV series of all time. If you don't agree with that statement, you don't belong in my readership (but thanks anyway for the hit!). Back when the TV biz was nowhere near as established (or corrupt) as it is now, much of the programming that found its way beamed into living rooms across America was essentially glorified filler made to take up time in between commercials (as opposed to now, when... wait). I sometimes like to tell myself that anyone with a camera, a script, a group of people to fill in as actors, and at least half a clue could have made history in the burgeoning picture business of this era. This is because I equate every writer and director of this era with Ed Wood for some reason.

Enter Rod Serling (shown here as the innovator of the old "arrow through the head" gag), who would have been better than you no matter when he was born no matter what you think. He was one of those ridiculously prolific types who can churn out works of irrefutable depth and profound social resonance at breakneck pace and on no budget (which, other than the "irrefutable depth and profound social resonance" part, actually sounds exactly like Ed Wood).

Don't get me wrong - just like any anthology series, there are more than a few Twilight Zone eps that could be generously described as clunkers (and the Serling-penned Night Gallery segment "The Nature of the Enemy" is actually one of the worst things I've ever seen). But the man wrote 148 of these episodes, among a ton of other things, many of which I love the shit out of, so I'll balk at calling him an overhyped hack and settle for "creative genius." Remember, kids, on the internet you're either one or the other.

But before I really digress and this turns into another Hood of Horror epic, let's just hurry up and get down to ranking the top five best things about "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet."

And by the way - you can fully watch this episode on YouTube.

Snoop Dogg's Hood of Horror

I'm gonna start this blog off right - with this monster-sized, probably too long to read, screen-heavy (for the skimmers) writeup of Snoop Doggie Dogg's best starring vehicle since Soul Plane.

It's hard to believe an anthology horror movie heavily featuring Snoop Dogg could exceed expectations, but Hood of Horror is even more spectacular than I ever dared hope. I stumbled across this gem after catching the tail end of Tales from the Hood on BET the other night, and I don't know what inspired this unrelenting block of awesome in BET's programming, but I would have been a fool to not gorge myself on so much inner-city terror.

I'm just gonna throw this out there: urban-tinged genre movies are nothing new, but there's no genre that benefits from a hood sensibility more than horror. This probably has to do with the fact that both hip hop and horror are at their absolute best when they're at their most over the top. And Hood of Horror is so over the top it's impossible not to enjoy. This is that rare film that's at its best when it's not even bothering to make sense. And even when it's at it's worst, the movie still features Snoop Doggie By God Dogg as a soul stealing demon of the ghetto, the promise of which probably got this project the green light on its own. Hell, I know I would've signed off on that pitch.