Helloween’s 2007 release sees them reborn for the second time in as many decades. They became the power metal Jesus, except they did it twice. Which makes it even better. (With due respect to J-Man, is it too much to ask to die two or three times, just to put the issue beyond doubt? One resurrection may just be luck.)
It’s among their most aggressive albums. Although it doesn’t have the downtuned crush of The Dark Ride or the demented aggression of Seven Sinners, it’s still a fury. Guitars are thick and rip at you like hypersonic winds. Every song seems on the verge of stripping its bolts with sheer energy. Charlie Bauerfind gives it a rough-and-ready “too much” production style that the songs really lean into.
To be clear, Gambling is not a full return to form. There are still too many cooks per square inch of kitchen, some blatantly weak tracks, and far too much fiddling with the dials (the syrupy keyboard tone Matthias Ülmer attempts on “Final Fortune” is a self-conscious modernism that doesn’t make sense with the raw Marshall tone of the guitars). And the album cover is, of course, decrepit. The pentagram on the floor doesn’t even match the one on the roulette wheel. Satan’s leaving their asses on read.
2007 was also the year I began listening to power metal. My first Helloween song was “As Long As I Fall”, this album’s lead single. And I hated it. About two years later, I gave the band (and this album) another try, and realized it was the worst song on the album. There’s some truly sublime stuff on here.
Opening song “Kill It” is so simple it makes “Mrs God” from the last album sound like progressive rock, but it thrashes hard and destroys your neck. The black metal-inspired bridge (??) is a creative idea that absolutely works, which is not something I say often about the band’s creative experiments.
The greatest track of the album—perhaps the greatest post-2000 Helloween song—is the fast and melodic “The Saints”. Someone should piss-test this song. It just isn’t normal. It just explodes out of the gates with heavy, modern riffwork, the verses contort and build, the chorus is straight out of 1989, and the duelling guitar solos showcase every trick Sascha Gerstner and Michael Weikath know as they swing axes at each others’ heads. Anything you could possibly enjoy about Helloween, past or present, is in this song. A marvel.
The lyrics seem to be referencing legal corruption, and are delivered with snarl and bite by Deris. The microphone probably had to be destroyed after he expelled so much venom onto it. He was an unusual choice to replace Michael Kiske, but tracks like “The Saints” make powerful arguments that he was the right choice.
Sascha Gerstner’s “Paint a New World” and “Dreambound” are more speed material, with the second being the better of the two. Deris’s “The Bells of the Seven Hells” is an agitated uptempo thrasher with a diabolic vocal performance. “IME” is another great Deris-penned track, full of angst and piss and rage.
A large pile of bonus songs round things out, some of them better than the actual songs on the album. “Find My Freedom” is a great faster track. “See the Night” opens with “Born into a neighborhood that ain’t exactly rich / Never knew his father and his mother was a bitch!”. Which is, uh, better than I could write in German, I suppose. “We Unite” is another fierce, barnburning anthem.
On the other (more limp-wristed) hand, “As Long As I Fall” opens with an insipid keyboard tinkle that sounds like it was recorded to test sound levels and an awful buzzkill of a chorus. “Helloween plays Christian rock” is kind of a Roko’s Basilisk for me—a concept I don’t need in my head. It’s Deris’s songwriting at its worst, just as “Kill It” sees him at his best. “Can Do It” is another “Heavy Metal Hamsters”—a songwriting well the band continually draws from, never with any success. A blandly brainless KISS-style party rock song, it’s better skipped over. Grosskopf’s “Heaven Tells No Lies” is Kim-Kardashian’s-ass-sized album filler that bounces around for seven minutes. “Fallen to Pieces” is a ballad with a fast section questionably integrated. “Final Fortune” is just a flat line of cliches. There is no way this song took any longer for Markus Grosskopf to write than it took me to listen to.
There’s about 35 minutes of good-to-great material on Gambling with the Devil. And the weak tracks mostly tend to be “filler track” rather than “Helloween playing ska or nu metal”. The house did not win. Not this time.
Okayish romantic comedy—I don’t have any opinions on it, which is why I’m pounding out a review on it late at night. My voice must be heard.
Um…let’s see…a few funny jokes, it was nice to see Julie Andrews again, and Anne Hathaway is a dime. Not that I was swayed by her physical aspect. You might have been, you lech, but as for me…(adjusts bowtie, slicks back hair, applies a spritz of cologne, screams through a megaphone at passing group of women)…I jack it to women with ASPIRATIONS and PERSONALITIES!!! It was a shock (in a “seeing your teacher outside a classroom” way) to see a John Rhys-Davies role where he’s not a dwarf.
But as The Princess Diarrheas Number 2 ended, I was left with a burning question.
Why does Genovia have so many orphans?
A secondary plot point (in a movie which struggles to even have a first plot point) is that Anne Hathaway wants to turn a summer home for the Genovian royalty into a house for the nation’s orphans.
Orphans?
Genovia is described (in the first film) as a country “between France and Spain”. As you’d expect from such a place, characters have names like “John” and “Blake” and everyone speaks in a vague British accent. It appears to be a tax shelter for rich people. Yet it has orphans by the cartload! Racially diverse orphans, too!
Where did they all come from? Was there a Genovian genocide or Holodomor? An ethnic cleansing, purged from the pages of history? Has Anne Hathaway inherited a throne of bones?
I began investigating the issue, and what I uncovered was shocking.
Spoiler: it involves sex and death.
Where Genovia’s Orphans Came From
Let me explain exactly what happened to produce these orphans. It wasn’t pretty.
(Warning: I am about to get explicit. Sensitive readers are advised to adjust their monitor’s gaussian blur so that my words are censored.)
“But the Genova orphans aren’t babies!” You might be arguing, detecting a flaw in my argument. “They’re children.”
Ah, that’s where you need to consider the big picture. Babies don’t stay babies forever. They grow up to be children, and then adults. (Unless you leave them alone in the bathtub because you were watching pro gamer Philip “ImperialHal” Dosen frag the fuck out at the ALGS Grand Finals, then sometimes they don’t quite get there.)
We have every reason to believe that the orphans of Genovia were once babies, which logically necessitates (barring rare cases of parthenogenesis) that sex was involved in their creation.
Yes, it’s disturbing. Yes, we both wish the truth was other than this. But the evidence cannot be ignored, and we need to tackle it head on.
The adorable little plot devices you see in the film were created through sexual intercourse. (!!!)
Your Point? I Already Know How Babies Are Made
Wow, good for you, sweetie! I’m glad you know! Want a pat on the back? A gold star on your homework?
Guess what, buttercup, lots of people don’t know. That’s who this is for! Do you barge into kindergarten spelling lessons and complain to the teacher “stop wasting time, I already know that c is for cat!”
Maybe not everything is for you, hmmmm???
Face it: not everyone lives in your jacuzzi bath of privilege, where you can just know shit any time you want. Some people are born without skin, brains, spinal cords, and exoskeletons. I know a kid who was born with his eyeballs backward. You think you’ve got it rough? His optical nerves are dangling down in front his face like a pair of disturbing tentacles, and his corneas, irises, pupils etc are pointing at the back of his skull. You can imagine how hard it is for him to read. A team of doctors must surgically remove his eyeballs, write a few words in glow-in-the-dark paint against the dark wet bone of his occiputs, then gently reinsert his eyeballs, over and over. They can only fit a few words inside his skull at a time, and reading anything is hellishly slow. His school assigned Moby Dick, and four years later he’s only up to “With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword”. At the rate his his hundreds of surgeries are bankrupting the medical system, it’ll be a million years before that kid learns how babies are made. But one day he’ll be ready, and maybe he’ll learn it from here. That’s who I’m writing this for. For him. The kid with backwards eyeballs. Not you. Get fucked!
In any case, I’m only getting started.
The children are not just any children, they’re orphans. Merriam Webster defines an orphan as…
a child deprived by death of one or usually both parents ex: He became an orphan when his parents died in a car accident.
Also, Merriam Webster offered these as the top most recent searches. US politics is going well, I take it?
To summarize, the parents of these children are D-E-A-D. That’s the bare minimum to qualify as an orphan. No exceptions. “Well, my Mom’s dead and my Dad lost an arm in a logging accident, can I squeak under the wire?” Nope, two dead parents, or GTFO. Yeah, doesn’t sound so good now, does it? Everyone wants that #OrphanGang street cred…until they find out what’s involved.
How did they die? That’s not important. What is important is that when Mia Grimaldi Thermopolis Renaldi confronts the teeming orphan krill, she’s confronting adolescent specters of death, catapulted into the earth by rampant fucking. This is the dark underbelly of the Genovian crown.
It’s no surprise Anne Hathaway never returned to the franchise. The erotothanatic compulsion of sex and death invoked by The Princess Diaries is best not dwelled upon for any length of time. Frankly, I’d rather find Mia’s name on the Epstein flight logs.
“Kissing children. Hugging orphans. What a vulgar, low, despicable, political trick!” – John Rhys-Davies
Here at Coagulopath dot com we pride ourselves on staying up to the minute, so let’s discuss the presidency of George Bush.
Bush was a popular and well-liked man who presided over a largely peaceful epoch of American history. Little of note happened in his Presidency.
Yes, he made some mistakes. (Like you’re perfect). He might have meant well when he signed the so-called “No Child Left Behind” Act into law, but I think it’s clear by now that some children should be left behind. Most children, if we’re honest with ourselves.
Bush had a totalizing stranglehold on the entertainment world from 2000 to 2007. He was The Issue. I remember Bush jokes going through a cycle: first they were funny, then they were lame, then they went beyond lame and became funny again, because you assumed the person was attempting ironic anti-comedy. (“That Gilligan’s Island show, huh? If they’re so smart they can build a radio out of a coconut, how come they can’t fix the dang hole in the boat? Who writes this shit? George Bush? Wacka wacka!”)
In 2000, a celebrity’s street cred hinged on one thing: can I find a quote of them threatening to bloodily disembowl Bush on the front page of a Google or AltaVista search, yes or no? Midriff-baring teen pop chanteuse Britney Spears sealed her fate as a ditz when she said “I think we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that.” Conversely, every moribund rock band from Ministry to Green Day resurged to a minor comeback by being willing to say “fuck Bush” on record—comebacks that usually burned out years before Bush left office. He tended to outlast his critics.
Bush’s influence on the internet has waned significantly. In 2025, his main legacy to pop culture is the internet meme below: an expression of polite concern while someone (White House Chief of Staff Andy Card) whispers in his ear.
Bush is a fascinating case of how internet memes tend to devour their subject. Call it Bugs Bunny Syndrome. Bugs was a character designed to be charismatic, cool, fun, and interesting—a trickster God, a fast-talking smart-aleck, Loki fused at the medial lobe with Clark Gable. A character designed to survive the ages and never diminishing to anything less than his whole. It didn’t work. The internet swallowed him, then shat out a disgusting corpse. Bugs Bunny’s existence has collapsed to a single frame from a 1941 Bob Clampett short where he looks fat and weird. That’s it. See what time makes of us.
They don’t even call him Bugs Bunny anymore.
So you’ll have to trust me when I say that Bush was more than a pretty face. He was reknowned as an orator. The speeches he delivered will be stared at—not read, *stared at*—for generations to come. He declaimed fearful, awe-inspiring words over the American project. Words to be written in letters as deep as a spear is long on the firestones on the Secret Hill. Words to be read by flickering torchlight on the crumbling walls of an ancient Mayan temple, while the camera pans onto the explorer’s shocked face.
He was a 9th-dan blackbelt of the “Bushism”—a unique rhetorical style that I don’t think anyone else ever mastered. You can Google Bushisms for complete lists. A “just the hits” playlist would include:
“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”
“Rarely is the question asked: is our children learning?”
“There’s an old saying in Tennessee—I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, ‘Fool me once, shame on…shame on you.‘ Fool me—you can’t get fooled again.”
Bush spoke earnest yet odd sentences that were both incredibly funny and uniquely malformed.
“Just like Donald J Trump!” That’s where we part ways, friend. Trump is funny but not particularly earnest. Bush meant every word he misspoke. Also, I’ve often heard people do successful impressions of Trump, but have never heard a successful off-brand Bushism.
Why do I like Bushisms so much?
I think it’s the delivery. George Meyer (writer for The Simpsons) once observed that a true fan of comedy laughs at the setup, not the punchline. You don’t laugh when Homer Simpson knocks over a stack of wineglasses, you laugh when the wineglasses get stacked in the first place (you’re thinking two steps ahead, and know that Homer will soon come blundering into the room.)
Bush is a man who knows 1) what words he should say 2) how they should be said. All the pieces are there…but then the words just come out wrong. Maybe he’s nervous, or maybe he’s mentally retarded. But it’s this mismatch of intent and outcome that makes Bushisms hilarious. You sense the furiously noble intent behind them…and then he fails. He probably stayed up late practicing his speech in front of a mirror, and it still did no good. He furrows his brow, clenches his hands to the stand…and then spews out nonsense. His frustration and failure is palpable, and (to me, at least) hugely relatable.
This is another area where he differs from Trump. Most of Trump’s words provoke a reaction of “what was he even trying to say?”
I do not understand Trump’s words. I do not even think there’s even that much to understand: it’s all just blurted out top-of-the-head shit. He does not plan his speeches, and feels no shame when he misspeaks. You’re kind of a sucker for reading anything into them. Spend thirty seconds thinking about anything Trump says, and that’s half a minute more than Trump did.
When Bush mangled a sentence, you could always see the unmangled version of what he was trying to say, pure and unsullied and unspoken—like a puppy playing in heaven while its Earthly body lies mashed into the road by an eighteen-wheeler. There’s always a smart, dignified version of Bush’s words. This seldom the case for Trump. Take his comments about John McCain to Frank Lunz.
And I supported him, I supported him for president. I raised a million dollars for him. It’s a lot of money. I supported him. He lost, he let us down. He lost. So I’d never liked him as much after that because I don’t like losers. He’s a war hero. (…) He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured, okay?
A fairly offensive statement. But what’s interesting is that there’s no possible way it could have not been offensive.
The statement is predicated on Trump’s personal preference being the thing to care about. It’s not a discussion of John McCain’s qualities: it’s a discussion of whether Trump “likes” the man or not. That’s the important thing here at stake here—Trump’s likes and dislikes. He sounds like he’s talking about ice cream flavors.
“He’s a war hero with sprinkles. And I like war heroes without sprinkles. I like war heroes with a chocolate topping, okay?”
There is literally no way Trump’s words could ever not have been a trainwreck. In George Meyer’s The Simpsons metaphor, it’s like if Homer stumbled through a bunch of glasses that were already smashed when they came out of the factory.
Imagine if he’d said the opposite of what he’d said. “I like John McCain, even though he was a loser. He got captured, but I still like him. I like all war heroes equally, even the ones who got captured.” …It’s still barely less offensive!
I find it difficult to imagine Trump’s brain. It must be a scary place. Thoughts get ripped from dendrites and flung screaming into the world like baby birds catapulted out of their nests before their feathers have even dried. Few people are like him. His brain is truly alien. I can’t even compare him to ChatGPT, which has been known to solve high level math problems occasionally.
I find George Bush far more relatable. Donald J Trump is an alien, but George W Bush is the ur-human. Few of us have his gift of rhetoric, but we all know what it’s like to have amazing thoughts and have them come out a disgusting slurry.
Bush is inside us all. We’ve all spiritually looked awkward in a cowboy hat, haven’t we? We’ve all painted a malformed dog or two, metaphorically speaking. We’ve all been figuratively elected by nonliteral hanging chads in some allegorical Palm Beach County of the soul.
