This one kind of came out of nowhere. I’ve been unaware of it until a Facebook friend linked another friend to it and I just happened to see the post. This is a deceptive trailer. At first, I thought it was some kind of low budget zombie thing because it certainly carries that vibe and in spite of zombies more or less running out of gas as a low budget vehicle, but there’s a lot more going on here and it’s looking pretty interesting.
Here’s a paraphrased version of the really long synopsis on the official site: By 2015 we’re out of oil and society breaks down in the face of overpopulation and not enough resources to go around. A giant and shadowy corporation introduces a depopulation program but a rebel crew of scientists introduce a drug, instead, that reduces the dosed humans to savage creatures without sight. One of the last survivors is a lone hunter-gatherer just trying to survive while staving off attacks from the post-humans, now called Biosyns. Meanwhile, the Corporations genetically engineered trackers are out to kill him, fearing that he may be the antidote to their drug.
Just watch the trailer. I’m oversimplifying things. Then head over the movie’s website and read the synopsis and see photos. This movie looks like a really cool piece of indie horror. If you’ve got a Netflix account, you can stream this flick right now. I’ll be checking it out tonight. Thanks for the tip, Andrea.
I caught this documentary on IFC years ago, it would seem, and it’s incredibly awesome. American horror came to a crossroads in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead. It was a pivotal moment that would change the rules of horror filmmaking forever and usher in a wave of big scares and fresh ideas going into the 70′s. Nothing was sacred. Everything was fair game and among the exploitative trash that was clogging the pipes in cinema in the 70′s were some big gems from young American Filmmakers. The American Nightmare documentary explores what it was about George A. Romero, Tobe Hooper, Wes Craven and John Carpenter and the films they produced that made the horror genre so vivid and culturally relevant and explains how the genre has always been a social mirror to reflect the times that we live in.
In case you need to know how many ways that Halloween set the pace for the American slasher movie, consider how common it was for your average slasher movie, circa 1982, to be set on some kind of holiday. I guess we can argue that Black Christmas (Review) was there first with this idea but I never really considered that one a slasher. It’s missing some key ingredients, mostly due in part to it being the first of its kind. If anything, it’s a Canuxploitation variant of the giallo. But I digress. There are a couple of key holidays that, for some reason, have gone without the slasher treatment and I’m stumped as to why that is. Thanksgiving got Rothed in the fake trailers portion of Grindhouse and to this day it remains untouched by the slasher paradigm. The other notable exception, until 1997, was Independence Day. For some reason, the Fourth of July has remained off-limits to horror filmmakers for whatever reason. Jaws is set on the 4th but the date is incidental. It never becomes the focal point of the movie. Rather, a gigantic fucking robot shark does.
Today, you’ll no doubt be too busy to chill and read a review of a trashy horrror movie, what with all the barbecue you’ll be eating, beer you’ll be drinking and fireworks you’ll be watching and if I had my way, I’d be watching a motherfucking marathon of The Twilight Zone but someone over at, ahem, SyFy decided that The Zone was old-school and Greatest American Hero was a more appropriate for a Fourth Of July marathon, a show that no one remembers save for the fucking theme song. SyFy can eat cocks. Here’s a review of Uncle Sam.
Infant Xenomorphs never really struck me as something that might be delicious. In fact, I think the biggest turn off would be the first bite when a sudden rush of acidic body fluids from the alien burn your head from the rest of your body. Then again, maybe something in the preparation process would drain the alien of those fluids but is it really safe? I mean, the blood of the one Xeno on the Nostromo burned through something like four bulkheads. Argh! I sure am getting anxious about something that’s not even real, aren’t I? Whatevs. Propmaster supreme on our currently on-hiatus web series, How To Survive The Strange, Sean O’Connell, linked this from his Facebook profile and I couldn’t resist. I don’t post about science fiction enough and with something this cool and original, I couldn’t resist. A French dude with a reputation for being grumpy and a blog to match posted the details and photos of a birthday party he threw for a friend of his with a menu boosted from classic science fiction novels, TV and movie themes.
The menu had the main course of chest burster (pictured above, from Alien/s), a pitcher of Slurm (Futurama), Klingon Gagh (worms from Star Trek), Bao (a chinese meat bun featured in Firefly) a myriad of spide-related items (Dune) and Soylent Green (from the novel Make Room! Make Room! or, if you must, the eponymous Heston flick).
There’s a series of killer photos to accompany this and explanations on how to do it, yourself. Do check it out!
If you’re just joining us and haven’t been following me on Twitter or the Facebook, you’ve missed months of me going on and on about how excited I am to finally have a comic published. I also reviewed the first volume of Zombie Bomb just prior to its release before the Boston Comic Con, where it sold out in mere hours. What can I say? I liked it a lot. It was a great book. This time around, Rich Woodall and Adam Miller have been keeping it quiet and I’ve only gotten a brief preview of comics to come in volume 2, apart from my own, that is. It’s shaping up to be a kick ass comic. Better than the first, even. I’ve seen the colored and lettered version of my contribution, This Night I’ll Eat Your Flesh, and it had my pulse racing at the very excitement of seeing my story come to life on the page. It was a short that Rich Woodall liked so much, he did some rearranging of his own workload in order to do the pencils, himself, and I couldn’t be happier with the results. Seriously. It’s fucking awesome! This is not to downplay the contributions of the other two artists on the story. Lawrence Basso, who I want to call Lance Bass so badly, turned in an appropriately nasty color job for the story that accentuates Rich’s pencils perfectly and the lettering, by Matt Talbot, even expresses every nuance of the dialog. When I finally get to hold the printed version of the comic, it’ll be a transcendent moment for me and when you get to hold the printed version of the comic, you’ll get to see a kick ass zombie comic. Honestly. Even the unbearably negative jackasses at Ain’t It Cool News’ Talkback compared the book to Heavy Metal Magazine, which is a staggeringly sweet analogy.
San Diego Comic Con kicks off on July 22nd, showering the internet with big-hype movie news, a new stand-up talking show from Kevin Smith and more photos of chicks in Leia slave garb than you can shake a stick at. It also brings the launch of Zombie Bomb volume 2 which you’ll be able to buy directly from Terminal Press at the show and at their website. I’m not positive at this time, but I believe they’ll have had a distribution deal worked out with Diamond at that point and you’ll also be able to order from Previews and find it on your local comic shop’s shelf. But don’t quote me. Check it out below, bitches, and see what I have in store for you when I put my own spin on the classic EC formula of irony in a horror comic. Click on each to see a larger view.
You can probably tell that I watch a lot of movies and because of the context of this site I tend to see a rather large amount of the same kind of movie. There’s a lot of overlap there and you tend to see the same themes visited over and over again. That’s fine, too. I just happen to love watching horror and sci-fi movies and since I’m getting most of these flicks for free these days, I can’t really complain. Not to pat myself on the back too hard but being a celebrated movie blogger has its perks. The downside to this is that I feel like I’ve seen the same movie about a thousand times and I’m often obligated to review these pictures because of my personal code that if I ask for a copy of a review screener, I have to review it.
Such is the case with Salvage. I saw the solicitation come in and I asked for a copy to review based on the admittedly vague synopsis that came with the press release. It sounded fairly original. What I discovered upon viewing it was that I had actually seen Salvage many times over. Not literally, of course. I’m talking about in the metaphorical way that the plot is very familiar and that I’ve seen a lot of these kinds of movies before. It has all the necessary ingredients to be any given siege movie. But here’s the rub, Salvage is actually pretty cool.
A lot of people have this impression of New Hampshire like it’s a small state and while it is in comparison to god damn Alaska or California, a drive from the Seacoast, where I live, to Keene, where The Colonial is is a long fucking drive. Yet one of these days I plan on making it out to a Spooktacular. I love special theatrical engagements for old movies since I’m one of those rapidly aging horror fans, boldly proclaiming that they don’t make them like they used to. But they don’t! Plus, the theatrical experience isn’t what it used to be and a house like The Colonial is exactly the kind of place you want to go to see Son Of Godzilla but I’m getting ahead of myself.
What is Spooktacular? Well, it’s your average revival cinema experience. The fine folks of New Hampshire’s own horror-host program, Saturday Fright Special team up with Keene’s Colonial Theater periodically to put on a special show with a killer 35mm feature presentation, trailers, bumpers, cartoons and prizes. I’m told that they’re a good time. Back in the day, Universal even had a new print of King Kong vs. Godzilla struck just for these guys so they’re definitely on the up and up. I’m living vicariously through Mark Nelson, aka the guy putting this whole show on since I can only seem to project crappy movies in a gas station parking lot out of the back of my car. They got an actual theater to project their movie! The mind boggles!
The film tells the touching tale of the bond between a father and son (who just happen to be 30-story giant lizards), and what happens when giant insects come between them.
The SPOOKTACULAR will also feature prize giveaways including an original Godzilla sketch from renowned artist S.R. Bissette, as well as signed copies of a new Bissette comic that will premiere at the event. The costumed cast from Saturday Fright Special will be on hand to introduce the film and mingle with the public.
Yes. Stephen Bissette. He of Swamp Thing fame. You know? The pencils during that run where Alan Moore turned Swamp Thing into one of the greatest horror comics of all time.
This is an all ages event. For god’s sake! If you go, bring your kids, brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces. Bring somebody’s kid to this show! Turn them on to the wonderful world of matinees and Godzilla! They’ll thank you for it when they’re 34 and running a high profile horror movie blog.
Ho-lee shit! Here’s a trailer where a Japanese guy does an awful lot of yelling but I can’t blame him. It’s a pretty exciting trailer. From Quiet Earth:
Set in 2220, the pic will depict the evacuation of 300 million people from Earth to avoid certain death from an expanding black hole. The Yamato, a space battleship, is leading the rescue fleet when it is attacked by an alien force.
That doesn’t really sound like Space Battleship Yamato to me. As a matter of fact, I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. The original space opera is about humanity’s last stand in the face of an alien race that renders the surface of the Earth uninhabitable and some elements of the trailer back this up. If you listen closely, you can hear one of the characters say the word Iscandar, which is the destination planet in the show. There’s also a shot of what looks like a meteor heading toward Earth, which is what the Gamilon weapon looked like so maybe Quiet Earth has their details wrong.
They’re still holding out on us in the Wave Motion Gun department, too, which is frustrating as hell. If you’re unfamiliar with the ship, the mouth on the bow of the Yamato is actually a gigantic fucking gun and when they fired it up on the show, the effect was spectacular. You could break a planet in half with that thing. I’m guessing that when they actually break it out in the movie, it’ll be a pretty big deal. The space battles look absolutely gigantic, on par with those space fights in Battlestar Galactica when a cloud of Cylons would attack and the screen would be nothing but explosions and ordinance. I hope I’m not getting my hopes too high, though. The director is a guy named Takashi Yamazaki, who directed a minor cult picture called The Returner, which somehow managed to rip off just about every science fiction movie ever. It was fun but really quite bad.
Nobody ever asks me about The Delta Force. If there was one thing I wish more people asked me about, it’s that movie. I love it. I rank it pretty high among my favorite 80′s action movies, actually. I’m not even a Chuck Norris fan, either. Go ahead, get the Norris jokes out of your system now. That shit stopped being funny around the time Chuck started talking to media seriously about secession and being the President of the sovereign Republic of Texas. Who knew the karate kicking Texas Ranger was also crazy as hell? It sure caught me by surprise. Setting that aside, though, The Delta Force has a lot going for it. Among that wave of baroque, jingoistic action movies from the time, The Delta Force has the advantage of being ripped from the headlines and around the time it went into production, airline hijackings and hostages in the Middle East was on everybody’s mind. I mean, John Rambo parachutes into the jungle looking for POWs and finds that the last vestiges of the Viet Cong are still hiding out in the canopy, backed by commie Soviets? How the fuck am I supposed to take that seriously? I know, I know, Rambo: First Blood Part 2, was also kinda sorta ripped from the headlines, but that’s another story for another time. It also benefits from having a killer cast featuring Cannon favorite, Martin Balsam, Bo Svenson and Lee Fucking Marvin in his last performance before his death in 1987. Sure, he looks kind of confused on the poster and his bazooka is going off randomly to his left but you have to take my word for it. He’s just as awesome in The Delta Force as he is in The Dirty Dozen!
Nobody did these super flag waving flicks quite like The Cannon Group, either. For the sake of argument, let’s forget all the shit they did like The Apple and Breakin’ 2 and think about the sheer volume of Reagan-era republican balls that this production company celebrated. You’d think the White House was personally sending Cannon checks to make the most basic yay-America boo-everybody else movies possible and none of them spoke as loudly as The Delta Force. I’ll tell you why: The Cannon Group was headed up by producers Manahem Golan and Yoram Globus, a pair of Israeli filmmakers who were Roger Corman graduates with a serious mad-on for Arabic aggression toward Israel and Jews in general. Because of this, The Delta Force keeps one foot in a disturbing place juxtaposing the real-world horror of Islamic terrorism with motorcycles that launch mini-rockets from the handle bars. Dig?
Every now and then I go on a vampire kick. Can you blame me? They’re pretty sexy monsters. I also wrote a short piece about how Dracula is my favorite vampire movie for The Vault of Horror/Brutal As Hell collaboration, Lucky 13, so I’m sort of in that mode right now. Movies are one thing, but if there’s another place that the vampire allure has also proliferated, it’s music. The idea of young and sexy forever is extremely compatible with rock. So for your enjoyment, here’s 10 songs about vampires.
The Pretty Reckless -- Make Me Wanna Die
My wife, Denise, turned me on to this one. Prior to her mentioning the band, I’d never heard of them or their singer, Taylor Momsen, who I guess is some kind of actress on Gossip Girl. Never seen the show but she turns out a fairly smoky performance of a song full of veiled references to vampires.
Concrete Blonde -- Bloodletting
By the time Concrete Blonde released Bloodletting, they’d been at it a while without making much of an impact on the rock world. They had a brief hit with their single Joey but that was about it and it’s a shame because they’re pretty good and singer, Johnette Napolitano puts on a hell of a show. This song lifts a lot of themes from Anne Rice novels.
Bauhaus -- Bela Lugosi’s Dead
Chances are if you’re reading this, you know who Bauhaus is and if that’s the case then you definitely know Bela Lugosi’s Dead. It’s not entirely clear what the song is actually about and even though the band is on record about how the song was some kind of obtuse joke, they unwittingly spawned an entire genre of music with devotees clad head to toe in black, silver jewelry and white makeup to get that vampire look just right.
Roky Erickson -- Night of the Vampire
Roky Erickson made his name as the frontman for The 13th Floor Elevators, allgedly the first band to coin the term psychedelic rock. Heavy acid use and some troubles with the law in native Texas wound Roky up in a mental facility where he went even crazier and when he came out, he released a collection of songs with a heavy horror bent.
Wesley Willis -- Vampire Bat
Continuing with the theme of vampirism and mental illness, here’s Wesley Willis. The late Chicago schizophrenic “musician” was known for a shit ton of songs about whatever happened to be on his mind at the time and were often performed to the preset songs on his keyboard. Most of them began with the words “once upon a time”. Wesley is confused about the differences between bats and birds and exactly how a bat might extract blood from a human but then again, Wesley was confused about most things.
Mazzy Star -- Taste of Blood
It’s a shame that Mazzy Star never broke out bigger than they did. Back when radio was hungry for anything moody and “alternative”, their single Fade Into You popped into MTV rotation and then they were never heard from again, leaving most people with the impression that Mazzy Star was the name of the singer, whose name is actually Hope Sandoval. In actuality, they released three really good albums full of moody, jangly pop songs, combining shoegaze with The Doors. Among those pop songs is this one about being killed by a vampire.
Slayer -- At Dawn They Sleep
It’s actually kind of alarming to me that Slayer has a song about vampires. The horror of their lyrics has often been relegated to Satan and true-crime death metal variations on horror. This one’s from their second album, Hell Awaits, an album that I really don’t care much for. Show No Mercy hasn’t exactly aged well, but it’s still a killer album and a tough one to follow and in my opinion, Hell Awaits doesn’t really stand up, but here’s what it sounds like when a thrash band takes on the vampire thing. See? It’s not just for goths!
Outkast -- Dracula’s Wedding
Speaking of not just for goths. Here’s what happens when hip-hop takes on vampires. Dracula’s Wedding appears on The Love Below half of the Outkast double album with Speakerboxxx, that is, Andre 3000′s half of the album. Outkast has always been on the edge of hip-hop conventions but without Big Boi to tether him, Andre 3000 released what basically amounts to his interpretation of Purple Rain. The whole album is abstract and silly but everything lived in the shadow of Hey Ya, a single so strong that is absorbed just about everything else on the album.
Calabrese -- Vampires Don’t Exist
I really wanted to avoid writing about a horror punk band because just about every one of them has a song about a vampire and just about every one of them sounds like The Misfits but Calabrese is the official band of Cinema Suicide and I fucking love this song.
Type O Negative -- Black No. 1
I hate to speak ill of the dead but I always hated Peter Steele’s lyrics. The guy had a great voice, for sure, but the melodrama of “happy Halloween, baby” gives me eye strain from rolling them so hard and let’s not even approach the lyric, “boo bitch craft”. What the fuck is that? What would a list of vampire music be without at least one Type O Negative song, though? That was pretty much their thing and sometimes Peter Steele’s issues with enunciation in the vocals department led me to believe that he was singing with a pair of plastic fangs capping his canines.
This one kind of came out of nowhere. I’ve been unaware of it until a Facebook friend linked another friend to it and I just happened to see the post. This is a deceptive trailer. At first, I thought it was some kind of low budget zombie thing because it certainly carries that vibe and in spite of zombies more or less running out of gas as a low budget vehicle, but there’s a lot more going on here and it’s looking pretty interesting.
