Cinema Suicide

I’m plowing through this baby for review right now, but while you wait for my righteous assessment of Ben Thompson’s, he who maintains the website, Badass of the Week, catalog of impossibly driven warriors and conquerors, you can enter my contest to win 1 of 2 copies which have been generously provided to me by the fine folks of Harper Collins Publishing.

To enter, all you have to do is send an email to bryan@cinema-suicide.com. In the subject line, enter Suicidal Book Club Giveaway and in the body of the email tell me who your favorite historical ass kicker is. Next wednesday, the 11th, all winners will gather in the Cinema Suicide battledrome and you will fight to the death. The remaining two gladiators will be rewarded with one copy each of Badass by Ben Thompson.

In truth, winners will  be chosen at random and no one will be hurt, unless they ask to be.

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They of Calabrese, the greatest horror punk band in the world, also being the official band of Cinema Suicide, have hit their site and Myspace page with a couple of items that I’m pretty excited about. First up is the new album art, to the left there, by one of my favorite running comic artists at the moment, Eric Powell (who does the ever-awesome horror comic, The Goon). Click on the image to get a better look. Secondly is the album title. The winner of their contest to name the album, Bianca Vargas, named the album Calabrese III – They Call Us Death. The album is said to land in February and I couldn’t be more excited.  I tell you this because their leadoff single, Violet Hellfire, is pretty righteous. You can hear it on their Myspace profile.

If you’re still not wise to Calabrese, these guys carry the torch for The Misfits and write a series of songs pretaining to monsters, ghosts, evil and teenage alienation. Each song is saturated in catchy hooks and carefully crafted choruses that were designed specifically for the spooky sing-along crowd. Find out more at the official website of Calabrese, their Myspace profile and the Calabrese twitter feed.

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Here we are. The final post in the blog-a-thon and I’m actually a day late on this. October has been an unreasonably busy month. Such is life when you run a blog where the bulk of the writing is dedicated to horror. The last four days, however, have been particularly busy. I don’t know what it’s like out there wherever you are, but our families live out here in New Hampshire, spread across a couple of different communities, each of which stage their Halloween nights on different nights. This weekend, we’ve done trick or treating with Delilah in Brentwood and then over to Hampton.

Night 1: This neighborhood, one of a couple of dense housing developments in an otherwise barren landscape of dragstrips, speedways, the county prison and John Birch Society bunkers, was a zoo. Hundreds of kids ran wild on this steez for two hours. We took Delilah out and then managed our own handing out of candy for the rest of the night.

Night 2: Actual Halloween night. I somehow managed to pull together a rudimentary costume pulled from clothing items borrowed from my brother and a friend at work plus some modded horns to look as though The Devil was going to court (pictured above). Delilah wore her costume again which coincidentally, she thought was a Tinkerbell costume, and my gorgeous wife, Nise, dressed to the nines in her demonic pixie outfit to complete the triad of the most infernal family on The Seacoast. Together, we hit Hampton for more candy, briefly and then made the rounds around friend’s homes, which somehow culminated in the beginnings of a boozy Halloween night. The evening’s original plans were to hit Portsmouth for the Halloween parade. The Halloween parade, whose beginnings were rooted in the local demonstrators, The Leftist Marching Band, had grown to East Village proportions and now on Halloween, Portsmouth had become a mob scene that put the 4th of July and New Year’s Eve to shame… which is why we couldn’t find parking and had to beat it. Our intentions were to park it somewhere in town, look really good together as we made our way to Market Square to see the Thriller Dance group do their thing (video below) since I’m friends with the organizer, Tara Sullivan. Unfortunately, we just couldn’t do it and wound up heading home, putting Delilah to bed and then drinking the rest of the night away.

In summation, best Halloween ever. I’m not sure if the Blog-A-Thon had something to do with it, but the spirit of the season had a hold of me tightly and idle chatter about donning a costume and doing something actually took shape and became a fun family outting for a couple of days. Unfortunately, with the passing of the season, it seems like the rest of the year is a foregone conclusion. It’s all downhill from here since Thanksgiving is a gigantic pain in the ass and Christmas is probably the most stressful time of the year. At least I have the New Year’s Eve Twilight Zone marathon to look forward to now.

Happy Halloween, everyone!

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Here we are, bearing down on the final day of the Blog-A-Thon and the final day of my busiest month of the year. Tomorrow night marks the end of the pagan calendar so I thought it might be interesting to show off what the pagans will be doing tomorrow. Here are a couple of videos to illustrate the pagan ritual on Samhain. Everyone does this differently since there’s no dogma in the heathen religions. Every grove and coven has their own traditions. Here are a few that can be found on Youtube.

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I did this last year as well and we’re already making plans for next year. With only three quick appearances on the show Word of Mouth for New Hampshire Public Radio, I have become the defacto Word Of Mouth horror movie guy. Last year, I showed up for their Halloween special equipped with a list of movies that you could show your kids and not feel bad about (article here) and this year I turned out to the airwaves with a Halloween horror movie triple play and some suggestions for music to play when you throw your own film festival in your living room. For ten minutes I talked about a couple of old favorites (The Sentinel and The Fog) and a new one (Trick ‘r Treat). I’ll spare you the details because the Word of Mouth production crew goes to the wall to turn out  a great show and host Virginia Prescott is a great radio personality.

Since this is the World Wide Web, that series of tubes that we all know and love so much, not all of you are right in New Hampshire to tune in (but wouldn’t that be weird if you were?). So for your benefit and the benefit of your friends, whom I encourage to listen in and leave a comment at their site, here is a link to the New Hampshire Public Radio appearance of your truly.

Click here to head over to the Word of Mouth site and select either Windows Media or MP3 to stream the segment.

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I looked back on these Blog-A-Thon posts today and realized that I’ve been pretty old-timey in terms of subject matter. There has been a lot about radio broadcasts and whatnot and I think there’s a reason for that. Modern times leave us with no mystery. If we see something cool for the first time, an hour later we’re an expert on the subject thanks to the internet and an endless set of resources with which to educate ourselves. Halloween, at least when I was a kid, had a ton of mystery to it. The origins of the holiday were shrouded in mystery, all the spooky local legends came out in full force on that night and I love a good mystery. So Halloween always takes me back to being a kid when parts of the Halloween experience still scared me. Be they finding myself drawn into the Frank Langella Dracula (a memory that has stuck out in my mind since I was 12, for some reason), stalking through the cemetery across the street from our house as a shortcut to a nearby neighborhood we hadn’t hit yet or tuning into the local college radio station, WUNH, on that night that the broadcast was nothing but a spooky ambient soundtrack set to the Stephen King book-on-tape of The Mist. I think back and there seemed to be a time when local TV and radio went to the wall to turn out the best scary programming they could. In spite of Christmas being the ad-buy powerhouse that the season tends to be, these stations put far more energy into their Halloween night broadcasts and had a lot more fun. While searching through archive.org the other night for Halloween themed audio (where I found those seance and War of the Worlds recordings), I also found this one, an entire night of Halloween AM radio programming, which includes a really great update of The War of the Worlds.

This is WKBW, an AM station in Buffalo, New York from Halloween night in1973. Along with The War of the Worlds, you also get some spooky storytelling and radio plays. It’s a shame that no one does this anymore. So get comfortable. This is a long one.

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I’m going straight unconventional with this Halloween post. I want it to be known that Cinema Suicide isn’t just a horror movie blog. I’m often unfairly pegged as strictly horror. True, the bulk of the writing goes out to the genre but that’s only because it’s what’s happening right now. I’m actually a fan of revival cinema in all forms and one that I don’t get enough of are Italian war movies. A while back, I did a write up of Severin’s stellar release of Enzo G. Castellari’s Dirty Dozen knock off, Inglorious Bastards (review). Now they’re back with another release of Enzo’s war epic, Eagles Over London. They sent me a copy for evaluation and I’m here, bearing down on Halloween, to tell you why you might want to take a night off from the evening’s creepy festivities and take in the historical flavor of one of World War 2’s turning points, The Battle Of Britain.

What does all of this have to do with Halloween, you ask? On October 31, 1940, the British Air Force managed to resist and push back the nigh-unstoppable German Luftwaffe in the face of certain defeat. Earlier that year, the German war machine had dealt some crushing blows to the French and British armies and England began pulling back troops as France negotiated an armistice with Germany. Castellari’s movie, Eagles Over London, wraps the story of England’s fight around a tale of Nazi infiltrators in England. And it’s awesome.

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You know me. I’m never really starved for words. I can run on and on and on at length about whatever because I excel at the gentle art of bullshit, but this trailer had me on my knees. I don’t know what to say. That is, I don’t know what to say that will make any kind of sense. I could sit here and slap the keyboard with my open hand as some kind of accurate, albeit abstract, expression of my enthusiasm but what we need here is a concrete narrative that describes my actual feelings about the trailer that you’re about to watch.

Know this: It has samurai. It has ninjas. The ninjas flip out. People fight with swords and it all looks really feudal and Japanese. But get this; there are space ships and missiles and a lot of other anachronistic stuff that seems perfectly at home in what looks like a sweet chanbara filtered through the sensibilities of a young music video director. All of this is coming from Irish director, Gary Shore.

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On October 31st, 1938, the front page of the New York Times read as such: Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact. You see, the night before, Orson Welles took to the airwaves on a show called Mercury Theater on the Air and presented a series of news bulletins that described beings from Mars descending on Earth and roasting everything that moved with a frightening, unstoppable group of war machines. For nearly an hour, as part of their show, Welles kept listeners glued to their radios as he and his production team proceeded to freak out an estimated 6 million listeners. According to Welles in his live radio adaptation of the classic H.G. Welles sci-fi story, an invading force from Mars crashes in a field in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey and promptly begins killing everyone in sight before succumbing to Earth’s germs, which they were unprepared for.

Since the original broadcast, Orson Welles’ production has been cited as the undisputed case study for mass hysteria. History has adopted the press’ account from that night that people up and down the east coast were convinced that this was it for the world and were either offing themselves and their families in fear of death by death ray or they were holing up in their basements, waiting for the end to come. Yet, in the 71 years that have passed since that night, many have come to question the intial reports that the papers, then in fear of radio as the deathstroke for the printed word, were blowing this story wildly out of proportion and that suicides, rioting and looting were breaking out all over the place thanks to Welles and his brilliant way with fooling everyone. However, did you know:

• During the broadcast, at the beginning, middle and end of the show, there are spoken reminders that it is a work of fiction.
• Though broadcast in 1938, the story actually takes place in 1939
• Hitler cited the broadcast’s effect as evidence of the decadence and corrupt condition of democracy
• The War of the Worlds was not the first radio stunt to pull this crap. In 1926, the BBC aired a hoax broadcast called Broadcasting From The Barricades, alleging that London was in the midst of a violent, bloody uprising.

A couple of the root causes for the panic, which undeniably took place, just not in the capacity that history has accepted it, were that Mercury Theater on the Air was a small-time show, running opposite the top-rate show at the time, The Chase and Sanborn Hour. As the Chase and Sanborn show went into a musical number after the 12 minute mark, listeners began to channel surf and caught War of the Worlds in progress, just as the broadcaster began to announce the opening of the Martian meteor containing the invaders and their subsequent devastation of everything. Also, this was 1938 in the days leading up to World War 2. Hitler and The Germans were always in the paper and a war with Germany was an inevitability. What many people, just tuning in, thought they were hearing were the early stages of an invasion by Germans, not Martians.

The War of the Worlds has become so synonymous with mass hyseria and widespread public panic that it is an experiment that has been attempted more than once. Radio Quito, of Ecuador, broadcast their own version of the radioplay in 1949, and wound up at the end of the night with their studio in flames and 7 dead thanks to the ensuing riot. In 1992, the BBC aired Ghostwatch (review), an alleged paranormal investigation show gone horribly wrong on Halloween night that results in injuries, disappearances and the demonic possession of BBC news personalities. There are also countless reproductions and adaptations for film and television. Orson Welles and The War of the Worlds are an American treasure and proof positive of the public’s gullibility and willingness to melt down over the supidest things.

UPDATE: Why the hell not? Here’s the original Mercury Theater on the Air broadcast of The War of the Worlds

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The road to Fury Road has been a long one. Seems like they’ve been talking about a new Mad Max movie publicly for at least six years and in that time it has gone from another sequel, to a remake to an animated film. Judging by the photos below, though, it’s looking as though Mad Max: Fury Road is going to be some kind of reboot. One of the cars below is a V8 Interceptor, similar in style to the last Interceptor that winds up destroyed in The Road Warrior. This also puts the kibosh on rumors of Mel Gibson taking the wheel again (which is kind of a relief). There are no solid casting choices yet, according to director George Miller, but there are rumors going around of Sam Worthington and Charlize Theron starring in the movie, which begins production next year in New South Wales, Australia. Apart from the Gibson rumor, the latest crazy-ass casting rumors are about Theron’s role in the movie. Word on the street has it that the Max in Mad Max may be short for Maxine or something equally as feminine as Theron is said to be up for the lead… which I happen to think is a really bad idea.

So no cast details. No plot details, though I do have to wonder where they’re going to set this movie. If it’s a reboot, are we going back to the beginning where society is crumbling or are they just going to dump us in some kind of post-holocaust setting (though it’s never explicitly stated what happens in the Mad Max world to make things so bad)? I hate to be a downer about this movie but I always felt that Mad Max and The Road Warrior (I don’t much care for Thunderdome) were specimens of a time and place and this feeling was very much supported by a recent viewing of Not Quite Hollywood (review), a documentary about Australian exploitation movies. No matter. Feast your eyes on this pair of photos, revealing the designs of the new V8 Interceptor and some rusted out hulk with the biggest fucking engine block and blower I’ve ever seen.

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Ordinarily, I’d relegate this review to the old Android’s Dungeon group of reviews but we’re here on the home stretch of Halloween posts and I need Halloween themed material. There was a period in my comic reading biography where I could no longer stand to read super hero books. DC had been in a slump for years with a string of huge event books and publicity stunts (like killing Superman) and Marvel had put all their juice into mutant books and those bore a lot in common with daytime soaps. This is the spot when I finally let my guard down and in a desperate frenzy for a paper and ink fix, I turned to the imprint that I should have been reading all along. I discovered Vertigo and I loved it. It was sophisticated and weird. The problem was, however, that I was picking it up as most of Vertigo’s big guns were moving on to do major league books like JLA or were giving up comics for novels. At least I had a rich history of canon to explore.

The House Of Mystery Annual almost seems like a reminder that for all the books like DMZ and Y: The Last Man, the larger bulk of titles in the Vertigo line-up are actually part of the DC Universe. It sets a wraparound story set in the titular House Of Mystery to give you short four or five page stories from currently running Vertigo titles and one upcoming title. A mask, ejected accidentally from The Dreaming winds up bound to a girl’s face and shows her what it has done to people in the past. There’s a Hellblazer short, a Madame Xanadu short, one from The Dreaming and one from Mike Allred’s upcoming horror book, I, Zombie, and it’s great!

It warms my heart that anthology horror books are on the rebound. This one features some of DC’s best weird and horror fiction comics teams and it’s a consistently strong book from cover to cover even though it’s fairly clear that no one team knew what the others were doing. They were probably given an image of the mask and the idea that their story would be a smaller part of a larger tapestry, the comic book equivalent to an exquisite corpse. It’s fun and it’s a great way to introduce yourself to a bunch of books you either haven’t read in a long time (Hellblazer and The Dreaming are both still quite good) or maybe you haven’t read at all (I gave Madame Xanadu a shot and didn’t care for it) and one that you should be excited for (Mike Allred is the shit and I, Zombie looks like it’s going to be outstanding!). It’s a big book with a lot to see. Definitely put it in your pull list if you like horror comics.

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Maybe some ideas are best left in the grave. Dracula: The Un-Dead hit the horror wire a few months ago with a fair bit of hype. The reasons for this are that the book  was based on notes from Bram Stoker, himself. They were a series of unused plot points and concepts that didn’t wind up in his original Dracula manuscript. The other piece of the hype puzzle was that it was to be written by Dacre Stoker, a distant relative of Bram. The good news is that two thirds of the book work. The bad news is that the remaining third practically ruins everything.

Dracula: The Un-Dead is a sequel to the original Bram Stoker classic, Dracula. It picks up twenty five years after the first novel and all is not well for everyone. Jack Seward is a morphine addict whose life was ruined by the horror of Dracula. Quincy Harker, the son of Johnathan and Mina ditches his law school studies for the stage and finds his way to a production of Dracula being put on by Bram Stoker. Van Helsing and The Harkers are also still in the picture but someone is on the prowl and they’re hunting down the people who killed Dracula.

Stoker’s writing, Dacre, that is, is better than I expected it to be. He’s adequately descriptive and writes good dialog. Everything culled from the original Stoker’s notes is top notch and handled well and even the angle of Bram Stoker in the sequel to his novel, a very fan fictionish approach to writing, is balanced and without a hint of awkwardness. Dacre Stoker manages to take Bram Stoker’s ideas that he tossed out of Dracula, works in some of Bram’s own history and the story of Sir Henry Irving but then it all falls apart when it becomes clear that Stoker’s notes didn’t paint a complete picture. The even handed gothic horror approach stops being a reflection of the Count Dracula legacy and the work of Hammer Films and looks something more like the Underworld movies or The Matrix. There are wild, deeply stupid plot twists, hyper descriptive martial arts fight scenes and page after page of nauseating dialog. Cracks begin to show in what looks like a solid plot and the entire story unravels before your disbelieving eyes.

It was a good idea, I suppose, but Dracula: The Un-Dead smacks of novelty. A book that was picked up because of the Stoker family tree, the vogue status of vampires these days and what was probably perceived as a strong manuscript. But did anyone at Penguin actually finish the book before they agreed to publish it?

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If there’s one thing I love about going to cons, it’s the growing number of low budget filmmakers turning out to these things. All I have to do is mention that I run a marginally popular cult film website where I review movies and I get screeners dumped on me like you wouldn’t believe. I also wind up learning a few things in the process. For instance, I’m just now discovering that there is some kind of strange genre movie indie culture happening in Providence, Rhode Island. Prior to this, I’ve been only aware of Richard Griffin and his Scorpio Film Releasing group. At the recent Rock & Shock show in Worcester, Massachusetts I also met up with Ricky Laprade from 12 Gauge Pictures and took home a copy of his latest movie, Death Force. I took it for a quick spin one morning and saw the name Shanette Wilson in the credits and immediately started connecting the dots. These guys had to be from Providence. Shanette was also in Richard Griffin’s last picture, Nun Of That (review). The next day at the con, I made my way back to the 12 Gauge table and sure enough, they were from Providence.

It’s fucking weird. I don’t really equate Rhode Island with a burgeoning scene of young, talented filmmakers flexing their celluloid muscle to make trashy action and horror movies. It’s a city that seems so banal. Sure. Lovecraft is from there, but that’s about all they have going for them.

We all know by now how I feel about Richard Griffin (I like his movies a lot). But this article isn’t about Richard. This is about Ricky Laprade. I can now add another indie director from Providence to my watchlist. Death Force knocked my fucking socks off. It’s a deeply flawed movie, which I will inevitably get into, but for a feature made for peanuts in a small New England city, you’re going to be hard pressed to find anything that approaches its production and entertainment values

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I’m not sure what’s going up in Scandinavia, but they have been hitting the international horror scene with a god damn vengeance lately. Norway has hit us with Dead Snow and Cold Prey and now Denmark is jumping into the game with what sounds like a nasty, nasty stalk and slash picture with a heavy historial basis. Though, the trailer suggests that this is a true story (don’t they all?), it’s also loaded with grammatical errors.

During World War 2, Jews fleeing occupied Denmark would find safe passage out of the country and into Sweden on Danish fishing vessels. Thousands made their way out to safety, but the Germans caught wind of this and put their own trap boats out on the piers that managed to sucker a few desperate refugees into taking their vessels out of the country and straight into an extermination camp. I’m not sure what all of that has to do with Denmark’s upcoming slasher, Final Solution, but it factors in somehow. Check this out. It doesn’t show you much, but it looks like it has the potential to be devastating.

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I talk it up a lot around these parts, but the one thing that drew me in to horror in the first place was the afternoon Creature Double Feature on Boston’s WLVI, channel 56. This was pure old school UHF goodness. Crappy flicks meant to influence the easily corruptible minds of New England’s children. Among those influenced was me. Now look at me! I’m one of the barons of the horror blogosphere! Between heavily echoplexed station bumpers set to Emerson, Lake & Palmer I was exposed to the wonders of the genre and it left a huge impression on me. It’s a crying shame that these things don’t really exist anymore. Creature features in the days of yore had long shelf lives and you were extra lucky if your local creature feature came with someone like Zacherley or Svengoolie. Every now and then my Creature Double Feature pops up on the radar thanks to local car dealership emperor, Ernie Boch Jr. but they never stick around. If you’ve never seen a Creature Feature like the one I’m describing, you don’t know what you’re missing. If you have, then I’ve probably inspired great tears of nostalgia. Go ahead. It’s okay to cry.

This coming Saturday, that’s Halloween, folks, you people with cable hookups to do so will be able to tune into New York’s WPIX for a taste of the good life, when the Uncany X-Men cost thirty five cents per issue and Tom Carvel assaulted your ears with his heavily accented New York drawl by way of ten cartons of cigarettes. Yes, Chiller Theater is coming back and if you have the means to do so, I strongly advise you to tune in. If you don’t, you’re not a troo horror fan. They’ll be running Hammer’s The Evil Of Frankenstein from 1964, starring Peter Cushing and the show will be hosted by none other than Elvira, Mistress of the fucking Dark! The show will feature the original opening, too, which is a staple of the program similar to the Creature Double Feature that I described above. The show starts at 8, so have your popcorn popped or you’ll miss it!

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Hey, gang. Listen. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but that blaxploitation sendup I’ve been yelling about since last year finally opened theatrically over the last weekend. Everyone kept asking me if I was going to see it and my reply was a uniformly resounding no. Not because I spent the weekend at the Rock & Shock con, it was because in spite of Black Dynamite opening in theaters, it still hadn’t been booked in a theater remotely near to me. However, this is the beauty of the internet. I can put a call out to all of you and get encourage you to go see it.

You may ask, “Bryan, how do you know it’s any good if you haven’t seen it, yourself.” I have an easy answer for you. I don’t know if it’s any good. However, every single piece of video that made it to the internet was solid gold, the soundtrack, heard in those videos, was outta sight and there’s a ton of already positive reviews going around since the movie first started its tour of film festivals. Need I provide you with more evidence? Here’s the thing. I’d love a review of the movie, I know where it’s playing and much like my recruitment of Viktor for the review of Paranormal Activity, then only playing in a handful of theaters, I’d like to put the same call out to you folks. Do you dream of your writing being featured on Cinema Suicide? Well, neither do I, but here we are. Here’s an opportunity. I will tell you where to see it and then I will post all reviews that I receive right here in this space. Well, not this space, exactly, but it’ll get its own article and all that. It’ll  be syndicated to all the sites that syndicate my posts. My some 1,200 followers on Twitter will see it and so on. I’m a social media maven. What can I say? You’ll be credited, obviously, and as per my Creative Commons License, you can repost it anywhere you like.You’ll also get a link back to your website, should you have one.

Sound like a deal?

Awesome.

Here’s where it’s playing. Get out to one of these theaters, check it out and get back to me, will ya? Submit all reviews to bryan@cinema-suicide.com

New York
Regal E-Walk Stadium
Angelika Film Center

Los Angeles
AMC Burbank Town Center
The Bridge
The Arclight Hollywood

Philadelphia
AMC Loews Cherry Hill

Atlanta
Regal Atlantic Station
Regal Hollywood
AMC North Dekalb Mall
AMC Parkway Point
AMC Discover Mills 18

Seattle
AMC Pacific Place 11
Varsity Theater
Regal Parkway Plaza 12

Chicago
AMC Loews 600 North Michigan
AMC Loews Pipers Alley
ICE Chatham

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These days, just about everywhere you look, there’s some kind of haunted house attraction. Right now, you can probably name three in your area(I can name 5, Haunted Overload, Spookyworld, Castle of the Damned, York’s Wild Kingdom Haunted Hayride,  and Fright Kingdom) without even thinking about it. It’s big money this time of year and everyone does it. I’ve seen some downright outstanding haunted house attractions and have been to and worked at some really bad, honky-tonk attractions that are completely full of shit. I set out to write this article, illustrating the beginnings of this movement up to their current state but ran into a problem. There’s really no defining point in global culture that kicked off a wave of haunted attractions. Halloween, being a festive time of year since its beginnings in Celtic Europe, has motivated people for centuries to embrace the spooky side of the season and let their imaginations run wild. So for years we’ve had people holding seances both tragically hokey and allegedly real, Grand Guignol style stage performances, horror themed on-rails Fairground rides and Museums of the Odd. It’s a no brainer that at some point in our global stage of history, someone would smash them all together and outfit their garage with a strobe light, a fog machine and some spray cans full of fake cobwebs to entertain the trick or treaters of their neighborhoods.

Probably the most commonly found haunted attractions are those put on the JayCees (Junior Chamber International), an organization founded in 1920 and dedicated to motivating young people for volunteer service. One of my earliest haunted house experiences was a JayCee’s haunted house put on at the Marblehead, Massachusetts YMCA. I was 7 or 8 and dressed in a bee costume as some jackass teenager in a hockey mask led me through the lamest haunted house I’d ever see, staged in the Y’s basketball courts. He promised that I could never leave and then promptly led me through a winding path that ended at a door with a brightly lit EXIT sign above it. Explain the logic in that. A couple of years later, I’d live in North Hampton, New Hampshire and find another JayCee’s haunted house one town over that markedly better. Those things were everywhere! Years later I would find myself hiding behind a covered bridge, wearing a rubber werewolf mask, yelling “BOOGA BOOGA BOOGA!!!” at truckloads of people on the York’s Wild Kingdom Haunted Hayride in York, Maine, arguably the worst haunted attraction I’ve seen since that one at the YMCA. The point I’m trying to make, though, is that these attractions make bank! Though neighborhoods had been putting these things on since the 50’s, most likely, the money would escalate the chain of commerce until entire corporations were open for business with no other intention than franchising the very concept of a branded haunted attraction. Terror On Church Street, a haunted attraction that used to be on the corner of Orange Ave and Church Street in Orlando, Florida, was on such attraction. Extremely elaborate in its presentation, Terror On was a part of a franchise or chain of haunted attractions with roots in Brazil that combined movie-set special effects and actors to torment visitors through the entire walk. I’ve never seen anything like it. Hot on its heels came Pasaje Del Terror, which was built beneath the Pleasure Beach Casino in Blackpool, England.

Everything escalates, of course, and while theme parks had been in the game for years, none of them took the haunted attraction quite as seriously as Knott’s Scary Farm (one of the first haunted attractions, in 1973), Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights and Six Flags’ Halloween Fright Fest. Each park dedicates massive amounts of real estate and replaces their usual costumed characters with spooky folks in make-up or characters licensed from movies. Universal, being that it is a movie-lot theme park, is pimping The Wolfman for the upcoming remake, has a Saw attraction to tie in with the annual Saw movie release and others, like Chucky. They hire actors specifically for the job and contract some of the biggest theme park designers from around the world to make their parks the baddest in the world for the month of October.

The king of all the haunted house attractions, though, is said to be the Haunted Hospital attraction at the Fujikyu Highland park in Fujiyoshida, Japan. At the foot of Mount Fuji, this attraction, more than your average walk-through is the largest haunted attraction in the world that boasts 4 hour long wait lines to get inside on any given day. What goes on inside to warrant such a long waiting line? From the looks of this video, not much.

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The Portsmouth, New Hampshire Halloween parade is featuring a dancing mob of zombies this year. No matter what you think of the dearly departed Michael Jackson, you like Thriller. It’s one of my tested theories. Everyone likes Thriller. If you tell me you don’t, you’re lying. That’s all there is to it. It also somehow warms my heart that people will plan these sudden gatherings just to baffle everyone around them and dance. On the flipside, MC Hammer’s U Can’t Touch This routine has been getting the flashmob treatment lately as well. So in honor of this haunted Halloween, the Portsmouth Thriller Dancers and the fact that I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel for festive Halloween posts, here’s a collection of other noteworthy Thriller flashmobs and the original video, directed by John Landis.

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Say what you want about Celts and Pagans, they can be a pretty strange lot but Halloween has a tendency to bring out the weird in all of us. It’s like it’s the one day of the year where we’re given license to let the real freak flag fly. You’re certainly not excluded if you’re Christian. Most sane Christian people take the day in stride and have as much fun as the rest of us, but there are pockets of loons all over the country who flex their personal beliefs in some of the strangest ways possible. Ever gotten religious tracts in your trick or treat bag? It’s enough to sour a whole load of sickeningly sweet goodies and put a damper on the festivities when someone, instead of candy, slips you a short comic explaining how you’ll burn in hell for eternity because you wore a mask one night of the year and splattered pumpkins on the sidewalk.

For some reason, in Canton, North Carolina, Pastor Marc Grizzard has organized a Halloween book burning. Not of tomes of magic spells or evil Satanic heavy metal, but of Christian works, including bibles not of the King James persuasion, denouncing them as satanic and perverse. This is simply because their mild variations don’t jive with his strict interpretation of the bible.

Beginning in the 1970’s, Jerry Falwell kicked off a trend of Fundamentalist Christian haunted houses, better known as Hellmare, where depictions of drug use, rock music, abortion, homosexuality and so on to scare people out of their hedonistic antichristian lifestyles and straight into the loving arms of Christ. However, in 1990, starting in Texas, this trend exploded all over the country and started to infect other parts of the world. The general idea is that you’re guided through a series of scenarios meant to be horrifying and then in the end, you can either enter back into the sin cursed world or sit in on a sermon meant to put you on the path of rebirth. These things, as you might imagine are all over the south and throughout the mid-west. Living as I do in sinful, liberal New England, I’ll probably never get to taste these absurd Halloween treats. There’s an outstanding documentary about an elaborate Hell House production in Texas. Hell House makes for pretty interesting viewing around this time of year.

Remarkably, these days, that’s about all the protest you’re going to get. These are, admittedly, hardcore fundamentalists and in no way are they an accurate representation of mainstream Christianity, but it’s still fun to shine the light on these folks.

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A while back I wrote this quick article about a movie called Road To Hell, which is supposed to be an all green screen unofficial sequel to one of my favorite Walter Hill flicks, Streets of Fire. It’s being directed by one Albert Pyun, a guy whom I had the balls to call out in the comments over at Twitch Film only to find out that Todd Brown is a fan of Albert’s and I had to defend myself in the face of staunch opposition. Then I posted that Road To Hell article over here where I was pretty critical of Albert again only to have Albert, himself, show up in the comments and explain himself. His good nature and ability to take harsh criticism in stride left me, the editor of this here website, feeling like a second-rate chump as myself and Lurple discussed the possibility that it was the real Albert Pyun. A quick email off to Todd Brown reinforced my belief that it was really him.

So here comes Albert Pyun again, the man of a thousand projects in production. Most of his filmography can be summarized by a hangup on post-nuke flicks. He directed the Van Damme vehicle, Cyborg, where most of the dialog is comprised of people screaming at one another. He also did the well-meaning post-nuke Yojimbo remake, Omega Doom, with Rutger Hauer and a reasonably sweet cyberpunk flick called Nemesis, which I actually recommend you check out if you have nothing else to do some night. It’s a lot better than it has any right to be. Albert made his way in the early 80’s with a low budget fantasy flick, The Sword and the Sorceror and is returning to his roots with this fantasy vehicle, Tales Of An Ancient Empire. I can’t really say much about it because I don’t know much about it aside from the fact that Kevin Sorbo is looking kind of old these days but the production values look to be about on par with the old Raimi Hercules/Xena productions. It also features The Highlander, himself, Christopher Lambert. Thing is, Albert can occasionally surprise you and while what stills of Road To Hell I’ve seen make it look pretty godawful (to be fair, it’s still in post-production. Drawing conclusions at this stage are unfair), you just never know with this one.

Tales Of An Ancient Empire -Scene Clip ROUGH CUT OCT 12 from Albert Pyun on Vimeo.

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