Full Moon Direct

Anyone who haunted the horror section of their local video store will no doubt be familiar with Full Moon and their low-budget (but often high fun) films. The following video was posted last year to celebrate the company’s 10th anniversary and includes clips from various movies by Full Moon and Full Moon’s predecessor, Empire Pictures.

What makes this video particularly interesting is that it comes from Full Moon’s official Youtube channel, which also hosts movie trailers, classic “VideoZone” behind-the-scenes segments and full movie uploads!

Ken’s Dead

Confession time: I like pro-wrestling. There. It’s off my chest. I like the spectacle, the goofy convoluted story-lines and mainly the acrobatics. Lucha Libre like CMLL. Indy wrestling in particular, like Chikara, PWG, ISW or DDT and Triple6 from Japan.

Also, video games. Used to like them, not terribly alot but enough to head over to a local blockbuster rent a game. Back in 2004, I made a poor choice, renting a poorly, poorly designed wrestling game from Japan called ‘Rumble Roses.’

Women wrestling video game from Japan. Chances are, if the game has nothing but women in it and it’s from Japan, it’s not going to be very progressive in female roles. Chances are there’s going to be some degradation and that game didn’t disappoint (actually, yes. I was very disappointed, not just with Japan but myself.) If you want sincere, authentic women’s wrestling that doesn’t make them out to be strippers sans poles (which, in their own right, is quite the athletic achievement) then you’d want to check out SHIMMER.

So, in the game, there was this character named Candy Cane (ugh) who came out to a song by The Killer Barbies. Did a search and found that they were this punk band from Spain. And that was it until recently, when I was able to get a listen.

Despite there being a gap with a band singing in English as a Second Language, they’re not bad. Nothing you absolutely need to get first off but good supplemental material for your library. Can’t really go wrong with a band who wrote a song called ‘I Wanna live in Tromaville.’

They have a spooky punk element to them, with songs like ‘Chainsaw,’ ‘Love Killer.’Plus, they pulled a ‘Rock n’ Roll High School’ and starred in two movies – ‘The Killer Barbys’ and ‘The Killer Barbys vs. Dracula,’ both directed by Jesus Franco.

They’ve broken up and it looks like their lead singer Silva Superstar is parlaying herself into a solo career as an edgier Gwen Stefani (hot girl from an underground band going a bit mainstream) but here’s hoping there’s success for her and all the other bandmates.

Along with the Misfits ‘Skulls,’ ‘Then He Kissed Me’ by the Crystals, the band does a cover of ‘Candy’ by Iggy Pop and Kate Pierson. An odd choice, seems it seems like one of those uncoverable songs. Listen for yourself.

Note: you can tell there are some dedicated fans on Wikipedia when the entry on Iggy Pop’s ‘Candy’ is amended to include a detailed account of the KB version.

Talk about creepy…

After finding the material for yesterday’s entry, I decided to mess around with Google Books some more. I was hoping to find material on haunted hayrides (especially if there were any books devoted to creating and running one), but what I found was so much more bloggable.

You see, I found a page from Guy Gets Girl, Girl Gets Guy: Where to Find Romance and What to Say When You Find It by Larry Glanz and Robert H. Phillips. Not only does it more or less suggest that you sit near someone you’re attracted to in the hopes that they’ll get scared and grab onto you, but it actually offers up some sample pick-up lines. Said pick-up lines range from painfully bland to some of the most awful, cringe-inducing attempts at humor I’ve ever encountered. I even skimmed through some of the other sample pages and found that the lines only get worse. I’m honestly shocked they didn’t suggest doing the old “hole in the popcorn tub” trick during the section on trying to pick up someone at the movies.

The book itself seems to be a 2003 reprint of their 1994 book, How to start a romantic encounter: where to go to find love and what to say when you find it. To me, this makes description of a haunted hayride as a “…new type of hay ride” to be particularly bizarre. The last time I checked, haunted hayrides have been around since at least the 1980s. There is simply no excuse for a 1994/2003 book to refer to them as being a “new” type of attraction.

Would Gravedigger’s Local 16 be setting itself up for potential legal trouble if I recommended that the proper response to someone using any of the lines from this book would be a shift kick to the nethers? Probably? Well, then I didn’t just type that.

UPDATE: Back when I first wrote this, I assumed it would be obvious how Strange Jason and I were kidding around at the end of this article. But since many people online seem hellbent on not using their common sense, I now feel compelled to point this out. Despite our both thinking poorly of the advice given in the above book, we don’t actually advocate using physical violence on anyone using these pick-up lines. Oh, and it turns out haunted hayrides actually date back to the 1970s. Just thought I might as well throw that in there as well.

Calling All Ghouls

Have you been listening to Ghouls Night Out? I hope you discovered this band on your own from my post about Gein and the Graverobbers and The Crimson Ghosts. I know you would have checked out Necro-Tone Records and saw that Myra from Gein and the Graverobbers has a band called Ghoul’s Night Out.

Hopefully, dear reader, you have a copy of ‘The Mourning After,’ the record GNO put out. On that release was Amy Von, who would leave to pursue her own career. And proving that being a possible undead psychopath that could flay the skin off your body and feed it to her cat (allegedly) doesn’t mean being without principles, Myra decided to work on some new songs.

I saw GNO back in May and they played the new songs. I tell you, they’re fucking. fantastic.  I hyperbole you not, reader.  The arrangements are incredible and the new songs showcase the range of Myra’s vocal talents. They describe themselves as ‘if the Misfits ‘spent the night’ with The Trashwomen,’ but I think GNO has taken the best elements of their influences to produce something better.

Lucky for us, GNO will be recording their second album this fall. But we shouldn’t rest, oh no. Reader, if perchance you haven’t, go over to their website. Listen to the ‘The Mourning After,’ as they have a free stream of it. If you like it, buy a copy. Send an email and say ‘This is fantastic, and we look forward to the new album.’ Go to their Myspace page and listen to ‘The Rage,’ one of those new songs. If you’re in the area, make the trek to Worcester, Massachusetts on the 30th to see them play with Creepin’ Cadavers and the Cretins. If you like rock, if you like spooky, if you are either dead or alive or both and in that plane of existance there is a modicum of good taste inhabiting your physical or corporeal presence, then show some support and spirit for GNO.

Vampires are Cheap

Growing up, the vampire was the fall-back costume when it was too expensive to be anything else. Both me and my next-door neighbor/best friend would sport the costume two or three times in a row. Ninety-nine cents for a pair of plastic fangs, some leftover white grease paint, the old black plastic cape and a small tube of fake blood was the extent of the costume. All else I needed could be found in my closet – white shirt, black dress pants. After fifteen minutes, bam! Instant vampire. Just add water.

That might explain why I don’t think vampires are anything special. Yeah, it’s fashionable now to be all anti-vampire to be cool but anyone who knows me can say that even before the teenage fever gripping the world thanks to Twilight and other YA novels/movies, vampires have inspired that ‘blah’ feeling in me. Somewhere along the way of growing up, sucking blood and fearing the sunlight never stopped being lame.

Could also be something geographically inclined. I came from Arizona and moved to Upstate New York at a young age. I left a state that’s 4/5th sunshine to a place that is cold and damp for nine to ten out of the twelve months. I was living away from sunshine (or the intensity I had come to know). Outside of going chupacabra on the plenty of dairy cows you can find in the area, I pretty much had the vampire schtick down and it wasn’t making me feel any better.

Now there is this revisionist history going on to make Vampires totally down with the ultraviolet. Oh, they just sparkle. They’re weakened but the sunlight doesn’t destroy them. I do not buy that one bit, man. That’s a bunch of BS from brats who want to be able to have tans but walk around with fangs. It’s a case of a kid wanting to have all the superpowers so he or she always wins – s/he’s the fastest, strongest and toughest. Forget that, man. Either you get straddled with the equalizing weakness of the mythological creature or you don’t play. Overcoming those weaknesses make for the better character.

And this nonsense – if vampirism is a disease, then I want it to be a STD. I want it on the same levels of syphilis. Get some action from some hot goth on a Saturday night – wake up on Sunday and find that holy symbols and sunlight give you the heebie-jeebies. Go to the doctor on Monday, get a shot, EAT SOME GARLIC. Fantastic. This whole trope of having zombism, vampirism and lycanthropy as some disease like AIDS is a ridiculous fad in fiction when someone can’t come up with a farfetched idea of how to get the creatures to walk. 245 Trioxin did that nearly twenty five years ago, people. Don’t pull this ‘some mysterious disease’ crap. Who needs realism when you have goddamn vampires, zombies and werewolves running around? How about a disease that causes mummification? The layers of skin thickening to human wrapping? Man, I should be pitching these to Hollywood – anyone know an agent?

You want to know the only vampire I ever liked? Bunnicula. Suck on that.

More Vintage Halloween Insanity

Before I begin, I want to give some credit where it’s due. This post (and several of my other recent entries) would not have been possible if I hadn’t learned the joys of Google Books from Atomic Mystery Monster’s link-filled JREF posts.

Long-time readers will likely remember an entry from the first GdL Halloween countdown where I linked to dangerous Halloween ideas from an old issue of Modern Mechanix. After discovering that Google Books offered complete scans of Popular Mechanics and Popular Science, I decided to see if I could find any other oddball Halloween tips similar to the ones from 2008.

At first, it seemed liked the old dangerous and lawsuit-baiting ideas I discussed last year were a one-time only thing. This three page article on mask-masking from 1931 seems fine, as does this article about making a Halloween-themed rocking chair. Although many of the tricks noted here are quaint, they’re pretty safe for the most part.

But once I started reading scans from a November 1934 issue of Popular Mechanics, things started to go downhill. It starts off pretty well, but soon lapses into over-complication once they wheel out the smoking robot and tent costumes. Sure, the robot costume looks neat, but don’t expect any easy time getting out of it to use the toilet. As far as I’m concerned, the only really useful (and fairly easy) idea to be found in the article is the part about giving a costume glowing eyes.

But things got really crazy in the November 1935 issue, both in terms of the layout and suggestions. If you think tricking people into biting cakes of soap and electrically-charged nails sticking out of a chair are bad, wait until you hear this: The article actually suggests making “secret messages” appear using a hidden curling iron and sulfuric acid! I don’t care that they told people to use caution when handling it or that the acid should be diluted, why the hell did they think telling people to use sulfuric acid at a party would be a good idea? Did they forget that children and alcohol consumption tend to appear at parties, Halloween or otherwise? Did they forget that writing messages on paper with lemon juice and holding them over a lamp provides the same basic effect with much less effort and much greater safety? Then again, these are the people that recommend wiring up a Ford coil to a tin strip over a light bulb or creating a burning alcohol mixture in order to produce strange lighting effects, rather than simply using colored bulbs (or fireproof colored coverings placed over bulbs). Unsurprisingly, the simplest and safest ideas are saved for the end of the article. It’s amazing that people managed to survive Halloween in the thirties.

Now that I think about it, why on earth are they giving Halloween advice in their November issues? My first guess was that the magazine was bi-monthly, but the existence of October issues from that period prove that theory incorrect. Did Halloween used to occur in November back then? It would certainly explain why the protagonist of Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn went trick-or-treating around Thanksgiving. Does anyone out there in readerland have an answer for me?

The Truth Behind The Exorcist

Thanks to years of documentaries and TV specials, many people are at least vaguely aware that The Exorcist is was based on a true story. But, just as how The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is only loosely based on Ed Gein, the truth about The Exorcist is stranger (and far less exotic) than fiction.

The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry’s website has an article which reveals some interesting details about the original “exorcism” (such as how the allegedly possessed youth was a male). On top of that, StrangeMag.com offers up a detailed and well-researched timeline of the events and an interview with a man who was present at the exorcism.

It’s both sad and strangely comic just how obviously non-supernatural the whole incident was in retrospect. The boy in question had been a troublesome, nasty youth prior to his “possession.” The “moving bed” had wheels on it and strange marks only appeared on the boy’s wrists after his hands were near them. Instead of projectile vomiting pea soup, the boy just spat without opening his mouth. Oddly enough, that’s actually one of Jeff Foxworthy’s “You might be a redneck” jokes!

Give a Hoot

Halloween Hootenany

Rob Zombie once had a record label and it was AWESOME. Along with the first Ghastly Ones record and a release from The Bomboras, Zombie A-Go-Go records put out one of the best Halloween compilations ever to grace this land – Halloween Hootenany.

It’s amazing who’s on this and amazing to think that I heard most of them for the first time because I happened to swipe this copy from my college’s radio library (you don’t have to be so underhandedly as many copies are going for cheap on Amazon. I need to pick up a spare myself, since I’m afraid I’m going to wear mine out.) Incredible to think that I first heard the pure massive sonic bodyslam that is was Rocket From The Crypt on this album. Their song, ‘I Drink Blood’ is one of their best and highlight why the band, gone from this earth four years this Halloween, is missed.

The album is bookend by narration from famed horror host Zacherle, who even joins Southern Culture On The Skids for a wonderful cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Sinister Purpose.’ Other covers include Los Straitjackets doing their version of ‘The Munsters’ theme song and The Amazing (royal) Crowns rocking out to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s, ‘Little Demon.’

The real standout of the comp is up front, where Rob Zombie joins The Ghastly Ones for ‘Halloween (She Gets So Mean).’ It’s a roadhouse circus with a burlesque side-show of a song, with Zombie’s trademark whirling voice against the Ghastly One’s garage-surf sound.

The Ghastly Ones are all over this album, offering their first version of ‘Banshee Beach’ (later found on ‘All-Plastic Assembly Kit,’ then on their ‘Unearthed’ release.) In addition, The Born Losers play ‘Werewolf on Wheels,’ a song written (and I suspect secretly performed by) The Ghastly Ones.  Surf and fuzz are well represented on this comp, with even the legendary Davie Allan playing with The Phantom Surfers on ‘Extrasensory Deception.’

Deadbolt, Frency, Satan’s Pilgrims, the Swingin’ Neckbreakers, Dead Elvi and The Legendary Invisible Men are also found on the record, giving a wide candy bag of treats for your Halloween pleasure.   It kind of bridges the gap between the ‘This Is Horrorpunk’ comps and all the other rocka/psychbilly comps out there.

Add it to your library this year.
(Note, thanks to R. Zombie’s loveable incoherence, the lyrics in the video below are PROBABLY not accurate. Take it with a grain of salt.)

Demon Ouija Board

This is one of my favorite Whitest Kids U Know comedy sketches, pulled straight from their official Youtube channel. I don’t have much to say about this one, only that it’s a both a hoot and the weirdest use of lightsaber sound effects I’ve ever encountered. Enjoy!

There’s always room for giallo

For those not in the know, “giallo” is a term that (for English-speaking horror fans) usually refers to an Italian genre of violent mysteries and thrillers. The word itself is translates as “yellow,” which refers to the yellow covers of the books that spawned the genre. You see, a company called Arnoldo Mondadori Editore published a line of pulp mystery novels called “I libri gialli” in 1929, which was eventually renamed as “Il Giallo Mondadori” in 1946. The name itself came from the distinctive yellow background used on each book cover. The line sold very well and prompted other companies to start putting out similar novels with such covers. Naturally, film companies wanted to make adaptations of such best-sellers and the giallo film genre was born.

When many horror fans think of gialli, several genre conventions come to mind:

1. Explicit violence and nudity

2. A mysterious killer wearing black gloves (and sometimes a mask)

3. Murders often being investigated by someone who isn’t in law enforcement

4. The films often (but not always) having a bizarre title. Here are some examples:

Four Flies on Grey Velvet
Five Dolls for an August Moon
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key

You might be surprised to learn this, but you can make your own giallo, complete with strange title, without a film crew or budget of any kind! Just head on over to Braineater.com’s Do-It-Yourself Giallo Generator, follow the easy-to-read instructions and you’re all set. Feel free to post your favorite creation in the comments section!

To learn more about giallo, please use the giallo Wikipedia entry as a starting point. Trust me, my brief summary only scratched the surface of the information that link contains.

Straight out of R’lyeh

Worn out by werewolves and think Mummies are dusty and dull? Frankenstein’s monster not giving you a jolt anymore? Think that Vampires, in all forms, suck? Have the old horror icons lost their luster or, perhaps, you are in need of a change of pace?

Time to crack open the Lovecraft and get yourself acquainted with Darkest of the Hillside Thickets. Based out of Vancouver but coming straight from R’lyeh, this group is fronted by Toren Atkinson, an artist who has contributed to Call of C’thulu roleplaying game. He and guitarist Warren Banks wrote the game Spaceship Zero, which is also an album by their band.  

Rock and roll and Lovecraftian mythos make for a good combination. ‘Great Old Ones’ and ‘Cthulu Strikes Back’ are good introduction albums, while ‘Spaceship Zero’ and ‘Shadow out of Tim’ are more sonic stories. Start with the first two, progress to the latter, go mad in the meantime. They’re a fun rock band that doesn’t let the subject of the work bog down their music.

This band played at Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) 2008, which would hint that they’re more nerd than spooky. But sometimes, it’s not all crypts and ghoolies.

Exhuming Dead Ernest

As you might recall from my last blog post, it’s been rumored that a TBS horror host by the name “Dead Ernest” was actually played by media mogul Ted Turner. I first heard about the rumor from an old issue of Scary Monsters magazine and there are several references to it online. In fact, that last reference reveals that the show existed much earlier than I had originally thought. So early, in fact, that the “TBS” it was on was a far different animal than the one we’re all familiar with. The history of TBS is complicated. Really, really complicated.

I was very pleased to discover that the webmaster of E-gor’s Chamber of TV Horror Hosts had apparently gotten in contact with Ted Turner’s assistant. After all, this saved me the trouble of having to do it myself. As you’ve probably guessed, Ted Turner never played Dead Ernest. However, he was apparently very fond of the character. You know, that probably explains why MonsterVision hung around TNT for so long, going from a horror marathon to a bumper that played before showings of certain horror films to the Joe Bob Briggs-hosted show of the same name. On the other hand, that show was forced into becoming a “movie in general” show, so I could be wrong.

On a final note, I find it quite odd that there’s so little information about Dead Ernest online. Maybe I’m just missing the right links due to Google pulling up stuff on a novel and britcom of the same name. If anyone has any links or information about Dead Ernest they’d like to share, feel free to post them in the comments section.

Well, isn’t this interesting?

Quick bit for today. Haven’t really talked about spooky hip-hop for a reason: outside of maybe a few songs off of one Necro album, there’s very little ‘horrorcore’ that I like. To each their own, right?

Seems one zealous fan is accused to chopping four people up into pieces. It’s CNN so the reporting is shoddy. Here’s hoping it’s not another case of West Memphis 3 bullshit, where they round up some kid, citing that he’s involved in horror and spooky and wearing all black as the prime evidence. More details at the MTV.com piece.

Let’s see how long this YouTube page stays up. Go for the crappy amateur beats, stay for the hilarious comments. In all cases, the accused is innocent until proven guilty.

Grandpa, could you whip me up a blog entry?

Movie reviewer Scott Foy (aka The Foywonder) has posted a clip from the episode of TBS Super Scary Saturday featuring King Kong vs. Godzilla (hosted by “Grandpa” Al Lewis) on his Youtube account:

In the above clip, professional wrestling personalities Michael “PS” (“Purely Sexy”) Hayes and Jim Cornette debate which of the monsters they’re representing will win the battle. The sketch’s loving parody/recreation of wrestling promos (love that 80’s WCW logo) is quite amusing and it ties in nicely with the similar publicity Japanese and American campaigns used for the film’s original release.

Wrestling fans are probably going to hate me for saying this, but the wrestling angle also ties into how the King Kong winning fight was totally rigged. There’s a soft spot in my heart for the big lug, but I’m a Godzilla fan first and foremost. Honestly, do you really think a fire-breathing monster than can shrug off artillery fire like it was nothing could be defeated by a monster that was trounced by biplanes? I mean, come on.

It’s been said that the reason Kong was scripted as the victor was due to Godzilla still being a villain at that point in the series and King Kong having been more popular at the time. You can read more about the issue, along with notes on the film’s production, the never realized follow-ups and a debunking of the “Godzilla wins in the Japanese version” urban legend here. Or, if you want a more scholarly resource, scroll through the publicity campaign link I posted earlier or click here. I bet many of you reading this never would have guessed that the original Japanese version was more of a social satire than a serious science fiction movie.

I know I’ve already commented on the bizarre “He’s ‘Grandpa,’ but not ‘Grandpa Munster'” licensing issue in a previous entry, but I’m still amazed Turner Broadcasting was willing to make such a legally iffy choice as the host of their horror movie show. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love Al Lewis and his work, but I wonder if TBS Super Scary Saturday was a quickly-created replacement for Dead Ernest. In case you’re wondering, Dead Ernest was another TBS horror host from the 80’s. His biggest claim to fame was that he was rumored to have been played by the superstation’s owner, Ted Turner! You know what? I’m officially intrigued enough by this to do a little digging into the matter. Stay tuned!

Somewhere a man named Williams is screaming…

It’s rare to get an in-depth look at the making of a bad movie. You might occasionally find a honest director’s commentary on a bad movie’s DVD release, but you’ll have to search through the untold number of denials and blamefests that tend to appear in commentaries for such films. Even when one is found, the commentor’s desire to keep the conversation from straying from what’s seen onscreen can limit the amount of time spent on a particular subject. That’s why the Bad Move Report’s “Making a Bad Movie” section is such a treasure.

In it, b-movie reviewer Dr. Freex (aka Freeman Williams) discusses how his interesting Lovecraftian tale “Nightcrawlers” slowly but surely mutated into the much-derided movie, Forever Evil. The good doctor details the project’s growth from a simple idea to the troubled filming (along with the film’s legacy) over the course of eighteen segments. Said segments come complete with behind-the-scenes pictures and comparisons of the original script to what made it onscreen. Although I know that the DVD release of Forever Evil. has a commentary track, I can’t imagine that it has the same impact as the website. Check it out, you won’t regret it.

Howling at the Moon

The Young Werewolves http://www.theyoungwerewolves.com

Vampires are currently having their day in the sun (har har) thank to ‘Twilight’ and zombies have regained some coolness with movies from ’28 Days Later’ to the recent ‘Zombieland.’ There’s a new generation learning what all death rock and horror enthusiasts know – spooky is cool. Benicio del Toro and his movie ‘The Wolfman’ is slated for next year. And I guess there’s lycanthropy in the new ‘Twilight’ movie, which seems that vampires can’t go five steps without involving werewolves (see the ‘Underworld’ series. Wait, on second thought, don’t.)

Werewolves are due for their turn. Sincere werewolves, not some wereotters or were-polar bears or were-banana slug Baskin-Roberts 32 Flavors bullshit that usually happens. Wolfman. American Werewolf in London. Straight up howling at the moon.

This is good for The Young Werewolves, who you should be listening to anyway.

The Young Werewolves are sexy people playing sexy instruments, putting out some spook-rock that combines all their influences. They’re not a psychobilly band, not a death rock. They’re rock and roll. I really like the title track off their ‘Cheat The Devil’ release, mainly because outside of the word ‘devil,’ the song has nothing to do with spookiness but rather the evil characteristic of a malicious, superficial society. ‘Everyone wants to get their fill/Nobody want to pay their bills.’

But the next track, ‘Runaway,’ is a haunting cry, a very low creeping shadow of a song that is pretty spooky without invoking a monster or vampire. The Young Werewolves can play low or high, fast or slow. They can have a seductive beat like ‘Devil Dancer Girl’ or belt out a barn burning track like ‘Zombie Drag Race.’ They also pay tribute to their influences. During a live show last spring, they did covers of ‘(I’m not your) Stepping Stone,’ name checking all the bands who covered that Paul Revere and the Raiders song, as well as a version of Ratt’s ‘Round and Round.’

Each bandmember (Nick Falcon, Shewolf Dana Kain and Johnny Wolf) sings, helping the band avoid being pinned down. If there’s anything to being a werewolf, it is about negating limits. A man with the strength and savagery of a beast or an animal with the smarts and savvy of a man – the werewolf is all and cannot be caged down by definition. The Young Werewolves are like this, their music existing as a rock-bebop-punk-horror hybrid that aims at the common cause of rock and roll: fun. You’ll have fun at a Young Werewolves concert. Their music will make you grow hair in all the right places and you’ll be howling and drag racing and dancing until the moon goes down.

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