Tag Archives: Horror

03/26/13

More Links *I* Like

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It’s been ages since I’ve done one of these and Atomic’s been hogging the concept for far too long. Now it’s time to reclaim what I started:

The Cinema Snob – Ever wonder what would happen if a snobby film critic tried reviewing exploitation films? Thanks to Brad Jones’ hilarious video reviews, now you don’t have to wonder anymore! As seen on That Guy With The Glasses.

The Dead Next Door: A Field Guide to Regional Horror Films – As I’ve said before, I LOVE regional horror films, so this site is like crack to me.

Scar Stuff – Although the music files are long gone, Scar Stuff is still the greatest resource of information about old spooky records available online.

The A.V. Club – Once a part of The Onion devoted to covering movies and TV, The A.V. Club has since grown into its own massive site. The humorous (but often lengthy) comments section of each article are well worth reading.

Hark A Vagrant! – Kate Beaton’s comics makes history and literature awesome. Well, more awesome than usual…

Foywonder – “One man. Many movies. No life.” Scott Foy tackles everything from mainstream theatrical releases to the rarest obscurities in his ongoing quest to mock the worst the entertainment industry has to offer.

Creepypasta Wiki – If you don’t know Slender Man from Jeff the Killer, this is the site for you.

The SCP Foundation – Serve. Contain. Protect. The mysterious SCP Foundation’s goal is to protect the world from paranormal threats. If you’re looking to kill some time, reading their current mission briefings and case files (or adding in some of your own) is the perfect way go about it.

Dinosaur Dracula – X-Entertainment strikes back from the grave!

The Drive-In Mob – Because making fun of bad movies on Twitter is much more fun if you’re doing it with other people.

Pop Culture Junk Mail – Or as I like to call it “the blog before blogs existed.” Long before Blogspot came into being, the PCJM website acted as an extremely well-written collection funny and fascinating information with (with much love for Halloween). Although the archives didn’t make the jump over to Blogspot, the mission remains the same.

Cocktail Nation – Koop Kooper serves up an amazing selection of exotica and lounge music every week.

Teleport City – “Yesterday’s Tomorrow Today!” Teleport City has been covering bizarre movies, long-forgotten music and unusual travel destinations since 1998. It also holds a special place in my heart since it’s been a major influence on my writing style.

Universal Monster Army – Their motto says it best: “Universal monsters and vintage monster toys unite in the Universal Monster Army!”

Eccentric Cinema – While many cult film review sites mainly focus on making jokes, Eccentric Cinema opts to look deeper into the subjects of its reviews. Just make sure not to read it at work (the same warning also applies to most of the review sites listed here).

04/2/12

Looking At The World With Broken Glass In My Eye by Mark Justice

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title of the collection Looking At The World With Broken Glass In My Eye by Mark Justice is all the preparation you need before you dive in, as it sets the tone as to the humor and horror of the stories published in this collection from Graveside Tales.

Mark Justice has a dark humor to him that really packs a punch. It helps him make his horror that more sinister, as there’s always an edge in every joke, a little bit of poison in every bit of hope that might possibly be found within this book of his.

There are entries in Looking… that don’t mask their nature of being straight-premise based works. These smaller pieces are the vaudeville hosts cracking jokes in between the bigger acts, the palate cleansers between meals so that the reader isn’t overwhelmed if they go at it for one setting. “What if Death had an Agent?” Mark Justice asks in ‘Agent of Death.’ “Or, what would happen if the mythological pantheon of gods were to retire?” he inquires in ‘Nursing Home of the Gods.’

These almost-micro-fiction stories are written with a more irreverent tone. This tone is the winking eye that clues you in, the way Justice says “we won’t get a lot of mileage out of this idea but let’s enjoy the ride while we can.” Justice could have overwritten these stories but instead, chose brevity. The shorter stories are also stages for Justice’s twisted sense of humor.

The longer stories are perfectly fit for Mark Justice’s perspective, as he comes up with characters, voices and ideas that flourish with the breathing room. While the genre of ‘occultism alternative WW2 history’ isn’t all that radically new, I think Justice could offer a great contribution to it if ‘Das Hollenfeuer’ is any indication. ‘Father’s Day’ had a great take on vengeance and anger, and ‘Song of the Bones’ is a legitimately creepy story, especially since I recently moved to a densely metropolitan area.

Mark Justice is a showman with his fiction. There’s a great deal of entertainment in Looking… and I think that any horror fan should definitely pick this up.

Three major works divide up the collection, though the ‘Deadnecks’ story, split into two sections, bookends the work. ‘Dead Town’ marks the middle with ‘The Autumn Man’ anchoring the tail end of Looking….  Two of the three are set in Justice’s native Kentucky and deal with a lot of the perceptions of the area. Justice has written a lot about that part of the world, which holds a lot of eldritch mysticism to it. While the instant connotation of the ‘south’ bring sup the characters you’d find in ‘Deadnecks,’ the story, a twist on the zombie holocaust trope, is oddly comedic and strangely heartwarming. Even though it’s a story about being zombies, Justice makes the characters and, essentially, rednecks seem very human.

The differences between the nature of the supernatural in the other two stories – ‘Dead Town’ and ‘The Autumn Man’ –were stark and displayed how Justice has tried to expand himself as a writer. ‘Dead Town’ reads, to me, as a very urban, horrifyingly cold take on the world. It’s all buildings and concrete, whereas ‘The Autumn Man’ is very—surprise, surprise—nature, very wet, very alive.

While he maintains a signature voice when it comes to humor, drama and bleak terror, the stories in this collection are not repetitive. There is a great amount of variety here that whoever picks it up will find something to enjoy in Looking At The World With Broken Glass In My Eye. I definitely recommend it.

Mark Justice (with David T Wilbanks) has written two books in The Dead Earth series: The Green Dawn and The Vengeance Road. His forthcoming 2012 release is the western horror, The Dead Sherriff. You can hear Mark Justice on the horror literature podcast, Pod of Horror.

Thanks are given to Graveside Tales for providing the review copy. 

 

11/7/11

The path of Excess leads to SAW 3D.

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A post-Halloween tradition is to bust out the Minutemen as a palate cleansing device.

I like Minutemen a lot. ‘The Punch Line’ got me hooked. Eighteen songs, fifteen minutes; they’re both complex and simple, dealing with deep context, diverging abstracts and yet, still very accessible. The music isn’t obtuse. It’s not the 1-2-3-4 punk rock or hardcore that came about their day. It’s been well documented how awesome the Minutemen were by people who, unlike me, were there to see them and experience them when they were fresh.

I think the last decade was one of decadence. A lot of self-indulgence and precocious bits of art have reflected a cultural shift away from the societal and physical restrictions. Rudimentary forms of communication, like ‘zines, radio and mail-order have been replaced with blogs, podcasts and Twitter feeds. While before, there weren’t that many sources for information, the rarity placed greater importance on them. Maybe it made them more trustworthy, or there just wasn’t enough counter evidence to dispel them. Whatever.)

With the internet allowing everyone to know what everyone else is doing, a lot of those of past scenes bemoaned the homogeneous mush of culture that has produced LCD Soundsystem, Twitter and Zooey Deschanel. Because we CAN have it all, we have decided to have it all. Want ten people in your band? Go ahead. Want to have two different genres in your movie? Why not?

I think we’re set for a rejection of “indulgence,” of “excess.” Musically, I welcome the return to the forefront of the 3 or 4-piece, bare bones rock group that looks at all these cumbersome groups producing over-the-top sound as obnoxious. Less Arcade Fire, more G.G. Allin (sans excrement and misogyny.)

Horror, I think, hasn’t been as affected by the increase in connection/communication, save that old tropes have been demolished. The fear that “the phone has gone dead” is now eliminated, meaning that cell phones either have to have the hokey plot-point of “not getting any reception” or, the more realistically, running out of power. Increased communication means that the fundamental ‘fear of the unknown’ is easily dispelled.

I think there will be ways for modern horror to work around this, if they aren’t already.

There hasn’t been a wide-spread, mainstream film that has made people afraid of Social Networking (except, well, The Social Network but that piece of fiction made Mark Zuckerberg look like a autistic-dickhead. Whether that’s an accurate portrayal remains debated.) Having someone(s) using your Facebook account to track you and ultimately, kill you will inspire parents to be afraid, even more so than they should be.

But what about a monster, creature or killer that can’t be explained by a Wikipedia page? Or a group of people using the internet for some nefarious means? John Carpenter’s At The Mouth Of Madness, a great film, uses the idea of communication spreading madness. This is also done in Tobe Hooper’s novel, Midnight Movie as well as The Ring. What about a viral video that caused more than a few laughs?

As for excessive, indulgent behavior, a corner of Horror’s foundation is built on gratuitousness. Blood, breast and beast, like The Vooduo say. However, some restraint might return the genre back to its effectiveness. The first Saw movie had some weight to it, before the excessive sequels neutered the franchise. Dealing with simple antagonist v. protagonist (with decent explanation, outside of some bullshit writing like that in High Tension) will probably give fear a bit of a boost. The continual success of the Paranormal Activity movies show that people STILL like to be scared, even if the movies are, in my opinion, trite. If there can be a horror movie like a Minutemen song, simple in presentation but deep, layered and not totally obtuse/abstract, it’ll be great.

Horror exists in the realm slightly above pornography and slightly below art, meaning that often, if it maintains a low-enough overhead, it can do whatever it want. If there are films out there that have used these ideas, and there HAS to be because I know I’m not the only one to think of these, let me know.

10/12/11

Ghost of Horror Trivia

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Anyone who has ever seen Hammer’s When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth has probably wondered by why they stuck in two photographically-enlarged lizards dressed up like dinosaurs in the middle of a film filled with Jim Danforth’s masterful stop-motion animation work. Danforth had actually planned on including two dueling stop-motion allosauruses, but the idea was vetoed by a producer who thought the model dinosaurs resembled gay men in high heels! Short on time and money, the lizard footage was spliced in and the rest is history.

Popular Ultraman foe Baltan is actually a reworking of the “Cicada Man” costume from the series Ultra Q.

It’s pretty well-known in horror fandom that many of the original monster scenes from the Danish film Journey to the Seventh Planet were edited out and replaced for its American release. What you may not know is that Jim Danforth’s original replacement monster design was rejected for looking like a teddy bear!

Musician Joey Ramone once posed with a statue of the original Kamen Rider. No, really.

In what may or may not have been a publicity stunt, Boris Karloff took out insurance against potential premature aging that might be caused by horror make-up in 1931!

The script for The 7th Voyage of Sindad was written around Ray Harryhausen’s concept art for monsters he wanted to animate.

One of the plans for the currently unfilmed Rambo V was to do an adaptation of James Byron Huggins’ novel Hunter, which would feature Rambo battling a genetically engineered monster!

According to the Tales from the Darkside: The Movie commentary track, Tom Savini feels that the film is the “real” Creepshow 3.

The film The Adventures of Galgameth is an uncredited remake of Pulgasari. Given that it was co-written by the same man who directed Pulgasari, Shin Sang-ok (under the name “Simon Sheen”), it seems reasonable to assume it was his way of getting revenge on Kim Jong-il for having him kidnapped and forced to make movies for the dictator. You can watch it for free on both Hulu and Youtube.

Vincent Price requested that a line about his vampire character in The Monster Club having retractable fangs after discovering that he couldn’t speak while wearing them.

The Slime People originally had scenes which showed that the titular Slime People were aided by giant voles. However, the scenes were removed from the film due to the laughable quality of the vole costumes.

Since Universal had wanted to reuse the giant props and sets from The Incredible Shrinking Man, Richard Matheson wrote a script for a sequel featuring the Incredible Shrinking Man’s wife shrinking.

For more trivia, check out:

Horror Trivia
The Return of Horror Trivia
Son of Horror Trivia

07/6/11

Bad Whoremoans, BAD WHOREMOANS

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Bad Whoremoans
Bad Whoremoans

I avoided certain genres of music for a while because after one or two attempts to get into them, the handful of bands I optioned all sounded the same. Psychobilly was this to me for a while – I just could not get into it because everyone I listened to was doing a bad Kim Nekroman impression, turning the upright bass up in the mix and having that deep-gulch yokel vocal.

Homogeny is the worst thing to happen to a scene or a genre. When there is only a specific look and sound that’s accepted, innovation is impossible since all the people doing different things are forced out. And once that acceptable sound is established, there can be so many new bands conforming to it that homogeny actually promotes a premature nostalgia. Look at modern mainstream country or the current state of rock.

This is why a band like Bad Whoremoans is a good thing. On their own, they’re a great punk band. As a horror punk band, they’re fucking fantastic because in addition of a sound that doesn’t sound like anyone else, they bring that “fresh blood” into it. They take their sound more from garage punks and the Descendents than the Misfits, which is a bit of poetry since Paul of the Living Dead, frontman and founder of the band, is 100% New Jersey.

Perhaps that’s why Bad Whoremoans don’t sound like the Misfits. If this band’s music, in any way whatsoever, shows some influence from the Lodi, NJ band, there would be the instant connection. It’s a shadow that I think many bands out of the Garden State have to evade. Sort of if you wanted to start up a band in Liverpool, Seattle or Gary, Indiana.

BAD WHOREMOANS is a celebration of the VHS age of cult and horror movies. Included on the album is a double Troma feature, songs about both “Surf Nazis Must Die” and “Class of Nuke’Em High.” Hometown hero Jason Voorhees gets a celebratory ode with “Camp Crystal Lake,” whose infectious chorus makes me think it’s a blast to see it live. Other horror staples like Michael Myers (“Haddonfield Horror”), Frankenstein’s Monster and its Bride (“It’s Alive”), Christine (“Killer Car”) and vampires (“Vampire Pin Up Girl”) are all represented.

I think that’s why I like this music. This is the soundtrack to growing up with a Video Store. This is the music for the weird kids that spent their teenage years among VCRs and faded cover art and plastic cases. Mutant slasher punk youth that doesn’t take itself too seriously because that’s not fun.

There’s some really good songwriting present here and that’s evident with the acoustic tracks for “My Dead Girlfriend,” “She’s Weird” and “Graveyard Girlfriend.” It’s a tender side of Paul of the Living Dead’s vocals and able to adapt a punk song into a somber, if not romantic, ballad.

At this point, there’s only one Bad Whoremoans release and Paul of the Living Dead’s activity is also divided up with his band, The Exstatics. Hopefully, there will be future music from this band since we need new voices to rise above the din and keep us going.

10/1/10

Have I got a story for you…

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Several stories, in fact. However, some might not be appropriate for readers of all ages. You have been warned…

The Amazon preview for the Cthulhu Unbound anthology contains a full view of Linda L. Donahue’s “Noir-lathotep.” As you’ve probably guessed, it’s a humorous mash-up of the Cthulhu mythos and film noir with enough injokes to appease all but the most uptight fans of each genre.

Speaking of the mythos, Australian sci-fi/horror author David Conyers contributed to the Call of Cthulhu RPG and has written numerous Lovecraftian short stories like “Aftermath,” “The Swelling” and “Black Water.”

I originally discovered The Fright Site in my search for bad movie reviews, but it was the two original horror stories there that really caught my interest. Both Vampire Moon and The E-Leech are unique in that they are presented in an episodic format and are designed to seem like chat room conversations and diary entries, with make for a creepily realistic touch.

But enough modern fare, let’s look at some classics next. First up is Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, which inspired countless Hammer movies about lesbian vampires.

BLAH!

Like Carmilla, the penny dreadful Varney the Vampire is a vampire tale that predates (and influenced) Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It also (allegedly) introduced the conventions of the “tragic vampire tormented by his cravings” and vampires having fangs to horror fiction.

Speaking of Stoker, Dracula. was not his only foray into the world of horror. Ones of his other scary stories is Lair of the White Worm, the inspiration for the classic 80′s horror film of the same name. Fans of the film will undoubtedly be surprised at how different the original story is compared to the film. I actually think it’s better that the film was a loose adaptation, as the source material isn’t up to the standards of Dracula and is very politically incorrect.

William Hope Hodgson is one of my favorite horror authors, second only to Lovecraft in my mind. That links offers from his strange tales of the high seas to the adventures of the supernatural investigator Carnacki and his electric pentacle. I personally recommend The House on the Borderland, The Boats of the Glen Carrig (which is strikingly similar to The Lost Continent by Hammer Films) and “The Voice in the Night,” best known as the inspiration for the legendary Attack of the Mushroom People.

Strange Jason has sung the praises of Algernon Blackwood and I think you’ll understand why after reading tales like The Wendigo The Damned and The Willows (among others).

Did you know that The Phantom of the Opera was originally a serialized story by Gaston Leroux? Now you do!

And if you want even more tales of terror, please visit:

Graveside Tales
The Feckless Goblin
Short Stories from 1aDayHorror

06/27/10

More Cool Cover Art

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While browsing through the recent “Gravedigger’s Local 16 Flashback” entry, I couldn’t help but find myself drawn to the “Cool cover art” entry. Although the website noted in it (Critical Condition Online) is the undisputed king of online VHS cover art collections, I was inspired to see if there were any other sites devoted to cover art scans out there. I was not disappointed:

Itsonlyamovie.co.uk has a nice selection of British VHS covers from before the infamous “Video Nasties” crackdown.

Retro Slashers has a wonderful collection of the sort of slasher film box art that used to thrill us back in the day.

Both the Uranium Cafe and Friday the 13th: The Website have some cool pages devoted to VHS covers.

The Lightning Bug’s Lair has a cover gallery devoted solely to Christmas-themed horror movies.

Toho Kingdom has numerous pages devoted to both VHS and DVD covers.

Last but not least, the Horror Section offers a huge collection of covers from the best section of the video store, along with reviews and other goodies.

05/31/10

Mothra Madness

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Mosura!

Mothra is actually based on a serialized Japanese novel called The Luminous Fairies and Mothra.

Mothra was supposed to battle the unused monster Bagan in a never-realized 1990 film called Mothra vs Bagan. Elements of that script, along with the similarly never made Godzilla vs Gigamoth, were utilized in the 90′s version of Godzilla vs. Mothra.

Mothra is said to bear a resemblance to an European Peacock Butterfly.

During the DVD commentary for the South Park episode “Mecha-Streisand,” series co-creator Trey Parker revealed that his favorite Japanese monster movie is Mothra.

After finishing Gravity’s Rainbow, author Thomas Pynchon was rumored to have been working on a Mothra novel. However, this turned out to be untrue.

Wikipedia claims that Mothra’s distinctive chirp was created by speeding up Anguirus’ roar. That section also claims that Mothra was never realized by a person in a costume, which is disputed here.

In the movie Pokémon: Giratina and the Sky Warrior, Mothra’s chirp is used to create Giratina’s cry. The film was distributed by Toho (better known as the studio behind the Godzilla movies) in Japan…

In the American dub of The Magic Serpent, Mothra’s chirp is used as the voice of a giant bird. Similarly, the film’s dragon now has Godzilla’s roar and the giant toad uses Rodan’s cry.

The popularity of Mothra among women in Japan prompted Toho to make the 90′s version of Godzilla vs. Mothra.

When Mothra was released in America, the distributor suggested that theaters should display radioactive materials in their lobbies in order to build publicity for the film!

Eagle-eyed daikaiju fans might notice how the eyes of larval Mothra are red in her cinematic debut, yet they turn blue in Godzilla vs. Mothra(aka Godzilla vs. the Thing in America). In fact, they stay that way for the remainder of the old school Godzilla movies).

If you look at official reference guides, Mothra is much larger than Godzilla when she appeared in Mothra and had to be scaled down for her appearances in the Godzilla franchise.

11/8/09

Tales From The Crypt

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Though its initial run on HBO ran from 89-96, I didn’t catch ‘Tales from the Crypt’ until syndication since I didn’t afford the premium cable. But when it finally was distributed among the networks, I lived far up north that I caught it on a Canadian station that played in hour-long chunks every weekday at midnight.

I didn’t make the connection then, but I had come across, not Tales specifically, but the Tales format through those old comic books once given to me by a family friend. In between the superheroes and mutants, there was a plethora of ‘House of Mystery,’ ‘Grimm’s Ghost Stories’ and ‘The Witching Hour’ issues.

Similar to the Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the Crypt Keeper popped up at the beginning and at the end. Much like Afred Hitchcock, the Crypt Keeper had a corny sense of humor and a macabre use of puns. I’m a sucker for outlandish punnery, especially when it’s supposed to be so groan-inducing.

Much like horror hosts, the segments before and after the feature presentation took the edge off. Groan inducing punnery will take the sting out of any scare. Though most of the episodes weren’t terribly frightening; in fact, some very hackneyed, with the twist being either straight out of nowhere or seen from a mile away. 

Though stripped of its nudity and profane language, the whole attitude of the show remained intact when I watched it for the first time. Lately, I’ve been going over the old episodes, seeing the ones I’ve missed and revisiting the ones I saw before. On a whole, I would say that it’s a series that has aged well. I’ll have to do some digging to see the history behind the show before I put up any episode reviews. Personally, my favorite episodes aren’t those that deal with the supernatural. I like the ones that deal more with the monstrosity of the human condition. Though the ends are gruesome, they’re not that far removed from the realm of possibility. They’re usually the episodes that are written better (and much easier to watch.)

You can get all seven seasons for under two hundred bucks (less if you purchase used) on Amazon. Definitely worth the rental.

Also, if any of you readers out there can do me a favor – when it didn’t run in an hour’s chunk, there was a sorta-news program that ran before/after Tales From The Crypt on CBC 6. It dealt with a lot of paranormal activity, weird shit ’round the board. Trying to remember what the name of that program was and track down some episodes of it. Any clues can be sent over to me or the Front Office. Thank you kindly.