Spastik Children!!!

There are things that'll bug me even after I rottenly return from my grave to eat your brains.

Like for instance, why did no one release a record by SPASTIK CHILDREN? What kind of insane world do we live in where a SPASTIK CHILDREN record doesn't exist!!! James Hetfield on drums and Cliff Burton on bas, at one point Kirk Hammett was also in the band, and also other well known people from the SF metal scene back then like Paul Baloff and Fred Cotton. They had songs like "Burp" and "Cunt".



PS: the official spelling IS with a k, not a c.

TROLDKARLEN (1999) Anders Østergaard, Denmark/Sweden

How does a film manage to create a shiver down your spine when you've watched it heaps of times already? And how does a bloody documentary film create that feeling? I don't know but that's usually how I feel when I re-watch Anders Østergaard's Danish documentary TROLDKARLEN (aka Trollkarlen) about Jan Johansson. I pull out the movie ever so often and it's always the same, and last night was no exception.

Jan Johansson was a Swedish jazz musician who lived long ago and who died untimely in the late '60s. There's one point in the film where his brother vividly talks about having had dreams about seeing Jan in the Stockholm underground after Jan passed away. In his dreams he meets Jan and says to him, "We thought you had died. Where have you been?" to which Jan explains he's been away to play in Russia. His brother then continues in the doc, "But then I woke up and everything was the same". It gets me every time. So sad.

I highly recommend TROLDKARLEN, even if you're not a fan of old jazz music. The Danish dvd has subs in Danish and English (of the special kind we call Valby-engelsk, argh).

Look into these eyes and tell me you love me

Wauw!!! You know there are songs you hear in your youth and they just stay with you forever - even if you don't listen to them for years on end. For me once such track is GREEN ON RED's awesome "The Drifter" which I first heard via a live recording on a Danish radio station in the early '80s.

I taped it and played the tape over and over again. The song about being a drifter made me dream about leaving the camp (i.e. home) and piss off to faraway lands (which I later did). What I never knew was that the song is actually about... Ted Bundy!! Haha.

Diabolik from Uncut forum (aka Hans-Jørn Reimer) recently sent me the photo you see in the above and said, "recognise him?" and all it took was looking into those eyes. He appears to be reading a book ... but click the scan and you'll see he's looking right at YOU. Creepy beyond belief.




Thanks to Diabolik for the scan.

What you expect - I'll never be (Stay Sick! dance party Vol. 1) - #1

STAY SICK! TURN BLUE!

Here's some crap (or crank) info you don't know about. Sometime in a long gone decade I put out a bootleg record as a soundtrack to my fanzine STAY SICK! (it was a freebee so record labels need not sue. Thanks). The platter was entitled "What you expect - I'll never be", a title both a ref to rockabilly and wild trash film culture - as well as the obvious response to, well, you know! The track list was all awesome stuff from before these times that we squad in that are truly awful pop-culture wise. Hey, I did not eat the cranberries from a dented can! Not much anyway. I'll try and post the ol'e tracks here in days to come (or not. In the words of my friend George Costanza "I'm an enigma" so who knows). Chronological orders are so square so let's kick off with number 10: KILLDOZER doing "Cranberries" from their EP "Burl" (which if I remember correctly they dedicated to a guy called Earl, and then years later they found out he hadn't died at all). I discovered Killdozer via an interview in Moshable fanzine in 1990 when I lived in Baron's Court in London and they were one of my fave bands for so many years. They run their own fb page here somewhere but don't update much. They took their name from a telly flick by the same name which isn't on dvd and that's a bloody shame as it's the coolest killer "car" movie. I mean, a film about a slooow moving demon possessed killer bulldozer, how could that not be cool. There are bootleg dvds out there.

For those who can read it, the original liner notes from the bootleg sleeve:
"Eet af mine favoritbands gennem alle tider. Nu desværre opløst. Totalt psykotiske sange, man skrandgriner bare hele vejen igennem!! Alle numrene er fra EP'en Earl." (det sku' ha' været "Burl")

James dishing it out in 1978

I'm told that crooked ex-KGB agents are working on a time machine somewhere in a secret bunker under the Gulag, and my man behind the old rusty iron curtain tells me it'll be ready soon. I can't wait for them to put it into production. I'm gonna get a five round ticket for 1978 and I'm gonna stay there for five years straight (every time we hit December you'll get thrown back to January) and I'll go to every gig by every NO-WAVE band that ever existed! And I'll get all the records (and buy extra copies and sell them at inflated prices when I get back here). This is JAMES CHANCE & THE CONTORTIONS with "Dish it out" from the fabulous "NO NEW YORK" LP. James is a Wildman so bug off!!!

Lost stock of ONAR FILM's "Turkish Death Wish" dvd found and for sale!!!

From the semi official ONAR FILM facebook page:

"CELLAT"... "THE EXECUTIONER"... LEGANDARY REMAKE OF LEGENDARY "DEATH WISH"... IT WAS ONE OF THE BEST REMAKES OF TURKISH CINE HISTORY... BLOODY, SHOCKING, BRUTAL... AND SOMETIMES IT WAS BETTER THAN THE ORIGINAL!

ONAR FILMS' CELLAT WAS OUT OF ORDER FOR LAST ONE YEAR. IT WAS TOTALLY OUT OF STOCK. BUT, WE FOUND SURPRISINGLY 60-65 NEW COPIES LABELED / NUMBERED BY ONAR IN A SMALL DVD SHOP.

NOW, WE START TO SELL THEM AS A GREAT SURPRISE... AND A GREATER SURPRISE: WITH THE SPECIAL SIGNED MINI POSTER OF TURKISH ACTION ACTOR MR. SERDAR GOKHAN (TURKISH ARCHITECT OF THE STORY IN THIS REMAKE).
DON'T MISS THIS GREAT OPPORTUNITY!
FOR ORDERS:
onarfilms.lastfilms@yahoo.com

Onar Film on facebook

Killer toone on a Monday

Don't you just love the moment when a serial killer gets into your car and sings along to "Always on my Mind"?

Needless to say I chose a version that has Karaoke lines in Chinese (next to being an Aussie Londoner by heart I'm also fake Hongkongese).

En Lejemorder Ser Tilbage and Psychotronic Broadcasting presents...

Another of my Dogme style YouTube videos on my Psychotronikc Broadcasting channel; Bad sound, bad filming, bad intro in bad German, and let's not talk about the info provided (i.e. lack of!). But at least the jokes are bad.

Best MATTEI OF THE DEAD ever!

One of my fave YouTubers is Pete aka Mondo Squallido and his channel Mattei of the Dead. He's just so fucking interesting! Pete is this super cool pommy guy who divides his time between the UK and Deutschland. This month he goes against the grain and instead of doing horror film reviews he's reviewing 31 documentary films! How awesome is that. Too fucken right it is!

I'm embedding his review of CORMAN, HOLLYWOOD'S WILD ANGEL here (I've got the vhs, it's not on dvd) and I urge you to check out more videos on his channel. If Pete were an icy pole I'd get a whole box right away from the ice cream parlour. And I say that in a strictly non homo erotic way.


PS: I realise the headline is confusing. It doesn't mean that this video is the best MATTEI OF THE DEAD video but that there are no other MATTEI OF THE DEADs out there as good as t-h-i-s MATTEI OF THE DEAD. lol

Knowing the difference

This song and this video by EELS are just wonderful. It also strikes home with this writer. Oh well. You just gotta make the most of it.

Winner of "Best YouTube Channel Ever" prize!!!

I'm so happy! YouTube has decided that my channel PSYCHOTRONIC BROADCASTING is thee best channel in the history of YouTube! Wauw! Wauw!! Wauw!!! Sure, it's in the alternative universe of Bizarro World but, hey, you gotta take what you can get, right!

I've been running this shitty channel since over summer and I've got something like 20-25 videos (couldn't be arsed to count 'em). Check it out. Sorry about the sound, filming, camera angle, noise, rambling dialogue, whatever. It's done that way on purpose cos I FOLLOW DOGME FILM RULES!!! (and in the words of Richard Kuklinski, if you believe that I have a couple of bridges to sell you).


PS: non English speakers may not realise this but the headline is a play on words; Piles (plural) is another word for haemorrhoids.

The Mind is a Many Splendoured Thing

I had stayed up till the early dawn. And I had asked the little man who lives in my alarm clock to wake me at 2pm but I woke before that. My house is haunted and ghost banging on the walls usually mess up my sleeping. An hour before the alarm clock were to go off I was half asleep with a mind that drifted between a late night convo and images of distant lands. Then out of a sudden, as when your computer program crashes in a split second and your wallpaper is thrown in your face, I get this vivid image from a location I don't recognise. Thinking about it, it may have looked like a table at a travel office. My dad is sitting in front of me. He doesn't look at me but past me. His face is worried and it is thin. Not quite as thin as what it later became but thinner than those old Kodak memories that float in my mind. It's like getting a bucket of cold water splashed into your face. I was wide awake in a split second but right awake tried to go back to that unknown desk in that unknown room in that unknown location. I got back but the picture was now frozen. I've got a slight headache now and it is a grey and cool day outside. It has almost got the feel of a 1970s' day. The mind is an odd creature that messes with you in surprising ways that you don't expect. It's annoying and I find it fitting that I end this by quoting my friend H.J. Simpson, "Brain, I thought we had an agreement; I'll leave you along if you leave me alone".



PS: The haunted house comment is real. I taped it and it's on YouTube.

Here it is. The smoking gun. Evidence of a hard-boiled meeting. Once in a lifetime.

To any reader of hard-boiled crime fiction this is an amazing photograph. This is the only photographic evidence of the two masters of pulp fiction Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Changler ever having met. The fact that it's from a dinner party at Black Mask magazine in 1936 only makes it even more awesome.
- Chandler second from left at back, Hammett far right, back.


Everyone in the photo:
Back, L-R: Raymond J. Moffatt, Raymond Chandler, Herbert Stinson, Dwight Babcock, Eric Taylor, Dashiell Hammett.
Front, L-R: Arthur Barnes, John K. Butler, W.T. Ballard, Horace McCoy, Norbert Davis

Wish you were here

Bill Barounis (with cool sunglasses on the left) passed away today three years ago.

Bill ran the coolest dvd label ever, ONAR FILMS. I never met Bill but like a few of us I knew him through correspondence; through Cinehound worldweird film forum, and through trading films with him. He lived in Greece and saw it as his life project to track down lost Turkish cult films and release them. In 2009 he got brain cancer and passed away in 2010.

The guy on the right, grinning like an undertaker, is Tom from Switzerland who met him in 2010 during a period when we all thought Bill had beat the illness. With Jared Auner (of Mondo Macabro and "Worldweird" blog) I maintain the semi-official ONAR FILMS fb page.

Bill could be tough but he knew who his friends were. He is sorely missed.

Cult of J now on the toobe

While I took a break from posting on this blog and Facebook I travelled to India, Pakistan, and also I met the good people of Africa. I wrote a book about my 6 years as a white man among the Hottentots, and I recorded an album.
 
- Alright, alright, maybe I'm slightly exaggerating but I d-i-d open an account on Youtube and became part of the horror community there. The channel is called Psychotronic Broadcasting. I think it was partly Richard Schmidt from the Cinema Somnambulist blog [and insert 10-15 other blog/podcast/radio/zine names here that he does] who does awesome vlogs (not least the ones were he watches 10+ films in a row and reviews them all throughtout!!). Oh, the Toobe is a wonderful land, you should visit us sometime. I'll buy you a lemonade. Here's a presentation I did of a random dvd shelf. I'm not featured in it but I am in some (most) of the other ones.

Mex on SWV

Here's a photo of a few random video tapes on one of my shelves. Four old Mexican horror movies from the '60s on VHS from Something Weird Video. The movies are DR. SATAN, DR. SATAN VERSUS BLACK MAGIC, ISLAND OF THE DINOSAURS and ZORRO VERSUS THE TEENAGE MONSTER. The tape on the far left is also an old Mexican horror movie, THE BLOODY VAMPIRE. It is however not a SWV tape but a bootleg. Incidentally, the bootleg tape is the only one that is dubbed into English. The other four are in Spanish only (i.e. no dub, no subs). I bought them years ago on eBay. The films have been discontinued from the Something Weird catalogue for a long time; none of them made it to dvd or dvd-r (from that label, Bloody Vampire is out on a non English friendly dvd from Mexico).

Old devil cult movie?

Here's a cool new video by the band Black Prism for the track "Satan's Country". The video looks like an old movie from the 1970s about Devil worshipping! And the music sounds like a lost Black Sabbath record from that same decade. Pretty cool!

I found the video on a Danish blog called Fra Sortsand and I highly recommend you check it out if you read Danish.

New horror channel to celebrate Halloween

There's a new film channel on YouTube called HorrorGlobe and it's all about horror flicks, and it's going to cover every day of October! Here is the first review and I'm happy to report it's done by my buddy TJ Pyramid who lives in Salem!! (I won't spoil the fun and tell you it's a different Salem). They've invited me and, hey, I might even do a review or two there. ^_^

Bloody Weekend Horror Movie Festival (2013)

Today was the third day of the Blodig Weekend (i.e. Bloody Weekend) horror movie festival in Copenhagen, Denmark. I got home around midnight after a long but very cool day. The festival continues tomorrow. The full programme is listed here.

CAPOTE (USA, 2005) dir: Bennett Miller

I watched Bennett Miller's film CAPOTE tonight. It's basically the story of how the American author Truman Capote wrote his novel "In Cold Blood" about the two murderers who killed four people in 1959 with gun shots to the head. The film is very good but don't expect neither a serial killer film like HENRY or a horror movie. CAPOTE is neither. It is however a very good movie and Philip Seymour Hoffman's portrayal of Truman Capote is spot on. I watched the Danish dvd which came in a box set with Richard Brooks' film version of the book, IN COLD BLOOD, from 1967. I haven't watched the latter yet. The PQ on the dvd was good most of the time but shadows looked awful as they were full of pixellation squares. It looked like a fucking video-cd from Hong Kong!! I think I have the book somewhere.

Trailer for the Danish cult film STENBROENS "HELTE" now with English subs!

aka CITY STREET HEROES (Denmark, 1965)



This is the trailer for the Danish psychotronic masterpiece STENBROENS "HELTE" from 1965. It was directed by Poul Nyrup who only made three films and then disappeared back into obscurity. The film is a true CULT film in MY book but sadly almost only in my book; The rest of Denmark ignores it. Their loss I'd say. Unfortunately, a piece of pop culture can only gain cult status if the Americans have told the Danes that it's a cult film. And so since STENBROENS "HELTE" hasn't yet been discovered by the American cult movie fans we can't worship it in Denmark. Denmark, I despise you (somebody please get me out of here!). The film has (of course) never been released on dvd in Denmark, and it's not even been on TV. It was released twice on VHS in the '80s and there's a well known bootleg VHS from the '90s. The subs on the trailer were done by some crazy fanatic fan somewhere. The only Poul Nyrup film that exists on semi legit dvd is his second film, COPENHAGEN CALL-GIRLS (aka Villa Vennely) from 1964, which Something Weird Video put out on dvd-r (and probably also VHS) in the States. Their print is not the same as was used for the Danish VHS but an old English subbed cinema print.

APOCALYPSE VIRUS ZOMBIES (France, 2010) dir: Luc Lagier, 52 min.

Cinémas d'Horreur - Apocalypse Virus Zombies (French title)
Horrorfilme - Apokalypse Viren Zombies (German title)





"The 66th minute of a horror movie called The Descent. If you don't wish to watch a scene of horror you now have 10 seconds to switch over!"

I've just uploaded this horror movie documentary which covers some of the new horror movies that have come out in recent years. The doc was made by ARTE TV/France. Arte is a joint French-German culture channel which is rather exceptional as it basically exists to broaden the friendship and knowledge between those two nations (Germany and France have not always been the best of friends). All programmes are basically broadcast simultaneously in both countries, and all programmes have a voiceover in both countries' language (that being French and German - duh!).

I don't live in either country but even so I can watch the channel via a spiffy satellite dish. I dvd-r'ed both versions earlier this year and I was going to upload them both as it's a rather good film. However, lo and behold, someone beat me to it with the French version. I'll link to it at the bottom of this post.

As I said, the doc is pretty good; It has interviews with Alexandre Aja (Hills Have Eyes remake), Jaume Balagueró ([REC]), Neil Marshall (The Descent), Paco Plaza ([REC]), Eli Roth (Hostel). Some of them are interviewed in English but unfortunately translations are made via voiceover instead of subtitles. I must admit I fucking hate when they do that. You can sorta make out what they say under the voiceovers if you pay attention though.

The use of Johnny Cash's song "The Man Comes Around" at the end of the film is great (listen to it in full here). I love the DAWN OF THE DEAD remake but I gotta say that the scene that stands out the most is the fragmented collage footage at the beginning with Cash's song over it.

Click here for the doc with French language voice over.

BODY SWITCH - trailer

English subbed trailer for the Danish teen horror film BODY SWITCH (aka Farligt Venskab, Denmark 1995). From a rare Ocean Shores dvd (i.e. from Hong Kong).

Oh, Lydia

Sods bass player Knudd Odd talking about Lydia Lunch's involvement in their LP "Dagger & Guitar". From the TV documentary OMKRING EN SORT SOL - ET PORTRÆT AF SODS from 1984 (this is from the actual TV broadcast that I taped on Betamax!!!). It's never been repeated in its original form.

Well, whad'ya know!

I was walking home late one afternoon about four months ago. As I walked past an old house I saw some feller trying to get his groceries out from the boot of his car, but he seemed to be having trouble with it as he had a cast on his right arm. I offered to give him a hand, he said sure thanks buddy, I carried his stuff into his house and next thing I know I wake up in the dark and on the floor of his basement. I stayed there for four months without a fucken chance of getting out. And none of you fuckers called the cops or asked around. Gee, "thanks". Anyhoo, I'm back now and despite the deep mental scars I'll try and get things back to normal. I've got about 3000 things that need to be done but, hey, nice to be back.