Filipino remake of John Woo's A BETTER TOMORROW on the olde tube again!

It's annoyed me for ages that the Filipino remake of A BETTER TOMORROW (HK, 1986) got deleted from YouTube so now I've uploaded the fucker myself! Hardly anybody knows about this entertaining remake, and Wiki completely ignores the film even though they have a section of ABT remakes! And no, I'm not gonna try and update their page. The people who run Wiki are weird and odd creatures. Years ago I tried to add Turkish remakes but they kept deleting my info. Oh well, fuck 'em! Here's a link to my old info filled post about FILIPINO A BETTER TOMORROW.

EN LEJEMORDER SER TILBAGE and PSYCHOTRONIC BROADCAST proudly presents ... a night to remember ... the premiere screening at CINEMA J !!!

En Lejemorder Ser Tilbage ... in cooperation with ... Psychotronic Broadcasting ... proudly presents ...

Hell of the Living Dead Disintegrating VHS Cases!!!

ASIAN CINEMA TAKEOUT fanzine No. 1 out now!

My buddy David K and Jessie Midnitecrawlr have just published the first issue of a new review fanzine on Asian cinema entitled ASIAN CINEMA TAKEOUT! I'm on board as a writer and there's a bunch of other spiffy folks there as well. The zine is 20pp and it's scheduled to get released every two months.

Apart from a limited print edition exclusively for the fanzine's writers, the mag is going to be purely a gratis print-on-demand zine; In other words you print your own edition. For free. Either that or download and read it as a PDF file.

To download/print go here.

WASHING MACHINE aka Vortice Mortale (Ruggero Daodato, Italy-France-Hungary, 1993)

"It's a unique packaging, coupled with the fact that the film is not officially available anywhere else in the world..."
[Shameless lies, I mean Films]

Funny how I've just been able to watch this film on official DVD from Thailand. Released in 2003.

Here's a link to Jason Meredith's incisive review (funnily enough he also posted about the official Thai DVD that Shameless claims doesn't exist!).

PS: no, the film isn't blue. Apparently, my cheap-ass camera is only able the zoom in on one object and get its colours right!

Ho Meng-Hua's BLACK MAGIC 2 coming to blu-ray soon

Woah!!! Ho Meng-Hua's BLACK MAGIC, PART 2 is being released on blu-ray! This is one of my all time fave HK horror flicks. Dark and wild. DARK AND WILD!!! Part one is good but this is way better! It took years and years of waiting to get to see this. It never received a release in any format in HK. There was ONE vhs release in the USA - cut beyond belief (missing ten minutes). Eventually they put out a reg. 1 dvd.

Film credits on HKMDB

From 88 Films in the UK.

MÄDCHEN MIT GEWALT (Roger Fritz, West Germany, 1970)

A great night in front of German television for sure! Tonight, a local German tv station (WDR) screened Roger Fritz' MÄDCHEN MIT GEWALT for the first time ever. Made in 1970 but considered so crass it's NEVER been screened on tv before. Tonight was its tv debut. 48 years after its cinematic premiere. WDR is screening two new (from 2016 and '17) cinema docs about West German genre films from the 70s ("Verfluchte Liebe Deutscher Film" and "Offene Wunde Deutsche Filme") and some of the genre films mentioned in the docs are screened as well during the next two weeks. Last night they ran Klaus Lemke's "Brandstifter" (1969) and next week they're showing stuff like Wolfgang Petersen's "Smog" (1973). 

 It was mentioned in the one of the docs that Sam Peckinpah ordered a screening of "Mädchen mit Gewalt" before he made "Straw Dogs". "Mädchen mit Gewalt" is a rape drama that takes place in the duration of just one day. Sometimes these films are mere wank fantasises but this one was great. Great acting, great dialogue, crude, violent, and yet no cartoon characters. And the ending is nowhere to be found in a Hollywood film. 

Subkulture Entertainment in Germany has put it out on an English subbed dvd (no idea how good the subs are though, I hear their "Blutiger Freitag" aka "Bloody Friday" subs sucked ass).

EDIT: Jared Auner of Mondo Macabro and Worldweird blog just told me he's going to do the English subs for upcoming releases from Subkulture Entertainment. Very cool news indeed!

Richard Kern, Lung Leg, Dave K, zines from last year and yesteryear

Recently, I received David K's (sometimes Dave K) oneshot fanzine from last year, Fiendish. Thanks, David (and thanks for the mention). David does the A Fiend on Film channel on YouTube. Cool stuff, check it out, paesano! Last night I read his article on the complete blu-ray release of Richard Kern's 1980s underground films from New York entitled "Hardcore". Good stuff.

I watched some of Kern's stuff via 4th or 5th generation VHS dupes back in the 90s and always dreamed of having lived in NY in the 80s - and to have hung out with the likes of Lydia Lunch, haha. (don't mention it, no, I'm sure it wasn't as cool to actually have been there as it is to watch the flicks). Funnily enough, David mentions that if he'd seen Lung Leg (from Kern's films) back then he would probably have fallen in love. I can understand why. Fucked up and yet so attractive. The irony is whereas I wished I'd been in NY in the dark and gloomy 1980s David K was actually there ... and missed the whole thing. Well, the Richard Kern underground thing that is. Oh well, that's how life goes sometimes. In regards to Lung Leg here's something I don't think I've ever mentioned on this blog or elsewhere;

I published my first fanzine in 1994, Banned in Britain #1.  Then at some stage in the latter part of said decade I received an e-mail from someone in the States. I forget his name. My zine was distributed by people in the UK, Norway (Thomas Eikrem's Rage distro), and Denmark. But never in the US. But even so by the end of the 90s he'd gotten hold of a copy of that long gone debut issue, and he sent me an article about Lung Leg. By that time she had completely disappeared off the face of the Earth. Or at least disappeared from the New York underground scene and the people who monitored it.

It was a well written article. And that was about it. I never heard from him again. I was slow at getting my arse in gear and putting out the next issue of Banned in Britain. Didn't happen till 2004 and by then I'd completely forgotten about the article. A couple of years back I remembered it and did a Google search and found out that not only had Lung Leg returned from whatever dark, damp, dank hideout she'd been holed up in, but she'd even been in some new horor flick. Well, as The Cramps might or might not have said; that's the way the flop mops sometimes. 
 

Scala Cinema Club - THE BOOK!!!

Yours truly with one of my original
programmes from the Scala Cinema Club

The legendary SCALA CINEMA CLUB in London existed for 15 years (1978-93). Out of those 15 I was a regular for three years (1988-90) and what can I say. It was the best of times and it was the worst of times. I had wonderful all-nighters at the Scala but I also had crappy work at bloody 8 in the morning on Sunday mornings for a full year, haha. I miss the Scala. I'm sure other regulars do too.

My entire collection of original Scala Cinema programme posters - zept for one!

The good people at Fab Press (genre book publishing house run by the old fanzine editor Harvey Fenton) are gonna publish the most fab book in the history of publishing. This is what Gutenberg invented the book format for. Well, that is... if enough people wish to support the book! It's a crowd funding project. 

Check out the video (at the bottom of this post) and their funding page (here) that has more info that I could be arsed to repeat here. I'm gonna be in on this. I couldn't care less for tote bags or badges etc etc so I'll go for the cheap edition.

The back of the posters have info and brief plot descriptions of the films

But still. 400 pages and reprints of ALL programme posters. Wauw! (I've still got 10 of the from back then). Long live the Scala Cinema Club (even if they've been gone for 25 yrs by now!).


FAB Scala Crowdfunding Video from NucleusFilms on Vimeo.

Today's writing tip

If you wish to write successfully it's a brill idea to be in the vicinity of:

 1) Strong coffee
 and
 2) A guy called James.

 In fact, get two James while you're at it!