Craze

Tonight's film: CRAZE. Jack Palance is an antique dealer who worships the god of Chuku (!!). His business isn't going very well so obviously he begins to kill women to satisfy Chuku and receive his reward. One of the women is Norwegian cult(ish) actress Julie Ege who was interviewed for Psychotronic a couple of yrs ago (I forget which issue, you figure it out). Directed by Freddie Francis, 1974. Pretty good. On Danish ex-rental vhs as Woodoomord.

What if... Godfrey Ho had...

Tonight, I watched the HK movie ROBO VAMPIRE. Hm, how can I describe ROBO VAMPIRE? Well, if you can imagine the HK producers having asked Godfrey Ho to do MR VAMPIRE (thee best 'hopping vampire' movie ever made) just after he ran out of Richard Harrison footage!! That is what ROBO VAMPIRE is; MR VAMPIRE done the Godfrey Ho way, and with third rate Richard Harrison clones, haha. Very entertaining, very crappy. It's so entertainingly crappy (or crappily entertaining) that I don't even WANT to see it without the horrid English dubbing!

There's two DVDs in the US, the Brentwood one is a double bill with the sequel DEVIL'S DYNAMITE (which I haven't seen yet). This is the version I watched. It's letterboxed and copied from... a Japanese video tape!!! And guess what, it doesn't matter one iota!

Alright, the missiles are flying

Yup, I did the first review for the next BiB tonight so it's official now: Banned in Britain #3 is on its way! The movie btw is 'GATOR BAIT, hah! Next up is 'GATOR BAIT 2: CAJUN JUSTICE!! I've also got an editorial so all I need now is another 36 pages (I'm opting for 40 pages this time). Woo-hoo!! 'The missiles are flying', as the president says in Cronenberg's THE DEAD ZONE. I've actually had an outline of the mag laying around on my computer for quite some time (like, forever), complete with cover, editorial, and another 37 empty pages! In my editorial I had explained why I was going to deliberately change BiB from being a horror/splatter movie mag to an overall psychotronic movie mag. However, as I mentioned in my last post, to the best of my knowledge, there are NO fanzines left in the world of this sort, and so I thought it over and, well, decided to do what I originally set out to do; make a full-on, hardcore horror 'n' gore movie mag!! Yep, back to the old days! If no one else is gonna do it I will. Uh, and incidentally I stumbled over a British eBay seller who was selling out from his collection of pre-cert video tapes that has been sitting on his shelves for 25 years! Obviously I had to buy some (too many!!!) of them!! Fortunately (!!!) they were Betamax tapes (!!!!!) so they were cheap and although pre-cert tapes usually are an arm and a leg these ended up being... not very much. Ahh, it's a good day to start off another BiB!

The world's only remaining old-skool splatter movie mag still alive (kind of)

Recently I've received a couple of emails from people asking if I still have copies of my old splatter/horror/trash movie fanzine Banned in Britain laying around. And yes I sure do, a whole pile collecting dust actually so since I'm not using this blog for anything else at the moment I thought I might as well give the ol' rag a plug.



I started publishing Banned in Britain ('BiB' among friends) way back in 1994. It was inspired by the old UK zine In the Flesh that I use to buy when I lived in London in the late 80s. BiB #1 was reviewed in the final issue of the Danish (almost pro-mag) zine Inferno that came out in '94. This all happened back in the days of type, cut & glue-fanzines. Before the Internet (yes, dear young reader, there was a time, in the longlongago, when man didn't have Internet!) and before those shiny little discs called dvd's were invented (I'm not pulling your leg here, we really didn't have dvd's back in the old century either!). In those early days when all we had was video tapes (also referred to as vhs!!) that was when BiB arose from a tormented earth to ravage amongst men of... alright, I'm rambling (again) but to cut the chase short I put out #1 in 1994, sat around on my arse for ten years and put out #2 in 2004, and #3... well, the world is still awaiting that one (i.e. doesn't give a rat's ass). In 1999 I started publishing another zine called Stay Sick! but that's an entirely different story. BiB is where it all began.

No.1 is long gone but as I said I've got heaps of #2 left. 32 pp filled with my ravings about horror, gore and trash movies. There's also something on Slayer (the legendary thrash metal band, in case you didn't know) and reviews by renowned Danish cartoonist Lars Kramhøft. $4/€3 postpaid anywhere in the world. I take PayPal. Just shoot me an email. And before you ask, no I have no idea when issue no. 3 will be out but since it has recently dawned on me that there are almost no horror movie mags (and certainly no fanzines) left I'm beginning to think it's time to revive this so there'll at least be one old-skool splatter mag around! (NB: obviously I'm talking about REAL magazines printed on good old-fashioned dead wood, i.e. paper, as there's, of course, heaps of stuff in Cyberspace).
Jack

Black Warrior (aka Super Platoon)

Yes yes, I know. I should use this blog to tell you more rad stuff from my exiting life. Ehm, soon. Okay. Here, read another of my awesome reviews, this time for Black Warrior.