About a year ago I copied two lists of films from DVDMANIACS forum. The original forum threads were similar in that members were posting horror movies that they really like and that are new. "New" meaning films made after 2000. I'm never up-to-date cos I spend my time watching so many old films, worldweird films, films that are simply not horror, AND WHAT HAVE YOU! But we're in 2012 so it's time to try and catch up!! Haha. So without much checking for quality I'm simply gonna try and get hold of these movies in the coming months. Like I said, I'm not gonna read up on any of them so I'm bound to post about flicks that you think are the worst crap ever. But, hey, I wanna make up my own mind about this stuff.
Out of the four films I ordered this morning I paid LESS than a pound for 3 of them (each). Yes, they're second hand but I tried to get copies that had specific descriptions describing them as being in a close to mint condition. Sometimes you're lucky and sometimes the seller in question sends you shite. That's the name of the game when you buy used stuff.
The old list of "new" horror movies is here. If you know of new good horror films I ought to check out feel free to make a suggestion in the comments section. Cheers.
I received THE SUPERNATURALS on video from the US yesterday. I didn't empty the mailbox till very late and I was pretty tired but since I hadn't had anything to eat I thought I'd grab a bite and watch the beginning of the movie before turning in. I didn't know anything about the film other than I'd seen the cool Greek video cover and knew it was a low-budget zombie film and that it wasn't released on DVD. That alone spurred my interest enough to make a bid on the Greek tape, and when I stumbled over the NTSC tape on eBay I thought what the hell, the US tape might very well have a better picture quality. Greek tapes can look fine but often they equal watching a television programme from an outskirt TV station while someone on the roof is holding the aerial trying to pick up the weak signal. From foggy to more foggy. I still don't know what my Greek tape looks like as it's still located at the Church Moors in Finland but the US tape looks pretty good. Sharp picture and the tape has only minor traces of being worn.
Incisive plot description:
The film starts off during the civil war in the United States in the 1860s. It's towards the end of the war and a group of soldiers from the North have caught a bunch of soldiers from the south. They force them to walk over a mine field. Some stuff happen. And then we switch to the present (well, the present of the 1980s anyway) and a group of recruits arrive to the very same forest where the beginning took place a hundred years earlier. And then... cut to the chase... they're attacked by civil war zombies!
I thought THE SUPERNATURALS was great and I was entertained all the way thru. As I said at least enough entertained to finish it altho I was really tired and only planned on watching 10 minutes before going to bed! It's low-budget but it's well filmed and the actors are good. The dialogue wasn't corny (altho there's nothing wrong with corny dialogue of course). There's at least one STAR TREK actor in there and a brief cameo from one of the Gibb brothers (apparently. I don't know shit about that band but that's what I read anyway). The zombies look great. Not like your regular George A. Romero or Lucio Fulci zombies but more like skeleton zombies. There's no gore or nudity but I can live with that.
For some reason the film belongs in that big pile of films that have never been granted a DVD release and that's a pity. This film deserves to be seen again by a broader audience. If you can stand watching films on YouTube someone has uploaded the entire film there.
EDIT: Fred Anderson of Ninja Dixon informed me that there is actually an English friendly, uncut German DVD release! I'll post the cover at the bottom of this post.
I copied the American VHS cover from VHS WASTELAND which is a great site where they upload video covers in hi-res. My own cover looks better as theirs isn't in the best of conditions. The Greek cover is the exact one I bought from Member-X's eBay listing. I think the Greek front cover is the by far cooler one.
I couldn't find a trailer so here's the clip from the Greek tape that Member-X posted with the auction:
Thanks to Fred for the info and German DVD cover. Fred reviewed the film over on his NINJA DIXON blog. Man, he even mentioned the film director's name! >_<
When I discovered the HK movie there was only one way to get the films; thru tape-trading with other fans. Some of those fans would live in cities that had Chinatown video stores; They'd rent films and dupe them onto a blank video tape. This was a time when you couldn't just BUY original tapes cos they didn't sell them anywhere. At least not the HK movies that some of us had wet dreams about. Feverish wet dreams.
Then something quite wonderful happened; In the UK two labels sprung up to distribute these films. One label was the (notorious? Infamous?) EASTERN HEROES label run partly by Toby Russell. The other label (and in my view the better one of the two) was MADE IN HONG KONG. Out of a sudden you could chuck out your 4th generation vhs dupe of A BETTER TOMORROW, THE KILLER or A CHINESE GHOSTSTORY. Now they came out on letterboxed and subtitled sell-thru vhs with cool box art and for the most part great info written on the inside of the sleeves.
Most of the films have since then been granted DVD (and now blu-ray) releases (altho some of these tapes are still the only/best way of watching the films!). But in contradiction to most other collectors I haven't got rid of the old MIHK tapes to make room for dvd's. To me they have value! These were the tapes that kind of SAVED the UK and Euro Hong Kong film collectors.
Anyhoo, quite a number of the tapes I never got hold of back in the day and so I'm actually buying them now. And one of the coolest releases that I never got hold of was the limited collector's editon box set edition of THE KILLER!! I got the ordinary (but still highly cool edition as it was subtitled and letterboxed!) MIHK release of the film. And before that I'd bought the fullscreen, English dubbed vhs (also from the UK). But now... a couple of decades down the line... I have finally got hold of said box set. Or at least I have won it on eBay UK and will hopefully get it soon - but of course you never know with mail these days. Let's cross our fingers and hope that I also actually RECEIVE the fucker! Hah!
The past few months I've been a wild and insane hunt for the old NO WAVE bands, the records, the people, the books, the stories, the rumours, the pictures - ohh, the pictures - and indeed the pictures of a young LYDIA LUNCH are nice to say the least. And talking of which, I stumbled over this trailer for a French translated edition of one of Lydia's books that was made public recently. The book is "Will Work For Drugs" (or Déséquilibres Synthétiques in the lingo of the frog eaters). I haven't read it. Or any other books by Lunch. But the pictures are nice and TEENAGE JESUS AND THE JERKS is mandatory listening.
And the VIMEO uploaded video lead me to THIS other video, a new(ish) music video from Lydia. Watch them both, they pretty cool.
PS: I realise the videos are a bit too big for the video space that this blogger layout allows and I could fix it but updating to one of the newer fancier layouts but screw that I'm gonna stick with this old one (that you can't even choose any longer as Blogger has deleted it in the layout section). Alternatively, go to VIMEO and watch the videos in their full size.
Back in the day, documentary films were "real" films but along with their becoming a full blown genre of their own we now have 6 trillion shit documentaries that were made by TV directors using whatever old footage they had lying around in their stations' archives. Over the last couple of days I've watched JEAN SEBERG AMERICAN ACTRESS (Switzerland, 1995) twice and it's so cool to watch a proper doc.
Jean Seberg played the American girl in Jean-Luc Godard's BREATHLESS (aka À bout de souffle) from 1960. She made films in both the US and France. She was involved with the Black Panther movement and got the FBI and CIA on her back. In 1979 she was murdered in Paris and dumped in a car. The inefficient French police wrote it off as suicide. The documentary has a kind of sadness to it that goes well hand in hand with Jean Seberg's sad and ultimately tragic life. I don't know if the film is available on DVD or VHS, I taped my copy off TV.
I've just ordered THIS film because of THIS review! ^_^
The film is on sale from the film makers at half price of what it is at Amazon (so it says anyway, I haven't actually checked it out). 15 dollars incl. postage to this forsaken hell-hole. It looks like an interesting different take on the zombie film. I recommend you read Jason's review at Cinezilla (that I linked to).
The most forgotten rock band of the 80s is THE PRETENDERS. They released two fabulous LP's ("Pretenders" & "Pretenders II") in the early 80s after which half the band OD'd on smack and died. Lead singer CHRISSIE HYNDE never managed to get together an equally great band after that nor to release records that came no-way near those two original platters. It's a crime against all humanity that those two albums are now lost in the big abyss of the forgotten records.
Those two early LP's are great real rock'n'roll. Not the kinda plastic shit that otherwise polluted the 1980s; Shit like Shakin' Stevens that was deliberately so tame that every granny could swallow it with her afternoon tea without getting offended. And of course it didn't hurt matters that Chrissie Hynde had one of thee best voices in rock music - up there on par with Siouxsie Sioux if you ask me. Check this early live version of "Bad Boys Get Spanked" from "Rockpalast" from German tv. The picture quality sucks, the music does not.
The first time I learnt about The Pretenders was via an article in a Danish youth magazine (Vi unge). I was in my 7th grade and there was an article about the band and a photo of Chrissie Hynde. She looked tough. She didn't look like a typical '77 punk but she had actually previously been in The Damned. The article was mostly about Chrissie Hynde. It said, "Chrissie never wears anything but leather pants - and she doesn't wear knickers underneath". I knew I had to have their record.
I'm doomed to live a life in circles of having a migraine and not having a migraine. This is the first time for a week that I'm switching on my computer. I've had extreme headache attacks on a daily basis for over a week now. So far, today seems to be okay. Migraine isn't like having a mere hangover. It's the worst hangover times 25. I'd swap a migraine for a root-canal any day. Root-canals is kids' pains. And apart from the shitty pain it means I lose out on cool stuff and ... have 17 pages of new emails, tons of PMs, and unpaid bills. If you wrote to me I'll get back to you at some stage.
PS: If you're applying for my fanclub don't worry I've got people take care of that. Have your credit card ready.
It's been common practice among a few American film companies to release films in the DVD-R format the past couple of years. Now, while this is obviously not the best way to release films it does mean we get the chance to watch stuff that might not otherwise get a DVD release. And some of these films are presented in their correct ratio and remastered so we're not necessarily talking about copies off old VHS tapes that are quickly slapped onto a DVD-R (although reportedly not all releases look equally great).
However, so far it's been a bit of a jungle as to what has been available in the DVD-R format and what hasn't - not least since most regular shops don't stock these "releases". This week it all became just a little easier as Amazon has just launched a special store where you can browse all these titles!
According to this article the shop will list both old releases as well as new upcoming ones. You can browse either via genre or all films at once (the genres are listed on the left). Unfortunately, the DVD-R store is an Amazon.com store only, i.e. you can't access it via Amazon UK (I haven't checked Amazon Canada or the other branches but I wouldn't think they've put up similar stores either). A full-on kick in the nads to Eurotrash and Brits alike as this means higher postage rates and the risk of getting an extra customs fee slapped on top of the price. But is that going to discourage the fanatical film fan? Not at all, not at all.
