Lunchmeat #4 is here!

Great! The cool US horror flick fanzine Lunchmeat #4 has just been released. I can't really comment on it as I've just ordered it today so I'll quote the press release instead:

Come and get it, videovores! Issue # 4 of Lunchmeat is ready to be devoured!

We’ve stuffed our newest issue with in-depth reviews of cinematic curiosities such as Blood Salvage, Eyeball, Night of the Living Babes, Enemy Territory, and oodles of other buried gems that simply cannot be ignored! Also skulking around in this issue we have an interview with Carl Crew (Blood Diner, Dahmer), Rob Hauschild shares his tapes rescued right from the trash, a Killer Animals cover spread and, of course, a Living Dead themed crossword puzzle where you can win prizes. You read right: prizes!! Good ones, too!! Hell yes!! Oh, and did we mention a new and exclusive full page illustration from Putrid himself?! 'Cause that's in there, too!! Hell yes again!

What other tricks and treats await you in our newest issue? To find out, you’ll have to grab one…before it grabs you!! Keep those eyelids peeled and glued, kids! Hoooo-haaahhhhh!!!

You can buy the mag on ebay here and they still have copies of #3 left. They're $6 a pop plus postage ($4 to Europe).

Robo Vampire (1988)

VHS/Japan/letterbox/English dub/Japanese subs.

More highbrow arthouse quality from Hong Kong! Today, I received Godfrey Ho's ROBO VAMPIRE on Japanese VHS. I've never watched it before but I believe it's a piece of quality cinema on par with, well, the best of them! XD

Incidentally, Don_fofo wrote a cool piece on the film yesterday over on his über cool blog Cinediondo. You may need Google translator. I must admit I really really like Cinediondo even if my Spanish isn't very good and even if the Google translations come out truly bizarre. Just the look of his blog is awesome!

Alapaap (1984)

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Multo bene! I've been hunting this Tata Esteban directed Filipino horror movie for a couple of years and now I'm finally gonna get it!! The VHS is from Japan and dubbed in English. Awesome! xD

Cool slime on a Friday

The original US trailer




How awesome is this; The original Japanese trailers!
#1


#2



- And finally, the complete theme song:

Emergency! Living Dead in Tokyo Bay... finally... coming to non-VSoM DVD!!!

You: How... but... huh... wha'??? Say again?!?!?!

Me: Relax baby, cool it, all is good. Hahaha.

I know, I know, you don't capisce this, do you. Nah, you don't. It's not capisce'able for you ordinary folk out there to comprehend the greatness of this so lemme try and explain, slowly.

Yes, it is true; Kazuo "Gaira" Komizu's EMERGENCY! LIVING DEAD IN TOKYO BAY (original title: Batoru gâru: Tokyo crisis wars) is finally going to be released by a legit video company!!! (I'm sure it's redundant that I mention Gaira is also behind such classics as ENTRAILS OF A VIRGIN and ENTRAILS OF A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN). No longer will fans of exotic zombie flicks have to pull out the ol'e DVD-R from Video Search of Miami (or 3rd generation dupes off the VSoM boot, haha). Sounds amazing, aye!

It's the good people (well, Don May jr.) over at Synapse who are putting LIVING DEAD out on DVD. Street date: February 23, 2010. It's already listed on Amazon. It must be something like 15 years ago since I got hold of this film the first time; on that aforementioned bootleg VHS from VSoM. Or rather on a video tape from a tapetrader in Finland copied off a boot from VSoM, haha. Then much later, very recently like one or two yrs ago, I re-bought the film on DVD-R from that thar boot company in order to get a slightly better picture quality. Their version is pretty decent enough, good picture and comes with English subtitles provided by Thomas Weisser & Co. but needless to say getting a proper DVD is gonna be so much better, not least cos for the first time it'll be presented its original letterboxed format. [EDIT: actually it's in fullscreen. Thanks Jayson]

So what's EMERGENCY! LIVING DEAD IN TOKYO BAY all about I hear you ask. Well, a deadly green meteor crashes in the middle of Tokyo harbour and panic ensues partly because the rays from the green meteor turn dead people into... zombies! (you didn't see that one coming, eh). And our heroine battle chick has to... ehh... I forget... do some stuff I guess. But very entertaining. hmm, maybe I should go and watch my boot again. :/

Anyhoo, this new spiffy DVD will contain:

SPECIAL FEATURES
- New Digital Transfer from Original Vault Materials
- Presented in the Original Filmed Aspect Ratio of 1.33:1
- Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo Sound
- Newly Translated Removable English Subtitles
- All-New Video Interview with Director Kazuo “Gaira” Komizu (53 mins.)

Oh, and as you can see on the cover there's also a slight re-titling as Synapse have added the "Battle Girl" moniker from the Japanese video. Personally I think they should've left the old VSoM title as it were but, hey, that's a minor gripe.

Over on DVDManiacs Don May jr. said this about the interview:

At 53 minutes this interview on BATTLE GIRL is also quite brain melting. I think the guy must've smoked about 9 packs of cigarettes in that hour. It's so odd and crazy, we decided to just not edit it at all and have the entire thing on the disc! LOL!

PS: Synapse are (most likely) also going to release a VIOLENT SHIT box set!!! More on that later.

I guess ol' GG didn't wanna read

The dead are in their graves and you are dead. Understand!

I'm by no means an expert on this genre but this is one of my favourites and this is a pretty cool trailer (plus the title music is awesome!). :D

VIVA DJANGO was released in Germany as a Trinity brothers film, haha. I have it on tape (I actually wrote a long comparison article in Banned in Britain #1 fifteen yrs ago) and it's hilarious. The German title is Joe, der Galgenvogel [lit. trans: Joe, the Gallows-bird] The original version is a cold and cynical western, very violent and relentless. The Germans changed the entire dialogue so it became a comedy along the lines of the real Trinity bros films. The fact that Bud Spencer's character isn't there is even explained in the new dubbing. I wish someone would subtitle the German print and release it. It's a laugh riot. In the original version there's one scene where Django in a cold manner shoots a guy in the eye. Well, we can't have that in a funny western aimed at 12 y.o. boys in Germany so the scene is explained by a voice over who says something along the lines of "I did the old powder-in-the-eye trick; instead of shooting I blew powder into his eyes", hahaha. In another scene Django shoots a guy in the back but this is cut out and explained with some more voice over: "I let him ride away, there's been enough killings". Haha.

Here's the awesome intro song in full followed by the amazing shoot-out at the end (the uploader basically cut away the entire middle part, lol). I really should check out if there's CDs out there with only spaghetti western soundtracks on 'em. The bad guy is played by German actor Horst Frank who had one of the best bad guy faces ever.

Gory-Glory #3

The new issue of Gory-Glory fanzine is out now. Expect a review later. Until then you can check their ordering info here. Sorry, all of it is in Swedish.

Scoop up them ex-rentals!

Henrik Larsen of Obskuriøst magazine is selling out of his collection of rare video tapes. Quite a few German peplum tapes (in German) and horror movies (in English) and then some. Go here. Write for info on prices (I can't see an email address but you can use the comments section).

(click for bigger scan)

Last of the Zombies

Hey hey heey!! I finally got hold of the Japanese video release of Bruno Mattei & Lucio Fulci's big masterpiece ZOMBI 3 (Japanese title: SANGUELIA 2). Awesome!!! I've been on the lookout for that one for quite a while. So what this means is that I now have the video version of ZOMBI 3 on video and the DVD version of ZOMBI 3 on DVD - whereas most of you losers out there have to settle with Media Blasers' or Another World Entertainment's cut 'n' paste DVD version which basically means you've got the video version AND the DVD version all in one*. Video-on-DVD, hahaha.

Check the DVD cover here.



*i.e. the MB/AWE DVD is taken from a cut master which had the censored bits reinserted using a video tape as source for the censored bits.