fangoria: leatherface edition

Issue #57

Issue #89

Issue #256

Issues #57 & #89 have lovely posters included for use in your family room of The Beast from Poltergeist II & Michael Myers (and his hideous mask) from Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers. That mask looks fucking atrocious in the actual movie, but in that poster, it manages to look even worse. Quite a feat.

I also have the 42nd issue of Rue Morgue with Leatherface on the cover and a nice article on the 30th anniversary of the original film, so I figured I'd toss that up here, too. However, unlike the Fangoria issues above, this is only the cover and accompanying article.

Issue #42 Cover + Article

"halloween 6" megapost.

I was never one for the Friday the 13th flicks. The first entry lulled me asleep, the next three were moderately entertaining, and the rest would probably smell like children if I were the Grand High Witch of Roald Dahl's magically perverse imagination. The Elm Street movies were more my style; the first is genuinely frightening, the second is amusing in a rather homoerotic way, and once they went full dreamland as a plot device, I relished the cheese with a tupperware bowl full 'o crackers.

But when it comes to my particular favorite slasher series, I have to hand it to Halloween, simply because of the manner in which those calling the shots torpedoed it from the threadbare premise of a psycho in a mask killing teenagers to full-blown ridiculousness involving cults, Druids, telepathy, and Paul fuckin Rudd.

Just when the "Man In Black" element of Halloween 5 got you thinking that it could not possibly get any crazier, along came Halloween: The Curse of Michael Mysers six years later. Plagued with reshoots, rewrites, a pathetic director (according to star Marianne Hagan), and teen boys at test screenings, what ended up on theater screens is generally considered an abortion of what could have been by all involved.

Fortunately, a so-called "Producer's Cut" leaked shortly after the theatrical release in the mid-nineties; a cut vastly different from the one released, but even more muddled with absurdity. Those absurdities, however, are what make it such a stand-out entry in the series. Moustapha Akkad & Co. dived in, tits to the wind, to make a horror flick of such preposterousness that one much admire it for that alone. A horror flick in which small stones are used to stop Michael Myers.

This is that so-called "Producer's Cut" in the best available quality. Whereas previous versions spliced the cut footage in with the DVD release, resulting in a film of varying quality every few minutes, this version is completely unspliced, taken from a low generation copy before it really started making the rounds in trading circles.

Screenshots (click to enlarge):

"Producer's Cut" DOWNLOAD (800 MBs, join with HJ Split)

In addition to the alternate cut, I also have quite a few odds & ends that I've acquired over the years. The Fangoria cover story, promos, trailers, and even some home movies of the special effects shot during the reshoots.

Fangoria Magazine #147 - Cover Story Scans

Promotional Featurette

Entertainment Tonight Feature

Special Effects Home Movies

Early "666: Origin of Michael Myers" Trailer

Theatrical Trailer

TV Spot #1

TV Spot #2 (awful quality)

alejandro jodorowsky is bitchin'.

I generally count Santa Sangre as one of my favorite horror flicks, despite the fact that it transcends a myriad of genres, and attempt to view it at least once a year. Visually, it's a marvel; many scenes, regardless of their dark nature, astound me to this day. The baptismal pool found within the Church of Santa Sangre is especially striking.

Many critics fault it for being highbrow nonsense, but they fail to realize that beautiful, overwrought nonsense is the point. The use of deep reds has always struck me as being indicative of extravagance, the surrealism indicative of the disregard Alejandro Jodorowsky has for making complete sense of the story being unspooled. Surrealism is nonsense.

I recently came across a rather interesting documentary from the BBC about Jodorowsky, "For One Night Only," produced around the time Santa Sangre was released. It's a rather obscure, moderately fascinating look at a director whose work I find startlingly beautiful (and alternately grotesque), one who has managed to stay under the radar enough where I know next to nothing about the actual man.

(click to DOWNLOAD)

bad movies i love: the possession of joel delaney

The Possession of Joel Delaney

Set in a world much like our own but with Perry King & spirits & shit, Warren Beatty's sister has heart palpitations at the sight of a single Puerto Rican. Nevermind that her younger brother has supposedly been possessed by the ghost of a voodoo serial killer, she sees one Puerto Rican on the street and can't run fast enough, yet leaves her children alone with a murderer. Suddenly, an epiphany: "Oh, fuck, them Puerto Ricans know all about that crazy voodoo shit and can save my bro; I need their help! LOLZ SORRY GUISE, I LOVE U NOW AND I EVEN HAZ MONIES TO SHARE!"

As awful as this offal is, and as obvious as it is that they wanted to cash-in on The Exorcist furor, the finale is so creeptastic that goosepimples are guaranteed. But the build-up sure is a hoot with Shirley's Puerto Rican Hysteria!!! taking center stage. They won't harm you, Shirley, I promise. And they have plantain chips.

review: THE BOOGENS. like boogers, except not really.

To simply say I had bad taste as a child seriously robs my lack of judgment in film of any real gravitas. I didn't just have bad taste, it was as if the phrase had been created just for lil me. The b-flicks that Gilbert Gottfried introduced for "USA Up All Night" were what made life living (well, that & a piping hot bag of Pop Qwiz, washed down with a few gulps of Crystal Pepsi for the few months it lasted on store shelves). To this day, my own personal mission is to rediscover every awful movie I watched way back when and record my thoughts on them, some twenty odd years removed. Some memories are more prominent than others, but one that has always stood out in my mind was of small, critter-like creatures attacking workers in a factory and/or mine.

Eventually, I stumbled across the monstrosity known as The Boogens and thought maybe, perhaps, this was the film I remembered. Unfortunately, it is not. I like to think that even as a child who found Kid Cuisine meals to be the epitome of good eatin', I would have turned my nose up at this thing and actually gone outside to, uh, play. A few off-screen kills, a most hilariously obnoxious romance, and a single creature that turns the plurality of title into one big, fat lie make this the perfect movie for those with the more masochistic of tendencies. If it was at all possible to market it in pill form, sales of Ambien would plunge.



A rather good opening montage of old newspaper articles establishes the backstory: a coal mine in Silver City, Colorado, is closed after unexplainable accidents over a number of years that claim the lives of numerous miners. Naturally, after a few minutes pass, some Einsteins reopen the mine. A large pile of human bones is discovered and...well, no one does anything. They just leave them there. Lovely working conditions, stumbling around a dark mine with various mandibles under foot.



Two of the young mine workers, Roger and Mark, are anticipating the arrival of Roger's girlfriend and another chick who's tagging along with her. The landlady of these chicas decides to prepare the house she's renting to them and, unfortunately for her, she has no idea that her evening is going to be a week of yellow shitstorms rolled into a mere few hours. After almost hitting a deer and getting her land yacht of a vehicle stuck in a ditch, she's forced to set up camp at the rental property for the evening. We suffer through ten minutes of nothing until she wanders into the basement (shock!), awakens whatever is down there, and gets attacked & hopefully killed by something because her face is beginning to grate.



Roger's girlfriend, Jessica, and her Mary Sue bestie, Trish, arrive the next day. Trish and Mark suddenly embark on a romance after knowing each other for about three-quarters of a "General Hospital" installment and we have to suffer through it for nearly an hour before anything else occurs. Roger bites the big one while his gal is playing pool at the local drink and the other two halfwits make sweet love. Long tentacles grab him from under his truck in the garage and an unseen creature finally kills him. Mostly offscreen, of course.



Not long after, Jessica decides to bathe and as she's soaping up her unseen breasts, large claws emerge from the heating vent in the floor. Now is the time for Jessica to put her detective hat on and go investigate exactly what those noises are. Quickly, something grabs her and starts to pull her down into the vent, but she escapes and throws a kettle at it. It wants your flesh, not English Breakfast, Jessie. Fortunately for us, the thing finally kills her (onscreen!) by slashing the plasma out of her with its claws.

At this point, I was just fucking exhausted by this picture and wanted it to end. I still had twenty some odd minutes to go and the lethargic pacing was torturing me. I wanted to go all Sally Field on it and tell it that if mothers ran the world, bad movies like this wouldn't make it past storyboarding.



Turns out the house is located directly above the reopened mine and this weird ass scaly creature (seriously, that thing looked liked a miniature Sleestak adopted for use as a hand puppet on Mister Roger's Neighborhood) was coming in through the basement to KILL. And it was only one Boogen. Not plural as the title suggested. What a fucking rip. I guess The Boogen wouldn't have the same verbal jolt to it as The Boogens, but still. False advertising. They kill the thing by, get this, DROPPING A STICK OF DYNAMITE INTO THE MINE SHAFT. Premature ejaculators aren't even that anticlimactic.





My quest for the film I still have memories of in my cavernous mind still remains. Long nets of white cloud my memory, while this movie is suffering banishment in VHS obscurity. Perhaps one day, we'll both find our prince.

5 obscure horror flicks that deserve viewings.

Whilst I love delving into the gory depths of horror on video, it usually dawns on me, in the most upsetting way, that aside from the online horror community, it's very difficult to find people in The Real World who have seen such obscure flicks as Sssssss or even something like Tales from the Darkside: The Movie. Fact is, that shit has all but disappeared from video rental shelves. And since I'm a fan of horror and I'm a fan of making lists (a big, big fan of making lists), I have decided that this here day deserves a list: 5 Obscure Horror Flicks That Deserve To Be Watched.

5. Nightmare Maker (aka Night Warning and a bunch of other shitty titles)

Susan fucking Tyrrell. She's reason enough to track this down. After becoming guardian of him after a car crash kills his parents, Aunt Cheryl develops an unhealthy obsession with her nephew Billy (aka Kristy McNichol's less-successful brother; you'd think she'd have gotten him a gig on "Empty Nest" to pick up a paycheck or two, but no.). The lil git wants to pack up and vamoose for college, but Aunt Cheryl puts the kibosh on that, going so far as to accuse her gay TV repairman of rape & murdering him to guilt poor Billy into sticking around.

As Billy distances himself from Aunt Cheryl, chica finally lets the floodgates of cray-cray flow forth and no one is safe. Tyrrell gives one nasty, in-your-face performance that makes Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford seem laudable as a loving, doting parent. You'll either let your mouth gape in shock & sadness at how little Susan Tyrrell there is on celluloid for you to consume or you'll want to cunt punt her.

4. In a Glass Cage

Confined to an iron lung after a failed suicide attempt, a Nazi pedophile is blackmailed by a former victim into employing him as his nurse. Like Kirstie Alley at a drive-thru, nothing good could possibly come of such a situation.

A supremely disturbing movie, this has one of the most unsettling endings I've yet seen. The setting eventually descends into a virtual concentration camp, complete with barbed wire fencing rolled along the main stairway, and a chase scene a third of the way through does Hitchcock better than Hitchcock. The mood never rises above woeful and progressively gets bleaker.

3. Popcorn

Look at that poster. It's a thing of beauty. One of the greatest posters with one of the greatest taglines: "Buy a bag, go home in a box!" Sure, the movie itself isn't scary in the least, but it's a lot of fucking fun. All it needs is an Aroma-rama card to push it over the edge into masterpiece territory. Since it lacks one, however, go mow your lawn with deodorant & sniff your pit during the key odor-ific sequences.

A bunch of dumb film students stage a horror film fest to drum up program funds and some mean man starts killing them off. That's pretty much it. Toss in some cameos from Dee Wallace, Ray Walston, and Tony Roberts, Jill Schoelen as the main idiot and Kelly Jo Minter as the sassy support, and you've got a winner. And I haven't even mentioned the 50's b-movie recreations. In-cred-i-bull.

2. Wendigo

From what I gather, this is a love-it or hate-it proposition. I happen to love it. It's the Toto to my Dorothy. The broken bridge to my Owen Wilson nose, if you will.

A couple of NYC yuppies and their young son retire upstate for a small vacation and fall victim to a spittin' redneck (I assume they all spit, but my experience with rednecks is not what I would refer to as "vast"). Said redneck and yuppie family also fall afoul of the local Native American myth, that of the Wendigo. Or do they? A truly fantastic little movie; the DVD sports a real gem of a commentary that is compulsive listening for anyone who enjoys the flick. Every time I watch it, I find a little scene or quirk that adds to my interpretation of the story.

1. Tourist Trap

My personal favorite horror flick. With one kick-ass performance by the Bad Ass Motherfucker audiences have come to know as Chuck Connors. Possibly one of the greatest genre performances of all time, the man can make you love him one second and scare the piss right out of your genitals the next.

The story is a simple, but it only adds to the effectiveness. A slew of twentysomethings on a road trip blow a tire and end up at Slausen's Lost Oasis, a roadside attraction with the creepiest mannequins ever committed to film. The owner, Mr. Slausen, agrees to help them but warns them to stay away from the house out back. Like the horror film fodder they are, they fail to heed his warning. And then SHIT GETS REAL. This sucker has given me goosepimples since I saw it on USA back when I was but a wee one. And it still does. That score is like nightmarish carnival music.

Ode to Barbeau

After a particularly lengthy one-sided discussion with myself, I've decided there's no better way to kick off the proceedings than with a pictorial ode to Barbeau; scream queen, as we've come to know her, and official mascot of this here blogspot. Consider it a christening of sorts. One with ample cleavage and more sassy attitude than a gaggle of overweight Golden Corral customers suffering through a roast beef shortage on a Friday evening.

My first exposure to The Barbeau was though an old videotaped copy of Creepshow. With the advent of home video, my grandmother, the gleeful pirate that she was, took it upon herself to record every tape she rented. My particular favorite became a triple-feature of The Shining, Creepshow, and The Changeling, all in glorious EP mode. As Velma, The Barbeau delighted my young ears with the expletives she shot out of the speakers. Then she seemed to pop up in everything my grandmother taped; Swamp Thing, The Fog, Someone's Watching Me, Escape From New York, Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death (best film title evar?). The bitch was and is fierce.

It's blood-boiling to know that a cult worships at the altar of L. Ron Hubbard and not The Barbeau. After her historic cinematic contributions, she deserves her own tax-shelter.