Ah, The Internet.

I’m sorry folks – just a quick “house-keeping” post to formally apologise to any readers of this blog who have been kind enough to post comments on this blog over the past couple of years and have not seen them subsequently approved or responded to.

Basically - I've always relied on email notifications to alert me to new comments, but last week I just happened to check the “comments” tab on the Blogger dashboard and discovered a large backlog of comments awaiting approval that I was previously unaware of, having apparently not received the aforementioned notifications. How embarrassing!

Even worse is that this problem seems to have affected the same few people on multiple occasions, so if you are one of them, I hope you don't think I've been deliberately ignoring/deleting your contributions… my sincere apologies!

Rest assured, I am always grateful and happy to know that actual, real life people are engaging with what I write here (on what is basically an obsolete platform with no promotion whatsoever and an annoying ‘content warning’ affixed to the front), and it makes me even happier to reflect that this blog has always received such thoughtful and good-natured feedback. (In fact we’ve pretty much never had any troll-ish or offensive comments – a few pretty weird ones now and then, but hey, that’s cool.)

So… long may this situation continue, and I hope that the missed approvals etc issue will not recur in future. Actually, I’ve just disabled the moderation/approval stage for comments, so they should now appear straight away and I’ll keep an eye on them manually from now on. (I initially had the approval option turned on to avoid spam, but to be honest there have been very few spam comments popping up in recent years, so it shouldn’t be too hard to weed them out by hand, as it were.)

Meanwhile, I’m hard at work on a few big End-of-Year type posts, so will have them up here as soon as they’re ready – sorry again for the sporadic updates of recent.

Old Movie Reviews: Introduction.

As usual, I’ve got to apologise for the recent lapse in posting here – I’ve been busy moving house and taking care of all manner of related running around, and am now cat-sitting for some friends – which is all going pretty nicely thanks, but it does tend to rather put a hole in my schedule when it comes things like getting drunk and writing overlong diatribes about weird old movies, scanning the covers of old detective books I found in charity shops and so on – y’know, the real two-fisted ride into the danger zone that is my day to day life.

So until I manage to pick up steam again with all that, I thought it might be interesting to take a trip back to the heady days of the mid-‘00s, when I used to occasionally post movie reviews on my music blog, Stereo Sanctity. They’re fun little reviews, and they’re not doing much business gathering dust in the archives over there, so might as well give ‘em a new home here.

Reading them back today, it’s interesting (well, interesting to me anyway) to see how much my approach to things has changed over the past five years. Back then, my interest in horror/cult movies was still at a pretty embryonic stage… I enjoyed watching ‘em whenever I got the chance, but I never really went out of my way to obtain them or to do any research/reading on the subject. Also, I’m surprised at the extent to which I seemed to lack an understanding of the simple aesthetic pleasures of weirdo film – for instance, my comments on Lucio Fulci’s “The Black Cat” are quite sneering and derisory, whereas these days I hold that film close to my heart as an example of everything that’s wonderful about this kind of cinema. I guess my watching these films and writing these reviews back in ’04 and ’05 marks the beginning of an infection which has either turned my brain to mulch or raised my artistic sensibilities to a higher plain entirely, depending on which way you look at it.

As I say, I didn’t make much effort to actively further my weird movie viewing at this point in my life, but for a wonderful year or so, my existence of boredom and poverty led me to a wealth of random viewing opportunities, and hey, only a fool swims against the tide. For one thing, I’d just managed to hook up my little TV with an old-fashioned coathanger aerial that gave me pretty good reception, and I discovered that BBC 2 were showing a British horror movie every Friday night as an after midnight schedule filler after the end of Newsnight Review. And they weren’t just showing obvious/familiar ones either – for some wonderful reason, they were screening stuff that was TOTALLY FAR OUT, and often completely unavailable on video/DVD. It was on one of these fateful Friday nights that my jaw first hit the floor as “Psychomania” flickered across the screen, closely followed by “The Sorcerers”, Anthony Balch’s “Horror Hospital”, “Incense For The Damned”, and god only knows what else, padded out with generous servings of moderate-to-good Amicus and Hammer fare. And this wasn’t some fancypants “re-evaluating British horror” season or anything either – some hero in the scheduling department was just throwing this shit on at random intervals with no fanfare whatsoever, like some last stand for weirdo-friendly broadcasting in an era when they’d even replaced the Saturday morning cartoons with cookery shows (not that I ever got up early enough to confirm this vile treachery, having stayed up til 3am waiting for “The Blood Beast Terror” to stumble toward it’s conclusion). Anyway, god bless whoever was responsible, I hope they’re doing well.

My appetite whetted, I also never missed a chance to visit a stall which used to set up for business every Wednesday in Leicester Market (and maybe still does), manned by an appropriately scary and hag-like old lady who seemed to have access to a seemingly endless supply of totally killer VHS – tons of Redemption tapes, French New Wave movies, ‘60s concert films, anime… I don’t know where it was all coming from. It was by the grace of this scary market lady that I got to see my first Jean Rollin movie, George Romero films other than NOTLD, “Faster Pussycat Kill Kill” – oh, heady days. There was this great record stall there too that used to do cheap jazz records and garage/psych represses and stuff… social life? Who needs one!

But anyway: I’m gonna republish a bunch of those old movie posts, beginning this weekend. Please bear in mind that my feelings about a film THEN doesn’t necessarily reflect what I think about it NOW, but that aside, I hope you at least enjoy their brevity, which makes a refreshing change from my usual bullshit.

(Messiah of Evil pics borrowed from Monster Music Music.)