A Perfect Monster Has No End: Halloween Mix CD 2009

(cross-posted with Stereo Sanctity.)





download (92mb .zip file).

For reasons too dull to go into, last year’s Halloween mixtape actually dated from 2007 (give me a shout if you’d like me to re-upload it), so I’ve had a whole extra year to stockpile creepy tunes for your enjoyment.

Unlike the last one, there’s no film soundtrack / narrative type gimmick year, just a whole heap of the usual twisted rock n’ roll and such, with obligatory appearances by Roky and The Cramps, and taking in witches, demons, zombies, psycho killers, werewolves, vampires, demonic ghost-cats and the like. Like any good horror movie, it will hopefully succeed in being broadly enjoyable and atmospheric, with occasional lurches into the realm of genuinely disturbing mania. Try it out at parties.

So, simply my gift to you to celebrate what’s self-evidently the coolest day on the calendar, and if you’re stepping out this weekend, remember, play safe:



Further useful advice from Beat Happening:

Youtube Film Club:Louis Feuillade, Fantomas and Les Vampires

I’ve recently been watching a number of films by the great Georges Franju (best known for 1960s ‘Yeux Sans Visage’ / ‘Eyes Without a Face’). Reviews coming soon, hopefully.

On several occasions in his career, Franju teamed up with the writer Jacques Champroux, grandson of famed silent era director Louis Feuillade, to make films loosely inspired by the spirit of Fantomas, the diabolical criminal mastermind who hopefully needs no introduction as one of the most popular and influential characters in French popular culture.

Although Fantomas was the creation of writers Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, Louis Feuillade can arguably take just as much credit for cementing him in the popular imagination via his series of silent adventure serials, produced during 1913-14, at the same time as Allain & Souvestre were publishing their stories.

So, as useful background to Franju’s films, just out of general interest, and also as a primer to the as-yet-unread volume of Fantomas stories on my bookshelf, I thought I’d check some of Feuillade’s films out.

Sadly, very little footage from the Fantomas serials is available on Youtube (perhaps as a result of the same copyright issues that prevented Franju & Champroux from using the character directly in their films), but this brief clip can at least serve to reassure us that they were pretty bad-ass:



An unexpected delight that my Youtube searches did show up though is some significant chunks of Feuillide’s subsequent serial, Les Vampires (1915-16). Need I say more?



Actually, I probably had best say more. From what I can gather, Les Vampires does not actually feature any vampires, but, confusingly, it does prominently feature the eerie, expressionistic beauty of its heroine Irma Vep (portrayed by one Musidora, who sounds like a pretty fascinating woman in her own right), who plays a vampire at the theatre, and who becomes the main antagonist of a gang of Fantomas-like masked criminals called ‘Les Vampires’.

Filmed in the overly theatrical manner common to their period, with a stationary camera and few close-ups, Fuillade’s serials are clearly not in the same order of formal innovation as other early vampiric classics such as Murnau’s ‘Nosferatu’ or Carl Dreyer’s ‘Vampyr’, but nonentheless, they are hugely enjoyable, relatively fast-paced little capers for their era, and their exquisite production design and solemn, gothic beauty is remarkable.

Whilst these films might not have had quite the same impact on the world as Fantomas, it seems inconceivable that many subsequent champions of the fantastique in France, my man Jean Rollin foremost amongst them, didn’t take at least SOME inspiration from ‘Les Vampires’.

Episode 2: “The Ring That Kills”:




According to Wikipedia, the publicity campaign for ‘Les Vampires’ saw this mysterious poster pasted around Paris…



…whilst the next day’s newspapers carried the following verse:

Of the moonless nights they are kings,

darkness is their kingdom.

Carrying death and sowing terror

the dark Vampires fly,

with great suede wings,

ready not only to do evil... but to do even worse


I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: God bless the French.



The entirety of “Les Vampires” first episode (entitled “The Severed Head”) can be seen split across four youtube videos, beginning here. Sadly, sound & picture quality is pretty low:

Dust In My Throat by John Farrimond (Corgi, 1963)

Finally! A REAL miner's novel!

This one rather reminds me of the breakthrough bestseller that Stanley Baker's character was supposed to have written in Eva.

The press quotes are superb.

Killers From The Keys by Brett Halliday (Mayflower Dell, 1963)

Pretty straight up.

Don't Bother To Knock by Clifford Hanley (Digit, 1959)

I'm afraid I startled several other second hand bookshop patrons by laughing out loud when I got to the phrase "glamorous wench". That plus complications ensuing, and I had to lay down 50p for this one.

Maybe I'm being pedantic, but isn't it rather in the nature of "wenches" that they are not glamorous..? Then again, what do I know - I'm not a travel agent.

Here's the imdb page for the film this edition seems to be tying in with ("Haileywood Productions" eh?), not to be confused with the better known 1952 film of the same name. It's odd that the front cover fails to mention Elke Sommer, whose presence seems to have been the main selling point of this otherwise largely forgotten movie (tagline: "Elke Sommer...The 'Shot in the Dark' girl gives SEX a shot in the arm!") Anybody seen it?

"Can a Mermaid Kill?" by Thomas B. Dewey (Tower Books, 1965)

Well, how could I resist this one?

Sadly, it turns out to be a fairly stuffy, undistinguished murder mystery:


There seems to be a pleasantly gothic air to things, but sadly I'd guess you could read the whole damn thing and still be none the wiser re: the homicidal propensities of mermaids.

Apologies for Lameness.

Apologies for my poor showing re: updating this month. Needless to say, I'm got a ton of exciting discourse of movies, literature and general weirdness to impart... as ever, the trouble's just finding some spare time to write some of it down.

In the meantime, I'm gonna up my post count by putting up a new scan of a recently obtained paperback every day this week (well ok, let's be realistic - most days). Hope you enjoy, and I'll be back with some more substantive posts soonish.

Youtube Film Club: Harry Smith

When he wasn’t busy changing the world forever by compiling the Anthology of American Folk Music, forging new ground in the fields of anthropology and ethnomusicology, engaging in Thelemic magickal practice and the wider world of occultism and generally making the scene as all-round godhead of mid 20th Century beatnik weirdness, Harry Smith liked nothing more than knocking out tripped out experimental films such as the ones that follow.

Most of his earlier stuff was entirely abstract, though no less captivating for it:





It seems it was slightly later that animated figures and symbolism started to find their way into his work, resulting in some truly incredible stuff; mindbending esoteric psychedelia, years before anyone even came up with the term ‘psychedelia’:





Sixty seven minutes of his quite unbelievably strange “Heaven and Earth Magic” can currently be seen on Youtube. Apparently his original cut ran for over six hours! Here’s part # 1:



I dare you to get to the end of part # 7 in one sitting.

Finally, here’s some words of wisdom(?) from the man himself in his later years. I wonder if he and Burroughs ever got together for a grumpy old coot counter-cultural griping contest? God, I hope not. My money’d be on Harry anyway.

I had a very strong sense of deja-vu during the bit where he starts going on about two books someone sent him to review – sure I’ve heard that sampled/quoted somewhere…



The music in some of the above videos is interesting too of course. “Heaven & Earth Magic” may just have a load of cat noises, and “No. 11” has been fitted out with a nice bit of Thelonious Monk, but the music accompanying the first ‘Abstractions’ video could easily be a LaMonte Young or Tony Conrad piece, and you can clearly hear Angus Maclise banging away on some of the others… interesting stuff.

Album Covers by Chris D.

When I moved into my new flat earlier this year, I thought it would be a cool idea to pin some particularly pleasing looking LPs from my collection on either side of the blocked up fireplace in my room. And frankly there’s no reason why anyone else should care what I pin to my wall, so let’s assume that I was right and that it is a cool idea.

One of those LPs is The Gun Club’s ‘Miami’:


Now I don’t know quite what it is that makes this cover so striking, but it’s GREAT, isn’t it?

I mean, on the surface it’s just a shot of some guys who look more or less like you’d expect some guys in a rock band in the ‘80s to look, standing by some palm trees, with some plain text in the corner. But the composition of the shot, the choice of (presumably) slicing it off at the shoulders, leaving acres of hungry sky and those unhealthy looking palms stretching into the heavens, the almost hallucinogenic oversaturated colours, the way the text is set out in the corner in such a low key yet curious manner, with that sinister little cross beneath the album title… how cool is that?

It’s difficult to explain why, but it’s a masterpiece – the kind of cover that draws people with no particular interest in the band to pick it out of the racks, to wonder what it sounds like, but to not doubt for a moment that whatever’s going on inside, it’s fucking cool.

Actually, my copy is slightly different from the one reproduced above. It looks like this, and I think I prefer this shot, maybe just because I’m more familiar with it:


Anyway, it wasn’t that much of a surprise to notice that this cover is the work of Chris D., who also co-produced and otherwise contributed to the first couple of Gun Club albums. Chris D. is best known as the singer/conceptualist behind LA death-punk band The Flesheaters, and a brief google search will reveal that he’s also built up a reputation as a bit of a subcultural renaissance man over the years, working as a journalist/critic (for the seminal Slash magazine amongst others), as a record producer, poet, an all-round LA punk scenester and perhaps most notably as a cult film enthusiast/expert. In that capacity, he’s worked as a cinema programmer, written several books on Japanese cinema, and in 2004 he directed his own intriguing-sounding vampire flick, “I Pass For Human”. Pretty nifty CV, huh?

The overriding interest in horror/b-movies is unsurprising, given that his lyrics and general aesthetic for The Flesheaters consist of a dense catalogue of cult references, even more so than horror-rock contemporaries such as Roky Erickson and The Cramps. What seems to be lacking from any of the online biographies/articles on the man however is an appreciation of his highly distinctive work as an artist/designer, as expressed primarily through record covers for his own bands, and those of his buddies.

Especially awesome is the iconic cover to what is usually considered The Flasheaters’ masterpiece, ‘A Minute To Pray, A Second To Die’:



Musically, the album doesn’t really click with me that much, but you’d better believe I’d pick up a vinyl copy of THAT if I ever saw one at an affordable price.

Amongst his other credits:






What I think is remarkable about these covers is both their comparative subtlety. Given his interests and the scene he emerged from, you’d reasonably expect Chris D. to indulge in a whole loada cluttered kitsch rockbilly/tiki lounge excess, but instead his images – obviously homemade, and influenced by both collage-based punk rock flyers and Warholian pop art – are bold, deliberate, striking and authentically weird, rather than contrived weird.

I’m SURE he must have turned his hand to doing movie posters in this distinctive style at some point, and I’d love to see the results. As I say, surprisingly little info is available online re: his visual art, so if you’ve got any more info or scans, pass it on. Dude’s a master.

Werewolf Woman (Rino Di Silvestro, 1976)

To start this overlong review off on an immediate tangent, I know I’ve written here before about my slow but inevitable transition into a Euro-horror fiend, my reservations about becoming such, and about the love/hate conflicts that exploring the murkier depths of this kind of cinema cause within me.

As if to demonstrate this, I recently found myself making a vow: no more Jess Franco movies. Now, clearly this resolution would have any true devotee of The Eurohorror Way spluttering in appalled disbelief, and quite rightly seeking to eject me from their hypothetical clubhouse with an attitude of outraged ferocity. And I know, I know – Franco’s movies certainly have their own strange charm, existing as they do in their own parallel world of surrealistic trash-art wonder etc. etc., and all have elements that are crazed or beautiful or hilarious. But frankly, having sat through about seven or eight of the things, I’ve seen enough. There are better things to do on a quiet Friday night, y’know? Even if it’s just watching Jean Rollin movies.

I’m tired of that empty feeling – that “what the hell was THAT?” feeling, that “can I have my eighty minutes back please?” feeling; the feeling that even his best work engenders to a certain extent, and that his less good work positively revels in. I mean: “Kiss Me Monster”. What the fuck? Billed as some kind of great-sounding horror/spy/comedy caper, it turns out to be some kind of baffling motion picture in which nothing of interest happens at all. Nothing. No plot, no point, no monster, not even much kissing. I remember some shots of planes taking off and landing, a bit where two girls in tuxedos played saxophones in one of those creepy Jess Franco nightclubs, I think I remember some people wandering around some sets…. but aside from that it’s like I got sapped on the back of the head by a cunning burglar and just sort of lost an hour. It was like a porn movie without the porn. Hell, knowing Franco it probably WAS a porn movie without the porn; an hour or so of random footage he cobbled together to meet a deadline for a non-X rated double bill filler or something. By what possible logic has this film been released on VHS and DVD when the majority of Andrzej Zulawski’s films haven’t…? And now I’ve got to look at the damn thing sitting on the shelf for all eternity, reminding me of my folly.

So yeah, the next time I read about another Franco movie, or see one on the shelf at the Music & Video Exchange, and think “hey, that one looks kinda fun, and it’s only a few quid”, I’m just gonna walk away…. I’ll be happier that way. I know I’m selling his films short here, and that each of them has at least a couple of great psychotronic moments to recommend it if you’re in the right frame of mind, but, I think the realization that I’m often not in the right frame of mind neatly demonstrates the fact that I will probably never be able to overcome the obstacles on the path to true Euro-horror enlightenment.

But, Franco-related time-wasting firmly behind me, I nonetheless strode happily onward in my quest this month like a blind, hopeless fool, and promptly crashed into the biggest obstacle yet placed before me: a big, glowing hazard named WEREWOLF WOMAN.

Yes: Werewolf Woman!

Now there’s a title you get your teeth into. None of that “Blood of Ghastly Horror” rubbish to try to cover up the fact your movie’s a load of meandering bullshit about nothing in particular. The people behind Werewolf Woman, you feel, are not in this game to piss around.

Naturally, the film was also released as “Legend of the Wolf Woman” and “Naked Wolf Woman” and as god only knows what else, but that’s just confusing the issue. This ain’t no legend buster: Werewolf Woman is right here, right now! Tacking on extra words just for sake of it isn’t going to do anyone any favours. Werewolf Woman it is, and forever shall be.

I was actually hoping that before I watched it, I’d have the opportunity to take part in a conversation that goes as follows:

Someone else: So, what are you up to this evening?

Me: Oh, I think I’m probably going to watch a movie.

S.E.: What are you gonna watch?

Me: ‘Werewolf Woman’.

S.E.: What’s that about?

*wry silence*

Sadly that conversation didn’t happen, and it’s probably just as well actually as, post-viewing, watching Werewolf Woman is certainly not something I’d want to boast about.

Werewolf Woman begins pretty well – in fact, who am I kidding, it begins brilliantly. Straight in, the first scene has a naked woman running into the centre of a circle of flames in a darkened forest clearing and performing a clumsily hypnotic ‘fire dance’ to the accompaniment of freaky voodoo drums. Oh man, I think this is gonna be a good one! Next, she starts skulking around the place, and undergoes a predictably cheap and goofy werewolf transformation, emerging as a truly embarrassing sight, covered in scrappy fur, with whiskers and a fake dog-nose. Less than three minutes into Werewolf Woman, and we’ve already got a werewolf woman – beat THAT, ‘Werewolves on Wheels’!

But wait, some guys with flaming torches in thoroughly unconvincing period costume are out looking for her! She corners one of ‘em, and kills him to death in a ridiculous OTT poster paint gore sequence! Alright! Then his pals catch her, and crucify her in full naked wolf-mode over a blazing bonfire, a scene that must rank pretty highly on any actress’s list of “things I would rather not do”. I mean, Jesus, the werewolf makeup alone was bad enough, how undignified can you get? Do you reckon they never heard about that whole ‘silver bullet’ thing, or did they just decide flaming crucifixion would be more fun?

Anyway: so far, so good! Face it, you’d need to be a pretty demanding horror fan to have any complaints thus far. Only, tragically, the action now departs from this exciting milieu, and we flash forward to the present day / reality (you decide), where a modern-day, non-werewolf woman is reading this tale about her ancestor in a book of ye olde superstitions.

Henceforth, Werewolf Woman will feature no more werewolves. Not one. There is, admittedly, plenty more woman still to come, although sadly not in any sense that could really be construed as positive.

If you want to stop reading now, well… good for you. Go and do something useful.

As for the rest of us:

Daniella is our protagonist, of sorts, and she is it seems a rather damaged individual. Via a series of those inevitable exposition scenes in which concerned doctors blather on to each other about unconvincing psychosexual maladies in deadly serious tones, we learn that Daniella was raped as a teenager and has never fully recovered from the ordeal. She identifies herself with her werewolf ancestor, and every time she’s sexually aroused, she – oh no, I’m afraid so – starts biting and stabbing and killing and so on. Deep sigh.

What follows is a thoroughly sordid softcore/slasher outing, seemingly modeled after similarly themed Franco flicks like “She Killed In Ecstasy” and “The Bare-Breasted Countess”, and invested with the kind of off-hand, cynical nastiness that only Italian horror of the late 70s/80s can muster, with only occasional touches of weirdness to lighten the overall mood of grinding, dehumanizing boredom.

Everything about Werewolf Woman is sleazy. Even its cinematography is kinda unpleasant - fuzzy and dirty with a preponderance of dark browns and reds. Star Annik Borel (hey, apparently she was also in “Blood Orgy of the She-Devils” and an episode of “The Odd Couple”) and the other women who appear in the film all look desperately unappealing too, pale and emaciated, with only garish period hairdos, excessive make up and fake boobs serving to mask their evident deep unhappiness at having to appear in crap like Werewolf Woman. The sex scenes, of which there are many, present some of the grimmest, most awkward on-screen coupling I’ve ever seen. And I mean, I’ve seen “Rock N’ Roll Nightmare” (shudder).

One early scene features Daniella spying on her sister and her hunky new husband getting it on. By ‘spying’, we mean ‘standing in the doorway and just staring’, in that manner common to crappy movies. As she starts to get excited, we get a clumsy, Franco-style zoom in to her hand rubbing her crotch through her nightdress. We clearly see a fly buzz into the frame, and land on her hand. They actually kept that shot in the movie.

And it was here, about fifteen minutes in, that I began to realize what I was dealing with. My dismissal of Jess Franco began to seem increasingly naive and pig-headed, as I was hit full in the face by the realization that there was in fact a substrata of cinema in the ‘70s that actually aspired to Jess Franco levels of competence and sophistication. To the makers of Werewolf Woman, Jess Franco was a real classy guy. And indeed, through the lens of my post-Werewolf Woman reading of European film, HE WAS a real classy guy. I realize that now, and I’m sorry I bad-mouthed him earlier. I take it all back. After all, Franco composes shots with a certain amount of flair. He keeps the colours looking nice and he generally works with actors who look like they actually want to be in the film. And if he were to shoot a close-up of a traumatized woman masturbating, he would almost certainly keep insects out of the frame. He is a classy, classy guy.

Cutting back to the humping couple, we see the sister throw her head back in ‘ecstasy’, giving us a good view of her fillings. They could do with some work.

It was at this point that I cracked.

Why in god’s name am I WATCHING this thing?

Why did I PAY MONEY for it, even?

Shouldn’t I be out having fun, meeting interesting people, making the best of life?

There’s a whole world out there, and I choose THIS?

What have I BECOME?

Say what you like about Ingmar Bergman or Lars Von Trier, they’ve never managed to bring on an existential crisis with quite the ease of Werewolf Woman.

But, steeling myself, I rejected the coward’s way out, put the pistol away, and continued…. maybe salvation will come yet.

And indeed, it’s about now that we also get what’s a shoe-in for this movie’s flat out weirdest moment, when Daniella’s sexual phobias are manifested in the form of….. a giant lizard that slowly crawls over her body as she writhes in some sort of fever dream and eerie, fuzzed out synthesizer drones hiss away in the background..!? Holy cow! I didn’t see that one coming! Is this supposed to actually be happening? Is it a hallucination? I have no idea, other than to confirm that it’s absolutely freaked out and wonderful, briefly exhibiting the sort of random, lunatic inspiration that the rest of Werewolf Woman so sorely lacks. Salvation? Not quite, my friends, not quite…. but surreal, synth-drone lizard writhing is about as close as we’re gonna get here.

The first victim in Daniella’s killing spree is of course the aforementioned hunky husband. In a mildly diverting scene, she hurls his carcass off a ravine at sunrise whilst howling like a beast. That was pretty cool. Most of the other murder scenes in Werewolf Woman though sadly achieve a sort of ‘worst of both worlds’ status, by vestige of being both offensively gratuitous and also too short and dull to convey any tension or cinematic excitement. Argento, this guy ain’t. Hitchcock might as well be a distant, unseen god floating in a whole other order of being.

As to taking an interest in the rest of the plot…. c’mon, don’t make me laugh – we’re talking Italian horror movies here, and this isn’t even a GOOD one for christssake. Although not incoherent enough to actually be surreal or baffling, Werewolf Woman still only makes the vaguest, laziest sort of sense.

One trying scene for our scriptwriters features Daniella’s sister visiting her in hospital, where she’s tied down in the psychiatric ward, and confronting her about the whole suspicious-death-of-my-husband thing. So imagine if you will, a woman having to speak to the mentally ill sister who recently killed her husband, and having to try to force a confession out of her – that’s got to be a pretty tough situation for any film to convey believably, right? How does Werewolf Woman rise to the challenge? – well basically they just go all camp super-bitchy and yell “Whore! Bitch! Slut! I’ll kill you!” etc. at each other until the sister is dragged away. Again, I am stunned. Top marks for use of profanity, but…. oh, what’s the use.

So obviously Daniella escapes from the psychiatric ward, with the help of a raving nymphomaniac, who unties her in expectation of some sapphic slobbering, and promptly gets stabbed to death for her trouble. Now really, consider this: a scene in which a possibly werewolf-possessed mad-woman brutally murders a predatory, sex-crazed lesbian with a pair of scissors…. leaving aside all concerns of ethics and good taste (and if you’ve watched this far, we’ll assume you left them at the door), this should be a pretty dynamite set-piece for a movie like this, right? Something to give the sleaze crowd what they paid for, to stick in people’s memories etc? – Werewolf Woman has the whole thing done & dusted after FIVE SECONDS of bleary jumpcuts. Honestly.

So… I suppose Daniella wanders about aimlessly and kills a bunch of other people, I don’t know, I’m really losing hope by this point, as the film periodically cuts back to her worried father and the psychiatrist who are still earnestly yacking by the pool about what is to be done about this unsavoury state of affairs. Come on guys, less talk more rock! There are sleazy bald men and courting couples dying out there already! Haven’t the police found a handy photographer or bohemian painter they can put in charge of the investigation yet, or – no, hang on, wrong genre.

By this stage I’m feeling so lethargic that it scarcely even registers that Daniella just met a guy who seems to be a trainee stuntman (!!), that they immediately fall in love, complete with a running-along-the-beach-in-slo-mo montage (!?!?), and that the stuntman appears to live in some otherwise deserted Western movie set town in the middle of nowhere (….!?!?!!?...). I guess that’s just the kind of thing that happens in these movies.

And as for all that time she just spent running around sleeping rough in a graveyard and slaughtering people as a result of paranoid psychosis and deep-rooted mental trauma… why, I guess all the poor girl needed to bring her back to perfect health was for a good, upstanding sensitive fella to show her a bit of attention. Always the way, isn’t it? And to think we pay psychiatrists for stuff.

So for a while everything is hunky dory, until Handsome Stuntguy goes off to do whatever he does, and leaves Daniella alone in the eerie Western town, and some Bad Men wander along out of nowhere to rape her. You can tell they’re Bad Men, because they wear leather jackets, and sort of stride around with their fingers in the belt buckles, like cowboys. That and the raping. That’s a dead giveaway too. And…. frankly, I give up; I’ve wasted far too many words on this terrible film already, and it’s not going to get any better, and I can’t even be bothered to remember what happens next, except that it left me feeling as if something important within me had died forever, and its carcass was making a bad smell.

Just to add insult to injury, Werewolf Woman has the nerve to be 100 minutes long too. One hundred minutes! I know that’s only fifteen or twenty more than yr standard exploitation flick, but boy is it ever unneeded it here. According to the blurb on the back of the DVD, the film was originally released in a “butchered” 70 minute cut… one that I really wish I was watching instead. In fact, it’s interesting to try to put yourself in the position of someone charged with editing down a film like this. Really, I mean, where would you start? As with some of the aforementioned Franco masterworks, you feel that if you started trimming footage that seemed ‘unnecessary’, you’d swiftly find yourself entering a zen-like state of mind, emerging with a film with a running time of zero.

Well, ok, maybe you’d keep the opening werewolf scene, and the bit with the lizard, but aside from that…. just, no. There is no reason to subject people to this.

All that, and it turns out that Rino Di Silvestro, the director of this strangely compelling travesty of a farrago, rather than changing his name and hiding under a rock like a decent human being, is actually proud of his achievement, and returns to rub our noses in it in the form of a fifteen minute interview included on the Media Blasters DVD. (I suppose pride must operate on a sliding scale when your CV also includes “Deported Women of the SS Special Section” and “The Erotic Dreams of Cleopatra”.) Herein, he harps on about the ambiguities of demonic possession vs. mental illness and about the fuzzy grey areas within our psyches that make us do bad things, blah blah blah. Personally I’d be more concerned with the fuzzy grey areas that drive a man to fill his werewolf movie with hideously unerotic softcore porn instead of werewolves and not even bother to edit out the flies, but apparently this guy thinks he’s actually made a film with a message.

And you know what? I think he’s right. Werewolf Woman does have a message. LIFE IS CRUEL, burned in flaming, ten foot high letters upon every degraded frame.

Now where’s that copy of “She Killed in Ecstasy”? I need something a bit more upbeat and tasteful to cleanse my palette….

Bognor Regis Paperback Haul

For reasons obscure at best, I found myself spending some of the August bank holiday this year in the beautiful environs of Bognor Regis.


Whilst my friends were hanging around on the beach during the afternoon, I took the opportunity to take a walk around the town, in search of… well, anything remotely interesting really.

Bognor can boast a pretty impressive collection of blue plaques – apparently James Joyce finished writing ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ here, the pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti had a studio, and no less a personage than William Blake spent some time here too, getting thrown out of a nearby inn for brawling in the process. Aside from that though, wandering the streets of Bognor is not really an experience I can recommend. The town has a certain amount of that eerie, out-of-time South Coast atmosphere that I’ve also enjoyed so much in Hastings, Great Yarmouth etc, but is perhaps unique in managing to combine it with a desolate, nigh-on apocalyptic blandness suggestive of an economic deadzone with scarcely even much tourism to keep it alive. I was hoping it might be kinda creepy, but it was more just sad really – a once notable, historically potent locale, sinking deeper into its sniggersome ‘Crap Towns’ fate. In fairness, the beach is nice, and relatively deserted.

In desperate search of something to kill time, you can perhaps imagine my relief upon spying the Bogner Regis Paperback Exchange – an establishment that seemed less like a shop in the conventional sense, more like a vast depository of mouldering pulp wherein the area’s substantial retirement community can part-exchange their books for new ones on an arcane points-based system for as little as 10p each. Now, I’ve been into hopelessly overstocked second-hand bookshops before, piled high with unwanted volumes that they’re never gonna shift, but this place was ridiculous. The ‘old book smell’ was overpowering. Thank god - time killing mission accomplished. I felt completely at home.

The shop’s front room was stuffed with enough crime and romance and fantasy to see the entire town through several lifetimes, and, as you’d expect, enough Stephen King to crush a man to death. Out the back, a series of airless corridors contained the ‘proper’ literature, biography, non-fiction and the like, shelf space at such a premium that popular authors were simply stuffed into cardboard crates stacked along the floor - a crate of D.H. Lawrence, a crate of Graham Greene, a crate of Daphne DuMaurier etc, each probably yours for about the price of a round of drinks.

As it happens, I didn’t find any ‘proper’ books I wanted to read just at this minute, but it was in the Science Fiction section that I struck gold, picking up the following for a combined total of £3:


(no year on this one - what do you reckon, late 50s/early 60s?)

(1959)



(1971)

‘The Leaves of Time’ was hanging on the wall in a ‘collectors item’ type plastic wallet. I asked the man behind the counter how much it was, answer: £1.50. As you can see, it's one of the most beautiful psychedelic SF covers I've ever seen - can anyone identify the artist (no credit is given, but the signature reads "hinge")?

UPDATE: Well that was easy: Mike Hinge (1931 – 2003). His cover to Clifford Simak’s ‘Choice of Gods’, executed in the same style, is similarly awesome.

I also picked this one up:


Full story behind this can be read here. I know it’s likely to be terrible - awful cover too - but as a big Vonnegut fan and a grudging admirer of Philip Jose Farmer, I figured I should at least have a copy on the shelf.

The other business I can recommend in Bogner by the way, is the Mediterranean / Tapas restaurant near the station. It's very good. It’s easy to spot – there aren’t any other restaurants. Didn't some king or other have something unkind to say about this place..?

Dance of the Dead (Gregg Bishop, 2008)

‘Dance of the Dead’ came to my attention when I happened across a review on Critical Condition, probably whilst idly searching for info on some other film beginning with ‘D’. Now, the reviewers on that site tend to be cynical to say the least, routinely dispatching straight-to-video trash with a couple of sentences of pure disdain, as if they went in expecting a lost Howard Hawks masterwork or something. Which is ok I guess, and certainly makes for an entertaining read. So their write-up of ‘Dance of the Dead’ make an impression on me simply because it presented something almost unprecedented on that site: a positive and good natured assessment of a modern independent horror film, and furthermore one that sounded like good fun too, rather than a more challenging (read: exhausting) exercise in some weird variety of ultra-violence or other.

Believe it or not, this review alone was actually enough to send me over to Amazon to give it a whirl, alongside a bunch of other DVDs I was ordering that day. And yeah, good call Critical Condition – this one’s a keeper! Admittedly, on one level ‘Dance of the Dead’ is film without a single original idea in its entire run time, but it’s still a real breath of fresh air in the current horror landscape, simply by vestige of presenting some solid, enjoyable and uplifting fare.

Plot synopsis: there is a High School. There are zombies. The High School does what High Schools do, the zombies do what zombies do, and it all comes together rather splendidly on the night of the prom (the ‘Dance’ of the title). What more do you need to know?

I mean, I could sketch in some of the major characters and plot points for you, but frankly, assuming you’re conversant with the respective tropes of the genres being crossbred here, you could probably write the thing yourself and get about a 70% match.

Taking a seemingly deliberate decision to eschew shock value, nastiness and disruption of audience expectation, director/producer Gregg Bishop and writer Joe Ballarini set about realising ‘Dance of the Dead’ with a sense of “if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well” craftsmanship that’s a joy to behold in this era of cynical, sloppy faux-artistic filmmaking. The high school elements are played out as an applaudable approximation of the easy-going pathos and humanism of a John Hughes flick, whilst the zombie stuff largely aspires to the eerie naturalism of Romero, only occasionally giving way to the more campy teen/zombie formula established by ‘Return of the Living Dead’ (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Speaking as a lifelong fan of all those tropes, it’s hardly surprising that ‘Dance of the Dead’ drew me in like a big, warm cinematic comfort blanket.

The teenage cast – who actually ARE all teenagers for once – are great. After all the whacked out 60s/70s trash I’ve been watching recently, it’s nice to see a film where the cast look like they actually wanted to be there, and they’re a pretty damn good bunch of young actors too, launching into their roles with gusto, and bringing a sense of charm and believability that really helps carry the movie.

Add some energetic, excellently staged action sequences, a quietly (not uproariously) funny script, more than enough improvised weaponry and gleeful zombie splatter to satisfy the horror crowd, and a happy ending that actually succeeds in being touching, despite being entirely silly and predictable, and…. well, you’re home safe, gentle viewer. As mentioned above, most genre filmmakers would likely take ‘Return of the Living Dead’ as the benchmark against which a movie like this shall be judged, but actually ‘Dance..’ reminded me more than anything of a prime-era Buffy episode, with its pleasantly off-the-wall tone, genuine character and surprisingly high quality of execution.

If there’s a downside, it perhaps lies in the film’s aforementioned avoidance of novelty, and its decision to stick so rigidly to the conventions of its chosen genres that some may find things a bit stifling. But hey, I’m cool with that – I like genres, after all, and these are some of my favourite ones. It’s like introducing a couple of old friends to each other for the first time or something.

(I wish I did have friends who represented the living embodiments of zombie and teen movies. What times we’d all have! I guess they might look a bit like Sid Haig and Molly Ringwald, respectively. Or maybe Melinda Clarke from ‘Return of the Living Dead III’ and Joey Ramone. Hey, who knows, maybe they’d even hit it off?)

ANYWAY, enough of that, where were we? Oh yeah: it should also be noted that ‘Dance of the Dead’s tone is a little inconsistent at times – after all, its strongest suit is as a naturalistic zombie comedy ala ‘Shaun of the Dead’ (probably the recent film it most closely resembles, although obviously this is less of an out-and-out comedy and focused on a younger age group), which sometimes makes the inclusion of more overtly goofy horror stuff – dark & stormy nights, sinister cadaverous gravedigger, dodgy “I told you they were up to no good in that hastily photoshopped nuclear powerplant on the hill” explanation – seem a little jarring. Maybe that sort of thing might bug you, but again, I could care less – it’s all to the good. Overall, ‘Dance of the Dead’ probably gets my vote as the teen horror movie since ‘Ginger Snaps’ (not that there’s exactly been much competition).

Some may say zombie movies are getting a little tired (they have a point), some never liked teen movies in the first place (goddamn squares), but my god, we could REALLY do with a few more films as enjoyable as ‘Dance of the Dead’ right now, if the soul-crushing parade of omniscient serial killers, clanking chains, drained colour, crappy ‘lightning strike’ montage edits, grimy, stylized basements, rusty barbed wire close-ups and knife sharpening noises that comprise the entirety of the Ghosthouse Underground DVD’s seemingly endless indie horror trailer reel is anything to go by.

So in conclusion: not an all-time classic, not a mind-blower, not an “OMG you gotta see this” movie. But, once the bright lights of the eternal cavalcade of lurid lunatic weirdness that the world of horror movies offer me grinds to a halt for the evening, ‘Dance..’ is the kind of neat, self-contained little movie that will still be there, reminding me why I got into watching them in the first place.

Chick Tract.

So, walking back from a quick mooch around Greenwich last Sunday afternoon, I happened to see this staring up from the pavement in front of me:


I’m sure you’d agree, it would take a hard and incurious heart not to bend down and investigate further.

Any onlookers taking stock of my reactions would have seen excitement (hey, wow, it’s some kind of comic book!) swiftly turn to vague disappointment (oh, right, it’s one of THOSE comic books..), as I slipped my discovery into my record bag and continued on my way.

Jack Chick comics are of course the stuff of legend, and a perennial internet time-wasting favourite, but I am faintly amazed to find that Christian groups here in London are still using his hardline fundamentalist diatribes as a tool to win converts.

Beyond the wonderfully unnerving, surreal cover, this particular little number tells the tale of Charlie, an everyday fella who likes nothing better than to hang out with his work buddies and deny the sanctity of Christ’s ministry on earth.

This allows Chick to begin proceedings by pulling some cunning reverse psychology on us:



Of course, it’s not long before Death himself says “Hi There!” to Charlie (I don’t recall the concept of the grim reaper ever playing a big part in Xtian mythos, but whatever), and he finds himself sweating down in Hell, being lorded over by some self-righteous, pain-in-the-ass angel (Lucifer, I suppose).


And it is here of course that Jack Chick’s terrifyingly totalitarian worldview begins to assert itself. I mean, it’s not like Jesus is a being a jerk or anything, as he sits enthroned at the end of days passing down judgement. He’s your best buddy, after all. He doesn’t want to sentence you to an eternity of fiery torment for the unpardonable sin of saying something dumb on 27th September 1972 and not realizing that you should go to church every week, but THAT’S JUST THE WAY IT IS, you dig? Rules is rules, and you can’t expect old Jesus to stick his neck out and, ooh, I dunno, forgive you, after you’ve gone and wasted your time on earth mouthing off in your lunchbreak like a big doofus.



Imagine living in that world, everyday, with the cosmic secret police on your back. You’d probably end up staggering ‘round the streets scattering cheaply printed end-times comics too.