More on The Bunny Game, Human Centipede 2 and the BBFC...

So I’ve read this document I got off of the Facebook page of Adam Rehmeier who directed The Bunny Game that is a study conducted for the BBFC (who’ve banned and cut a slew of horror films in recent years, including The Bunny Game and Human Centipede 2) on sexual violence and sadism in films done on a study group in the UK.  I’m way too lazy to bother looking for the link, it’s on Adam Rehmeir’s FB page if you’re really interested in it.  The general purpose of the study is to justify censorship.  But I so enjoyed reading it.   The films discussed in the study include Antichrist, Wolf Creek, Martyrs, the Killer Inside Me, I Spit on Your Grave (the remake), A Serbian Film, Human Centipede 2, the Bunny Game, and the Japanese film Grotesque.  All these films were either given 18 certificates, massive forced cuts in scenes, or in the case of The Bunny Game and Grotesque, completely banned in the UK altogether.     I haven’t seen Wolf Creek or the Killer Inside Me, I will have to check those out.  I’ve seen the original I Spit on Your Grave, but I did not have any intention of seeing the remake, but since it made it into this stupid BBFC study, I will now have to go and check it out.   I didn’t like Grotesque that much when I saw it even though the BBFC had banned it, but I may have to give it another shot, based on reading this report.  All the films on this report in a sense are classics by the mere fact that they made it on to this preposterous report.  Don’t get me wrong- I loved reading this report.  It’s like a who’s who of contemporary horror cinema.  I could spend hours and hours re-reading the plot synopsis again and again of many of my favorite films.  You know how serial killers get excited re-living their own crimes and such?  That’s how I felt reading descriptions of scenes from all those horror films.  I was always kind of into horror films, but when I really got into horror films was when I moved to Vegas because I found this place the Sci-Fi Center where I work now that screened them for five dollars.  That’s around the time that Martyrs and Human Centipede and those kinds of films started coming out, so I have a real affection for some of these films.  I’m a little surprised that Dead Snow did not make the list, that’s a good one.   Are those films vulgar, repulsive, or sinful if you want to be religious about it?  I would probably say that they are if I really thought about it for a while.  That does not in and of itself give reason for such films to be censored or banned.  The people who made those films did accomplish what they sought out to accomplish in making those films which was in essence to make intense and terrifying horror films.  I’ve read Tom Six quoted as being upset about the since lifted ban of Human Centipede 2 in the UK, but it would almost seem the highest honor a film of the kind could receive.  I do feel to be honest a kind of impetus to move on and do other things. I’ve gotten sick of being the Human Centipede review guy.  What I have learned from putting out books that didn’t sell at all in my 20’s is that now I post based on what gets the most hits and that’s ended up being for the most part horror movie reviews and right wing internet radio.  I did get a fair bit of attention from writing on some of these very same films discussed in the study, in some cases overseas and from some fairly serious art world and academic types in Germany and the UK.  Based on that I suppose in that sense I was able to get a kind of prestige and sense of reward out of it. So are these immoral films that I regret having watched? Yes and no.  That film Martyrs is really good.  Antichrist is a good film.  Human Centipede 2 and A Serbian Film, I could certainly see where people would find these films objectionable but there is actually a certain artistry that is there.  Members of this stupid BBFC study groups suggested that the films may lead to a glorification of sexual violence, particularly in young men.   I hate to inform the BBFC, but people commit rape and films do not commit rape. The UK, of course, banned conservative radio show host Michael Savage from entering the country, so their little fetish for censorship doesn’t stop with horror films featuring rape and/or torture sequences.  They also suppress political material on the grounds of being “hate speech”, so it is really a very serious issue.  The state apparatus perpetuates its own existence by such censorship.  That’s true especially if it’s someone like Michael Savage who spends a lot of time challenging the appropriate place of government.  So the British government doesn’t have a leg to stand on with any of this. The closest I’ve ever come to being offended by Adam Rehmeier is when he posted that he didn’t like Prometheus, which is one of my favorites.  I have always admired Adam Rehmeier, Human Centipede 2 director Tom Six, and Michael Savage for being banned in the UK.  I was able to tell Adam Rehmeier this personally on FB, which he thanked me for.   They have effectively spat in the face of political correctness and for this they should be applauded.    I’ve also always admired Ron Paul, Bob Barr and Chuck Baldwin for being called out in the MIAC documents. Hey, I’m a libertarian, I don’t like socialist censorship. I also watch hours and hours of horror films and listen to hours and hours of right wing radio. You know I have to, it’s the way I charm the ladies.  There are those two things, and being extremely closed minded about a very slim number of either old gothic/industrial type bands or older metal bands being the only bands worth listening to.   I mean, how else do you attract women other than being able to listen to hours and hours of right wing radio on end and being obsessed with the Bunny Game and Human Centipede 2?

Asian Horror: The Uninvited/Coming Soon/Into the Mirror

There are a bunch of Asian horror films about ghosts that are sometimes on the lengthy side, don’t always make that much sense, and in some cases have something or other to do with mental illness.  As that with this blog I have gone more and more with horror film reviews being is that that’s all people read on here for the most part, I feel it is worth discussing these films a little bit.  However, it may be the case that reviews of these kinds of films will not get hits.  Even though these films are extremely violent and grim, they do not involve snuff films (Snuff, A Serbian Film, etc.), or feature women being raped and impregnated by a monster of some kind (Inseminoid, Humanoids from the Deep, Xtro, The Beast Within, etc.), or were banned in any country (Human Centipede 2, The Bunny Game, or A Serbian Film, etc.) which means this review is likely to yield a smaller on-line audience.  The Korean film The Uninvited is in the Asian Ghost film genre.  I asked the other people watching the film if it made any sense after the credits, and they agreed that it did not.  After I watched it I went back to a plot synopsis to see if I could make sense of the film of if I had seriously missed something.  The film still doesn’t really make much sense.   The Uninvited is that one with the guy who is about to get married seeing the two little girls in the subway and it turns out that the girls were poisoned by their mother.  Protestantism took off in a big way in South Korea which plays into the film-the main character’s dad is a pastor at a Protestant church.  There’s a whole thing about a woman with narcolepsy who can see the ghosts of the little girls that haunt the main character, and this whole bit about her best friend throwing her baby out the window.   In describing this film I’m making it sound as though this film makes a lot more sense than it in fact does.   It’s very convoluted.  There’s some weird fixation with infanticide and people jumping out windows that carries through the film.  It’s relatively non-linear, if you’re looking for a real concrete a-then-b-then-c sort of structure it doesn’t have one, or at least it doesn’t have one that works.   If you’re a film student or something and you want to psychoanalyze a bunch of weirdness about Korean women killing their children, then this is the film for you. Coming Soon is a Thai film. Spoiler Alert!  It plays with the notion somewhat related to the idea of a snuff film of a real death being caught on camera and used in a film.  The film starts with actually a fairly extreme sequence about a woman who removes the eyes of children she kidnaps.  Local villagers find her and hang her.  The story line revolves around the people working at the movie theater. The old woman in the movie comes out of the movie to kill people.   There’s an interesting little plot twist about the movie within a movie being based on a true story- but the ghost turn out not to be the real woman the film within a film is based on, but rather a woman killed during the filming of the hanging scene in the movie-within-a-movie.  Unfortunately, the death caught on camera used in Coming Soon is an accidental death that is kept in the film and not a deliberate murder on camera.  The definition of a snuff flick is a film made of a murder for purposes of commercial distribution of some kind.  It is unfortunate that the death on camera that appears in Coming Soon because then the film would be a film about snuff flicks, and reviews about films involving snuff flicks in the plotline are a large source of hits, largely from people looking for real snuff footage.  That being said, Coming Soon is a pretty decent film.  Here’s a tangential bit: when I was watching the films Coming Soon at the Sci-Fi center here in Vegas, a guy showed up with a t-shirt for the Norwegian black metal band Dark Throne.  It’s funny, if there is one thing I regret doing blogging it’s doing a bunch of reviews of obscure black metal bands no one really cares about.  Part of the reason for that is that in recent years there’s been that dumb little trend of art world and academic types becoming obsessed with black metal.  I think if you try to analyze and interpret black metal in an academic or a high brow art type of context you don’t really understand it.  There’s no reason to anyway.  Even if many of those Norwegian black metal bands were more or less certifiable, if you read interviews with them, their intentions have always been more or less clear.  The whole black metal thing is what it is.  Those black metal bands were all trying to sound like Venom sort of.  Venom is pretty good.  Into the Mirror is another weird little Asian ghost movie, this time once again from South Korea.  Speaking of academics, the Lacan people would love Into the Mirror because they have their big fixation with cinema and mirrors.  There’s a bit about a mental patient in Into the Mirror as well.  Into the Mirror is about a mall security guard conducting investigation into a series of murders that are actually carried out by a ghost that lives behind mirrors.   Into the Mirror is alright. 

Caroline Pierce+Allen Dusk/The Perfect House/Atom the Amazing Zombie Killer

This post is composed of brief reviews of a number of different films that showed at my work place the Sci-Fi Center in Las Vegas recently, except for the film called Slaughter Disc where I just got a promo DVD at a Sci-fi Center event.  In all cases, people involved with making the films were on hand to answer questions and do promo for their projects.  I have decided to include the reviews together to give a sense of the general vitality of things going on specifically at the Sci-Fi Center and also the general vitality of things taking place in the world of independent horror production.                                                               

Caroline Pierce who is best known as an adult film star, although she has collaborated with a guy named David Quitmeyer (who also just put out a novel about killer bed bugs called Shady Palms recently under the name Allen Dusk) on some more horror oriented films.  I got two DVDs free at the event, Slaughter Disc and Tales from the Carnal Morgue (an anthology disc of three shorts), and a copy of Shady Palms.  These films actually came out a number of years ago, but they are new to me and would be to a lot of people.  Slaughter Disc is yet another film that plays with the whole snuff flick death on video kind of thing.   It’s a little bit different from other murder caught on film/video type films in that this one involves a supernatural element, with people getting sucked into television screens, as in the 80’s film Poltergeist.  I suppose I should warn audience that a good portion of the film is essentially pornography sequences, and is arguably as much or even more so a porno film than a horror film.   Well, how is it?   I must be honest I’m a horror film person and not much of a porno person.  This one kind of addresses that kind of an impression of pornography though, because the main character has a very clear addiction problem with pornography. The main character is sort of odd, he chooses masturbating to pornography over spending time with his real girlfriend, for which she dumps him at the beginning of the movie.  That’s the one thing that is very interesting about the film- it’s a porno film about an individual destroyed by pornography.  I actually feel the depiction of pornography addiction in this one is psychologically dead on.    He comes across this haunted DVD and Caroline Pierce plays an evil female demon/ghost/whatever.  The filmmakers did not have a whole lot of money to work with, but the film is fairly gory.  The soundtrack music is actually pretty good- apparently it was done by Peter J. Gorritz the bassist for the goth band The Last Dance. At the Sci-Fi center event we screened two films from Tales from the Carnal Morgue, Mail Order Bride and Sustenance.  Mail Order Bride a guy orders a robot woman on-line, the robot woman is shown violent film footage which screws with her programming and then she kills the guy of course, it’s comedic in tone.  The other film on the DVD that was screened at the Sci-Fi center was Sustenance. Sustenance is about a woman who enters into a weight loss program where she is put in a kind of solitary confinement and fed her own flesh.    Fans of extreme horror will most likely enjoy the third film on the Carnal Morgue disk.  People who are fans of Caroline Peirce for her work from adult films will likely prefer Slaughter Disc.  I’m an extreme horror guy and not a porno person, so I preferred Sustenance. I haven’t gotten around to reading Shady Palms but it looks pretty decent.                                                                                                               

  The Perfect House is a recent horror film.  We had one of the directors Kris Hulbert and the producer Andrea M. Vahl and over and screened the film.  This is actually an excellent film.   I had initially identified the film as an anthology style film, but I was corrected and told by one of the director Kris Hulbert that sequels are planned in which the details of the storylines in the film become clear.  The general gist of it is that you have a couple looking at a house for sale, and they are surprised that the price is as low as it is, but this because a series of highly violent events have taken place in the house stretching back from the 200’s to the late 60’s which are shown in flashback.   One of them involves a dude killing his neighbor’s entire family in front of him for not returning his weed whacker. There’s another one about a family with a disturbed mother. Another one involves a guy who keeps a woman prisoner in small cage in his basement and brings down other people he kills because he enjoys having the prisoner watch.   It is the only film I’m aware of in which a victim with multiple stab wounds is thrown in salty bathwater, which is one of a few prolonged torture sequences in the film.  As you can tell, this film is obviously released by Disney. Family fun for children of all ages!                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             Atom the Amazing Zombie Killer is a comedy more than anything else.   A bunch of guys from Denver, Colorado made the film and dropped by the Sci-Fi Center.  The main character Atom is leader of a bowling team, who through a head injury suffers from hallucinations that he is surrounded by zombies, and starts hacking them up, but it’s actually just real people.   There are a number of other plot elements that have to do with the rival bowling team and their leader who steals Atom’s girl.   The theme music was done by the Las Angeles punk band the Radioactive Chicken Heads.   The violence in the film is strictly cartoonish slapstick, and there is a fair bit of gross-out bathroom humor.   It’s pretty funny.  Good times.

Voivod/Innocence of Muslims

Here is an update on two posts that did fairly well on here, even though they are both sort of peripheral to the one subject that does really well on here, which is horror cinema.   About a year ago, I think I dug up some artwork by Voivod’s drummer Away.  This was, as far as the text blog as opposed to the radio show, a fairly popular blog.   I have to admit to being an avid Voivod fan having been exposed to them on MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball when I was in 6^th grade.  I re-discovered them when I was in my 20’s.   The new single sounds exactly like Voivod sounded in the 80’s.   For a while they used old guitar tracks that the late Piggy had left behind, but they have a new guitarist who sounds just like him.   Jason Newstead of Metallica played base for them during the 200’s, but the current bassist is the original bassist Blackie. The new single is called “Mechanical Mind”.  “Mechanical Mind” sounds like an outtake from Nothingface.   If you want to see what the pinnacle of rock and roll really was, there are really two sides to it, as far as I can see.   One side would be those really classic early goth bands- Joy Division, Bauhaus, Christian Death, Sisters of Mercy, Souxsie and the Banshees, The Cure maybe, early Cult.  The other side of that would be the original Voivod line-up.   That band the Templars are pretty sweet- a really underrated band would be Blitz who put out both an early oi punk album and an early goth album and did both very well.   However, with regards to Voivod, that’s really the original Voivod album I’m speaking of, really.  I like to remember them as young, as they were.  The release last year of To the Death 84 last year was a bigger deal in my mind.  I have very odd and very specific musical taste.                                                                                                                                                  

  Elsewhere in the news, we have an update on the Innocence of Muslims saga.  The filmmaker has been identified as an Egyptian Christian named Nakoula Nakoula- although with the response to his filmmaking in the Muslim, his new name should be Dead Dead .   Nakoula Nakoula has been arrested.  Before you get your panties tangled up about the first amendment, he was not directly being arrested for making Innocence of Muslims.  Uploading the video to YouTube is what he is in jail for, because he was violating terms of probation.  He was previously in trouble for bank fraud and wasn’t supposed to be using aliases or the internet.  He’s a freak. Oh yeah, the killings at the US embassy had nothing to do with the Innocence of Muslims trailer, it turned out later.

Innocence of Muslims Trailer

I can assure you this movie is not coming to a theater near you anytime soon. 

I’ve written on here about some controversial films.  But Serbian Film, the Bunny Game and Human Centipede don’t come anywhere near the level of controversy of Innocence of Muslims.  The U.S state department said this got the U.S. Ambassador to Libya assassinated without having any kind of theatrical release.  The producer of the film’s identity is unknown and the actors involved with the film are in the media saying that they were mislead as to the film’s content.   That is probably a very  good thing for them to say as soon as possible for their personal safety.  Innocence of Muslims is a weird, anti-Muslim propaganda film in which the Prophet Mohammad engages in pedophilia and homosexuality, brutal murder, and fabrication of the Quran for the sake of defrauding his followers.  Michael Savage was banned from entering the UK for making statements about Islam far more moderate.  People like Salmon Rushdie and the makers  of South Park received death threats for much less provocative statements about the Prophet. 

It may seem a mote point, but based on the trailer, the film also probably doubles as one of the worst films of all time.   The costumes look like they were taken from some kids’ Christmas pageant at some church somewhere.  They shot on blue screen and edited in the desert badly.   You have likely seen better acting in pornography.  The thought that this is art worth dying for is sort of hilarious.  The filmmakers appear to be mostly successful at coming up with an excellent way to get your head blown off- for whatever cinematic value that has.  

I don’t know in what form we may ever see this film released in its entirety- perhaps on some sort of hate webpage somewhere.  Based on the trailer I doubt I will not dedicate time to watching the film in its entirety. The only case in which I can see their being reason to do so would be if someone was a real specialist in U.S/Middle East relations.

Update: without getting into it all, it has since turned out that this video was made by a guy named Nakoula Nakoula who was in trouble for white collar crime.  The video had nothing to do with the murders at the U.S. embassy in Libya, it also turned out.

Extreme Asian Torture Double Feature: Marebito and Infection

These two films, Marebito and Infection, were shown together (with subtitles) as a double feature at the William Powell’s Sci-Fi Center in Las Vegas.    I have to be cautious about what films I take the time to review on here because my schedule is becoming increasingly full and I only have time to review films that will attract public interest, if I can, which is by no means the kind of films that interest me much, but these films seem to be the kind that a review could attract some attention.   Those Japanese are sure to come up with some sadistic horror films given the opportunity- the Guinea Pig videos back in the 80’s actually had people thinking they were real snuff films,  Grotesque back in 2009 was banned in the UK outright.  If you want to talk about body horror, more recent Japanese horror cinema goes there in a big way.  Some of these ultra-sick and disturbing Japanese films are going to work better than others, obviously.  I strongly preferred Infection over Marebito.  Don’t get me wrong, Marebito is actually pretty good, but Infection is amazing.   Marebito I would be willing to sit down and watch again just to get a clearer sense of what is going on in the film, if such a thing is possible.  I don’t think you can necessarily sit down and map out the plot of Marebito and have it all logistically make sense really.  The main completely crazy and it is strongly suggested that what is going in the film is actually going on in his head.   The general gist of it is that the main character discovers an underground tunnel system beneath Tokyo in which he finds a woman that has never had human contact and lives entirely off of blood.  First he feeds her his own blood (which he says he enjoys and appears to get off on sexually) but then begins killing people to feed her.    This plot synopsis is a vast oversimplification but I hate writing out a plot synopsis for films in a review and, again, this film I would be willing to watch over because a lot of it didn’t appear to make sense to me much.   It is suggested at one point that one woman he kills is actually his wife and the strange woman that only drinks blood he finds underground is actually his daughter.   Obviously, this a wholesome family film that should be shown to children in elementary schools, especially around the holiday season.  Infection is hot.  It actually scared me.  This hospital in Japan is running out of money, not clear if there is some sort of economic depression going on, but that is sort of the implication. This hospital is running under budget and with inadequate staff.  There is an ambulance headed to the hospital with a mysterious illness.  This one becomes another one in which it is not clear how much is actually going on in the character’s minds.    There is an incident in which by making a mistake, one of the patients, a burn victim, dies, and the doctors and nurses involved discuss the ways to conceal the error.  Meanwhile, the ambulance has dropped off the mysterious patient which has a contagious infection which first effects the brain and then causes the internal organs to dissolve into green slime.   It is suggested that the disease is actually a disease that takes place in the mind, and has something to do with the death of the burn patient.  The answers are not given conclusively in the end, without spoiling too much.  A woman in the audience actually screamed during the screening of Infection.  It’s pretty sweet.  

Last Days Here Review

It makes sense for me to review this film now just because the DVD came out a few weeks ago and I just happened to see it.  I am not going to lie and say this is an amazing film- it is not.   It’s a documentary about the lead singer of the 70’s doom metal band Pentagram Bobby Liebling who spent years smoking crack in his parents basement.  He- I don’t know- Pentagram is a really good band but I am not crazy about this Liebling guy.  He’s really not especially insightful or interesting.  He’s a weirdo, and not really in a positive way.  He gets sober by the end of the film.   The film is similar in tone to the documentary about Arthur Kane of the New York Dolls except Arthur Kane had vanished from music and become a very serious Mormon, which is a lot more sympathetic.  Bobby is pretty annoying, he vanished from music to smoke crack in his parent's basement.  But who is really annoying is his wife.  He marries one of his young fans in the film.  This is an ugly crackhead who lives with his mom. First of all, she becomes romantically involved with a particularly ugly crackhead because he was in some band in the 70’s, which reminds me a lot of the woman who said she wouldn’t date me because I wasn’t a skinhead in high school.    Secondly, if you watch the film, the strong argument could be made that she was more of a hindrance to Bobby’s recovery than a help.  The documentary doesn’t even play that much Pentagram in it. 

More Whacky Snuff Flick Fun with Faces of Death 3!

Nothing spells class quite like the Faces of Death movies from the 80’s.  The original I know was at least banned in a number of different countries.  These “documentaries” have no plots and contain mostly fake footage of grizzly deaths of both humans and animals.  They’re ridiculous- people were fooled by them, amazingly.  It’s funny; Charlie Sheen took the second of the Guinea Pig videos seriously enough to contact the F.B.I about it, thinking he was looking at real extreme Asian torture and snuff flick footage, even though the video was very much a fake snuff flick.  Faces of Death 3 is a hilarious fake at points.  It does include what looks like real footage of a rabbit slaughterhouse.   The third one is the one where they show a secret political execution in El Salvador without explaining why their cameras would be allowed into a secret political execution.  3 is also the one where the skydiver crashes into water full of alligators that eat him.   We are talking serious gritty realism here!  The film as with it’s to preceding films is narrated by actor Michael Carr as Doctor Frances b. Gross (get it? He B. Gross!).  Apparently, the fourth films has a different narrator, but I have yet to be quite bored enough to watch Faces of Death 4.  Apparently, the 5^th Faces of Death film is all footage from the previous four films.  I find these films to be hilarious though devoid of any substance whatsoever.   Seriously, I cracked up when the guy skydives into the water filled with alligators.   If you’re a man looking to really charm the ladies, I’ll tell you what you do.  Early on in conversation, as early on as you can bring it up, mention being a huge fan of the Faces of Death films, in particular Faces of Death 3. Well, who can blame the ladies?  Doctor Frances B. Gross looks so sexy in his glasses, goatee, and timely late 70’s to mid-80’s suits.  You strat wearing that same suit, glasses, goatee and start narrating about the guy who skydived into the water filled with alligators, the tail is going to come crawling, I promise!   

Messiah of Evil (Full Film with Text Introduction)

The problem again and again with doing this site, as I’ve complained about at length on here lately, is that it tends to be only reviews of the more extreme kinds of horror films- Human Centipede 2, The Bunny Game, A Serbian Film, Men Behind the Sun- films that deal with torture, snuff films, rape- that get   many hits. As such I am forced to write on those to keep the audience expanding.  I did in all honesty enjoy many of those films, but it is frustrating that that must become the focus in order to keep the readership numbers high.  A film like Messiah of Evil is a good example of why I find this all very stifling. Even when it comes to horror cinema as the central topic, an extreme horror film like The Bunny Game of Human Centipede 2 does not represent by any stretch of the imagination the full scope of engaging horror films.  I kind of like this film Messiah of Evil from the 70’s that I saw last night at the Sci-Fi center in Vegas. No, this film only has flesh eating zombies, it does not involve prolonged sexual torture, rape and impregnation of human woman by aliens or monsters, or snuff films in anyway.  It was never banned in any country.  Messiah of Evil is like a zombie movie made by people on seven hits of acid or something.  I’d never heard of it but apparently a lot of people view it as a kind of a lost classic.  A good example of one such individual is Brad Jones “the Cinema Snob” (whose snuff-flick themed movie Cheap I reviewed on here).  Brad Jones has the whole shtick that he never likes anything, but he loves Messiah of Evil.  The general plot synopsis is a woman who has lost contact with her father, a painter- (and the paintings of his shown in the film are all tripped out, of course) goes to a small town in Northern California, where she meets up with some weird traveling bohemian types.  Her father’s notes suggest that something very bad is happening in this town, and then, you guessed it- flesh eating zombies.  There’s a kind of Antichrist figure that appears, as the title would suggest, but he’s a weird old west Antichrist, an Anti-Joseph Smith almost- it involves the Donner Party.  The film also includes some very nice early electronic soundtrack work akin to the soundtrack work of Can or Goblin from the same time period.  This film is more the sort of thing that I myself am into, weird zombie films from the 70’s and the like- but unfortunately on-line audiences seem focused on digging up images of sexual violation.   That is truly a shame in my book. 

The M Lady Tapes

Many of the people who have reached my site have used the search words “M Lady Tapes”.  I will make some brief notes here about what they are and some information about them.  This is not a subject I find that interesting myself, so I won’t go into that much detail about it.   Serial killers Leonard Lake and his accomplice Charles Ng in California tortured, raped and murdered a number of women up at their cabin where they lived.  Some of the sexual abuse and torture was captured on video.  I have seen some clips from these tapes which appear in the documentary Snuff: A Documentary About Killing on Camera which I reviewed on here.  Apparently, this M Lady Tape footage is in some form available on-line but I have never had enough curiosity about it to try and get a hold of the footage.   This footage doesn’t constitute snuff footage because there’s no evidence they made the tapes for purpose of profit, a vital element in the definition of snuff.  The Luka Magnotta video which surfaced more recently is not authentic snuff footage for much the same reason.  Yeah, these M Lady Tapes are real unfortunately, and supposedly you can get a hold of them.   I can’t imagine why you  would want to, but apparently they’re around. 

Extreme Horror Video Review! Night of the Seagulls

I’ve had to discontinue music reviews because of a general lack of public interest, but this is a little bit of musical trivia that I think merits mention.  Two bands have different songs entitled “Night of the Seagulls” that are inspired by the same Spanish zombie film from the 70’s of the same name.  One is by the band Templars (sometimes called The Templars), a skinhead (not the Nazi kind) “oi” punk band from the New York area in the 90’s.  The other is by the British doom metal band Cathedral. The band Templars I’ve known about for a little over ten years. Every so often I meet someone who is a Templars fan not often.  I sort of feel that of all the “punk” bands I’ve ever heard, they stand out as being the best.  I’ve been listening to them a lot lately.   They are a real underrated treasure I think.  I really like “Night of the Seagulls” by Templars.  The funny thing is that the really almost just as good and also underrated is the Cathedral song “Night of the Seagulls” is also really great.  I used to reference doom metal on this blog frequently, but by and large I’ve gotten sort of sick of metal.  Cathedral is good, I’ve always sort of overlooked them.  I have these very specific, almost OCD like compulsions about what music I listen to.  I have very narrow tastes that a lot of people find quite strange.  One of those is listening to some very odd music made as soundtracks for European horror/b-films from the 70’s such as the Vampyre Lesbos soundtrack and of course the work the Italian “progressive rock” band Goblin did for Dario Argento and others.  I’ve taken a tiny break from being obsessed with music from such films and listening to music inspired and about a European horror film from the 70’s in the form of both “Night of The Seagulls” by Templars and “Night of the Seagulls” by Cathedral.  

How is the film?  The film I would say is decent.  I have a real taste for campy horror cinema like this. It’s actually the last of the Blind Dead film series by Amando de Ossorio. Ossorio has a little bit of a perverted side.  He’s a little bit of a sleaze director.  However, people who are into extreme Asian torture videos, movies in which women are raped and impregnated by monsters, Spongebob Squarepants Porn, and trying to locate real snuff footage will find this film tame most likely.  That’s too bad.   There is, however, a good bit of breast exposure in this film.  Previous movies of the Blind Dead series I saw I found to have pacing problems, Night of the Seagulls less so.  The general plotline is that a doctor and his wife show up in this coastal village where the natives sacrifice young women to these undead knights without eyes.   In the other Blind Dead movies it is made clear that these are supposed to be Knights Templar.  I kind of like it.  It’s an okay film.     

More Whacky Fun with Snuff Flicks: Thesis(Tesis) and Mute Witness!

The funny thing is, I know exactly who is to blame for this whole thing.   It’s a dirty hippy named Ed Saunders.  He was the singer in a 60’s band called The Fugs, but this is not his work with the Fugs which I’m talking about.  Ed Saunders wrote a book on the Manson Family killings called The Family that was full of factual errors for which his publisher was sued successfully.  But there is one enduring contribution to our culture that is still at work.  That is far as I’ve ever heard or read of, The Family is the first place in which the unconfirmed rumor of the “snuff flick” originated.  Blogging about the subject and the numerous films that have incorporated the myth as a plot device has become a dull chore for me but it is a necessary evil because of the huge number of hits such reviews get.  I’ve gone through a lot of these silly movies.  Emanuelle in America is the one that’s kind of a European soft core film, A Serbian Film is the really extreme one,  Cheap is the one where the guy had good idea but no money, The Last House on Dead End Street is the one that is impossible to find, etc.   Then now, I’m down two these last two that I’ve run across which are better described as thrillers than horror movies from back in the 90’s.  One is the Spanish film Thesis or Tesis the other is a film called Mute Witness which is a US film shot in Russia.  These films are both good but not great.  I found them both for about ten bucks combined, so no great loss or win on that one.  They both have film geek types as characters and are semi self-referential, i.e. sort of films about film.   Thesis is about a film student who uncovers a snuff film operation on campus.  I don’t feel like giving a full plot synopsis because I’m lazy and sick of these films.    If you’re looking for hardcore degenerate kind of material or real snuff films, I’m sure Thesis will bore you.   It’s like the Saved by the Bell of the snuff film mythology.  There is some attempt to comment or observe about society and medias fixation with violence in it, but it is sort of just thrown out there in a very superficial manner.  I prefer Mute Witness which is about a mute woman working on a low budget horror film in Moscow who witnesses some Russian mob stuff involving snuff flicks.  This is not because Mute Witness is a brilliant film, but rather because the actress that plays the mute woman looked pretty sexy getting into a bath in the film.

Actually, Mute Witness is a little on the cutesy side.  That’s kind of like Saved by the Bell snuff flick action to!

Extreme Torture Snuff Video Action

I lied.  This blog post does not contain hardcore snuff flick action or extreme torture video action.  Posts get more hits when I give them titles like that though, which is why I did it.   These are two other videos that are probably just as disturbing as a real snuff flick if you actually thought about them.  In the one the actor Robert Blake flips out while he’s being interviewed about being tried for killing his wife.  The other one two politicians from Jordan are arguing on TV and one pulls out a gun. 

 http://www.youtube.com/embed/-rcyZmuuVV0

http://www.youtube.com/embed/-0YMNFXPAKE

More Extreme Hardcore Snuff Flick Action! A Further Meditation on the Nature of Snuff Flicks...

Snuff flicks are an urban legend from the 70’s with very little concrete evidence to support their existence. However, I have successfully used this legend to become famous, because thousands of people are looking for them. The clearest explanation is simply that there are a lot of people who get off on watching something die. One might think that snuff flicks exist somewhere, simply because the human race is too sick for them not to. The thing is it would be easier and probably cheaper to make a fake snuff flick. Certainly, huge snuff flick rings do not exist which is part of the urban legend as we’ve never seen a snuff flick trial ever, for example. So the snuff flick thing is also as much about the gullibility of mankind as anything else. I have at least one more review of some films that have used snuff films as a plot device slatted ahead.

Extreme Death Caught on Camera Video Action for Hardcore Snuff Film Fans! Guest Staring Tom Cruise!

Yes, the endless snuff film thing: not only do I get sick of writing about them but people never stop looking them up on-line for reasons I don’t fully understand, but now I’m even tired of repeating that I’m bored of writing about the subject and don’t get the fascination. For those looking for snuff films, I can say that there are more than enough videos of people dying caught on camera to look at. This one is from a courtroom in Arizona where a man named Michael Marin was found guilty of arson of his own home because he couldn’t afford the mortgage anymore. He appears to have consumed a poison in court upon hearing the verdict. It is not footage of murder set up on camera for the deliberate purpose of sales, but hey, if you want to watch someone die, I have provided this video right here, which was shown on mainstream news in many places and is widely available on-line. I think it was probably only the tenth most interesting thing in the news this week, but here it is for you. I think the whole thing with Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes getting divorced is even a lot more interesting, personally. I wrote a short story about the topic years ago. Rupert Murdoch over at Fox tweeted this morning that he thought this story was going to reveal a lot more and that Scientologist are “creepy, maybe evil” and one of the publications he owns, Murdoch owns, the New York Post ran a story today suggesting that the marriage was essentially arranged and staged. To be honest I don’t know how much will come out about Scientology and all that. In my mind there is still at this point the distinct possibility that Katie Holmes divorced Tom Cruise purely because he wasn’t an especially good husband, and not over his being gay as he is rumored to be or weirdness involving the church. Rupert Murdoch’s been in the news business a good long while though, so when he smells a little smoke there may be a little bit of fire. Of course, much larger audiences will be drawn to this post for use of the words “extreme”, “snuff film”, and “hardcore” in the title.

Racist Elmo Video

Here it is, footage of the Central Park Elmo impersonator ranting about the Jews, using the f-word, and getting arrested ultimnately. As sort of a side note, Elmo here makes refference to a body of anti-semetic writings by Henry Ford. It comes up every once and a while that Henry Ford was an anti-semite, not often. I suppose this does not belong tightly within the topic of horror cinema, but is certainly a kind of shock video. I really had no idea Elmo had it in him.

Max McDonald and Goodnight Gunfight Part 2

A previous blog on Max McDonald and Goodnight Gunfight dealt with an unused interview I did with a band called Goodnight Gunfight for a magazine I owned that didn’t really go anywhere sales wise called AeonElectron, and how I attempted to use the band to try and anchor an interview with Phil Spector threw them, but couldn’t stand them, so gave up. I actually once was in a conversation with a member of Spector’s legal team where I told that story in brief. It also made fun of their friend Max MacDonald, the son of Ian McDonald of Foreigner and King Crimson. Jessie whatever her name is from Goodnight Gunfight found it on-line and re-posted it. This was pretty much exactly the purpose for which the blog was posted. After it was reposted it got a fair few hits, I was excited to see. The thing is though that that was nearly a year ago that I wrote that thing, and now it is clear two principle things. Mostly the only blogs that get any hits are 1.) Expressions of my right wing political views on blog talk radio, banking off my grandfather’s name. 2) horror films reviews or topics related to horror films. It’s not simply horror reviews, but horror reviews that tend to involve a lot of sick and deranged kind of stuff. People are always looking around for snuff flicks which don’t really exist, and so writing about. So the strategy of making fun of New York artsy types to create a stir was one I largely abandoned by the time Jessie whatever her name is from Goodnight Gunfight found the post, all though I was glad to have been able to have gotten couple hits on that. It should be stressed that is some terrible, terrible music. I think that almost all bands are pretty much wretched and not worth getting excited about to be totally honest. Goodnight Gunfight they weren’t even nice, really. Around the same time I interviewed them I walked into a fetish club and got surrounded by a group of women in their early twenties, one of who said “ You’re our bitch now.” At which pointed I was tied up and spanked and clawed etc, by the group of young women. So it was easier to get play at that point by doing fetish club type stuff. That was more chicks than were even in Goodnight Gunfight. So I’ll still stand by my general opinion that Goodnight Gunfight had no reason to exist and less reason to be worth interviewing. The blog bitching about them got more attention than the interview would have.

Impregnated with a Tentacle Monster: Prometheus Review

I apologize for the title of the post. In order to get larger numbers of hits I have made named it as such so this post could be mistaken for Japanese tentacle hentai porn, which gets all kinds of websearches. This post is actually mostly a review of the film Prometheus. You have to meet your audience half way. Prometheus does have part in which a woman is impregnated with a tentacle monster, so this blog talks a little bit about that they want, a little bit about what i want to talk about. Ridley Scott has been gloating a little bit about how brilliant his new Alien prequel is (there was some question about whether Prometheus was an Alien prequel-it very much is). The general premise I think is perhaps more clever and engaging then the film itself is. Basically, these humans find these ancient cave drawings and ancient pictograms displaying gigantic beings pointing at a star- they think it’s an invitation from the aliens called “the Engineers” to come visit them. They go to the planet in the star map and their understanding of the pictograms is all wrong and what they stumble into is a planet which is a military outpost and they walk into a biological weapon storehouse. The aliens are the same alien in the chair at the beginning of alien. The implication, which actually makes the original Alien make more sense, is that the xenomorphs from the Aliens films was one of their weapons. That would explain why the alien was able to gestate in a human host, it was designed as a weapon to specifically do that. Some variation of the Xenomorph species makes a cameo at the very end popping out of the Engineers’ chest. The Elizabeth Shaw character, one of the scientist is impregnated with a tentacle creature that is some variation on the “facehugger” from the Alien films. I don’t feel like writing out an entire plot synopsis of it because that is boring and plot synopsis of Prometheus are widely available on-line elsewhere. I was very excited that this film was coming out and it is a satisfying and watchable film. I don’t think Ridley Scott is being nearly as philosophically interesting as he thinks he’s being by basing a film around the idea that aliens created the human race, which is an idea that come up here and there in UFO books and such. They left a number of things unresolved certainly with the intention of doing a franchise that would be a kind of Alien spin off franchise with Elizabeth Shaw as the new Ripley character. I got a kick out of the nasty irony of the general premise though. I sided with the Engineers for being a ruthless, militaristic race. It’s pretty good, I like it. Not as good as I thought it would be, but pretty good.