Table of contents for Issue 66 April 2007 in RUE MORGUE

Looking over this whopping twelve-page cover story on the grindhouse phenomenon, I was struck by the fact that I was still being nursed in 1975, when moviegoers were experiencing bona fide exploitation double bills in the seediest theatres of New York’s notorious 42nd Street. What a thrill it must have been to see movies such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Last House on the Left, The Astro-Zombies, The Blood Spattered Bride, Torso, The House at the Edge of the Park, Shockwaves, Burial Ground, Pieces, Blood Feast, I Drink Your Blood and Blood Eaters in their first run at some shithole theatre with a rowdy crowd of drunks, perverts and other miscreants. But these venues are a thing of the past, snuffed out by the advent of home video, urban…

Stuart Gordon is having a virtual garage sale and we’re all invited to check it out. The celebrated writer/director of films like Re-Animator and From Beyond is cleaning out his files and offering up storyboards that he created for many of his best-known films. “My wife used to joke about the amount of stuff I’ve accumulated over the years,” laughs Gordon, whose early training as a graphic artist was put to good use in these pre-production mementoes, “but I always told her, ‘Hey, you never know, this stuff may be valuable in the future.’” Gordon is putting that theory to the test, teaming up with LA horror store Dark Delicacies (RM#54) to auction off storyboards from films including Re-Animator, From Beyond, Dolls and King of the Ants, plus his two…

✢ Vlad the Impaler is rumoured to not only have eaten the flesh of some of his enemies, but to have spread their blood on his bread like butter. ✢ Stanley Kubrick chose to adapt Stephen King’s The Shining because, out of all the horror fiction he’d read at the time, it was the first story that held his attention. ✢ The word “tintinnabulation,” meaning the ringing of bells, was invented by Edgar Allan Poe in his 1849 poem “The Bells.” ✢ Ninety percent of Bela Lugosi’s fan mail came from women. ✢ The Egyptian queen Cleopatra allegedly took her own life by hiding two asps in a basket of fruit that she was eating from, knowing that sooner or later one would strike her dead. ✢ To play Leatherface,…

In this magazine, Tom Savini should need little introduction. With four decades of genre films under his belt – both behind and in front of the camera – Savini has become the most recognizable special effects whiz in the business by popping up in cameo roles all over the map. He’s appeared in George Romero’s Martin, the original Dawn of the Dead (as well as the 2004 remake), Knightriders and Land of the Dead (where he reprised his role as the biker Blades from Dawn). He played Garbageman #2 in Creepshow and The Creep in its sequel, got creamed in Bill Lustig’s Maniac (as Disco Boy!) and, of course, wowed viewers with his rapid-fire cock-and-balls as Sex Machine in the Rodriguez/Tarantino vampire flick From Dusk Till Dawn. Now, he puts…

A lot of years ago, my partner Dave Friedman and I had a lot of fun making a lot of movies that played in a lot of theatres and gave a lot of people a lot of entertainment. That’s a lot of “lots.” Our early output actually predated what contemporaries call “grindhouse” theatres, yet we helped establish the genre. Some of the devices we used still exist, and if a producer ever gets together with me to make Grim Fairy Tales, I’ll personally and absolutely re-establish grindhouses. To make a grindhouse film – and beyond that, to find a theatre that would risk being called a grindhouse, in which the film would show to what we charitably might call an “alternative audience” – took a considerable amount of guts. Not…

1. SMOTHERED HOPE (1984) This puppy proclaims (via Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt) that, “the world’s a hell.” What’s that lingering knell? “It’s my voice, my voice cries out obscenities…” 2. SOLVENT (1984) A slow, steady electro-creeper that uses loops and Ogre’s trademark zombie snarl to worm its way under your skin, then stay there and fester. 3. ASSIMILATE (1985) An industrial-strength dance beat serenading modern plague, pestilence and annihilation. The sound of peeling scabs and “death, death, death!” 4. BLOOD ON THE WALL (1985) Samples from TCM and Polanski’s The Tenant turn this synth-pop number into a sweetly horrific prelude of the band’s dark decade to come. 5. BURNT WITH WATER (1986) Exorcise this! Predating the glitch music phenom by a decade, this seven-minute long instrumental cutup uses an…

PREPARE FOR GORY! 300 Starring Gerard Butler, Lena Headey and Dominic West Directed by Zack Snyder Written by Zack Snyder, Kurt Johnstad and Michael B. Gordon Warner Bros. Pictures Visually stunning and exhibiting a high artistic style best described as Goya-esque, 300 plays out like a page from its Frank Miller source material come to life. Intense, hyperviolent, and with more gore than one would expect from a historical offering, the film is pitch-black from the opening shot of a mound of human skulls to the inevitable corpsestrewn finish. Like Miller’s graphic novel, which it follows closely, 300 is a cinematic retelling of the real-life Battle of Thermopylae, which took place in 480 BC during the Greco-Persian Wars. Of course, certain liberties have been taken and everything has been grossly…

brickfish.com/ruemorgue If you’ve ever wanted to design a Rue Morgue cover, here’s your chance. Beginning April 1, visit this site and submit your creations. The grand prize winner will receive a complimentary one-year subscription to RM, T-shirt, hat and poster. Second and third place finishers get a six-month subscription. itsmyremote.com/kk.html Conor Timmis wants to generate interest in his Boris Karloff biopic and to do so, he’s recreated, along with director Vatche Arabian, several scenes from the actor’s filmography, and made them available for download online. Watch, enjoy, then spread the wicked word. webcomicsnation.com/splitlip Writer (and sometimes RM contributor) Sam Costello teams up with a variety of comic book artists for this ongoing series of online comics. Primarily illustrated using a variety of black and white techniques, these psychological horror stories…

Welcome to a bold new experiment in motion picture making. To properly retrofit Grindhouse, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez rounded out their double feature with not only artificial print damage and vintage-style concession ads, but also added trailers for several exploitation movies… that don’t actually exist. To help, they enlisted three directors with a twisted track record of genre insanity. Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, Hostel), Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) and Rob Zombie (House of 1000 Corpses, The Devil’s Rejects) discuss their salacious mini-movies and mad love of grindhouse cinema. Brace yourself for the shocking truth! Describe your trailer. Eli Roth: It’s an early ’80s holiday slasher film called Thanksgiving. I grew up in Massachusetts, where Thanksgiving is a pretty big deal, as you may imagine. Every…

The trials and tribulations of electroshock rock trailblazers Skinny Puppy are legendary – a wild, depraved haze of blood, drugs, death and rebirth that scratch Shakespearean in their dramatic extremities. The group formed in Vancouver in the early ’80s when drummer cEvin Key (real name: Kevin Crompton) of new wave band Images in Vogue began hanging out with avant-garde poet Nivek Ogre (real name: Kevin Ogilve). As Skinny Puppy – whose name is inspired by the shaking dog prop in Disney’s Haunted Mansion ride – they epitomized a generation of black-clad, disenfranchised youth looking to delve deep into the darkest mysteries of the human psyche while simultaneously shaking their asses on fog-fuelled dance floors. With Key’s rabid, psychedelic compositions and Ogre’s razor-gargled, treated vocals (not to mention the band’s deliciously…

When it comes to Disneyland, two of the last people that jump to mind are Ray Harryhausen and H.P. Lovecraft. But in the wild paintings of Michael “Pooch” Pucciarelli, they come together almost as if they were meant to. A typical Pooch work depicts riotous “haunted attraction” motifs featuring Day of the Dead skeletons, monkey men or jack-o’-lanterns careening through roller coaster rides grandiosely bedecked in horror and dark pop culture imagery. Towering facades of devils, tikis and creatures of all stripes – including the cyclops from Harryhausen’s The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, Universal’s Creature from the Black Lagoon and Lovecraft’s infamous tentacled Great Old One – loom surrealistically over the tiny riders, who look half-scared and half-ecstatic as their buggies swoop and twist through the tilted landscape. Unsurprisingly, the…

~SLASHERPOOL.COM A TERROR-IFIC COMBINATION • Directed By The Legendary JOHN LANDIS (AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON) • Written By BRENT HANLEY (FRAILTY) • Starring GEORGE WENDT (CHEERS, HOUSE), MEREDITH MONROE (DAWSON’S CREEK) and MATT KEESLAR (SCREAM 3) BONUS FEATURES INCLUDE • Behind-The-Scenes Featurettes, Audio Commentaries, DVD-ROM Content and more! It’s a beautiful day in suburbia where mild-mannered bachelor Harold Thompson (George Wendt) is happily at work in his basement stripping the flesh off his latest murder victim. In a sunshine world of picket fences and manicured lawns, is it ever possibletoknowwhatgruesomeplansare percolating in the minds of your neighbors?…

It’s a pleasant, sunny day in the Tokyo suburb of Machida; children are playing; families are sitting down for dinner. The serene setting is shattered as a giant sinkhole suddenly opens and a vicious, bloodsoaked creature crawls out to wreak havoc. When the dust settles, 382 people have been slaughtered – their blood and body parts smeared across the floors, walls and ceilings of what used to be their happy homes. From the start, Tokko, the newest release from Anchor Bay’s growing line of Japanese anime titles, seeks to shock the viewer with unforgiving brutality and doesn’t let up until the closing credits. Set five years after the massacre, Tokko tells the story of Shindou Ranmaru, a police cadet who survived the carnage (along with his sister Saya) and is…

Once relegated to the back of grubby newsprint VHS mail-order catalogues, trailer compilations were the only way for fans to see vintage advertisements from their favourite horror films. Removing the ads from their original context, these tapes presented trailers not as promotional tools, but as snippets of pop culture ephemera – mini-films that were often more enjoyable than the movies they shamelessly hyped. Trailers may be much more accessible these days, offered as bonus features on most DVDs and plastered all over the’net, but the time-tested compilation refuses to die. DVD trailer compilations from Cheezy Flicks Entertainment, TheMonsterClub.com and Synapse are the new refuge for modern viewers who want to indulge in some of the genre’s most under-appreciated efforts. As most trailers are considered public domain, any tiny DVD studio…

Towards the end of the ’80s, video distributors struck minor gold releasing amateur shot-on-video horror films with titles such as Crazy Fat Ethel 2 (1987), Redneck Zombies (1987), Video Dead (1987) and Las Vegas Bloodbat (1989), which started popping up in the horror sections of local rental stores. The primary selling point of these films was the promise of titties and copious gore. Their packaging was often a stroke job, featuring half-naked women and gory stills not always found in the actual film. Sure, they suffered poor production values (translation: they sucked) but they appealed to my perverse sense of humour, so I rented them anyway. Besides, somebody had to love them. It was so long ago… Camp Motion Pictures is the latest in the EI Independent Cinema stable of…

Presents BLOOD FEAST Tackling sex, drugs, white slavery and other “adults only” taboos, exploitation films first appeared in the 1920s and ’30s to cater to topics that big Hollywood studios wouldn’t – and often couldn’t – cover. Though flesh-baring nature camp travelogues and venereal disease documentaries were still the dominant exploitation attractions in the 1960s, many fly-by-night filmmakers felt the constant legal hassles over portraying onscreen nudity ultimately weren’t worth the effort. Looking for a bankable alternative to the skin flick game, it was producer David F. Friedman and director Herschell Gordon Lewis (working from a screenplay by Allison Louise Downe) who first cunningly traded sex for slaughter, painting theatre screens red with a deliriously bloody gore film that mapped out the future of grindhouse horror. Even before Blood…

For over 50 years, from the 1930s to the 1980s, America boasted a second film industry, the exploitation arena, where some of the wildest, most outrageous films imaginable proliferated. During its decadent peak in the 1970s, exploitation was a kick in the teeth of “good taste” – thrills and spills and arterial sprays were plentiful, T&A was lewd, crude and wanton. The advertising ballyhoo was a sensationalist art in itself, which often outdid the actual movies. Cinemas dealing exclusively with this parallel industry were known as “grindhouses,” an allusion to the burlesque “bump-and-grind” entertainment for which many of them were previously known. The term also brings to mind meat-grinding: highly appropriate considering the violence so frequently purveyed onscreen. “Grindhouse” is one of those labels that was probably pejorative to begin…

PERVERT! Starring Mary Carey, Sean Andrews and Darrell Sandeen Directed by Jonathan Yudis Written by Mike Davis TLA A smirking love letter to grindhouse auteurs Russ Meyer and H.G. Lewis, Jonathan Yudis’ debut feature Pervert! is a fun, if flawed, romp of cartoonish sex, murder and those holy beacons of exploitation cinema: gargantuan breasts. Overflowing with bared flesh and lowbrow humour, the film’s throwaway plot has college student James (Sean Andrews) arriving at his father Hezekiah’s (Darrell Sandeen) desert farm for summer vacation, only to find the dirty old man shacked up with curvaceous teaser Cheryl (former porn star Mary Carey) and constructing statuettes of buxom babes out of butcher’s meat. After Hezekiah discovers Cheryl dallying with his son, however, she suddenly goes missing. James suspects his deranged dad may…

NIGHTMARE USA Stephen Thrower FAB Press At the beginning of the 1970s, relaxed censorship laws inadvertently fertilized a brave new wave of wild cinema we call the exploitation film, and by the late ’70s, drive-ins and “grindhouses” all over America were choked with wonderfully bombastic, bloody, booby-filled alternatives to the mainstream. And while some of these titles have been celebrated over the years, many have also been lost in time, like the cinemas that once screened them. In a new 528-page shelf-crusher titled Nightmare USA, genre authority Stephen Thrower (also contributing to this month’s cover story) explores the movement that gave rise to influential indies like Blood Feast, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Last House on the Left, Martin and Death dream, as well as lesser-known screamers such as I…

In the musical monster show that is Skinny Puppy, composer cEvin Key may be the mad doctor, stitching together sinister movie samples, concocting bone-rattling beats and working his audio alchemy on the final mix, but it’s Nivek Ogre (a.k.a. Kevin Ogilvie) who is the star creature. On records, his provocative stream-of-consciousness lyrics aren’t so much sung as spewed, coated in heavy effects processing and bile. On stage, well, let’s just say his gore-soaked, politically charged performances cemented his rock star status for those of us who like our singers to swing intestines around instead of microphones. But like all good ghouls, Ogre is also sensitive and funny. From his home in Los Angeles, he reveals the motivation behind the new record, his scare tactics and… that voice. Mythmaker is your…

After bouncing between publishers for over two decades, Dead World found a resting place last year at Desperado, which exhumed “the original zombie comic” for a new generation. Collecting issues #1-6 of the current run, Dead World: Requiem for the World finds wise-crackin’, motorcycleridin’ King Zombie and his army of the undead pursuing a busload of kids in the relentless effort to capture Deake, a key player in Zombie’s agenda to bring total destruction to the last of the living. The first two issues are illustrated by series alumnus Vince Locke, with a seamless transition to Croatian artist Dalibor Talajic for the remainder. Writer (and ex-Calibre publisher) Gary Reed crafts a compelling tale about the human factor in a war with intelligent zombies, every bit as good and gory as…

Just as it was once believed that cable TV would end the reign of movie houses, and video would kill the radio star, so was the fear that the internet would make print media obsolete. But those fears were put to rest after web technology became responsible for the publication of new novels such as David Wellington’s Monster Island and Cherie Priest’s Four and Twenty Blackbirds – stories originally told in blog format before being picked up for publication based on their online popularity. Add to that list James Farr’s Xombie: Dead on Arrival, which started out as an online Flash animation called Xombie (RM#48), a project that sprang to life when writer/animator Farr realized he’d never seen an undead hero in contemporary zombie fiction. “Right then, a little light…

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