Table of contents for Issue 63 December 2006 in RUE MORGUE

Weird Stats Morbld Facts + Those who were sentenced to burn at the stake would occasionally be permitted to quicken their deaths by tying small bags of gunpowder under their arms and between their legs. + Many of the motorcycle gang extras in the original Dawn of the Dead were from a local chapter of the Pagans, one of the largest outlaw motorcycle gang in America. + Superstition of yesteryear dictates that after death a corpse’s eyes must be closed or else the deceased will continue to look for someone to join them in death. + Before moving to the US, Bela Lugosi played both Hamlet and Romeo on stage in his native Hungary. + A shark that was captured for display at a Sidney, Australia aquarium in 1935 shocked…

At just twelve-years-old, with a command of four different languages, it’s no surprise that Barcelona native Ivana Baquero was handpicked by Guillermo del Toro for the lead role in Pan’s Labyrinth. A charming and driven young lady, Baquero rose to the daunting task of her first big acting gig and nailed the part of Ofelia, the sweet innocent whose life oscillates between the grim reality of living with a ruthless Captain (played by Sergi López) in a post-Civil War Spain and the beautiful magic of the fairy tale-like world she finds herself drawn to. “Ofelia is a really introverted girl and I’m an extrovert, I talk a lot,” Baquero admits. “But she’s also strong and brave, and I think I’m strong and brave because to do this movie I needed…

John Saxon is one of those actors that popped up everywhere during the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. He appeared on all kinds of TV series including Bonanza, Night Gallery, The Rockford Files, The Six Million Dollar Man, Magnum P.I., Fantasy Island, Dynasty, Ray Bradbury Presents, Murder She Wrote, and on and on. On the silver screen he starred alongside Bruce Lee in cinematic gold such as Enter the Dragon (1973), as well as campy crapfests, most notably, Mitchell, Mystery Science Theatre 3000’s favourite whipping boy. Of course, he’s most remembered by horror fans for having worked with Dario Argento on Tenebre (1982), Wes Craven on A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and Bob Clark on his landmark 1974 Canadian slasher flick Black Christmas. “[Black Christmas] was the next thing that…

HEADSPACE Starring Christopher Denham, Olivia Hussey and Erick Kastel Directed by Andrew van den Houten Written by Troy McCombs, Steve Klausner and William M. Miller Freestyle Home Entertainment Somewhere out there, in the netherworld between The Dead Zone, Altered States, Brain Damage, Jacob’s Ladder and the original Nightmare on Elm Street, you’ll stumble into Headspace. Nice enough place to visit, but live there? Nuh-uh. Talented newcomer Christopher Denham is Alex, a neurotic twentysomething New Yorker whose chance meeting with a stranger (Erick Kastel) over a chess game in Central Park sends his life into chaos. Along with severe headaches, Alex first notices his chess skills improving at an alarming rate, but this turns out to be just one symptom of his generally skyrocketing intellect and increasingly frequent clairvoyant episodes. (“You…

HELL-BENT FOR LEATHERFACE THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2 (1986) Starring Dennis Hopper, Caroline Williams and Bill Moseley Directed by Tobe Hooper Written by L.M. “Kit” Carson MGM There are but a gaggle of us horror hounds who will unabashedly say, without a smidgen of shame, that we enjoy The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 infinitely more than the ferocious first installment (see “The Mad Musing of a Schizoid Cinephile” column in RM#55 for all my gory gushings). That’s not to say Tobe Hooper’s outlandish follow-up is a better picture than his groundbreaking original, but the sequel is just so damned out of control, so broad, so black and so riotously repellent that it almost defies you to embrace it. The “plot” of Chainsaw 2, such as it is, is barely there…

LE BAGMAN – PROFESSION: MUERTIER Starring Anouk Whissel, François Simard and Jonathan Prévost Written and directed by Anouk Whissel, François Simard and Jonathan Prévost Digger Films While it may be stating the obvious, quantum leaps in digital technology have had a profound impact on the business of low-budget filmmaking. Inexpensive digital video cameras, powerful multimedia-capable home computers, professional quality editing and DVD authoring software and the ability to mass produce media and packaging have dropped the entire process into the laps of anyone with minimal financial resources, a little technical savvy and the necessary drive. The only real obstacle facing micro-budget filmmakers is exposure. Of course, the internet has proven to be a remarkable resource in this respect, but websites can be labour-intensive, expensive to maintain and easily lost in…

GROWING UP close to the border I had some exposure to Canadian television in the days before cable tied its Gordian knot around the world. Stations like CBUT and CHEK came in clearer more regularly than their Seattle counter-parts and I spent a fair amount of time watching them. Mostly US programming, but some Canadian shows like Tommy Hunter and Beachcombers. Unfortunately I have no recollection of The Hilarious House of Frightenstein but reading your article/interview makes me miss it without ever having seen it. Power of the written word or just good television? Steve Perram – Bellingham, Washington KUDOS FOR DOING the Uwe Boll articles in RM#62. Now, I’m not a big fan of his movies, and I’m glad that wasn’t the purpose RM had in covering him. I…

THE HAUNTED REALM CALENDAR $12.99 There’s a haunt for all seasons in Simon Marsden’s creepy new calendar, featuring twelve of the internationally acclaimed photographer’s spooky black and white infrared images. Each unsettling photo is accompanied by an account of the apparitions said to haunt the location. Make every month macabre at simonmarsden.com. MONSTER GUITAR PICKS $18.99 for 33 Pick Ultra Pack For guitar ghouls who always wanted to strum with a shrunken head or a skull, Hot Picks is here to help. Collections include Psycho Clowns, Zombies, Skulls, Monsters, Flash and assorted ghouls. Scar up your strings at hotpicksusa.com. VAMPIRE CONDOMS $2.00 each Why spend eternity with a bad case of herpes? Wrap your stake in a black latex contraceptive from Vampire Condoms, individually packaged in a black matchbook-style case.…

THIS ISSUE: LANCED GETS AXED WHACKiNG OFF… LiMBS THE CURSE OF LIZZIE BORDEN Anchor Bay Entertainment In 1892, Lizzie Borden allegedly chopped up her mother and father, inspiring a catchy rhyme and an enduring legend. More than a hundred years later it’s hard to believe that one of the most horrific unsolved murder cases in American history has had so few films based on it (six according to the IMDb). Curse follows a university professor who takes his class to a Lizzie Borden museum where one of his students, Cassie (Danielle De Luca), becomes possessed by Lizzie’s evil spirit, and pretty soon the axe is whacking off limbs and heads left, right and centre. Though plagued by a low budget and sorry sound effects, De Luca’s memorable performance as both…

The woeful lack of love for Alfred Sole’s unbelievably disturbing 1976 dark thriller/mystery Alice, Sweet Alice is one of the most hideous crimes in horror fandom. Alice, Sweet Alice, originally released as Communion, before being reissued as Holy Terror, is an eerie, emotional and visceral genre one-shot that may be the most unsung horror picture of the 1970s. Sole’s skin-crawling masterpiece tells the tale of New Jersey divorcee Catherine Spages (Linda Miller) and her two lovely daughters, sweet little Karen (pre-Pretty Baby Brooke Shields, in her movie debut) and the older, slightly disturbed Alice (Liquid Sky’s Paula Sheppard). Seems Alice is upset that her darling younger sibling gets all the attention from mommy, her aunt and even the local priest, causing her to throw temper tantrums and endlessly tease and…

As two new coffee-table tomes prove, there is something about black and white photography – perhaps the way the shadows fall and accent a building’s structural skeleton – that makes it the perfect medium for capturing decaying places, particularly ones that are long forsaken… or even said to be haunted. The first destination in our pictorial journey of history’s long-abandoned structures takes us across the Atlantic for celebrated photographer Simon Marsden’s (RM#42) latest effort, Ghosthunter: A Journey Through Haunted France (Flammarion). In his foreword, Marsden explains that he set out to photograph the country’s most haunted historical sites, and as such the 192 pages of this gorgeously bound oversized book are filled with centuries-old castles and chateaus, as well as the occasional graveyard (including Paris’ famous Père Lachaise Cemetery), church…

Soundtrack ROCK’N’ ROLL NIGHTMARE Thor and the Tritonz LA LA LAND RECORDS Canuck musclehead and self-professed “legendary rock warrior” Jon Mikl Thor did battle with Satan himself in 1987’s cheese-rock epic Rock’n’ Roll Nightmare, a C-grade guilty pleasure filled with weak oneliners, rubber demons and shiny codpieces. The long-awaited soundtrack re-release balances film dialogue (“Let’s tune our weapons!”) with deranged little synth accents and a murky underlying score, but sadly the audio suffers from bad analogue (and no doubt sketchy source tapes), neutering anthems We Live To Rock and We Accept The Challenge into a bottom-heavy, muffled mess. While it’s great this one’s finally available on CD, we suggest hanging on to that dog-eared vinyl copy you’d never admit to owning in the first place. Long live Thor! TD…

BETRAYAL AT HOUSE ON THE HILL Board Game Avalon Hill You were warned to avoid that creepy old house at the end of the street, but you went in anyway, and before you could say “Vincent Price” you were trapped inside. Fortunately, there are a couple of other poor sods stuck in there with you. Unfortunately, one of them wants to kill you. Gameplay in BaHotH is divided into two stages; in the “discovery” stage players choose from twelve characters that have varying physical attributes (speed and strength), mental traits (knowledge and sanity), then they explore the house to uncover useful items such as charms, weapons and even an ominous “toy monkey.” Along the way they also encounter human skulls, creepy spiders, spear-wielding puppets and things that bite in the…

Barely a year after the release of Land of the Dead, the fourth film in his long-running zombie cycle, George A. Romero has once again resurrected his shuffling, cannibalistic corpses for his latest horror entry. Diary of the Dead, a low-budget independent film that went into production in mid-October, isn’t a sequel to the legendary director’s earlier zombie films, but instead promises a fresh, back-to-basics twist on the popular subgenre he first brought to life almost 40 years ago. “It’s really starting over on the very first night,” Romero explains from the film’s Toronto set. “The story being literally when the dead first begin coming back to life.” Set in present day with all-new characters played by a cast of relative unknowns, Diary of the Dead offers a parallel storyline…

Over his 35-year career, director Bob Clark has tackled almost every genre, from lewd teen sex farces to family movies about Nazi-fighting toddlers. It’s his three remarkable 1970s horror classics, however, that are among the most revered in the director’s filmography. With Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things, Death dream and the highly influential proto-slasher Black Christmas, Clark set himself apart from his grindhouse-focused contemporaries through fully-realized characters, creepy imagery and occasional flashes of humour. With all three of his treasured horror films currently on the remake slate, Clark is finally poised to take his rightful place between Carpenter and Craven as one of the true masters of fright cinema. Like many aspiring directors, Clark first stretched his filmmaking muscles in Florida’s low-budget world of exploitation cinema. “I trained myself…

With an oh-so-hot cast of young TV actors, a writer/director who built his reputation on the teen-friendly Final Destination series, and a teaser trailer that promises, sigh, “The ultimate slay ride!”, there are plenty of reasons for horror fans to be skeptical of TVA Films’ remake of canuxploitation classic Black Christmas. Andrea Martin, however, is not one of them. Martin co-stars in both versions of the film, and although she’s known first and foremost for her tenure on the Canadian sketch comedy series SCTV, she bolstered her career playing victim to deranged stalker Billy in Bob Clark’s beloved 1974 proto-slasher. In that film, she takes on the role of nerdy roommate Phyllis Carlson, one of several young women preyed upon by the mysterious killer hiding in a large dorm house.…

TRIPLE THE TORTURE SAW III Starring Tobin Bell, Shawnee Smith and Angus Macfadyen Directed by Darren Lynn Bousman Written by James Wan and Leigh Whannell Maple Pictures Taking its cues from David Fincher’s bar-raising shocker Se7en, James Wan’s nifty 2004 thriller Saw was, while far from perfect, a tense, tricky, slasher movie sidestep that worked. The film introduced audiences to one of the more interesting nutbars in recent memory, the overly verbose, terminal cancer victim Jigsaw (Tobin Bell), who subjects his victims to time-sensitive, Rube Goldbergesque torture in the hopes that they might become better people… or have their faces torn apart by reverse bear traps – either one. Darren Lynn Bousman’s sequel was even better, a taut, ultra-violent take on Ten Little Indians, with an ever-escalating body count and…

Master of the erotic grotesque, Teruo Ishii was known in Japan as The King of Cult, a title well-deserved for a man whose 90-plus films abound with images of trussed-up geisha, torture-mad noblemen and deformed monstrosities (he even devoted an entire series of films to medieval torture practices). Occasionally clunky but always willing to go the extra mile, Ishii’s films – flavoured with the bizarre and surreal – resemble a kinky Japanese version of Italian Lucio Fulci’s work. The simultaneous release of Screwed (1998) and Blind Beast vs. Killer Dwarf (2001), courtesy of Panik House, gives us a look at the tail end of the late director’s long career. These films make it clear that Ishii’s eccentricities hadn’t waned since his late-1960s heyday with films like The Horror of Malformed…

As the trend for anthologizing continues, many publishers are taking interesting steps to ensure that their product is noted – and noteworthy. This issue: four 2006 horror comic re-masterpieces; fan-favourite storylines re-collected after undergoing a revamping process roughly equivalent to film restoration. We’ll consider the books in the order of their original release. Marvel’s Spider-Man horror Fearful Symmetry: Kraven’s Last Hunt (J.M. DeMatteis and Mike Zeck; 1987) is being radically remastered for a second time. The six-issue cross-title story arc, in which Spidey is buried alive for two weeks while villain Kraven the Hunter masquerades in his place, was first collected in a trade paperback that required reconfiguration of the art to accommodate an extra half-inch of width. Ahead of its time, the 1995 softcover was also fully recoloured, replacing…

Creepy Crawls: A Horror Fiend’s Travel Guide Leon Marcelo Santa Monica Press If, like me, you are filled with wanderlust and also an insatiable love for the dead, planning vacations around horrific haunts is a pleasure. Yet, even with the internet, it can be time consuming; The Texas Chainsaw Massacre gas station isn’t exactly listed in Lonely Planet, after all. Genuine gorehound and sometimes Rue Morgue “Travelogue of Terror” contributor Leon Marcelo makes it easier for us with this comprehensive guide to places with a very dark side. While there are many books about haunted inns and kitschy roadside attractions, this may be the first one devoted to real must-see horror sites. Creepy Crawls covers a wide variety of terrible travel destinations – mostly in the USA – made…

Sometimes it’s vintage lounge music that elevates fetishistic nudity to a sublime guilty pleasure, or maybe it’s another quixotic, experimental score by Ennio Morricone that enhances the tale of a schoolgirl snatched from her stately pedagogical environs, but one of the reasons classic Italian genre entries are treated by fans as rare diamonds is the music, like the films, didn’t always get wide distribution beyond Europe, or if it did, often arrived heavily edited down. For half a decade, Digit-Movies has answered the call of soundtrack fans by mining the vaults of Italy’s major labels, restoring and releasing complete scores from the archives of companies CAM, BEAT, Cinevox and GDM. “DigitMovies was born five years ago from a deep passion that my friends and I have always had for soundtrack…