Table of contents for Issue 69 July 2007 in RUE MORGUE

SESSION 9 T-SHIRT $16 Perfect attire for asylum renovations, this officially licensed, two-sided Session 9 tee features the creepy poster art from the film on the front and its even creepier last line of dialogue on the back. It’s so cool, there isn’t much else we can say, save for: “Do it, Gordon.” Live in the weak and the wounded at horrorshirts.com. BLOODY MARY JEWELLED COMPACT CASES $12.95 Ever have a nightmare where you’re surrounded by ghouls and have no way to check your eyeliner? These compacts from Bloody Mary have a handy mirror in the lid, and also provide a useful pocket-sized place to store all manner of nasty wee things. Go skin deep at dearbloodymary.com. COFFIN BOXES $28.95 Why strew your mourning jewelry all across your vanity table…

Special effects legend Stan Winston had a hand in bringing to life movie creatures as diverse as the title ghoul in Pumpkinhead, the malevolent ETs in the Alien series, killer cyborgs in the Terminator movies, live-action dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and the disfigured inbreds in Wrong Turn. Yet, The Monster Squad will always hold a special place in his heart for one reason in particular: the Wolfman. “Werewolves have always been my favourite character,” Winston admits. “It was always the character I wanted to give a special spin to. We tried some special things with Monster Squad.” Working under the constraints of a low budget and limited time, Winston and his effects crew at Stan Winston Studios – including Tom Woodruff Jr., who played the Gillman in the film –…

A PARENT’S WORST NIGHTMARE JOSHUA Starring Sam Rockwell, Vera Farmiga and Jacob Kogan Directed by George Ratliff Written by David Gilbert and George Ratliff Fox There is no shortage of fears to chip away at a parent’s shaky hold on domestic bliss. Paedophiles, drug peddlers, rabid dogs and invisible microbes loom large in the troubled imaginations of mothers and fathers. But because children seem hardwired to love their often undeserving progenitors, few parents bother to ask themselves: what if my child doesn’t love me? What if my child actually hates me and would do anything – anything – to be free of my love? This is the arresting and fully realized premise of Joshua, a superb psychological thriller with Gothic overtones and plenty of clever nods to such child-centred horror…

MOMMY’S LiTTLE MONSTERS WHO CAN KILL A CHILD? (1976) Starring Lewis Fiander, Prunella Ransome and Javier De La Camara Written and directed by Narciso Ibáñez Serrador Dark Sky Films With a plaintive title and a harrowing seven-minute opening credit sequence culled from documentary footage of the worst cataclysmal conflicts of the 20th century (narrated by the same voice actor who provided English dub tracks for Paul Naschy), Who Can Kill a Child? is the most heart-wrenching, scathing anti-war parable in the genre. British couple Tom (Lewis Fiander) and his pregnant wife Evelyn (Punella Ransome) are on a kid-free holiday in Spain before the birth of their third child. After a four-hour trip in a rented boat, they putter into a small fishing village and find it all but deserted, save…

Freddie Francis is dead and that’s okay. The much adored, Oscar-winning cinematographer, director and Hammer Horror icon lived a full life, working almost until the end of his 89-plus years (his last DOP gig was shooting David Lynch’s The Straight Story in 1999). Francis, whose filmography includes Paranoiac, Nightmare and Dracula Has Risen from the Grave, died this past March, leaving behind a body of work that was vibrant, strange, sometimes experimental, effortlessly entertaining and distinctly British. Now, I’m not saying his output as a director ever reached the polished heights of definitive Hammer force Terence Fisher, but Francis had a seriously arch take on the typical English Gothic style that was unique. He understood where to stick his camera and how to milk quietly kinky terror out of every…

Television Fright Films of the 1970s David Deal McFarland & Company There was a time, way before nickel-and-dime reality shows usurped the airwaves, when network television was considered an art form. At no time was this more evident than in the 1970s, when the movie-of-the-week reigned supreme. Real writers were writing real stories for talented craftsmen, and excellent, usually older, actors delivered solid pulp B-flick thrills to audiences who still demanded mature and challenging programming. Author David Deal explores the darker strains of these unique, compact, occasionally brilliant and always entertaining mini-movies in Television Fright Films of the 1970s, an intriguing reference book from McFarland & Company. Admittedly, this critic must confess a bias, as I’m already a loyal devotee of both latenight retro film binges and late, great TV…

At first glance, sunny Los Angeles and the celebrity-driven sheen of Hollywood doesn’t hold much interest for serious horror fans and other aficionados of the bizarre, unnerving and decidedly non-mainstream. Scratch the shiny surface of Tinseltown, however, and you’ll find that beneath the glitz and glamour festers a layer of nastiness made up of equal parts broken dreams and broken bodies. The road to stardom is littered with corpses, and Scott Michaels, director of Dearly Departed Tours, is the man who knows where the bodies are buried. A self-described “death hag,” Michaels traces his fascination with celebrity death and dying to the passings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Janis Joplin. And when troubled former Supremes singer Florence Ballard died in 1976 at age 32, from a blood clot, Michaels…

RM#68 was an excellent issue. Everything from the editorial to the feature on Fido had the kind of depth that is consistent with any other issue, if not actually higher. The biggest surprise of the issue was the feature on T.S. Kuebler. Holy fucking shit, those are some ridiculously amazing sculptures. They actually disturbed me, weirdly enough. The pieces on Grindhouse were both incredibly entertaining. Still, my opinion hasn’t changed and I’m convinced that Grindhouse is still the most ass-kicking movie of the year. The Assistant Warden – The Rue Mortuary THANK YOU for the short (but oh so sweet) article you did on Tom Kuebler in RM#68. I have been a fan of Kuebler’s work for a few years now and have yet to read an article on him.…

After giving the zombie film an otherworldly reworking with 2003’s Undead (RM#36), the Spierig Brothers are turning the vampire movie on its cold, pale ear with their new feature, Daybreakers. Shooting in Australia – where the siblings hail from – but set in the US, it’s a revisionist take on the bloodsucker tale. “It twists the rules of the subgenre without discarding or disrespecting what we love about it,” says Peter Spierig, who co-wrote Daybreakers and is co-directing it with his brother Michael. “Vampires are at the top of the food chain. Rather than hiding out in caves, castles or traditional underground dwellings, they have chosen to accept their place in life (or death) and returned to the suburbs. They have continued on with their day-to-day, or now night-to-night, existence,…

NiGHT OF THE LiViNG PORN STARS SWAMP ZOMBIES Brain Damage Films In what is a boost to the medical profession, a hospital experimenting with a reanimation serum dumps test corpses in a lake, creating an army of zombies who attack a group of college students doing an ecological survey in a nearby swamp. Nothing new here, yet Swamp Zombies entertains with gory special effects, lots of titular ghouls, an impressive body count and the even more impressive body of porn queen Jasmin St. Claire (Naked Horror), whose bad acting can be forgiven thanks to her prolonged shower scenes. Thankfully, more T&A, and some multitudinous gore overcome additional pathetic acting, ridiculously staged martial arts and a soundtrack that often drowns out the dialogue. Even UFC veteran Dan “The Beast” Severn shows…

THE TEACHER AND PICK-UP Directed by Howard Avedis and Bennie Hirschenson Back in our grindhouse retrospective (RM#66), Bill Lustig – an aficionado of the milieu if ever there was one – stated, “Ninety-nine percent of the films that were promoted never delivered on what they were promoting.” The director of Maniac and president of Blue Underground has a valid point when it comes to both features on Diemos Entertainment’s first Welcome to the Grindhouse disc, featuring two limp American flicks. Howard Avedis’ The Teacher (1974) is a timid, clumsy soft porn/thriller hybrid, in which eighteen-year-old Sean (Jay North) has an affair with his insanely hot teacher (Angel Tompkins, who appears all of a year older than the object of her affection). She’s being stalked by that old standby, the Deranged…

Fun, adventure, vengeance and the unexpected – four things readers should theoretically expect when reading about The Spectre, a hard-boiled horror character that is also one of DC’s oldest (anti-)heroes. Period. Certainly, each of those qualifiers applies in its own inconsistent way, as the phantom/entity/force has played the lead in more than a half-dozen titles, among them More Fun Comics (the ’40s), Adventure Comics (the ’70s), Day of Vengeance (2005) and Tales of the Unexpected (2007). That said, Nebulous Comics or Exploits in Theological Confusion might be more appropriate titles. With almost seven decades of continuity baggage and three (to date) human hosts, The Spectre – a judge/jury/executioner who’s completely unhinged – is more than a little unfocused. Co-created by Jerry Siegel of Superman fame The Spectre debuted in issue…

SPLATTER: NAKED BLOOD (1995) Starring Sadao Abe, Misa Aika and Mika Kirihara Directed by Hisayasu Sato Written by Taketoshi Watari Discotek The Guinea Pig series spawned a blood tide of shot-on-video gore films in Japan that ran the gamut from the over-the-top-style gross-outs of that series to poverty-stricken mutilation-fetish obscurities such as Women’s Flesh: My Red Guts. One of the more oddball entries in this canon of adult video is Naked Blood, a metaphysical horror film a nipple slice above the straight-up splatter it is associated with. It’s also the best known work of Hisayasu Sato, a prolific director whose filmography is peppered with such titles as Lolita: Vibrator Torture and Office Lady Rape: Devouring the Giant Tits! The plot centres on Eiji (Sadao Abe), the teenaged prodigy of two…

ZOMBIETOWN Board Game Twilight Creations Inc. ZombieTown is the newest game from the creators of Zombies!!!, and this time it’s a siege. Search for weapons and build barricades, while battling hordes of gut-munching zombies intent on liberating you from your brains. The wonderfully crafted, fold-out gaming board elaborately details the neighbouring houses and cemetery while the playing cards, though small, depict nicely illustrated scenes of the zombie apocalypse. Also included are 100 plastic zombie figures that are interchangeable with figures from any of the other Zombies!!! games. Each game is set over a fictional ten-day period with players moving their own characters as well as the zombies. Take turns utilizing action cards to determine your next move, be it arming yourself, setting off fireworks to stall a zombie advance, erecting…

Last summer, over 75,000 movie maniacs attended the tenth edition of FanTasia, North America’s biggest genre film fest. It’s a figure which both impresses and pleases Mitch Davis, the Montreal festival’s Director of International Programming. “I’m still scarred by a childhood where almost none of my friends were interested in watching the kind of films that I loved,” Davis tells Rue Morgue. “And it’s so damn amazing to see so many people storming the cinema and cheering for obscure and brilliant foreign genre films.” Look for equally enthusiastic crowds this month. Year eleven of FanTasia (July 5 – 23) will screen over 100 films and 120 shorts in three theatres. Expect a wild mix of horror, sci-fi and fantasy from around the world, including spotlights on New Zealand and Russia,…

Weird Stats Morbid Facts + Texas State University’s plan to build America’s largest “body farm” – an area where scientists bury corpses in order to study human decomposition – was recently suspended after fears surfaced that buzzards circling the area might become a threat to aircraft. + When The Bad Seed was released theatrically in the US in 1956, officials banned all children from movie houses where the film was screening, apparently believing that it might inspire copycat violence. + Until 1820, vandalism of Westminster Bridge in London was punishable by death. + John Carpenter began making genre films (with titles such as Terror from Space and Revenge of the Colossal Beasts) with a hand-held 8mm camera at age eight. + This past May, a seventeen-year-old boy walked into a…

“If we pull this off, I’m gonna shit!” observes Sean, as his ragtag group of neighbourhood kids prepare to battle the infernal forces of darkness in The Monster Squad. André Gower, who was barely a teen when he played Sean two decades ago, may not have saved the world from Dracula and his minions in real life, but he relishes the fact that all these years later, the once-obscure B-movie has pulled off what few genre films have: it’s now a bona fide cult classic. “I am actually enjoying the hell out of it!” he exclaims. “I’d hang out with Monster Squad fans over most people any day!” Since the recent resurgence of interest in the film, Gower has joined director Fred Dekker and other cast members at Monster Squad…

Presenting intricately detailed dioramas that range from the innovative silent thrills of 1925’s Phantom of the Opera to the campy psychedelia of The Abominable Dr. Phibes, The Witch’s Dungeon wax museum in Bristol, Connecticut is acknowledged as the longest-running Halloween attraction in America. Despite being open only on weekends in October, for four decades the Dungeon has been thrilling classic horror fans, many of whom line up for several hours just to spend a few minutes marvelling at the impressive figures created by museum founder Cortlandt Hull. Now, Hull and producer/director Dennis Vincent have created The Witch’s Dungeon: 40 Years of Chills, a documentary that not only uncovers the history of the attraction, but is helping pave the way for its future. Amazingly, Hull started the Witch’s Dungeon when he…

Though he may not look like one of the obsessive madmen who haunt the tales of Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, Andrew Migliore, the ex-software engineer who founded The H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival, has much in common with those doomed dreamers. Like many a Poe and Lovecraft narrator, Migliore has brought a single-mindedness of purpose and a love of macabre and arcane tales to his mission to track down and screen for the general public short and full-length films based on the works of Lovecraft and other pioneers of the weird tale such as Poe and Robert W. Chambers. Migliore and his staff have been screening films based on (or influenced by) the works of these distinctly literary authors at the Lovecraft Film Festival since 1995, making Portland, Oregon…

Soundtrack THE DEAD GIRL Adam Gorgoni LAKESHORE The only worthy thing to emerge from Candyman: Day of the Dead was Adam Gorgoni’s music, which transcended that film’s total lameness with minor success. The Dead Girl gives the composer a collection of better characters to craft a cohesive score from, and his use of electronic tonalities, soft piano, woodwinds and strings address the impact that said corpse has on several female characters. Gorgoni has gone for emotional drama over horror here and his music evokes shifting concerns of loneliness, regret, sorrow, shame and a modicum of hope. Gorgoni’s main theme is a melancholic New Age blues piece, and the cues sort of shape-shift from ambient concepts to fragmented riffs, with occasional bursts of exotic percussion amid a number of suitable vocal…