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Elfie Hopkins

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Elfie Hopkins - aka Elfie Hopkins: Cannibal Hunter – is a 2012 British horror film directed by Ryan Andrews from a script co-written with Riyad Barmania. It stars Jaime Winstone, Ray Winstone, Steven Mackintosh, Rupert Evans, Aneurin Barnard and Kimberley Nixon.

The film was released in the UK on 20 April 2012 by Black & Blue Films and Kaleidoscope Entertainment.

Plot teaser:

Twenty-two-year-old slacker Elphie Hopkins (Jaime Winstone) is a “wanna-be” detective who lives in a sleepy village. She is a stoner and an animal lover, and haunted by the death of her mother. Surrounded by her broken father and alcoholic step-mother, Elfie seeks solace and inspiration from the old school detectives in The Maltese Falcon and Chinatown. She entertains herself, along with her geeky best friend, Dylan (Aneurin Barnard), by investigating the villagers and upsetting everyone with their imaginative allegations. Elfie’s mundane existence is thrown for a spin with the arrival of a family of trendy city dwellers, the Gammons.

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The Gammons weave tales of adventure and seduce the villagers with offers of exotic hunting holidays around the world. It is not long before the villagers are flying off to the four corners of the world. Elfie, despite her best efforts, is not free to the Gammons’ charms, but soon smells a rat. Elfie and Dylan begin investigating the Gammons’ life. Bloody violence and pandemonium soon starts to rage in the village and it is no longer just the blood of animals. Elfie discovers the villagers are not making those flights and when she finally uncovers the truth, it is darker than she could have ever imagined…

Elfie-Hopkins-DVD

Buy on DVD | Instant Video from Amazon.co.uk

“It’s Ryan Andrews’ first feature film and he’s piled it high with cinematic references. He aims to evoke the provincial charm of Miss Marple, the deliciously ironic dialogue of Brick and the blood-splattered thrills of a gaudy B-horror. You so want him to pull it off, but most of the time you’d just rather watch the movies he’s been watching.” Jessica Lambert, Little White Lies

“The big problem is the character of Elfie who dresses kookily with blue streaks in her peroxide hair but is far less exciting than the filmmakers must assume, and a laidback Winstone plays her with little energy or charm. There’s a hint of camp pleasure to be gained from the film’s early soft-focus domestic scenes and late hysterics, but ‘Elfie Hopkins’ is sunk by a lame script and mannered performances.” Dave Calhoun, Time Out

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” …an orgy of mistimed jokes, stumbling narration and dim performances. I felt like taking my felt pen to the film’s poster and turning the overindulged star’s name into “J’aime pas Winstone”. Phillip French, The Observer

“There’s a decent support cast including Ray Winstone and Gwyneth Keyworth, who’s suitably creepy as the childlike girl next door. But Jaime feels miscast and the dialogue, direction and tone waver wildly before getting completely lost. There’s kitsch value in the themes and costumes, but any cult appeal is not likely to be the kind the film was seeking.” Anna Smith, Empire

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Cast:

Filming locations:

Wales

Useful links:

Wikipedia | IMDb | Facebook | Kaleidoscope Film Distribution

 



Hemlock Books – publisher

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British-based Hemlock Books was formed in 2007 by author and film historian Denis Meikle, whose own books include A History of Horrors: The Rise and Fall of the House of Hammer (1996), Jack the Ripper: The Murders and the Movies (2002), Vincent Price: The Art of Fear (2003) and Roman Polanski: Odd Man Out (2006). 

Buy Amicus Anthology from Amazon.comAmazon.co.uk

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Buy X-Cert from Amazon.comAmazon.co.uk

The company was set up with a dual purpose: as a retail publisher of niche titles for horror and fantasy fans on one side, and as a retailer of (mostly) American fanzines on the other side. Hemlock has many exclusive US contacts and is now the online presence in the UK for genre magazines like Little Shoppe of Horrors and Rue Morgue. It is the official distributor of GoreZone and producer-director Charles Band’s new publishing offshoot, Delirium.

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Buy Mind Warp! from Amazon.comAmazon.co.uk

Hemlock’s publishing arm was established to produce ‘cult’ titles of specific interest to fans of classic British horror. Many of these would be too narrow in their appeal to be of value to mainstream publishers but with modern digital technology, a niche publisher like Hemlock can print in lower volume and produce books for a limited audience who would not otherwise be catered for in the conventional marketplace. The model for this fan-based approach was US publisher Midnight Marquee Press, with whom Hemlock has a co-publishing agreement.

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Buy The Hammer Frankenstein from Amazon.comAmazon.co.uk

Some titles have been specifically commissioned, such as those in Hemlock’s ‘British Cult Cinema’ series, but most are unsolicited submissions. Anyone can suggest a book to the company, the criteria being that a) the author can write, b) it should bring something new to the table in a field where many of the topics have effectively been ‘done to death’, and c) unique access or exclusive material is a definite plus. Proposals can be submitted to info@hemlockbooks.com

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Buy X-Cert 2 from Amazon.comAmazon.co.uk

New and forthcoming titles include X-Cert 2, the sequel to John Hamilton’s X-Cert (2012), Frightmares: The Films of Pete Walker, a new series of ‘Hemlock Horror Companion’s featuring Witchcraft & Black Magic in British Cult Cinema, the films of Canadian cult director Bob Clark and actor Udo Keir, as well as four new Midnight Marquee UK editions.

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Future titles will include the sequel to 2013’s Empire of the B’s, examining Charles Band’s days with Full Moon Features, and a new definitive film biography of Vincent Price.

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Buy Empire of the B’s from Amazon.co.ukAmazon.com

In the space of a few years, Hemlock Books has established itself as the leading publisher of genre titles in the UK, with a reputation for original and quality writing. 

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Buy Urban Terrors from Amazon.comAmazon.co.uk

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Buy Bob Clark: I’m Gonna Kill You from Amazon.comAmazon.co.uk

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Buy Retro Screams from Amazon.comAmazon.co.uk

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Buy The Hammer Vampire from Amazon.comAmazon.co.uk

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Buy Fright Films from Amazon.comAmazon.co.uk

www.hemlockbooks.co.uk


Kang and Kodos – animated aliens

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Kang and Kodos are a duo of recurring characters in the animated television series The Simpsons. Kang is voiced by Harry Shearer and Kodos by Dan Castellaneta.

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They are aliens from the fictional planet Rigel VII and appear almost exclusively in the Treehouse of Horror episodes. The duo has appeared in at least one segment of all twenty-five Treehouse of Horror episodes. Sometimes their appearance is the focus of a plot, other times a brief cameo. Kang and Kodos are often bent on the conquest of Earth and are usually seen working on sinister plans to invade and subjugate humanity.

In the episode “The Man Who Came to Be Dinner“, the Simpsons ended up on Rigel VII where Kang and Kodos give them a tour and a brief look at their lifecycle before placing them in a zoo with one of them, Homer, to be eaten in a yearly ritual. But after it is revealed that human consumption is fatal to their kind due to their unhealthy diet, their queen killed as a result, the Rigellans send the Simpsons back to Earth.

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The first drawing of Kang and Kodos came from writers Jay Kogen and Wallace Wolodarsky. The finished design was based on an EC Comics issue cover. Kang and Kodos had brief cameo appearances in several non-“Treehouse of Horror” episodes and have appeared as villains in several of The Simpsons video games and as action figures.

The two also have a brief cameo in The Simpsons fun fair Ride. In 2013, a separate ride called Kang & Kodos’ Twirl ‘n’ Hurl was added in Universal Studios Florida park.

In 2009, Kang and Kodos were also made into 6″ collectible vinyl art toys by Kidrobot x The Simpsons. Kang was sculpted salivating and included an accessory book “How to Cook for Forty Humans”.

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Wikipedia

Horrorpedia


Balzac – rock band

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Balzac (typeset as BALZAC) is a Japanese punk band formed in 1992 in Kyoto. The band was founded by singer and songwriter Hirosuke Nishiyama, who has remained the only constant member of the band since its creation. Balzac was highly influenced by the sound and image of the famous horror punk band the Misfits and, especially during the very early years, Glenn Danzig’s Samhain, adopting and combining the musical and visual style of both bands to create their own. Despite the horror themes and imagery, the band’s music tends to steer away from being the cartoony flotsam many newcomers to horror punk/horrorcore resort to, though they are happy to exploit their look visually through toys and merchandise.

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The band has gained a certain amount of recognition and exposure outside of their native country, where they are very well known. Currently they have five official clothing brands (Shocker!!!, Dementia 13, Culture, XXXxxx and Balzac) with one store in Japan, plus three online stores (Shocker Webstore, Shocker World Wide and Shocker EU). They also have their own official record label called Evilegend 13 Records on which they have released EPs, singles and videos. Balzac is also well known for its toy releases, some created by the companies T.W.I.M. and Secret Base, and its extensive discography and side-projects.

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The current line-up of the band consists of Hirosuke Nishiyama (vocals), Atsushi Nakagawa (guitar/chorus), Akio Imai (bass/chorus) and Takayuki Manabe (drums/digital effects/chorus). Musically the band has drawn from punk, pop, industrial and noise, across their various releases.

Singer Hirosuke Nishiyama was originally the lead singer for Astrozombies, a band heavily influenced by the legendary Japanese rock group Gastunk (themselves pitched somewhere midway between the Misfits and Iron Maiden). After releasing just one demo cassette, entitled The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Hirosuke decided to disband and started his next project, Balzac, in 1992, named after the French novelist and playwright, Honoré de Balzac, more through the way the name sounded than any artistic inference. The band’s first line-up consisted of Hirosuke Nishiyama on vocals, Yoritsugu “Anti” Azuchi on bass, Tetsuya on guitar and Naoki on drums. During that time the band released their first demo cassette, which was limited to 13 copies only, entitled Scapegoat666.

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In 1993, having undergone a slight line-up change (to become a regular occurence), they released their second demo cassette, Descent of the Diabolos, going on to release the band’s first single, “The Lord of the Light and of the Darkness”, on their own record label, Evilegend13 Records. Over the next few years the band released four more singles, “Atom Age Vampire in 308″ (on MCR), “Isolation From No. 13″ (on HG Fact), “When the Fiendish Ghouls Night” (on Evilegend13 Records), and were part of some various artists compilations. Having toured Japan extensively even before the release of their first single, they had developed a dedicated fanbase in their home country.

By 1995 the band managed to release their first full-length album, The Last Men on Earth, after being signed to Alchemy Records. Comparisons to the Misfits are inevitable and entirely justified but their speed and energy are evident throughout, as is their knowledge of horror films – the instrumental opener ‘Night of the Blood Beast’, ’13 Ghosts’ and ‘Day the Earth Caught Fire’ and intriguing and great fun, though the Misfits-alike choruses are a little too familiar and cause the listener to err on the side of caution.

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1997 saw the release of Deep – Teenagers from Outer Space and saw them much improved in a studio setting, powerful production, even greater speed and ferocity and catchy songs which were more obviously drawing on their own talents, ironically just as a resurrected, Danzig-free Misfits appeared. Now being headed by original member and long-time bassist Jerry Only, Balzac was asked to open for the Misfits when they came for their first Japanese tour. This would mark a milestone in the band’s career, which would lead to much success for Balzac outside of Japan in the coming years. Their third album, 13 Stairway – The Children of the Night appeared just a year later, prolific releases being quite common for Japanese bands, especially rock and punk groups. They launched a full-scale all-Japan tour to promote their album and played to sold-out crowds.

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In 1999, Balzac released a split single, “Oldevils Legend of Blood”, with friends and fellow Japanese rock band Sobut. They released a special 12-inch version of “Isolation From No. 13″, a remixed tape as a special box set with toy industry friends, T.W.I.M (The World Is Mine) whose headquarters are in Nagoya, as well as playing on a Gastunk tribute album. On Halloween they released one of their most popular singles, “Into the Light From the 13 Dark Night”, on vinyl, CD, and cassette. It would be re-recorded in many different versions over the next few years. They also released the flexi 7-inch including “Neat Neat Neat,” a Damned cover. This year also marked the beginning of the band’s own fan club, the Fiendish Club a somewhat outrageous steal from The Misfits’ Fiend Club; it offered fans a great way to stay in touch with the band and to receive some very rare items at the same time; Japanese and international wings of the club were eventually opened to satiate demand.

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2000 saw The Misfits back touring Japan, and Balzac was there opening for them once again. The band were now popular enough that, again, like The Misfits (and in fairness Kiss and many other bands), more unusual merchandise began to appear, notably, Medicom Toy Co. versions of band members. Soon after, they released another figure, this time a 12-inch RAH version of the band’s mascot, the Paperbag Man, luridly packed with various accessories. In December 2000 Balzac released their next full-length album, Zennou-Naru Musuu-No Me Ha Shi Wo Yubi Sasu, a concept album more industrial in style than previous releases, though it still sold extremely well. Balzac opened their first retail store in Osaka, Japan – “Shocker!!!”, enabling them to sell their own original Shocker!!!! brand merchandise, as well as musical releases. Hirosuke also has his own clothing brand called “Dementia Thirteen” which is also available through the store. More recently, they have also launched yet another clothing brand, “Culture”, and are in the process of fully releasing another one called “XXXxxx”.

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In early 2001 the band released numerous singles, as well as a box set featuring the artwork of Japanese manga artist Suehiro Maruo, which had been used on the album Zennou-Naru Musuu no Me ha Shi wo Yubi Sasu. They also opened their second retail store, Coffin, in Kyoto. The following year, Balzac released a split single with The Misfits covering the songs “The Haunting” and “Don’t Open ‘Til Doomsday” as a medley, while The Misfits covered the Balzac’s “Day the Earth Caught Fire”. In April 2002 Balzac released their fifth full-length studio album a double disc set called Terrifying! Art of Dying – The Last Men On Earth II. The first disc was mostly new material while disc two was a complete re-recording of the band’s first full-length CD, The Last Man On Earth. On Halloween the band was invited to play in New York City, USA, with The Misfits, making this the first time the band played live outside of Japan. They were received very well and would be asked back to tour the following summer.

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2003 would be another breakthrough year for the band, touring with The Misfits, The Damned, The Dickies, and Agnostic Front, as well as releasing a maxi-single entitled “Beware of Darkness as part of a special 4-figure toy set from Medicom Toys Co. The video for the song was recorded in the USA and was released in May 2003. There was a censored, as well as uncensored version, due to the graphic nature of the video. They also released their first USA CD, Beyond the Darkness, on the newly founded Misfits Records.

In 2004 they released their sixth full-length album, Came Out of the Grave, released in a special edition long-box with a Be@rbrick figure inside. During that summer they played a large festival with American punk rock band Rancid, and released a tour documentary about their first USA tour, The Fiend Fest, later playing their first tour in Europe.

By 2005 they had released the single “D.A.R.K”. Soon after they released a mini album entitled Dark-Ism. 2006-2008: Deep Blue & Hatred, following this only a year later with their seventh full-length album, Deep Blue: Chaos from Darkism II in March. It was coupled with a special Skull Bat figure, also in 2 limited colours. Not content with this rapid release rate, they also performed as Zodiac, releasing a full-length Zodiac album, Beware On Halloween.

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In 2008, Balzac released their eighth full-length album entitled Hatred: Destruction = Construction. It marked a return to the heavier and darker side for the band, reminiscent of some of their earlier work. It was released in a regular edition, as well as a 666mm special edition featuring artwork by comic book artist Liam Sharp.

Around May 2009, the band gave the first hints on the process of making their next full-length album. They also released a couple of toys, shirts, pens, mugs and other items in collaboration with the Japanese company Sanrio, more specifically their character Hello Kitty, having the famous cat donning the characteristic skullsuit, another nod towards early Misfits. Further releases followed, their longevity and output allowing for multiple ‘best of’s’ and collections.

Discography:

1995: The Last Men on Earth
1997: Deep – Teenagers from Outer Space
1998: 13 Stairway – The Children of the Night
2000: Zennou-Naru Musuu-No Me Ha Shi Wo Yubi Sasu
2002: Terrifying! Art of Dying – The Last Men On Earth II
2004: Came Out of the Grave
2005: Dark-Ism
2006: Deep Blue: Chaos from Darkism II
2007: Paranoid Dream of the Zodiac
2008: Hatred: Destruction = Construction
2008: The Birth of Evil (Re-recordings of Demo material)
2009: Paradox (Mini album)
2010: Judgement Day
2012: Deranged

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

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Vulture Lord – metal band

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Vulture Lord are a Norwegian metal band from Hønefoss. They formed in 1990 as Interment before several name (and presumably line-up) changes as Energumen, Coffin of Lament and then Faun, before settling on Vulture Lord from 1995 to the present.

 

Encyclopedia Metallum states that the ‘band describes their music as “death metal” according to their ideological background, but the music is black/thrash metal.’ The band’s lyrics focus on Satanism, Anti-Judeo-Christianity and blasphemy within a Christian context.

Discography:

Exorcism of the Holy Ghost Demo 1997
Desire for the Dead Demo 1998
Deathfuck Compilation 1999
Kill the Children of God Compilation 2000
Profane Prayer Full-length 2003
Blasphemy EP 2006
Blasphemous Exorcism Compilation 2014

Cambiare Bar & Grill, Tokyo – Location

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Cambiare is a bar situated in the Shinjuku area of Tokyo, Japan, the interior and sign-design of which is based on visuals from Dario Argento’s classic 1977 horror film, Suspiria.

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Buried in the hustle and bustle of Tokyo’s already hectic Shinjuku region is an area known as Golden Gai – it is here at 1-1-7 2F Kabukicho you will find Cambiare, one of several themed bars and private clubs which operate in this district. Rather bigger than many in the locale, Cambiare takes its interior decor inspiration from the lurid and garish colour schemes of Dario Argento’s most famous film, Suspiria, the dazzling reds, yellows and blues almost requiring medical intervention to prevent burning.

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The most striking aspects are the familiar stained-glass window, overbearing chandelier and deliciously psychedelic wallpaper, though more committed fans will also notice that the exterior’s sign utilises the same font as Argento’s film, whilst the liberal use of neon reflect the strangely illuminated doorways on screen. The menu offers a less inventive selection of pizza, lurid cocktails and Italian wines and spirits but, rest assured, the familiar strains of Goblin will feast your ears whilst you contemplate exactly what is creating those strange shadows…

Daz Lawrence

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Sid Haig – actor

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Sid Haig – born Sidney Eddy Mosesian, July 14th, 1939 – is a California-born actor of American and Armenian heritage. His roles have included acting in Jack Hill’s blaxploitation films of the 1970s, films of varying budgets made by the likes of Roger Corman, George Lucas and Eddie Romero before finding a new audience specifically in the horror genre after his role as Captain Spaulding in Rob Zombie’s films House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects.

s3 After a childhood which began with a passion for dance and music, in particular the drums, Haig’s love for entertaining people expanded into the acting field whilst he was still at school. Keeping his options open, he recorded one single for the T-Birds, aged nineteen, called “Full House”, an instrumental rock ‘n’ roll tune which performed well in the local California area, reaching number 4 on the regional charts. However, this potential career was abandoned in favour of treading the boards, due in no small part to the influence of his school drama teacher, Alice Merill, herself a minor Broadway star.

After enrolling in the Pasadena Playhouse, the renowned acting school which had also contributed to the later success of the likes of Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman; a chance meeting with another Broadway star, Dennis Morgan (The Return of Doctor X) had convinced Haig that acting was the way forward and duly the bright lights of Hollywood proved irresistible.

sb Further good fortune saw Haig’s first screen role being in Jack Hill’s UCLA short film, The Host, in 1960, a union which was to be increasingly fruitful over the coming years. Until the latter end of the 1960’s, it seemed likely that Haig would become a mainstay of the television treadmill; early roles saw him appear as often larger than life characters in programmes such as one of the henchman to Victor Buono’s King Tut in Batman, the be-cloaked First Lawgiver in Star Trek and two parts in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. However, a reunion with Hill saw him appearing in the jumbled Corman production, Blood Bath (1966) that partly used footage from the Yugoslav-shot Operation Titan. It was not in any sense a massive success but it was a precursor to a film which was equally unconventional but immeasurably more influential.

bb 1967’s Spider Baby (aka The Maddest Story Ever Told) saw Haig, with his now recognisable shaven head, appearing as Ralph Merrye, a sexually complex, feral youngster with only rudimentary understandings of language and social etiquette. Performing alongside the legendary Lon Chaney Jr, it didn’t trouble the box office but it did showcase Haig’s remarkable physical acting style, as well as securing his mantle as one of the industry’s go-to character actors.

s2 Further television roles followed (of note were parts in Gunsmoke, Get Smart and a record number of guest appearances in Mission: Impossible), though Hill returned for his trusty partner in crime for Pitstop (1969) and the exploitation masterpieces The Big Doll House (1971) and The Big Birdcage (1972). The mainstream threatened to strike with lesser roles in Lucas’ THX1138 and Bond movie Diamonds Are Forever (both 1971) but it was in exploitation films and in particular, blaxploitation, that Haig became best known… at least for another twenty-odd years.

bdh Eddie Romero’s Black Mama, White Mama (1973) and Savage Sisters (1974) and Hill’s Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974) saw Haig as an often villainous and ominous character, his huge frame, swarthy looks, bald head and South American dictator’s beard allowing him to play characters from a variety of backgrounds. Though helping to pay the bills, more regular work was again found more easily on the small screen, the 1980’s providing many opportunities, from The Fall Guy to The A-Team, to Buck Rogers in the 25th Century to the short-lived Werewolf, almost always as the villain of the episode.

Parts in genre films The Aftermath (1982) and more especially Galaxy of Terror (1981, the trashy Alien-a-like romp which also gave early roles to Robert Englund and Grace Zabriskie) proved once more to be false dawns leading Haig to announce in 1992, quite likely to a meagre audience, that he was retiring from the business: “I’ll never play another stupid heavy again, and I don’t care if that means that I never work, ever.”

g1 The wilderness years, bizarrely, saw Haig becoming a qualified hypnotherapist. A pocket watch-swinging career was curtailed five years later when Quentin Tarantino came calling, having written a role specifically for him as Judge, for the blaxploitation homage, Jackie Brown, reuniting him with Pam Grier. Having passed on the opportunity to appear in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction in the Marsellus Wallace role later taken by Ving Rhames, it was a turning point in Haig’s career. Some three years later, another student of genre films, Rob Zombie, cast Haig in his film House of 1000 Corpses, the character of Captain Spaulding almost immediately becoming a fan favourite and leading to a reprised performance in Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects. Haig also appeared as Captain Spaulding in Zombie’s animated film The Haunted World of El Superbeasto.

s1 Spurred on by numerous horror industry awards and nominations, Haig enjoyed one of the most productive periods of his career, at least in terms of numbers of films, if not necessarily high quality or memorable. A minor part in Zombie’s Halloween was probably a blessing not to be larger, whilst lower-budget fare featuring the actor included the risible Night of the Living Dead 3D, Brotherhood of Blood, Dark Moon Rising, Hatchet III and The Inflicted, often alongside other horror film survivors from yesteryear, such as Ken Foree and Michael Berryman (the latter appearing, yet again, in Zombie’s The Lords of Salem). As of the time of writing, Haig has four films in varying stage of production, including Bone Tomahawk and Suicide for Beginners.

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Ghost Weddings – article

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In Chinese tradition, a ghost marriage (Chinese: 冥婚; pinyin: mínghūn; literally: “spirit marriage”) is a marriage in which one or both parties are deceased. Other forms of ghost marriage are practiced worldwide, from Sudan, to India, to France since 1959. The origins of Chinese ghost marriage are largely unknown, though reports of it being practiced in the present day have become more frequent. Whilst Sudanese and French ‘posthumous’ marriage largely revolves around a bereaved widow marrying one of the groom’s brothers or a partner killed in war, the Chinese variant regularly sees the joining in matrimony of a living person and a corpse.

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Chinese ghost marriage was usually set up by the family of the deceased and performed for a number of reasons, including the marriage of an engaged couple before one member’s death, to integrate an unmarried daughter into a patrilineage, to ensure the family line is continued, or to maintain that no younger brother is married before an elder brother. Upon the death of her fiancé, a bride could choose to go through with the wedding, in which the groom was represented by a white cockerel at the ceremony. However, some women were hesitant since this form of ghost marriage required her to participate in the funeral ritual, mourning customs (including strict dress and conduct standards), take a vow of celibacy, and immediately take up residence with his family. A groom had the option of marrying his late fiancée, with no disadvantages, but there have been no records of such weddings.

Chinese tradition looked very unfavourably on unmarried women, in part due to the deceased woman leaving no surviving male descendants who could pay tribute to her memory, whilst also causing a burden to her family, resulting her being no longer welcome in the family home. For a son to find himself unmarried and hence being unable to carry on the family name, a similar rejection takes place, both genders sometimes resorting to ‘ghost marriage’, very occasionally a living bride taking a dead groom, more often a woman disinterred to be with her new living spouse. The cadaver is not always required, the ceremony, performed by a psychic or a priest, sometimes transferring the spirit from the grave.

Ghost marriages are often set up by request of the spirit of the deceased, who, upon “finding itself without a spouse in the other world, causes misfortune for its natal family, the family of its betrothed, or for the family of the deceased’s married sisters. This usually takes the form of sickness by one or more family members. When the sickness is not cured by ordinary means, the family turns to divination and learns of the plight of the ghost through a séance. More benignly, a spirit may appear to a family member in a dream and request a spouse.

If a family wishes to arrange a ghost marriage, they may consult with a matchmaker of sorts: In a Cantonese area of Singapore there is in fact a ghost marriage broker’s sign hung up in a doorway of a Taoist priest’s home. The broker announces that he is willing to undertake the search for a family which has a suitable deceased member with a favourable horoscope.”

Others do not use the aid of any priest or diviner and believe that the groom the ghost-bride has chosen “[will] somehow identify himself.” Typically, the family lays a red envelope (usually used for gifts of money) as bait in the middle of the road. They then take to hiding, and when the envelope is picked up by a passer-by, they come out and announce his status of being the chosen bridegroom. In a ghost marriage, many of the typical marriage rites are observed. However, since one or more parties is deceased, they are otherwise represented, most often by effigies made of paper, bamboo or cloth.

For instance, a ghost couple at their marriage feast, the bride and groom may be constructed of paper bodies over a bamboo frame with a papier-mâché head. On either side of them stands their respective paper servants, and the room contains many other paper effigies of products they would use in their home, such as a dressing table (complete with a mirror), a table and six stools, a money safe, a refrigerator, and trunks of paper clothes and cloth. After the marriage ceremony is complete, all of the paper belongings are burned to be sent to the spirit world to be used by the couple.
In another ceremony that married a living groom to a ghost bride, the effigy was similar, but instead constructed with a wooden backbone, arms made from newspaper, and the head of “a smiling young girl clipped from a wall calendar.” Similarly, after the marriage festivities, the dummy is burned.
In both cases, the effigies wore real clothing, similar to that which is typically used in marriage ceremonies. This includes a pair of trousers, a white skirt, a red dress, with a lace outer dress. Additionally, they were adorned with jewellery; though similar in fashion to that of a typical bride’s, it was not made of real gold. If a living groom is marrying a ghost bride, he will wear black gloves instead of the typical white.

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Most of the marriage ceremony and rites are performed true to Chinese custom. In fact, the bride was always treated as though she was alive and participating in the proceedings, from being fed at the wedding feast in the morning, to being invited in and out of the cab, to being told of her arrival at the groom’s house. One observable difference in a ghost marriage is that the ancestral tablet of the deceased is placed inside the effigy, so that “the bride’s dummy [is] animated with the ghost that [is] to be married”, and then placed with the groom’s family’s tablets at the end of the marriage festivities.

France

The primary reason for the posthumous marriage in France is to allow for bereaved widows to marry their lost partners, usually as a result of death during war. It is also used to legitimize children that a woman might have, though it is also done for emotional reasons. After a posthumous marriage the living spouse inherently becomes a widow or widower. Posthumous marriage will also bring the surviving spouse into the family of the deceased spouse, which can create an alliance or moral satisfaction. The surviving spouse is also subject to impediments of marriage that result. Posthumous marriage also shows the strength of an individual to overcome a fiancé’s death.

The proliferation of post-life weddings prompted the French government to clarify the law in 1950. The resultant law decreed that marriage between a living person and a dead person was legal but required the approval of both the country’s President and Justice Minister. Wedding services which are allowed omit the line “til death do us part” and amend another line from “I do” to “I did”. The ‘missing’ partner is represented by a photograph at the ceremony. As recently as 2014, a posthumous wedding was granted to a woman whose husband-to-be had expired of a heart attack just one monthbefore their wedding was due to take place.

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Europe and Beyond

Ghost marriages in the United States are very rare indeed, although examples do exist, where a planned wedding has had to be aborted due to an untimely death. These instances have gone ahead on a locally authorised basis rather than a national decree. A law unto themselves are the members of The Church of the Latter Day Saints (Mormons), who often refer to marriage as ‘sealings’ and do not differentiate between the joining of a couple before or after death. Their justification rests in an interpreted passage in the bible in which in Matthew 16:19:
“And I will give thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”
Such wild imaginings also allow members of the church to partake in the somehow even more ghoulish practice of ‘dead baptisms’.
In Sudan, a ghost marriage is a marriage where a deceased groom is replaced by his brother. The brother serves as a stand in to the bride, and any resulting children are considered children of the deceased spouse. This unusual type of marriage is nearly exclusive to the Dinka (Jieng) and Nuer tribes of Southern Sudan, although instances of such marriages have also occurred in France.
Nuer women do not marry deceased men only to continue the man’s bloodline. In accordance to Nuer tradition, any wealth owned by the woman becomes property of the man after the marriage. Thus, a wealthy woman may marry a deceased man to retain her wealth, instead of giving it up after marrying. Among the Nuer, a ghost marriage is nearly as common as a marriage to a live man.

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The Sudanese tradition is related to ‘levirate marriage’ [derived from the Latin, ‘levir’, meaning ‘husband’s brother’]. Levirate marriages have been performed around the world and by many cultures, from Africa to Europe to throughout Asia, famous examples even taking place in England, such as Catherine of Aragon’s marriage to Henry VIII, brother to her previous husband, Arthur, Prince of Wales.
A turn in the economy of China has resulted in a black market trade evolving since the turn of the millennium, the trafficking of corpses for needy lonely hearts becoming a booming business. Although outlawed in the country since 1949, groups have taken to digging up corpses for the purpose of ghost marriage, selling the cadavers to desperate families for up to £3700 each. In 2014, 4 men were jailed for attempting to sell 10 corpses for the princely combined sum of £25,000. Less wealthy ‘customers’ often make do with statuettes or even baked effigies with black beans for eyes.

Telegraph report of recent corpse harvesting

Daz Lawrence

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Robert le Diable – opera

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Robert le Diable (translation: “Robert the Devil”) is an 1831 opera in five acts composed by Giacomo Meyerbeer from a libretto written by Eugène Scribe and Germain Delavigne. Robert le Diable is regarded as one of the first grand operas at the Paris Opéra. It derives some of its development from the medieval legend of Robert the Devil, a tale which was written in 13th Century France.

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The opera introduces Robert, Duke of Normandy, the son of a union between Bertha and Bertram, a disciple of Satan, perhaps even a demon himself. In Normandy, alongside several other knights, he attempts to win favour with the beautiful Princess Isabelle. A minstrel, Raimbaut, inadvertently singing a song that referred to Robert as a devil is imprisoned by the enraged Robert but is granted forgiveness when Robert realises his fiancée is his foster-sister, Alice. Under the influence of a disguised Bertram, whom Robert is unaware is his father, let alone a devil, the duke gambles, leaves the door open for the Prince of Granada to woo Isabella and sees Raimbaut given a sack of gold to pursue love interests other than Alice.

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By the time Bertram reveals to Robert that he is his father, he has communed with the devil himself, an event overheard by Alice who learns from the depraved chanting that if Bertram cannot convince his son to sell his soul to Satan by midnight, he will lose control over Robert forever. Bertram discovers he is being spied upon and threatens Alice, who leaves. He turns his attentions to his son who he informs could win back Isabelle by taking possession of a magic branch which grants invisibility, hanging near the tomb of Saint Rosalia in a nearby cloister. He agrees, despite knowing this is sacrilege and is punished by zombie nuns, the remains of sisters who lived with impure thoughts, who rise from their graves to taunt him.

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Avoiding their suggestive drinking and dancing, he escapes with the branch and seeks to interrupt the imminent marriage of Isabelle and the Prince. With the clock approaching midnight, Bertram fails in his attempts and is cast down to Hell, leaving his son to step in and marry the Princess.

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The opera was an immediate success on its premier in 1831 and drew plaudits from the likes of Franz Liszt, Alexandre Dumas (who featured the opera in his classic tale, The Count of Monte Cristo) and Edgar Degas. Brass (some provided by the now rarely used ophicleide, a forerunner to the bass tuba), fabricated thunder effects and baritone voices create unease throughout the opera, the Gothic drama of which comes to a head in the graveyard sequence where the hero is attacked by ghostly nuns rising from their tombs, Robert having to fend them off with supernatural powers. In many productions, this sequence is carefully choreographed to make the nuns particularly horrific and moving in unnatural ways.

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Whilst the opera was so successful that Meyerbeer became a celebrity and was feted by the French court, it is said that his rival, the Italian Rossini, was so affected by Robert le Diable that he retired from composition. The opera has been compared to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera, and is in fact mentioned by name in the musical. Considered shocking at the time of creation and still performed around the world today, the opera last appeared at London’s Covent Garden Opera House in 2012.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

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Devoured

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‘You will be’

Devoured is a 2012 American horror movie directed by Greg Olliver – his feature film directorial debut. The film had its world premiere on May 6, 2012 at the Bilbao Fantasy Film Festival and stars Marta Milans, Kara Jackson and Bruno Gunn.

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Plot teaser:

Lourdes (Marta Milans) is a young woman from El Salvador that has come to New York City in hopes of raising enough money to help care for her ill son, who lives with Lourdes’s mother back in her home country. She works in an upscale restaurant where her boss mistreats her, her boss’s boyfriend sexually assaults her, and various men forcefully solicit her for sexual favours. Lourdes endures all of this as she cannot afford to lose her job and while she is reluctant to prostitute herself, she will do anything in order to raise enough money for her son’s surgery. Her only solace is found in her phone calls to her son in El Salvador and her interactions with Frankie (Bruno Gunn), a firefighter that is the only person in New York who has shown Lourdes any true kindness. While cleaning the restaurant one night, Lourdes begins to experience strange visions where she sees strange shadowy figures that seem out to get her…

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Buy Devoured on DVD from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Reviews:

‘Devoured is a slow burner. You’ve got to have patience with it, but you will be rewarded with a pretty fantastic ending that you won’t see coming. Writer Marc Landau put together a unique tale that’s unlike anything we’ve seen before, and Olliver takes a very small cast and brings the story to life. And Milans absolutely carries the picture. Overall, it’s an entertaining film that’ll impress you. Have patience; it’s worth the wait.’ Dread Central

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Devoured mixes social commentary and dour New York alienation into its character study-cum-psychological horror format. It looks good and is competently acted, but a predictable climax and all-too familiar route getting to that point prevent it from being anything more than a fairly decent watch.’ Sex Gore Mutants

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Devoured is a hugely impressive film on all levels. The cast’s performances are subtle and understated, played with convincing believability but it is Milans who stands out. In a film such as this the lead role is all important (there is barely a scene she is not in) and Milans delivers with brooding intensity.’ Horror Asylum

Wikipedia | IMDb


Horrorcore: How Hip Hop Met Horror – article

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horrorcore13 Horrorcore is a subgenre of hip hop music based on horror-themed lyrical content and imagery. Its origins derived from hardcore and gangsta rap artists such as the Geto Boys and Insane Clown Posse, who brought the genre into the mainstream, if somewhat fleetingly. The term horrorcore was popularised by openly horror-influenced hip hop groups such as Flatlinerz and Gravediggaz.

horrorcore2 Horrorcore is the hottest potato within the hip hop genre, upsetting the purists and proving too extreme for mass consumption, it has even seen so-called ‘godfathers’ of the scene distancing themselves as pioneers. It has been argued that Jimmy Spicer’s 1980 single “Adventures of Super Rhyme” was perhaps the first example of anything that resembled horrorcore, due to the segment of the song in which Spicer recounts his experience of meeting Dracula. Interestingly, even this came after the wave of Blaxploitation films which flooded 42nd Street cinemas, the films themselves rarely grasping the opportunity to have an accompanying song to give them even greater visibility outside their niche.

horrorcore3 A year later, groups like Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde (unclear whether the misspelling was intentional) and songs like Dana Dane’s “Nightmares,” saw releases, though these had more in common with the horror pop craze of the 1950’s and early 60’s, with monsters seen as comical characters and the threat minimal. It wasn’t until the horror film itself embraced a more bubblegum aesthetic, with the likes of A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger appearing on television regularly, despite the film’s age rating, that rap and horror films edged closer together.

horrorcore4 In 1988, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince released “A Nightmare on My Street“, which described an encounter with Freddy Krueger. It was a crossover success and reached 15 on the Top 100 but whilst music was beginning to embrace horror, the film industry was less sure (possibly partly due to Smith referring to Krueger as ‘Fred’ and the song concluding with the razor-fingered murderer quipping, “I’m your DJ now, Princey”). New Line Cinema sued for copyright infringement and the accompanying video was pulled and copies destroyed. The album was emblazoned with the legend “not part of the soundtrack…and is not authorized, licensed, or affiliated with the Nightmare on Elm Street films”; all this despite the film’s producers seriously considering using the song in A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. It’s telling that a genre which had used themes and imagery from horror films far earlier, metal, had actually beaten the pair to Freddy’s affections anyway, with Krueger appearing in Dokken’s video for “Dream Warriors” which was indeed included in the soundtrack to A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors a year earlier.

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Playing by the rules were the Fat Boys who recorded the similarly-themed “Are You Ready for Freddy?” for the film A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and its soundtrack. The Chubby Checker-approved funsters even coaxed a rap out of Englund, though he had already flexed his musical muscle with Freddy Krueger’s Greatest Hits in 1987, an appalling collection melodically but a sign that horror was big business in all forms of pop culture.

horrorcore6 This was all rather flotsam and jetsam compared to what would truly be recognised as horrorcore, the first example of a darker strain appearing with The Geto Boys‘ debut album, Making Trouble, which contained the dark and violent horror-influenced track “Assassins“, which was cited by Joseph Bruce (Violent J of the horrorcore group Insane Clown Posse) in his book Behind The Paint, as the first recorded horrorcore song. The album had Tales From the Crypt-style narratives which were a world away from the luminous, jokey scares which went before. Their third album, “We Can’t Be Stopped”, featured the classic, “Chuckie”, which sampled Child’s Play.

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Pre-Eminem, Detroit’s most prominent hip hop artist was Esham, regularly cited as the most influential horror core artist of recent times. Contrarily, Esham denounces such labels (as did New York-based Kool Keith of Ultramagnetic MC’s, though both are prone to changing their minds) and, in fairness, the supernatural is more-often overlooked in favour of real-life horrors, with the troubles of his home city being a metaphor for Hell itself on his debut, “Boomin’ Words from Hell“, embracing rock and metal samples to enhance the effect. Extreme violence was to the fore, with occasional nods to familiar foes:

Esham – “Red Rum” (1989)
“More like Jason, but it’s you I’m chasin’
And once I catch ya, I’m micin’ and acein’
Runnin’ through your mind like Loki
And the reason you don’t see me, cuz I’m low key
I’m the Saturday shocker, horror flick routine
Showin’ you shit, that you never seen
Michael Myers, the crucifiers”

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Ultramagnetic MC’s – “Travelling at the Speed of Thought” (1988):

“Respect me, when I whip your brain
Skip your brain and dip your brain
In the lotion while I deck ya skull
I’m like a bird when I’m pecking ya skull
Til it hurts and swell, puffs, bleed, blood”

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KMC became the first act to actually use the phrase, “horrorcore” (disputed, naturally) in 1991, whilst other artists throughout the United States began to use similar styles of delivery and themes to distinguish their music from other forms of hip hop; of note are Brotha Lynch Hung, R.A. The Rugged Man, Backyard Posse, The Flatlinerz and The Gravediggaz. R.A. The Rugged Man, in particular, used themes and imagery from the horror films he loved; his debut album (eventually released several years after production) was titled “Night of the Bloody Apes” and featured a track called “Toolbox Murderer”. Under his real name of R.A. Thorburn, he became involved in the horror film industry himself, appearing in a number of shorts as well as co-writing and acting in Frank Hennenlotter’s Bad Biology.

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The boiling pot for these new acts was The Fear, a horror film which horrorcore used as its muse, the reverse of Singles which had used Seattle’s rock music scene for its own purposes. Consequently, frontrunners Esham and Flatlinerz combine forces to cover the title track, whilst Insane Clown Posse, the breakout mainstream stars of the genre, enjoyed huge radio play with “Dead Body Man”. Similarly, Gravediggaz developed a devoted following, their debut, “6 Feet Deep”, not only referencing horror films but using minor chords, atmospherics and effects used in the films themselves.

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While rappers in the underground scene continued to release horrorcore music, the mid-90s brought an attempted mainstream crossover of the genre. In 1994, according to Icons of Hip Hop, “[Horrorcore] gained prominence in 1994 with the release of Flatlinerz’ U.S.A. (Under Satan’s Authority) and Gravediggaz’ 6 Feet Deep (released overseas as Niggamortis), the latter aided by the early incarnation featuring Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA, the former Redrum (Jamel Simmons, nephew of Def Jam label co-founder, Russell Simmons).

Flatlinerz were possibly the pinnacle of the genre, despite only releasing one full-length album and only being resurrected as a going concern in 2014. Their track, “Live Evil” samples Jerry Goldsmith’s Ave Satani, from the film, The Omen.

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The genre is not popular with mainstream audiences as a whole; however, performers such as Insane Clown Posse and Twiztid have sold well. The genre has thrived in Internet culture and sustains an annual super show in Detroit called Wickedstock. Every Halloween since 2003, Horrorcore artists worldwide release a free compilation online titled Devilz Nite. Branching off slightly is Necro (who took his name from the Slayer song, “Necrophobic”), whose merging of rap and death metal prompted him to coin the term “death rap”. He has based his tracks on subjects ranging from The Manson murders, to suicide, to sexual violence, to cannibalism. His music was cited as an influence on the child murderers Michael Rafferty heard testimony from convicted murderer and Terri-Lynne McClintic, who were said to have repeatedly listened to Necro’s music. Necro has stated he would never condone the harm of children.

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A final word for a performer, who, whilst not only creating songs in the horrorcore style, did at least practice what many of the other acts preached. Big Lurch (real name, Altron Singleton), so-called due to tall, looming frame, only released one album, initially called “The Puppet Master” but later changed, for understandable reasons, to “It’s All Bad”. On “I Did It To You!” he sings:

“Jason Vorhees, Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson
And all of your friends I’mma finsta school ya
‘Cuz murder’s a hobby
I’m using a torture chamber and not a Ruger”

On April 10th 2002, Tynisha Ysais was found in her apartment by a friend. Her chest had been torn open and a three-inch blade was found broken off in her shoulder blade. Teeth marks were found on her face and on her lungs, which had been torn from her chest. An eyewitness reported that, when Singleton was picked up by police, he was naked, covered in blood, standing in the middle of the street, and staring at the sky. A medical examination performed shortly after his capture found human flesh in his stomach that was not his own. High on PCP, Singleton had attacked, murdered and partially eaten his victim, a court later pointing to his lyrics as an indication that he was prone to such thoughts, let alone deeds. He is currently serving a life term in prison.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

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Blumhouse Productions – production company

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Blumhouse Productions is an American movie production company, founded in 2004 and run by Jason Blum. Blumhouse produces micro-budget and low-budget genre movies like the Paranormal Activity, Insidious, and Sinister franchises.

According to various stories, the company’s model is to produce these movies independently and then release them wide through the studio system. They have a first-look deal with Universal Pictures. Blumhouse’s highly profitable credits began in 2009 with Paranormal Activity, which was made for just $15,000. The film was released by Paramount Pictures and grossed a whopping $193 million worldwide at the box office, even before disc , download and TV sales. The company produced the Paranormal sequels, Insidious which grossed over $97 million worldwide on a budget of $1.5m, and Sinister, which so far has grossed over $87 million worldwide on a budget of $3 million.

The company has worked with directors such as Scott Derrickson, James DeMonaco, Oren Peli, Scott Stewart and James Wan. Blumhouse’s films include its first for Universal — The Purge, Insidious: Chapter Two, and Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones ($90.9 million).

For Halloween 2012, the company opened the Blumhouse of Horrors, an interactive haunted house experience in Downtown Los Angeles. In 2015, they published The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares: The Haunted City.

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Buy The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares from Amazon.com

Select filmography and profit ratios:

Paranormal Activity (2009)

budget $15,000, box office $193 million

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Paranormal Activity 2 (2010)

budget $3 million, box office $177.5 million

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Insidious (2011)

budget $1.5 million, box office $97 million

Paranormal Activity 3 (2011)

budget $5 million, box office $207 million

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Sinister (2012)

budget $3 million, box office $77 million

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Paranormal Activity 4 (2012)

budget $5 million, box office $140.8 million

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The Bay (2012)

budget unavailable, box office $1,545,308 million

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Dark Skies (2013)

budget $3.5 million, box office $26.4 million

The Lords of Salem (2013)

budget $1.5 million, box office $1.1 million

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The Purge (2013)

budget $3 million, box office $89,3 million

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Insidious: Chapter 2 (2013)

budget $5 million, box office $161.9 million

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Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014)

budget $5 million, box office $90.9 million

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Oculus (2014)

budget $5 million, box office $44 million

13 Sins (2014)

budget unavailable, box office $13,809

The Purge: Anarchy (2014)

budget $9 million, box office $110.6 million

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Mockingbird (2014)

figures unavailable

Not Safe for Work (2014)

figures unavailable

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The Town That Dreaded Sundown (2014)

still on release

Ouija (2014)

budget $5 million, box office $100.6 million

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Jessabelle (2014)

box office $1.6 million

The Boy Next Door (2015)

budget $4 million, box office $49.7 million

The Lazarus Effect (2015)

budget $3.3 million, box office $27 million

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Unfriended (2015)

budget $1 million, box office $26.4 million

Upcoming films:

Creep (2014)

Amityville: The Awakening (2014)

Area 51 (2015)

Insidious: Chapter 3 (2015)

The Gallows (2015)

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Sinister 2 (2015)

The Visit (2015)

Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (2015)

6 Miranda Drive (2015)

Viral (2015)

Incarnate (2015)

The Veil (2015)

Stephanie (2015)

The Purge 3 (2016)

Untitled Blumhouse Horror 3 (2016)

Ouija 2 (2016)

Visions (2016)

Wikipedia | Official site

 


Zombies from Outer Space

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‘They Do NOT Come In Peace!’

Zombies from Outer Space is a 2012 German sci-fi comedy horror film directed by Martin Faltermeier and starring Judith Gorgass, Siegfried Foster and Florian Kiml.

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Plot teaser:

Rural Bavaria. The late 1950’s. Something very strange is taking place. When Maria (Judith Gorgrass) happens upon the dead body of a woman, little does she realize the terror that will unleashed. Noted scientist Dr. Robert Hoelzlein (Florian Kiml) and American Army Captain John Welles (Siegfried Foster), both brought in to investigate the crime, soon butt heads over the case and their mutual attraction to Maria. Romance takes a back seat when more bodies are discovered. Who or what has caused these mysterious deaths?

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The following bands appear on the soundtrack; Biermösl Blosn, The Meteors, Cherry Casino and the Gamblers, The Bricats, and Mars Attacks.

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Buy Zombies from Outer Space on DVD from Amazon.com

Reviews:

“The story works (quite) well and it delivers entertainment in good doses, even if I wished for more graphic gore and less talk. It’s already a bit too long, so I – if I was a producer – would have demanded some cuts, maybe to get it down to 85 minutes. Then it would have been perfect, cheesy entertainment. Now it’s a ambitious, good, crazy and very well-made oddity that deserves a bigger audience!” Fred Anderson

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“If you have a soft spot for the classic horror films of the 50’s and 60’s this could well work for you. Slightly more splatter would however have been welcome. All in all, not a knockout but  still a remarkable debut film “Made ​​in Germany”. Watch the Shit

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“Pure entertainment value is high, especially in light of the available funds and resources.” Scary Movies

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Official websiteIMDb

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The Barrens

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The Barrens is a 2012 American horror film written and directed by Darren Lynn Bousman (Mother’s Day) and starring Stephen Moyer (True Blood) and Mia Kirshner. The film was released under different titles in several European territories: e.g. as Jersey Devil in the German-speaking countries and as The Forest in France and Belgium. In the UK the film was released as Devil in the Woods.

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Plot Teaser:

It’s known as the Jersey Devil, the winged beast spawned 400 years ago by Satan himself. Some say this creature still inhabits the dense pine forests of southern New Jersey, where Richard Vineyard (Stephen Moyer) takes his family for a rustic weekend camping trip. As the Vineyard family ventures further into the woods in search of the perfect campsite, Richard teeters on the edge of sanity. And it seems that the blood-crazed demon called The Jersey Devil may no longer be just a myth…

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Buy The Barrens on Blu-ray/DVD combo from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

Reviews:

“Told in a pretty straightforward manner, The Barrens moves along at a good pace once the initial character build-up is over with. On the surface it sounds kind of meh, but this actually was an engaging movie. Sure, it has a lot of the cliché stuff that shows up in tons of movies (such as bad relationship between step-mother and step-daughter; psycho dad losing his shit). But the movie really does a great job of throwing in different pieces of information to set up a number of possibilities as to where the story will end up.” Rock! Shock! Pop!

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“It’s not a perfect film, in fact after the first viewing I thought the ending was sorta a cheat, trying to be all things to everyone but with a repeat watch I was left with the opinion that this is a really decent pulse-pounder with some definite notes of The Shining as he loses his shit Jack Torrence style putting his son Danny in danger. ” McBastard’s Mausoleum

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“I suppose it isn’t completely without redeeming qualities. The creature FX aren’t that bad, and if you like the frantic, overdone visual style of Bousman’s earlier (clearly higher-budgeted) movies, then there are brief moments of that to be found here. And I suppose some of the supporting players turn in some reasonable performances. But ultimately, this is just a turd, and – as the saying goes – there’s just no polishing it.” Brutal as Hell

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Read The Jersey Devil – folklore and mythology

Wikipedia | IMDb

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The Velvet Devil – wine

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The Velvet Devil is a red Merlot wine produced by Charles Smith Wines, Washington, USA. The grapes used are 99% Merlot, 1% Cabernet Sauvignon, grown in the Columbia Valley.

Review:

“There is a full frontal goblin attack of crushed black berry fruits, concentrated jammy and even slightly spicy cassis, blackberry sorbet, soft balanced tannins and a really lovely, juicy fleshlike mouth-feel. The midpalate is solid, showing good backbone and the lingering finish is a testament to skilled winemaking using top quality fruit, with just a touch of black licorice, black cherry and allspice remaining on the palate after 20-plus seconds. This devil does not joke around.” Gil Lempert-Scwarz, Las Vegas Review

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We fully concur with Gil’s expert review above. Having quaffed a carafe of The Velvet Devil this afternoon at The Red Lion and Sun pub, we can recommend it highly. So smooth and, yes,very velvety! Definitely one of the best Merlots we have ever tasted. Winemaker Charles Smith managed rock bands in Scandinavia for years before becoming a vineyard entrepreneur, so it seemed fitting that a legend of Brit rock, former Kinks-frontman, Ray Davies, was enjoying his lunch in the same pub… Lazying on a Sunny Afternoon.

Adrian J Smith

Buy The Velvet Devil from Amazon.co.uk



Christopher Lee – actor

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Christopher Frank Carandini Lee (27 May 1922 – 7 June 2015) was an English actor, singer, and author. With a career spanning nearly seventy years, Lee initially portrayed villains and became best known for his role as Count Dracula in a sequence of Hammer Horror films. His other film roles include Francisco Scaramanga in the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), Saruman in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy (2001–2003) and The Hobbit film trilogy (2012–2014), and Count Dooku in the final two films of the Star Wars prequel trilogy (2002 and 2005).

Obituary:

Christopher LeeWe knew it was coming – the man was 93, after all – but you could easily believe that if anyone was going to live forever, it would be Christopher Lee. His death on Sunday, announced today, shows that even he was mortal.

But what a life. It’s fair to say that whoever you are and however long you live, you will never be as utterly cool as Christopher Lee. This is a man who was a wartime spy, had a film career than lasted almost seventy years – working with everyone from Jess Franco to George Lucas – and in his Nineties recorded a bunch of heavy metal albums, picking up a Metal Hammer award to go alongside his knighthood, BAFTA  Fellowship and other gongs.

Lee made so many films that even listing the highlights will turn into a gargantuan list. He rose to fame working for Hammer – in The Curse of Frankenstein, he was simply the monster – sorry, ‘creature’ – but then got to prove his acting chops with Dracula the next year, in the process becoming the iconic version of the character in a variable series of films. Lee would be a Hammer regular in the late 1950s and continued to work with them, often co-starring with Peter Cushing, throughout the 1960s and 70s, on films as varied as SheTaste of Fear, The Man Who Could Cheat Death, Pirates of Blood River,The Devil Rides Out, Terror of the Tongs and the final horror film of Hammer’s first incarnation, To the Devil a Daughter. In 2011, he returned to the revived company to appear in The Resident.

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Lee also worked frequently for Hammer’s rivals Amicus – he starred in their first horror film The City of the Dead (aka Horror Hotel) and would be one of their go-to stars for films like Dr.Terror’s House of HorrorsThe Skull, The House That Dripped BloodScream and Scream Again and I, Monster. But Hammer and Amicus were just the tip of the iceberg when it came to Lee’s horror work in the 1960s, as he travelled across Europe to star in a huge number of films. He worked with Mario Bava on The Whip and the Body and Hercules in the Haunted World, spoofed his Dracula role in Uncle Was A Vampire (he would do likewise in 1976 in Dracula and Son) and also appeared in The Virgin of NurembergTerror in the Crypt aka Crypt of HorrorCastle of the Living DeadNight of the Big Heat, Circus of FearThe Blood Demon and The Oblong Box amongst others. He played Sir Henry Baskerville in Hammer’s Hound of the Baskervilles and then graduated to playing Sherlock Holmes.

DraculaAlso in the 1960s, he developed another recurring role, playing arch villain Fu Manchu in five films. The last two of these were directed by Jess Franco, who Lee would go on to make several films with – from the ambitious but ultimately misguided Count Dracula (an attempt to stick to Stoker’s novel) to The Bloody Judge and Eugenie: The Story of Her Journey Into Perversion, though Lee maintained that he was unaware of the sort of film he was making in that instance!

In the early 1970s, Lee continued to make international horror films, including The Creeping Flesh, Horror ExpressDark Places, Nothing But the Night (for his own Charlemagne company) but increasingly found himself able to move beyond the genre. While still a horror movie, The Wicker Man was a cut above the usual in terms of respectability, while other films like The Three Musketeers, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, western Hannie Caulder and Julius Caesar allowed him to move away from the genre to a degree.

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A move to the USA and an iconic role in James Bond movie The Man with the Golden Gun cemented a move to the mainstream, and in the latter half of the decade and early 1980s, he had major roles in the likes of Airport ’77, Return from Witch Mountain, 1941, Bear Island, Goliath Awaits and a surprising number of martial arts action films: An Eye for an Eye, Jaguar Lives and Circle of Iron. Not that he abandoned low budget genre films – he was essentially tricked into hosting The Hollywood Meatcleaver Massacre, but also appeared in The Keeper, Starship InvasionsEnd of the World, Arabian Adventure, House of the Long Shadows and, most bizarrely, Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf and the appalling Funny Man.

Eugenie The Story of Her Journey Into PerversionIn the 1990s, he worked with Alejandro Jodorowsky on The Rainbow Thief, appeared in Police Academy: Mission to Moscow and turned up in Joe Dante’s Gremlins 2: The New Batch. This latter appearance was a precursor to his 2000’s career revival when he was often hired by directors who grew up watching him. So he worked with Tim Burton on Sleepy HollowCorpse Bride, Alice in WonderlandSleepy Hollow and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and appeared in both the decade’s biggest franchises, Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. And he just kept working – between 2010 and 2013, he made twelve films!

And it was more than just films and TV. Lee lent his voice to numerous audiobooks and latterly provided voices for video games – he also appeared in CD ROM project Ghosts in the mid 1990s. He fronted collections of horror stories, and wrote his autobiography, and made numerous records – in the 1970s, he narrated Hammer’s Dracula LP and made an opera single, in the early 2000s sang a handful of shockingly bad pop songs and then became a heavy metal star, first working with symphonic metal band Rhapsody and then releasing his won albums. He seemed to genuinely love this new and unexpected career twist, presumably no longer giving a damn what anyone thought of him.

They say that you shouldn’t meet your heroes, and they are often right. But I met Lee twice – once while working on a The Wicker Man featurette with David Gregory, and once when hanging around with the boys as they filmed Lee and Jess Franco for The Bloody Judge extras. Lee was exactly what you wanted him to be – dignified, serious, gentlemanly and charming. In short, he seemed a thoroughly decent chap. When he called me up after The Wicker Man shoot to get a number for one of the crew, my inner ten year-old exploded with excitement: Dracula on the phone!

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Lee might not have been entirely comfortable with his ‘horror star’ reputation, but I think he eventually came to realise how much his work meant to so many people – including those now employing him. And regardless of what he thought of the films he’d made, he was a genuine connoisseur of the gothic and the nightmarish in literature. He never seemed ashamed of his past.

The death of Christopher Lee is the end of an era. I doubt any living actor will clock up the sheer number of credits that he has, or leave the same sort of cultural imprint. I’ll miss never seeing another Lee Christmas message. And I’ll miss his reassuring presence – he was an integral part of my life since I was a small child and the world feels that little bit emptier now.

David Flint, Strange Things Are Happening

Filmography

# Year Film Role Notes
1 1948 Corridor of Mirrors Charles
2 1948 One Night with You Pirelli’s Assistant
3 1948 Hamlet Spear Carrier Uncredited
4 1948 Penny and the Pownall Case Jonathan Blair
5 1948 A Song for Tomorrow Auguste
6 1948 My Brother’s Keeper Second Constable Deleted scenes
7 1948 Saraband for Dead Lovers Bit Part Uncredited
8 1948 Scott of the Antarctic Bernard Day
9 1949 Trottie True Bongo
10 1950 They Were Not Divided Chris Lewis
11 1950 Prelude to Fame Newsman
12 1951 Valley of Eagles Det. Holt
13 1951 Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N. Spanish Captain
14 1951 Quo Vadis Chariot Driver Uncredited
15 1952 The Crimson Pirate Joseph (attache)
16 1952 Top Secret Russian Agent Uncredited
17 1952 Paul Temple Returns Sir Felix Raybourne
18 1952 Babes in Bagdad Slave Dealer
19 1952 Moulin Rouge Georges Seurat
20 1953 Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot Voice Uncredited
21 1953 Innocents in Paris Lieutenant Whitlock Uncredited
22 1954 Destination Milan Svenson
23 1955 Man in Demand
24 1955 Crossroads Harry Cooper
25 1955 Final Column
26 1955 That Lady Captain
27 1955 Police Dog Johnny, a constable
28 1955 The Dark Avenger French Patrol Captain at Tavern Uncredited
29 1955 The Cockleshell Heroes Submarine Commander
30 1955 Storm Over the Nile Karaga Pasha
31 1956 Alias John Preston John Preston
32 1956 Private’s Progress Gen. von Linbeck’s aide Uncredited
33 1956 Port Afrique Franz Vermes
34 1956 Beyond Mombasa Gil Rossi
35 1956 The Battle of the River Plate Manolo
36 1957 Ill Met by Moonlight German Officer at Dentists
37 1957 Fortune Is a Woman Charles Highbury
38 1957 The Traitor Dr. Neumann
39 1957 The Curse of Frankenstein The Creature
40 1957 Manuela Voice Uncredited
41 1957 Bitter Victory Sgt. Barney
42 1957 The Truth About Women François
43 1958 A Tale of Two Cities Marquis St. Evremonde
44 1958 Dracula Count Dracula Alternative title: Horror of Dracula
45 1958 Battle of the V-1 Labor Camp Captain, Men’s Section
46 1958 Corridors of Blood Resurrection Joe
47 1959 The Hound of the Baskervilles Sir Henry Baskerville
48 1959 The Man Who Could Cheat Death Dr. Pierre Gerard
49 1959 The Treasure of San Teresa Jaeger
50 1959 The Mummy Kharis, the Mummy
51 1959 Uncle Was a Vampire Baron Roderico da Frankurten
52 1960 Too Hot to Handle Novak
53 1960 Beat Girl Kenny
54 1960 The City of the Dead Prof. Alan Driscoll Alternative title: Horror Hotel
55 1960 The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll Paul Allen
56 1960 The Hands of Orlac Nero the magician
57 1961 The Terror of the Tongs Chung King
58 1961 Taste of Fear Doctor Pierre Gerrard
59 1961 The Devil’s Daffodil Ling Chu
60 1961 Ercole al centro della terra King Lico (Licos) Alternative title: Hercules in the Haunted World
61 1962 Stranglehold
62 1962 The Puzzle of the Red Orchid Captain Allerman
63 1962 The Pirates of Blood River Captain LaRoche
64 1962 The Devil’s Agent Baron von Staub
65 1962 Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace Sherlock Holmes
66 1963 Katarsis Mephistoles
67 1963 La vergine di Norimberga Erich Aka Castle of Terror and Virgin of Nuremberg
68 1963 La frusta e il corpo Kurt Menliff Aka The Whip and the Body and Night Is the Phantom
69 1964 Castle of the Living Dead Count Drago
70 1964 Terror in the Crypt Count Ludwig Karnstein Aka Crypt of the Vampire and Crypt of Horror
71 1964 The Devil-Ship Pirates Captain Robeles
72 1964 The Gorgon Prof. Karl Meister
73 1965 Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors Franklyn Marsh
74 1965 She Billali
75 1965 The Skull Sir Matthew Phillips
76 1965 Ten Little Indians Voice of “Mr. Owen” Uncredited
77 1965 The Face of Fu Manchu Dr. Fu Manchu / Lee Tao
78 1966 Theatre of Death Philippe Darvas
79 1966 Dracula: Prince of Darkness Count Dracula
80 1966 Rasputin, the Mad Monk Grigori Rasputin
81 1966 Circus of Fear Gregor Alternative title: Psycho Circus
82 1966 The Brides of Fu Manchu Fu Manchu
83 1967 The Vengeance of Fu Manchu Dr. Fu Manchu
84 1967 Night of the Big Heat Godfrey Hanson
85 1967 Five Golden Dragons Dragon #4
86 1967 The Blood Demon Count Frederic Regula, Graf von Andomai Aka The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism and Castle of the Walking Dead
87 1968 Curse of the Crimson Altar Morley
88 1968 The Devil Rides Out Duc de Richleau
89 1968 Eve Colonel Stuart Alternative title: The Face of Eve
90 1968 The Blood of Fu Manchu Fu Manchu
91 1968 Dracula Has Risen from the Grave Count Dracula
92 1969 The Castle of Fu Manchu Fu Manchu
93 1969 The Oblong Box Dr. J. Neuhart
94 1969 The Magic Christian Ship’s vampire
95 1970 Scream and Scream Again Fremont
96 1970 Umbracle The Man
97 1970 The Bloody Judge (es) Lord George Jeffreys Alternative title: Night of the Blood Monster
98 1970 Count Dracula Count Dracula
99 1970 Taste the Blood of Dracula Count Dracula
100 1970 One More Time Count Dracula
101 1970 Julius Caesar Artemidorus
102 1970 Eugenie Dolmance Aka Eugenie – The Story of Her Journey into Perversion
103 1970 The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes Mycroft Holmes
104 1970 Scars of Dracula Count Dracula
105 1971 The House That Dripped Blood John Reid Segment: “Sweets to the Sweet”
105 1971 Cuadecuc, vampir Count Dracula/Himself
106 1971 I, Monster Dr. Charles Marlowe/Edward Blake
107 1971 Hannie Caulder Bailey
108 1972 Death Line Stratton-Villiers, MI5 Alternative title: Raw Meat
109 1972 Nothing But the Night Col. Charles Bingham
110 1972 Dracula A.D. 1972 Count Dracula
111 1973 Dark Places Dr. Mandeville
112 1973 The Creeping Flesh James Hildern
113 1973 The Satanic Rites of Dracula Count Dracula
114 1973 Horror Express Sir Alexander Saxton
115 1973 The Three Musketeers Rochefort
116 1973 The Wicker Man Lord Summerisle
117 1974 The Four Musketeers Rochefort
118 1974 The Man with the Golden Gun Francisco Scaramanga
119 1975 Diagnosis: Murder Dr. Stephen Hayward
120 1975 Le boucher, la star et l’orpheline Van Krig/Himself
121 1976 The Keeper The Keeper
122 1976 Killer Force Major Chilton Alternative title: The Diamond Mercenaries
123 1976 To the Devil a Daughter Father Michael Rayner
124 1976 Dracula père et fils Prince of Darkness Alternative title: Dracula and Son
125 1976 Albino Bill Aka Whispering Death and Death in the Sun
126 1977 Airport ’77 Martin Wallace
127 1977 Meatcleaver Massacre On-screen narrator Aka Evil Force and Revenge of the Dead
128 1977 End of the World Father Pergado / Zindar
129 1977 Starship Invasions Captain Rameses
130 1978 Return from Witch Mountain Dr. Victor Gannon
131 1978 Caravans Sardar Khan
132 1978 Circle of Iron Zetan Alternative title: The Silent Flute
133 1979 The Passage Gypsy
134 1979 Arabian Adventure Alquazar
135 1979 Nutcracker Fantasy Uncle Drosselmeyer / Street Singer / Watchmaker Voice
136 1979 Jaguar Lives! Adam Caine
137 1979 Bear Island Lechinski
138 1979 1941 Capt. Wolfgang von Kleinschmidt
139 1979 Captain America II: Death Too Soon Miguel
140 1980 Serial Luckman Skull
141 1981 The Salamander Prince Baldasar, the Director of Counterintelligence
142 1981 Desperate Moves Dr. Carl Boxer
143 1981 An Eye for an Eye Morgan Canfield
144 1982 Safari 3000 Count Borgia
145 1982 The Last Unicorn King Haggard Voice; also in German language version
146 1983 New Magic Mr. Kellar
147 1983 The Return of Captain Invincible Mr. Midnight
148 1983 House of the Long Shadows Corrigan
149 1984 The Rosebud Beach Hotel Mr. Clifford King
150 1985 Mask of Murder Chief Supt. Jonathan Rich
151 1985 Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf Stefan Crosscoe
152 1986 The Girl Peter Storm
153 1987 Jocks President White
154 1987 Mio min Mio Kato
155 1988 Dark Mission Luis Morel
156 1989 Murder Story Willard Hope
157 1989 La chute des aigles Walter Strauss
158 1989 The Return of the Musketeers Rochefort
159 1990 The Rainbow Thief Uncle Rudolf
160 1990 L’avaro Cardinale Spinosi
161 1990 Honeymoon Academy Lazos
162 1990 Panga
163 1990 Gremlins 2: The New Batch Doctor Catheter
164 1991 Curse III: Blood Sacrifice Doctor Pearson
165 1992 Jackpot Cedric
166 1992 Kabuto King Philip
167 1994 Police Academy: Mission to Moscow Cmndt. Alexandrei Nikolaivich Rakov
168 1994 Funny Man Callum Chance
169 1994 Flesh and Blood Narrator/Self Last collaboration with Peter Cushing
170 1995 A Feast at Midnight V. E. Longfellow, a.k.a. Raptor
171 1996 Welcome to the Discworld Death
172 1996 The Stupids Evil Sender
173 1998 Tale of the Mummy Sir Richard Turkel
174 1998 Jinnah Mohammed Ali Jinnah Lee considers this to be his favourite role/most significant[2]
175 1999 Sleepy Hollow Burgomaster
176 2001 The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Saruman
177 2002 Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones Count Dooku / Darth Tyranus
178 2002 The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Saruman
179 2003 The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King Saruman Extended Edition only
180 2004 Crimson Rivers II: Angels of the Apocalypse Heinrich von Garten
181 2005 The Adventures of Greyfriars Bobby The Lord Provost
182 2005 Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith Count Dooku / Darth Tyranus
183 2005 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Dr. Wilbur Wonka
184 2005 Corpse Bride Pastor Galswells Voice
185 2007 The Golden Compass First High Councillor
186 2008 Star Wars: The Clone Wars Count Dooku / Darth Tyranus Voice
187 2009 Boogie Woogie Alfred Rhinegold
188 2009 Triage Joaquín Morales
189 2009 Glorious 39 Walter
190 2010 Alice in Wonderland Jabberwocky Voice
191 2010 Burke & Hare Joseph
192 2010 The Heavy Mr. Mason
193 2011 Season of the Witch Cardinal D’Ambroise
194 2011 The Resident August
195 2011 The Wicker Tree Old Gentleman
196 2011 Grave Tales Himself Original version only
197 2011 Hugo Monsieur Labisse
198 2012 The Hunting of the Snark Narrator Voice
199 2012 Dark Shadows Silas Clarney
200 2012 The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey Saruman
201 2013 Night Train to Lisbon Father Bartolomeu
202 2013 Necessary Evil Narrator Voice
203 2013 The Girl from Nagasaki Old Officer Pinkerton
204 2014 The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies Saruman
205 2014 Extraordinary Tales Voice
206 2015 Angels in Notting Hill The Boss, Mr. President

Death Rides a Horse: Horror Westerns – article by Kevin Grant

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Horror films and westerns are two of cinema’s great mainstays, having established their distinct identities and sets of conventions in the earliest days of the medium. So distinct from each other, in fact, as to seem entirely incompatible – as different as night, the domain of horror, from day, the traditional setting for westerns.

And yet, this is to overlook, or underestimate, the commercial cinematic will to find a way – or to flog a dead horse, no matter how rotting the carcass. While the notion of ‘horror’ conjures up specific images or referents – castles, vampires, zombies, graveyards, summer camps – it is not defined by time or place, nor confined by character type or cultural/historical context. The western may appear to be immutable, certainly by contrast, although stories can slip north or south of the United States border, even into the present day, and remain hitched to the genre. It has never been impermeable, however – hence there are Cold War westerns, noir westerns, feminist westerns (albeit a rare breed), even – Wayne forbid – quasi-Marxist westerns, imported from Italy.

Horror began seeping in, like a virus, in the Twenties, mostly in the form of cloak-wearing villains whose ghostly aura was always dispelled in the end, much like every episode of the old-school Scooby-Doo. The novelty of combining seemingly disparate formulas quickly wore off through overuse (not before it produced The Phantom Empire, a western serial targeted at the Flash Gordon crowd, in which singing cowboy Gene Autry discovers a subterranean colony of ray-gun-firing robots). It was revived in the heyday of drive-in movies and creature features – the anything-goes era – and surfaced in the more baroque European productions, on the back of a gothic-horror revival.

The horror western has never had a ‘moment’, as such. That said, in the past decade a steady stream of titles has capitalised on the renewed popularity both of horror films – especially those centred on the undead – and, relatively speaking, of westerns. Not that we are talking about a golden age – nobody has yet calculated the perfect ratio of one genre to the other. If there is a unifying theme to these more recent films, it is that zombies and bloodsuckers have replaced the Native American as the feared and despised Other; the id that must be scratched (whether the land bordering the frontier belongs rightfully to the dead in the same way it is spiritually bound to the Red Man – at least according to romantic art and literature and revisionist western fiction – is not a notion these films entertain). Beyond that, it is a belief that style takes precedence over substance, and a misconception that references to Leone and Romero are both mandatory and sufficient.

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Kevin Grant:

Given the blurring of genre lines, exactly what constitutes a horror-western is not always obvious; there is not, as yet, an algorithm that can be applied to the problem (just what have mathematicians been doing with their time?). With that in mind, this is a subjective selection. The films in this overview all feature something uncanny, or at least allude towards it, and are set either entirely or substantially in the Old West. They must also utilise frontier iconography in a more than perfunctory or decorative fashion. Ergo House II: the Second Story, is omitted, zombie cowboy notwithstanding, as is the playful Sundown: the Vampire in Retreat, a contemporary horror-comedy with a light dusting of western tropes. And as for all those portentous Native American curse flicks – Death Curse of Tartu, Shadow of the Hawk, Nightwing, The Manitou, Scalps, ad nauseam – the bulk of these are not westerns and properly comprise a sub-genre of their own for some future article.

The majority of titles here were prepared for theatrical release, with one or two made for TV. More recent entries reflect the increasing importance – indeed, the crucial role – of home media formats as an alternative mode of distribution, certainly at the cheaper end of the market.

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Haunted Gold (1932)

An early example of The Cat and the Canary-type school of mystery film that plays on the fears of its characters and its audience in much the same fashion, exploiting setting and superstition to instil fear of a supernatural, or at least superhuman, presence that turns out to be anything but.

The plot, which centres on disputed ownership of a gold mine, is as creaky as the furniture; as a vehicle for John Wayne, however, then just twenty five years-old and the next big thing in westerns, it is lifted out of the routine by the spooky atmosphere conjured by Mack V. Wright’s lively direction and Nicholas Musuraca’s contrast-rich photography (Musuraca later graduated with distinction to film noir).

Wright utilises the murky environs – ghost town; abandoned mine; dark woods – and old-dark-house clichés – sliding panels; secret passageways; black-robed ‘phantom’ – with verve and imagination (some footage was spliced in from a silent western, The Phantom City, of which this film is a remake). There is relatively little physical action, for a western: the high point, quite literally, is a hair-raising tussle between Wayne and a villain in a mine cart, suspended over a canyon; shortly after, Wayne is saved from doom by the intervention of his horse, Duke – a co-star in at least six of Wayne’s westerns at Warners in the Thirties, and likely the source of the star’s future nickname.

Overall, this is a fair example of what Paul Green, in his Encyclopedia of Weird Westerns, calls the ‘Weird Menace’ sub-genre. The mystery element is unmasked without too much fanfare, but one aspect of the film likely to horrify modern viewers is the performance of the black actor Blue Washington, who plays Wayne’s sidekick as a jittery, bumbling, bug-eyed racial stereotype.

‘Phantom’ was a popular appellation for veiled villains and Zorroesque heroes in mystery westerns of the time. See also: The Vanishing Riders; Tombstone Canyon, in which chunky Ken Maynard discovers, in a typical twist, that the Phantom is his presumed-dead father; The Phantom of the West and The Phantom of the Range, both starring Tom Tyler, who later played a different Phantom in the 1943 cliffhanger serial based on Lee Falk’s comics and The Mummy.

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The Beast of Hollow Mountain (1956)

Emerging from a herd of dino-themed creature features – Two Lost Worlds, The Lost Continent, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The Land Unknown – this ersatz western rouses itself from a prehistoric plot about romantic/territorial rivalry for a rip-roaring climax. For almost an hour, the story of gringo rancher Guy Madison and his dispute with a Mexican landowner – over both cattle and a woman – plods its course, occasionally referring to a legend surrounding the titular mountain, the swamp at its base and a creature “from the dawn of time”.

Madison’s travails as an expat do not provide the basis for an affecting study of cultural dislocation along the lines of 1959’s The Magnificent Country. Rather, they form a flimsy pretext, ensuring there is an American hero on hand to battle the beast once it eventually appears – this he does virtually single-handedly, luring it into the swamp while a group of Mexicans watch from a safe distance (Anglo protagonists were always preferable, and demonstrably superior, to foreigners or racial minorities where the majority of Hollywood westerns were concerned).

The presence of Willis O’Brien’s name among the credits – as writer – may arouse expectations, but unfortunately the animation genius behind the original King Kong didn’t handle the effects here. The stop-motion work is as primitive as the ill-tempered Allosaurus itself, whose first full appearance in model form is preceded by close-ups of rubbery, clawed feet striding manfully into shot. It’s from here that the picture gathers pace – model cows are eaten, cattle stampede, Madison saves his enemy from the jaws of death and performs some Tarzan-like derring-do with his lariat.

It’s generally well photographed – the exception being the rear-projection footage in the dinosaur scenes, which is difficult to distinguish – and no sillier than most other monster movies of the period. Yet without a compelling context – the threat posed by nuclear technology, say – it’s merely average escapism. The premise of cowboys versus dinosaurs was realised in a much more accomplished manner in The Valley of Gwangi.

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The Swamp of the Lost Monsters (1957/English version 1965)

This mutant offspring of Creature from the Black Lagoon was dredged from the depths of cinematic obscurity by the opportunistic producer K. Gordon Murray, who scraped together a few dimes and dubbed and retitled a slew of Mexican monster movies for the Sixties drive-in circuit and late-night TV. Over-plotted and under-funded, it ropes in a cowboy detective (Gastón Santos) when the body of a wealthy rancher seemingly disappears from its coffin. The cause of death was a “fishy-eyed ghost” that inhabits the local swamp, but functions equally well on dry land and knows how to use a spear gun – and Morse code.

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The time-honoured ‘man in a rubber suit’ technique is more acceptable here in that the creature is, indeed, a man in a rubber suit. His identity is not difficult to ascertain once the dialogue brings in ‘life insurance’ as a plot element. The attempt to fuse matinee-western clichés (a super-intelligent horse; the curse of the comedy sidekick) with monster motifs is haphazard to the point of parody; the addition of melodrama – the dead man’s widow has been concealing the fact she is actually blind – takes it beyond that stage by some distance.

Santos was also a popular bullfighter and was a capable physical actor. He usually appeared on screen with his steed, Moonlight. The fact that the horse Moonlight can dance is not at all out of step with the tone of the film.

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Teenage Monster (1957)

Like its most memorable line – “This is no time for hysterics; there’s a killer terrorizing this town” – this drive-in also-ran is one long non-sequitur. The title suggests a conflation of two of the most popular trends in Fifties cinema – juvenile delinquency and science fiction – but what transpires is a primitive creature feature in western duds, with the titular tearaway played by a fifty year-old stuntman in a fright wig, hairy gloves and bad teeth; a rebel with claws, if you will.

Seven years previously, in 1880, young Charles was injured in a meteorite strike, which killed his father and afflicted the boy with an unexplained mutation. So far, so sci-fi, but the fireball (actually, it would seem, a children’s sparkler) is the extent of the film’s dalliance with the genre. The rest of the plot is taken up with the efforts of Ruth, Charles’ mother, to keep her hulking offspring’s existence a secret, not easy when he repeatedly sneaks out (in daytime) for adolescent high jinks, from killing cattle to throttling passers-by. Then the bitchy waitress Kathy discovers the truth, blackmailing Ruth and manipulating Charles’ undeveloped affections.

If the film-makers were hoping to elicit sympathy for the eponymous man-child and his jealousy of mom’s new boyfriend, the town sheriff, this is dashed by the sheer zaniness of the premise. This has the giant actor Gil Perkins, already burdened by comical creature make-up (this was a bad day at the office for Jack P. Pierce, who had designed Frankenstein’s monster for Universal since the Thirties), communicating in muffled grunts and groans (somehow his mother and the minxy Kathy can understand him), interspersed with the occasional intelligible word. “No Charles, don’t talk like that,” rails Ruth during one of his diatribes, and Perkins probably wished he hadn’t been obliged to.

Appearing in Teenage Monster perhaps hastened the retirement plans of Anne Gwynne, a minor star in the Forties, whose displays of maternal devotion as Ruth are nevertheless persuasive. The real star, in a film predicated, at least in title, on youthful petulance, is twenty year-old Gloria Castillo as Kathy, who turns on a dime from demure to devious, ensnaring the love-struck Charles with her doe eyes one minute; flashing them maliciously at Ruth the next. Whether venting her spleen or trilling coquettishly – “You love me, Charles? More than you love your mother…?” – she is far more frightening than the wolfman-like protagonist, who is a far cry from the “teenage titan of terror” proclaimed by the posters.

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Curse of the Undead (1959)
Residing somewhere between a B-western and a Z-grade horror film, this mid-alphabet quickie goes for the jugular from the opening moments as the credits, backed by a theremin, roll over images of grave markers and tombstones. Nearby, a girl lies dying, the latest victim of an epidemic whose physical symptoms include puncture wounds on the neck…

It sounds obvious but, were it not for its supernatural flourishes, the plot of Edward Dein’s film would be indistinguishable from countless other westerns about rival ranchers and water rights. Here, in a minor twist, the requisite hired gunman (paradigm: Jack Palance in Shane) is in the employ not of the land-grabbing bully of the piece, but the smaller rancher (Kathleen Crowley) fighting to survive. The major twist, of course, is that the mercenary killer is a vampire, played by Michael Pate, whose attraction to Crowley adds an edge to his rivalry with her intended, Eric Fleming’s town preacher.

Despite issuing from Universal, a studio steeped in Dracula lore, and being released a year after Hammer initiated a Bram Stoker revival, Curse of the Undead draws upon a different cultural tradition. Pate’s character is afflicted by vampirism after remorsefully committing suicide, a mortal sin in Catholicism. He is not evil, and Pate – an Australian expat whose wide-mouthed, leathery features saw him typecast as a heavy – plays him as a lost soul, more human than monster, eliciting greater sympathy than the more conventionally heroic Fleming. “What mercy did [God] show me?” demands Pate, whose woes began when he killed his brother in a red mist. Fleming, sanctimonious throughout, remains utterly implacable. (We might infer a certain amount of jealousy colouring the preacher’s judgement, given Pate’s involvement with the comely Crowley; unfortunately, the script avoids the issue.) When the showdown arrives, Fleming, armed with consecrated ammunition, is smugly assured of victory: “My boss’ll see to that.”

The ending satisfies the punitive demands of both second-feature westerns and mainstream religion, but it is the attention paid to Pate’s predicament that confuses the issue and makes the title, Curse of the Undead, more than just a throwaway concern.

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The Living Coffin (1959/English version 1965)
Buckskinned detective Gastón Santos returns, wonder horse in tow, for this variation on the legend of La Llorona, the ‘weeping woman’ of Mexican folklore. (Rafael Baledón, the director of Santos’s earlier Swamp of the Lost Monsters, made what is generally regarded as the best screen version of the tale, The Curse of the Crying Woman, in 1963). The traditional fable centres on a grieving mother reputed to have drowned her children for the sake of a faithless lover; she then spends eternity wailing and searching for them. In this rendition, superstition is rife that the late Doña Clotilde blames others for the death of her offspring in a swamp, and is responsible for a chain of killings. Santos has no truck with such talk, and suspects the location of a gold mine on Clotilde’s property is the root of the trouble.

Although far superior to …Lost Monsters, there are several issues with this Mexican hybrid (originally known as El grito de la muerte – the cry of death). The plot tangents, intended to forestall deductive reasoning, create instead the kind of narrative entropy that often results when the supernatural is employed as a cloak for the mundane. Not everybody will warm to the listless Santos, the equine heroics of his mount (rescuing his master from a pit of quicksand by tossing him a rope; firing a rifle – off-screen, sadly) or the comedic bumbling of his entirely dispensable sidekick, who short-circuits suspenseful build-up on more than one occasion. Nor can one overlook the incompetently choreographed fistfights, with blows that clearly miss by several inches.

Elsewhere, however, director Fernando Méndez (The Black Pit of Dr M) cooks up an oppressive, Poe-like atmosphere of morbidity and dread. Clotilde’s hacienda, where her sister resides in a limbo state, is shrouded in gloomy shadows, from the subterranean passageway, where ghostly señoras flit in the darkness, to the mausoleum, rigged with an alarm system that rings whenever a coffin has been disturbed. The nearby town – consisting, for budgetary reasons no doubt, of a single street and a couple of interiors – is subtly lit and eerily deserted; the lack of extras again points to penny pinching, but is explained plausibly as an exodus of young folk, driven away by the weeping woman’s curse. Clotilde herself (or so it would seem) enjoys some Fulci-esque close-ups, her pale, crusty face lit from beneath and looming from the screen. These gothic pleasures compensate for the periodic silliness and the routine climax – all masks, mannequins and mechanical platforms, in which Santos’s super-steed saves the day once more.

The Rider of the Skulls

The Rider of the Skulls (1965)

An endearingly preposterous, no-budget mash-up of Zorroesque heroics and monster mayhem, this is grade-Z cinema of the highest – or lowest – order. Seemingly cobbled together from a Mexican TV series, which would explain the discontinuity, it follows the titular masked crime-fighter as he subdues in turn a werewolf, a vampire and a headless horseman, each of whom terrorises the same ugly patch of scrubland, among the same derelict buildings, in otherwise unrelated episodes.

The monsters sport crude rubber and papier-mâché masks that would shame a remedial art class; the Rider’s face-wear resembles a niqab at first, although he changes to a full-head mask after dispatching the werewolf. (Indeed, he seems to be played by a different actor from this point.) Most scenes are filmed day for night, or vice versa – hence the absurdity of the vampire taking fright at the onset of dawn (“I must return to my coffin. Sunlight is deadly to me”) when it is clearly daytime already.

But then, everything about Skulls is ill conceived: exposition from a zombie; talking (patently fake) heads; a grown man who adopts the Rider as his “daddy”… The coup de grace of bizarreness is delivered in the final sequence, when the horseman, having recovered his head, disputes with God, represented by stock footage of lightning, like a child defying parental orders to go to bed.

Criticising a film like this is about as worthwhile as punching a kitten. It is one to watch, or avoid, because of the outlandish anomalies and non-sequiturs, not in spite of them.

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Billy the Kid vs. Dracula (1966)

Take generous quantities of ham and corn. Stir. Add marquee-friendly title. Serve to a jaded public. This myth-mash of vampire lore and Old West legend is unfortunatally far duller than its outré title suggests. Its undead villain (he is never referred to as Dracula) preys on a pretty young rancher, posing as her uncle in a plot to make her his mate. He is finally stymied by her sceptical fiancé, one William H. Bonney.

As a western, it is at best perfunctory – there is an indigenous American stagecoach attack, a brief fistfight and not much else. It is equally cursory as a vampire film – Carradine has no reflection, but is fine to walk around in daylight. His entrances are preceded by shots of a distinctly rubbery bat; tongues were avowedly in cheeks, which is just as well.

Director William Beaudine had been making films since the silent era. He earned the sobriquet ‘One Shot’ for his speedy, no-frills technique. This one was made in eight days at the Corrigan Movie Ranch in California, founded by B-western star Ray ‘Crash’ Corrigan. John Carradine responds to the absurdity of the premise with a supremely arch performance centred on the muscles around his eyes, while Chuck Courtney essays perhaps the blandest Billy the Kid in screen history. Nostalgia buffs may note the presence of veteran western players Roy Barcroft, as the slow-witted sheriff; Harry Carey Jr; and Carey’s mother, Olive, who is refreshingly wry as the town doctor, who naturally has a book on vampires among her medical texts.

Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter (1966)

William Beaudine’s swansong – begun just a fortnight or so after Billy the Kid… finished shooting – is as plodding and nonsensically plotted as its companion piece. The title again is misleading: Maria Frankenstein, the eccentric villainess, is actually the granddaughter of Baron Victor, whose work she pursues fanatically. Driven out of Vienna with her lily-livered (and inexplicably much older) brother, she has pitched up at a matte painting of an abandoned mission in Arizona, attracted by the frequency of electrical storms – the better to power her experiments. These have resulted in several dead children, but precious little progress. Then Jesse James arrives (don’t ask – contrived doesn’t begin to cover it), seeking medical help for his wounded friend, the muscle-bound Hank, whom Maria sizes up as a perfect specimen.

As in Billy the Kid…, the western plot – stagecoach hold-up, ambush, double cross – is nondescript, but the finale tweaks the tone to something approaching hysterical. In her lab full of buzzing electrodes and bottles marked ‘poison’, Maria transplants Hank’s brain (the difference is negligible), renames him Igor and turns him on Jesse and Juanita, a Mexican spitfire.

Estonian expat Narda Onyx overplays as Maria, whether disparaging peasants or eyeing Hank lustfully, while John Lupton as Jesse looks bemused throughout. “They were made for fun,” production supervisor Sam Manners said of Beaudine’s low-budget midnight movies, which were targeted squarely at the undiscerning drive-in crowd. Fun (and a quick profit) may have been the aim, but the results are lackadaisical more than anything else.

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Django, Kill! (1967)
The most notorious of Italian westerns, this concoction of art-film aesthetics and mordant humour is almost Buñuelian in its dreamlike texture and provocative imagery. Director Giulio Questi approached the project from a position of intellectual aloofness, transforming a standard plot – outlaw seeks revenge on treacherous partners/who’s got the gold? – into a macabre meditation on greed and intolerance, cruelty and madness.

All of this lies just beneath the surface of the nameless town where Tomas Milian’s half-breed outlaw discovers the massacred remains of the men who betrayed him. (His name is not Django; the export title merely traded on that character’s popularity.) The inhabitants of what the local Indians call “the unhappy place” are venal and corrupt, overseen by moral guardians who are murderous hypocrites.

Into the mix comes Roberto Camardiel’s jovial/sadistic Mexican bandit, with his retinue of well-groomed “muchachos” (their identical black outfits were Questi’s spiteful homage to Mussolini’s fascists), who torture Milian, tear up graves and (it is suggested) gang-rape a young Ray Lovelock.

There is splashy gore – scalping, bullet-hole fingering, eviscerated horses – and an infernal ending that paraphrases Roger Corman’s Poe series. The powerlessness of Milian’s protagonist mocks the western’s traditional espousal of macho individualism.

If You Meet Sartana ... Pray For Your Death

If You Meet Sartana, Pray for your Death (1968)
“I feel as if a ghost were following me…” The protagonist of this baroque, sardonic Euro-western is a gambler-cum-conjuror rather than a spectre, mesmerising and mystifying enemies and observers alike with his sleight of hand (made to look even more impressive by some subtle under-cranking) and powers of evasion. A private investigator of sorts, he is played in sly, suave fashion by Gianni Garko, who reprised the role in three additional films. (Garko played an unrelated Sartana, a villain in that case, in the earlier western Blood at Sundown.)

After surviving an attack on a stagecoach he has been trailing, Sartana unpicks a complicated plot involving stolen gold, blackmail and insurance fraud. Everybody is cagey by default – alliances are formed and sundered in the flash of a gunshot. And why double cross when you can triple cross?

Notwithstanding these narrative perturbations, which became a hallmark of the Sartana series, it is the central character’s Mandrake-like talents that make him especially enigmatic and darkly charismatic. Director Gianfranco Parolini, aka Frank Kramer, surrounds his hero with graveyards and morticians, and kits him out with Bondesque gadgetry.

He is augmented further by a front-rank cast of connivers and cut-throats, principally William Berger, Fernando Sancho, in his habitual role of grandstanding bandit chieftain, and a dapper Klaus Kinski – the first of his two appearances in the Sartana franchise.

Sartana describes himself as a “first-class pallbearer”; his chief antagonist thinks he’s more like the devil. Subsequent films would break the spell; here, however, Parolini encourages the impression with mischievous relish.

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The Valley of Gwangi (1969)

King Kong with cowboys. Substitute a giant primate with a dinosaur and that’s the concept in a nutshell. Sadly, Gwangi’s mighty roar fell on deaf ears in 1969, when popular cinema was more self-aware and more sensationalistic. “A naked dinosaur just was not outrageous enough,” lamented Gwangi’s creator, Ray Harryhausen, fresh from surrounding a nearly naked Raquel Welch with primeval anachronisms in One Million Years BC. Perhaps it would have drawn greater crowds in the Fifties, when both westerns and monster movies were at their peak. True, 1956’s Beast of Hollow Mountain did not exactly seize the box office in its jaws, but that lacked Harryhausen’s genius and was less evenly paced.

Nevertheless, this remains a rattling adventure. The plot excavates a 1942 project, also called Gwangi, by King Kong animator Willis O’Brien, and apes (ahem) Kong’s narrative: showmen slumming it in Mexico discover a fabulous creature in a “forbidden valley” (another variation on Conan Doyle’s “lost world”), dismiss native superstitions and bring it back to civilisation for an ill-fated exhibition. After a short-lived rampage, the creature meets a noble and oddly poignant demise. (Unlike Kong, Gwangi shows no interest in the heroine, except as a potential snack.)

Gwangi – an imagined cross between a T.Rex and an Allosaurus – is an imposing and vivid creation, all rippling muscles, swishing tail and snapping jaws. He is the alpha beast in Harryhausen’s prehistoric menagerie, which also includes pterodactyls, a strapping Styracosaurus and the rather daintier (and comically misnamed) ‘El Diablo’ – a tiny, horse-like Eohippus, extinct for 50 million years.

It is when El Diablo is stolen from Gila Golan’s Wild West show and returned to the wild by gypsies that Golan and her wranglers venture to the valley, joined by her old flame, the cocky opportunist James Franciscus, and Laurence Naismith’s conveniently placed palaeontologist. After a skirmish, Gwangi is subdued, transported in a wagon and readied for his stage debut; trapped in a blazing cathedral, he literally brings the house down.

There is some consideration to issues raised in other cautionary fantasies (notably Jurassic Park), with the concerns of science pitted against superstition and the profit motive, but these are not pursued with the same vigour with which the characters chase Gwangi, and vice versa. The human protagonists are largely an ignoble bunch; it is Harryhausen’s meticulous stop-motion monsters, and the havoc they unleash, that reward viewing.

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Django the Bastard (1969)
When Franco Nero and Sergio Corbucci brought Django to the screen in 1966, they weren’t to know the extent to which the character would take on a life of his own – perhaps even a life after death, if we take Sergio Garrone’s unlicensed follow-up at face value. The original Django had something of the Grim Reaper about him; wrapped in a heavy black cloak, he travelled with his own coffin, and had an unhealthy affinity for cemeteries. It was not too much of a stretch for Garrone and his co-writer and star, the lugubrious Anthony Steffen, to endow the character with seemingly supernatural traits.

Inexpressive even by Steffen’s standards, this iteration of Django is a former soldier on the trail of three officers who left him and his comrades for dead. Instead of a coffin, he totes crosses engraved with the names of his prey. He moves stiffly, like death warmed up (or just about). Through camera trickery and judicious editing, he seems to materialise and disappear at will, terrifying the gunmen employed by Paolo Gozlino, his final target.

Garrone evidently studied the horror stylebook, if only to master the basics, as when Django is revealed in the darkness (most of the film is set at night) by a sudden burst of light, appears as a reflection in a water trough, or slides into shot in close-up; the impression gained is of a spectral presence lurking just beyond the frame. He seems invulnerable until wounded by Gozlino’s brother, a psychotic man-child played by Italian trash-film talisman Luciano Rossi. The injury doesn’t hamper Django for long, however, and the ending restores his mystique.

This ambiguity elevates Garrone’s offbeat western above most of the Django derivatives produced in the same period. (It is often suggested that Clint Eastwood was inspired by this film to make the ostensibly similar High Plains Drifter. Yet Django the Bastard was not distributed in the States until after Drifter had been produced, and even then it was hardly a marquee release. It is not inconceivable that Eastwood – or at least Drifter’s writer, Ernest Tidyman – saw this film in Europe at some point, or read about it, but it seems unlikely.)

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And God Said to Cain (1970)
A counterpart of sorts to Antonio Margheriti’s Web of the Spider (itself a remake of his own Castle of Blood), this dark and stormy western, once it dispenses with the preliminaries, transposes the notion of vengeful spirits from the olde worlde milieu of Sixties Italian horror films to an equally fantastical old West.

Klaus Kinski (later to play Poe in Web of the Spider) is cast to type as a wraith-like avenger, back from the dead in a metaphorical sense – fresh out of prison, and fixed on punishing the man who put him there. With his cadaverous features and baleful pronouncements (“I’ve earned the right to kill, even if God chooses to punish me for it”), Kinski is an unnerving protagonist, as inexorable as the storm that symbolises his wrath and convinces the weaker-minded of his opponents that he is a force of nature.

The plot is a mere pretext – Kinski’s quarry, played by co-producer Peter Carsten, is a powerful man with a private army, a proud son and a woman who once belonged to Kinski. What distinguishes the film is Margheriti’s gothic rendering of threadbare material. Much of the action takes place in darkness, with dust clouds billowing; Kinski skulks in a cave system that snakes beneath the streets; natural sounds are amplified; the camera often tilted to disorienting effect.

In scenes highly reminiscent of Django the Bastard, Kinski picks off Carsten’s hired guns with uncanny efficiency (and not just by shooting – Margheriti stalwart Luciano Pigozzi is crushed to death beneath a church bell), before confronting his adversary in a room lined with mirrors. This was a cliché even then, but not in the context of a western – this becomes almost notional, as the director’s staging, combined with the claustrophobic setting, atonal music and the flickering and crackling of flames, takes us into the realm of gothic melodrama, not dissimilar to Margheriti’s own period chillers.

Other Italian westerns with comparable inclinations include: Margheriti’s Vengeance, a sulphur-scented 1968 film featuring a flamboyant supervillain, and Whisky and Ghosts (1974), a botched attempt to rejuvenate the slapstick Trinity formula with supernatural frissons – Rentaghost is funnier; Lucio Fulci’s The Four of the Apocalypse (1975), with Tomas Milian as a Manson-like sadist; Sergio Martino’s A Man Called Blade (1977), a formula revenge plot embellished with gothic frills; Tex and the Lord of the Deep (1985), a mediocre adaptation of a long-running Italian comic strip, which involves Giuliano Gemma’s Tex Willer with Native American supernaturalism, among more mundane distractions.

Black Noon

Black Noon (1971)
At a time when Satan spread his wings over much of popular culture, this modest TV movie exploited the same paranoid fears and fantasies about all things diabolical or pagan that fuelled The City of the Dead, Rosemary’s Baby, The Devil Rides Out, The Brotherhood of Satan, The Exorcist, et al. It projects those fears onto an Old West setting, where minister John Keyes and his wife, Lorna, are found stranded in the desert by the good folk of nearby San Melas. The mood that develops is subtler than the in-joke (Melas-Salem) suggests. Roy Thinnes’ man of God is slowly corrupted by the flattery of the townsfolk and the longing looks of the mute Deliverance (Yvette Mimieux), who incapacitates his wife with black magic.

The creeping tempo – classic made-for-TV – escalates incrementally. The locals’ Olde Worlde ways prompt Lorna to observe, “It’s as if they were from another time, or another world,” which proves to be prescient. Keyes has visions of a bloodied man pursuing him, while Lorna glimpses a masked gathering, complete with goat and dead owl. The revelation of communal devil worship will surprise nobody evenly lightly schooled in modern horror, but it is well timed by TV veteran Bernard L. Kowalski, whose efforts to convey a dreamlike ambience are only patchily effective.

The casting is astute, and helps keeps the town’s placid veil in place. Old stagers Ray Milland, Gloria Grahame (wasted) and western stalwart Hank Worden are buttressed by the beatific Mimieux; Henry Silva has a more stereotypical role as an all-in-black, mustachioed bandit, shot ‘dead’ by Thinnes in a scene that accelerates his character’s fall from grace.

A flash-forward implies these entrapments occur every hundred years. Like the church that hosts the fiery final sacrifice, which is strongly reminiscent of The Wicker Man, Black Noon is a well-constructed slow-burner.

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Cut-throats Nine (1971)
Ultra-nihilistic and gratuitously violent, the final western directed by Joaquin Luis Romero Marchent was the most anomalous assignment of his career. The Spaniard made westerns in Europe even before Sergio Leone. He wasn’t radical like the latter, but had greater integrity and passion for the genre than most of the hired guns churning out ersatz-American shoot-’em-ups in the early Sixties.

How he arrived at this grim tale of greed and bestial savagery is something of a mystery. He co-wrote the story and script with Santiago Moncada, a specialist in cynical horror films, which helps explain the bitter tone – exacerbated by the wintry, mountainous conditions in which a group of escaped convicts and their captives, an army officer (Robert Hundar) and his daughter (Emma Cohen), find themselves.

Yet Romero Marchent was producer as well as director, indicating a considerable degree of professional commitment. Bloodying the waters are the graphic stabbings, slashings and eviscerations that have made the film notorious – it has been suggested, and seems likely, that these were added by someone other than the credited director, perhaps at the behest of distributors.

Cut-throats is thus, in part, a splatter film; in America, it was marketed with the offer of ‘terror masks’ for the squeamish. Looking beyond these inserts, which mark the reduction in the prisoners’ ranks as they succumb to their basest instincts, there is a macabre passage in which one of them hallucinates a vision of an undead Robert Hundar, stalking him through the wilderness.

As a whole it is a bracing and unsettling, if exploitative, experience.

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High Plains Drifter (1973)
Clint Eastwood’s first western as both director and star returned the genre to its roots as morality tale, albeit with blurred distinctions appropriate to the sceptical Seventies. Eastwood’s protagonist emerges like a mirage from the desert heat and proceeds to uncover the hypocrisy and collective guilt of Lago, a small mining town, where a marshal was whipped to death by three hired guns with the leading citizens’ complicity. The trio are on their way back from prison to punish the locals for turning them in, but it’s Eastwood’s revenge that counts, posited as a kind of divine retribution that consumes the town – painted red and renamed ‘Hell’ – in a blazing climax.

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Building on his Dollars persona while slyly sending it up, Eastwood’s moral vision is very much of its time: materialism and cowardice are worthy of disdain; non-consensual sex a marker of alpha masculinity. He encourages inferences about the stranger’s otherworldly origins but leaves the matter unresolved; the script identified him as the marshal’s brother, but this is never vouchsafed in the film. The first flashback to the murder is from the protagonist’s perspective, in the form of a dream, with the lawman played by Eastwood’s stunt double – their resemblance is close enough for siblings, which would make Drifter a more-or-less straight-up revenge film.

But the only thing definitive about the denouement – bloody vengeance against a backdrop of hellfire, after which Eastwood drops his heaviest hint that the stranger is more avenging angel than mortal man – is that a firm conclusion cannot be drawn. (See also: Eastwood’s Pale Rider [1985], an amalgam of Drifter and Shane that similarly invites metaphysical speculation.)

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A Knife for the Ladies (1974)
Nineteen-seventy-four was a pivotal year in the development of the slasher film. But enough about Black Christmas and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Also released, to a clamour of indifference, was this torpid murder mystery, also known as Silent Sentence, for no apparent reason, and Jack the Ripper Goes West, which is no less misleading.

So poorly paced that it sags even at 82 minutes (for a later release it was chopped down to under an hour), the plot follows a chain of stabbings in the Old West town of Mescal, where the grouchy sheriff reluctantly aids a hotshot detective to crack the case. The western setting is elementary – it was shot on the Old Tucson lot, there are actors and extras milling about, flatly intoning clunky dialogue (“This has got to be the work of a madman”), but no sense of time or place. It is difficult to convey a period feel when your lead actor looks as if he would rather be surfing or singing soft-rock ballads.

The kill scenes are similarly perfunctory, as well as tame, and the central mystery is not exactly taxing, although the revelation of the killer’s identity and motive belatedly injects some manic energy into proceedings. The overall impression is of people going through the motions, from Larry G. ‘Nigger Charley’ Spangler’s sluggish direction, to the indifferent acting – the exceptions being Jack Elam’s typically eccentric turn as the aggrieved sheriff, and Richard Schaal’s mannered portrayal of the town’s mortician, the one red herring of note.

Even the soundtrack suggests a production pieced together without much thought – the film opens with synthesized whines that echo the period’s experimental electronica, and closes with a full-throated psychedelic rock song. In between, the music is recycled from Dominic Frontiere’s bombastic score to the Clint Eastwood western Hang ’Em High.

For a western with slasher/giallo tropes, a far superior offering is the 1972 Italian film The Price of Death, with Gianni Garko as a Sartana-like sleuth and Klaus Kinski as a scornful murder suspect.

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The Shadow of Chikara (1977)
Equally likely to be overpraised or lambasted, this foray into the crowded realm of Indian mysticism is an atmospheric oddity. Civil War veterans Joe Don Baker (reliably surly), Ted Neeley (of Jesus Christ Superstar) and Joy Houck Jr, as the requisite part-Indian tracker, venture up the Buffalo River to a mountain in search of diamonds. Along the way they rescue Clint Eastwood’s muse Sondra Locke, encounter slack-jawed hicks of the Deliverance variety and are menaced by unseen, arrow-firing pursuers who “leave no tracks… move like a fog through the forest”. It all pertains to a mythical eagle-demon, Chikara, which has banished mankind from its domain.

Writer-director Earl E. Smith had ventured into horror’s hinterland before, having written The Legend of Boggy Creek and The Town That Dreaded Sundown; his scenario foreshadows more polished films like Southern Comfort and, especially, Predator – Houck could be Sonny Landham when he says, “I fear no man, Captain, but these are not natural people; they’re spirits, demons.” No monsters reveal themselves here, unless close-ups of an eagle count.

Smith gets good mileage from dense foliage and precipitous cliffs, shooting from low angles, the camera skirting the river’s surface. The eeriness trickles rather than flows, in true Seventies style, playing on the nerves of the characters – except for the rhino-skinned Baker – and lingering after the ambiguous, fashionably downbeat ending, in which Locke’s character abruptly takes centre stage.

Chikara used to play regularly on UK television in the Eighties. Today, it is trapped in public-domain hell. A washed-out, abbreviated print, under the title Curse of Demon Mountain, one of its many AKA’s, is the only one currently in circulation. A fairer assessment of a film that is haunting but ragged will have to wait until a scrubbed and restored version becomes available.

Eyes of Fire (1983)
Set in the Appalachians during the Colonial era, this is technically a period piece rather than a western. It employs the motif of settlers versus ‘savages’ in a similar way, however, and shares with The Shadow of Chikara a fascination with Native American mythology – here, a belief that “innocent blood… sinks into the earth… the souls of the slaughtered creatures gather together into a breathing spirit, a devil, that captures the living and commands their shadows”.

The ‘devil’ is a shambling, ragged, witch-like creature, complete with the titular orange eyes and a retinue of naked, mud-smeared followers; they prey upon a party of dissident pioneers led by Will, a deluded preacher, who struggles to comprehend the threat to the group. It falls to characters more closely attuned to the natural world – a rugged trapper and a young woman with seemingly magical powers – to confront the evil in the woods.

Director Avery Crounse eventually succumbs to Night of the Demon syndrome – the monster loses power once it becomes too palpable – and an overreliance on (badly dated) psychedelic optical effects. For much of the time, however, he cloaks his story, told in flashback by the sole survivors, in a genuinely weird ambience, all misty greenery, shadowy figures half-glimpsed in flash cuts, amplified ambient sounds and arresting imagery: a tree festooned with feathers; human faces embedded like totems in tree trunks.

Historical detail is solid, from costuming and dialect to the preacher’s (inevitably misguided) faith in Manifest Destiny, but this loses relevance in the third act amid demonic attacks, showers of bones, exploding children and copious green goo.

Karlene Crockett gives the one performance of note, as the enchanted Leah, but the main character, as such, is the Missouri wilderness, which seethes with sinister intent in the best tradition of backwoods horror.

Near Dark (1987)
Classic films are rarely born from artistic compromises, making Near Dark a beautiful anomaly. Kathryn Bigelow yearned to make a western but, in the Eighties, studios had about as much faith in that genre as they had in neophyte directors. So she and co-writer Eric Red, recognising the shared romanticism of westerns and horror movies, spliced the forms together, reconfiguring vampires as nomadic outlaws led, fittingly, by a character named Jesse, old enough to have fought in the American Civil War (like the James boys) and still a rebel more than a century later.

Jesse’s feral “family” – sexy matriarch Diamondback, man-child Homer, leather-clad psycho Severen – unwillingly adopts Caleb, a Midwestern dreamer smitten by, then bitten by, the ethereal Mae, Homer’s protégée. Their relationship dovetails with the gang’s evasion of the law, Caleb’s father and sister, and their primary enemy, the sun. It’s all shot, mostly from dusk till dawn, against a hauntingly hazy backdrop of plains and desert highways, Bigelow folding in elements of film noir (never exclusively an urban phenomenon) and road movie.

Ironically, the swerve towards horror did not pay the dividends everybody had been hoping for. Eschewing gothic trappings (the only cross in evidence is engraved on the butt of Jesse’s Single Action Army revolver – so much for its power as a deterrent), Bigelow’s vision was just too unconventional for the masses, especially compared with The Lost Boys, a contemporaneous reimagining of vampire lore that nevertheless retained much of the old iconography. Yet Bigelow’s melding of dreamy Midwestern milieu, lyricism and grungy violence (viz. the massacre in “shit-kicker heaven”) remains timeless (even Tangerine Dream rein in their digital excesses), whereas The Lost Boys has an unmistakable Eighties date stamp.

Bigelow doesn’t jettison all vampire traditions. Some she embraces, principally the combustible ferocity of sunlight. (Not all the film’s innovations are so convincing – Caleb and Mae are cured of their affliction by simple blood transfusions.) And if there is pathos in the plight of the young lovers, stranded between darkness and light, so there is in the fragility of the outlaws’ existence. For all their murderous hell-raising, there is also something intoxicating about them, even as their rebel yell – radiating from Henriksen’s smouldering Jesse and Bill Paxton’s exuberant Severen – dies out in a (literal) blaze of glory.

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Ghost Town (1988)
Not as lurid as most Charles Band productions of the time, Ghost Town pitches a modern-day sheriff into a premise that could have served an episode of The Twilight Zone. Franc Luz’s Deputy Langley follows a missing woman’s trail to Cruz del Diablo, a decrepit settlement in the outback, where the skeletal remains of its long-dead lawman spring from the ground and beg him to “rid my town of evil” – to wit, a gang of undead outlaws led by Devlin, whose men hold the spirits of the locals in a kind of tyrannical limbo, waiting for the right man to send their oppressor to hell and redeem them for their High Noon-like cowardice when their sheriff was killed. This Langley accomplishes, in a routine finale that retreats from the almost oneiric atmosphere built up in the first half.

The opening scenes yield some well-timed jolts and striking images: the capture of Catherine Hickland’s character, swept up in an unholy dust storm; shadowy, whispering figures silhouetted by flashes of lightning, watching Langley as he investigates the town; a cluster of saloon patrons glimpsed in a mirror, but not in the room itself. Langley seems to be slipping in and out of surface reality, although this impression is not sustained and the plot dissolves into a straight-up western scenario, albeit with supernatural inflections. The requisite showdowns obscure the more affecting moments, when the few townsfolk given featured roles (notably Bruce Glover as a blind, fortune-telling cardsharp) voice their anguish at lingering in purgatory, as well as their longing for death.

It is the undead villain, however, who captures the filmmakers’ imagination. Devlin alone among the outlaws has rotting flesh, and the only reason for that, one surmises, is that all the decade’s most iconic horror villains, from Freddie Krueger to Jason Voorhees, had similar afflictions. Despite Jimmie F. Skaggs’ enthusiasm in the role, Devlin is not of that calibre.

Nevertheless, Ghost Town is worth a visit. It has some original ideas, and the production design, costumes and performances are generally convincing, for what was evidently a cheap production. Much like Cruz del Diablo, there are few traces of the film’s existence, with no DVD currently in circulation. Its director, too, disappeared from the scene – this seems to have been the only film he made.

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Grim Prairie Tales (1990)
Determinedly old-fashioned, much to its benefit, this anthology employs the discrete talents of Brad Dourif and James Earl Jones as mismatched travellers who trade yarns and insults one night over a campfire.

The stories themselves are not especially substantial – due partly to weak writing and partly to the brevity demanded by the portmanteau format – but this is almost moot. What the raconteurs impart, in their sharply scripted linking scenes, is the simple pleasure of relating and absorbing tall tales. Two of these cover familiar genre territory – the consequences of desecrating sacred Indian ground, and revenge from beyond the grave. The others are more diverting. A clean-cut young man succumbs to lust in the dust with a wandering succubus, climaxing in an image so grotesque it would have graced Brian Yuzna’s Society. The most affecting segment eschews fantasy entirely; the shock here is that a young girl discovers her adored father (an impressive William Atherton) is a brutal racist, yet her moral outrage is tempered, perhaps even outweighed, by filial affection.

If the vignettes are serviceable, the interplay between Dourif, as a peevish urbanite, and Jones, as an ursine bounty hunter, is sparkling. Their relationship even develops a degree of warmth, as the sun comes up and they go their separate ways, and there is a blackly comic sting in the tale that undercuts Jones’s pretensions as a bounty hunter.

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Blood Trail (1997)
It is a trope of Native American-themed pursuit westerns that white hunters often find themselves the hunted, outfoxed by a prey with seemingly mystical powers. (See, for example, Robert Aldrich’s Ulzana’s Raid.) The twist here is that the quarry is a white man, a no-account cowboy who is possessed by a vengeful spirit after he and a friend desecrate an Indian burial ground. What unfolds is a mixture of supernatural and serial-killer motifs, in which a group of deputies (and their obligatory Christianised Indian guide) dwindle in number as they track a murderer, nicknamed Bloody Hands for the prints he leaves, through the Indian Territories.

Most of the carnage occurs off-screen, actor-director Barry Tubb building up the atmosphere in subtler ways – fleeting images of the elusive killer and his grisly handiwork; close-ups of an owl, a rather obvious metaphor for the predatory villain. The performances (by a largely unknown cast) are mixed – some lacklustre; others laudably naturalistic. These are ordinary men confronted by extraordinary events, and their reactions are measured and plausible.

Tubb’s judgement is not always so sound: certain daytime scenes would have played better, and generated more suspense, at night; inserts of the Indian warrior in what is presumably the spirit world add little of value; the number of deputies could have been reduced – there are too many for the slender running time to accommodate, and none makes a firm impression. (The involvement of Near Dark’s Adrian Pasdar, the best-known actor, is similarly inconsequential. He has two scenes, in one of which he hangs himself.) The music – New Age lite – is another weak point. Nevertheless, Tubb’s film is quietly effective, merging genre elements without being jarring.

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From Dusk Till Dawn 3: the Hangman’s Daughter (1999)
Part prequel, part rehash, this entry in the Tarantino-Rodriguez genre-bending franchise folds in the imagined adventures of the American writer Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared in Mexico in 1913, or so it is believed, after joining Pancho Villa’s revolutionary forces. It is the one sliver of originality in the backstory of the vampire Santanico Pandemonium, future queen of the Titty Twister brothel-slash-vampire haunt.

Although no more necessary than the first DTV sequel, Texas Blood Money, this does at least improve on that, mainly due to Michael Parks’ droll performance as Bierce. Sadly, it’s not primarily his story. Instead, the focus shifts to the charmless outlaw Johnny Madrid, who escapes the gallows and rides off with his would-be executioner’s daughter, Esmerelda. Their flight takes them to la Tetilla del Diablo (which has a more romantic ring to it than ‘Titty Twister’), where their paths converge with Johnny’s gang, his pursuers, and Bierce and the Newlies, young married missionaries. After some preamble involving barman Danny Trejo and a sultry Sonia Braga, the fangs come out, with humans pitched against reptilian bloodsuckers in a ‘twist’ that will wrong-foot only those viewers unfamiliar with the first film. Esmerelda, of course, is revealed to be a vampire princess.

Director PJ Pesce exhibits the magpie-like proclivities of Tarantino and Rodriguez, but none of their finesse. The western action is rendered in the adrenalised style that has become almost compulsory – slo-mo, Dutch angles, rapid panning, fast cutting – to the tempo of a diet-Morricone soundtrack. The spaghetti western influences extend to the visuals, with landscapes coated in twilight red or dusty ochre, and the characterisations, which are plug ugly to a fault. By the time the onus has shifted to horror, most people will be rooting for the vampires.

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Ravenous (1999)
Seamlessly melding disparate material, Antonia Bird’s visceral black comedy is almost sui generis, which helps explains its failure to find an audience. (Twentieth Century Fox’s hapless marketing campaign was another factor.) The script pays blood-smeared lip service to the cases of prospector and self-confessed cannibal Alfred (or ‘Alferd’) Packer, subject of 1993’s Cannibal! The Musical, and the Donner Party pioneers, some of whom ate their dead comrades while snowbound in the Sierra Nevadas in the winter of 1846-7.

Yet Robert Carlyle’s Colquhoun, lone survivor of a group of settlers, has not resorted to anthropophagy from starvation alone, but to test a Native American belief that a man who devours the flesh of his fellows gains superhuman potency. This provides the basis for a satire of sorts on the Darwinian dynamics of the western’s survivalist ethos, with Colquhoun challenging Guy Pearce’s emotionally ragged Mexican-American war veteran, John Boyd, to a contest of wills as much as physical resilience. The subsidiary characters, misfits to a man, are largely an irrelevance.

Having eaten flesh himself in a moment of weakness, Boyd is vulnerable to Colquhoun’s fiendish entreaties. “It’s not courage to resist me,” says Colquhoun, “it’s courage to accept me.” Pearce articulates Boyd’s struggle intensely, nerves straining as he clings desperately to his humanity; Carlyle, predictably but no less pleasingly, attacks his role with relish, imbuing Colquhoun with almost evangelical fervour.

Typical of the script’s mordant wit is Colquhoun’s backhanded appreciation of Manifest Destiny – he looks forward to the imminent influx of pioneers much like a gourmet anticipating a new restaurant opening – while the subversion of audience expectations is evident in the hero-shaped hole at the heart of the narrative. That function is notionally Boyd’s, but he is swiftly revealed to be a poltroon, banished to remote Fort Spencer in the Nevadas for battlefield cowardice.

Few things play to type in Ravenous – the wintry vistas are oppressive rather than inspiring; the music rasping rather than heroic. Only in Boyd’s epic duel with Colquhoun in the grand-guignol final act is there the spectre of a classic western trope – that of a damaged man grasping for redemption.

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Legend of the Phantom Rider (2002)
Something went badly awry here between concept and execution. The main plot – outlaw gang rules a town by force – feels divorced from the supernatural backstory – the recurring clashes, centuries apart, of good and evil spirits.

After a pre-credits sequence in which two warriors fight to the death in the West of 1165, the story jumps forward 700 years, when Blade, an ex-Confederate officer, leads a band of cut-throats. They subjugate the town of Saugus until a woman named Sarah, whose husband and son were slain by the gang, cries vengeance, and an Indian shaman summons a mysterious, scar-faced gunfighter named Peligidium to do the job.

Blade is described as “pure evil, broken from the gates of hell” but, as written and played (in an insufferably mannered vein) by co-writer Robert McRay, he is a run-of-the-mill megalomaniac, no more intimidating than a thousand other western tyrants. There are hints that he knows Peligidium (also played by McRay, thankfully without dialogue), that these are indeed reincarnations of eternally feuding spirits, but the sense of supernatural forces at play is ambiguous – less by design, you suspect, than because of sloppy storytelling.

We must also infer that Blade’s sparing of Sarah is because she “unknowingly harbours the ‘lost spirit’ of a warrior chief” and is thus Blade’s quarry, as the opening text suggests. This also states that the “battle for supremacy” between good and evil forces “only takes place within the ancient walls of the city of Trigon”, in which case one presumes that Saugus is built on the same site. By such tenuous threads is the plot held together. Eventually it becomes a moot point, since Blade is dispatched not by Peligidium, but by Sarah – hardly a fitting comeuppance for “the devil himself”, with his opposite number rendered redundant just when it matters. It is scarcely Armageddon.

The anticlimax is in keeping with Erik Erkiletian’s direction, which records killings, confrontations and conversations in the same flat manner; not even Peligidium’s interventions raise the tempo, set by a monotonous dark ambient score. With his flowing duster, Jonah Hex-like deformity and stooping posture, this ‘avenging angel’ cuts a certain dash, but his role is poorly defined; neither he nor Blade lives up to his billing. The remaining characters merely fill out the scenery – even Sarah, the galvanising force, limply played by Star Trek: the Next Generation’s Denise Crosby.

Horror devotees may enjoy seeing Phantasm’s Angus Scrimm as the town preacher, who finally takes up arms against the gang. For western fans, there is a minor role for veteran Stefan Gierasch (Jeremiah Johnson, High Plains Drifter) and tributes to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and The Culpepper Cattle Company, among others. These are crumbs of comfort, however, in a film that offers nothing new as a western and a supernatural atmosphere that would dissipate at the striking of a match.

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Dead Birds (2004)
Opening during the American Civil War, Alex Turner’s simmering debut takes a sharp detour, via a bloodily executed bank robbery, into the realm of The Amityville Horror, The Shining and The Evil Dead, with a foreboding edifice – in this case, a deserted plantation house where the outlaws hide out – functioning as a portal for demonic forces.

As a western, it is of minor interest – the historical context is only fleetingly addressed – but Turner cranks through the supernatural gears proficiently enough, from unsettling portents – a dead bird; a book of spells; a skinless, deformed animal out in the corn field – to ghostly apparitions and gruesome deaths. The central section unfolds at what may charitably be described as a deliberate pace: characters wander off alone to their doom, synced to electronic drones; ghostly children bear their fangs; mysterious human/animal footprints appear; lightning illuminates nasty surprises. The history of the house involves human sacrifice and occultism, and now it seems that anybody who enters becomes possessed by demons.

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The lead roles are capably played, if underwritten, by a cast including E.T.’s Henry Thomas and Man of Steel’s Michael Shannon. Period detail and set design show diligence, as do the gore effects, and the lighting and camerawork imbue the plantation house and its surrounding corn field with palpable menace.

Turner grasps for that clammy, Lovecraftian sense of otherworldly dread, of diabolical terrors inhabiting “a world around our own”; overall, his execution is a little too mechanical to achieve those ends. Nevertheless, Dead Birds holds its own among the glut of ghost stories that have been in vogue for much of the past two decades.

Tremors 4: the Legend Begins (2004)

The original Tremors was an engaging combination of monster-movie clichés, droll performances and smart writing, the Jaws formula transposed from ocean to desert. (Even the posters mimicked Roger Kastel’s famous artwork for Spielberg’s shark-buster.) After two indifferent follow-ups this prequel appeared set in 1889, when the town of Perfection was still called Rejection – purely, it seems, so that characters can remark on its aptness following an exodus of locals and the closure of the local mine.

This is typical of the script’s laboured humour, as are the greenhorn antics of supercilious mine owner Hiram Gummer, the ancestor of series mainstay Burt Gummer (this was the role that practically sustained the career of actor Michael Gross for a decade and a half. He also played the part in a thirteen-episode TV series). Hiram arrives from the East to discover that 17 miners have been killed by unseen creatures, dubbed “dirt dragons” by the smattering of locals who remain. Of course, these are really the mighty-mawed graboids seen in various iterations throughout the series, from “shriekers” to “ass-blasters”, realised here mainly in the form of puppets and miniatures, with CGI (which reared its ugly head in T3) kept to a minimum.

Gradually the familiar Tremors scenario falls into place, with a group of affable characters – augmented for a time by Billy Drago’s scenery-gnawing gunfighter – besieged in an isolated location and improvising a counter-attack against their subterranean foes. (Grafted onto a western setting, it resembles the oft-used situation in which outgunned villagers prepare a trap for marauding bandits.) Familiarity does not necessarily breed contempt, given the lightness of tone maintained by the same group of film-makers responsible for the entire series, but it does mean that, as in many prequels, the script churns up old ground – and eats up a lot of screen time – while establishing continuity with the other films.

There isn’t much about the fourth instalment of Tremors that hadn’t seemed fresher and funnier in the first. Determined fans, however, will enjoy the portrayal of Hiram Gummer as a gun-shy fumbler, the antithesis of his great-grandson Burt, a weapons fetishist. Naturally, by the end of the film, Hiram has graduated from a palm-sized derringer to an 8ft punt gun. (Tremors 5: Bloodline is scheduled for release later this year.)

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The Quick and the Undead (2006)
Set 80-some years after a virus turned most of the population into walking corpses, this DTV quickie itself is symptomatic of the plague of modern zombie films: tongue in cheek but witless; stacked with quotes from better-known works; iconographically derivative – spaghetti westerns, Mad Max and, of course, George Romero are the main points of reference.

The only characters are a fistful of bounty hunters, whose trade is on the wane given the dwindling number of zombies. A nefarious scheme to infect more cities and increase demand is introduced too late to have a bearing on the plot, which focuses on antihero Ryn Baskin tracking a rival gang for revenge. Toting a loaded guitar case, El Mariachi-style, and dressed like an outcast from Fields of the Nephilim, the lead actor’s Eastwoodisms quickly become tiresome. (His given name happens to be Clint, but that’s no excuse.) Likewise his bickering relationship with his would-be Tuco-esque sidekick; mercifully, this is terminated halfway through, after a rare attempt at pathos that falls flat because of insipid dialogue – a failing throughout.

The scripting is strictly A-Z; anything that could have added substance or colour is bypassed. Baskin’s connection to the other characters, like his possession of an immunity serum, is given scant attention. The scale of the epidemic is stated at the beginning, but there is little sense of the world outside the frame (the lean budget would account for this to an extent). The make-up effects are passable, and first-time writer/director Gerald Nott injects some energy into the kill scenes and confrontations, but by and large this is a lethargic, unconvincing effort. The wait for a worthwhile zombie-western goes on…

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BloodRayne II: Deliverance (2007)
Ford, Mann, Peckinpah, Leone, Eastwood… Trace the line of descent far enough, take a sharp vertical dive and eventually, somewhere near the Earth’s core, you encounter the irrepressible Uwe Boll. This entry in his series of interminable video-game adaptations relocates the half-human, half-vampire heroine of BloodRayne from 18th-century Romania to the American West, where she tangles with a bloodsucking Billy the Kid.

Surely, the premise is not to be taken seriously; what to make of the rest of the film? Technically average, with a few moody shots of the misty environs of Deliverance town offering false hope, it fails in most other areas. The dialogue dies in the actors’ mouths, making already sub-par performances seem that much worse. The pouting Natassia Malthe, stepping into Kristanna Loken’s figure-hugging leathers as Rayne, suffers more than most, her bons mots about as cutting as lamb’s wool, delivered with the desultory air of somebody who expects to get by on looks alone – “You expect me to act as well?” Her physical prowess in the sporadic action scenes is so-so, although Boll’s slack direction does her a disservice – escaping from the gallows, Rayne has what feels like an eternity before Billy’s vampirised myrmidons react. Maybe losing one’s soul dulls the senses.

Not that Boll musters much more energy as a filmmaker, and most of that he squanders on ‘style’: hard stares and close-ups from the Leone school; slo-mo from Peckinpah’s box of tricks. (The score is faux-Morricone, to boot.) Atmosphere and tension evidently were not major concerns. The same can be said for the characterisations – Rayne must be one of the dreariest and least effective protagonists in modern horror, regularly requiring rescue by associates who include a bland Pat Garrett (Boll regular Michael Paré) and a phony preacher whose blessing, nonetheless, is supposed to sanctify garlic-infused bullets. Zack Ward’s Billy the Kid, meanwhile, is camp rather than menacing, hissing his lines in an inexplicable Mittel-european accent.

BloodRayne II can’t even be recommended as a riot of unintentional hilarity. It’s too vapid for that, notwithstanding the presence of a character named Piles and such philosophical musings as, “Life is like a penis: when it’s hard, you get screwed; when it’s soft, you can’t beat it.”

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Dead Noon (2007)
Produced for peanuts by a group of friends and gussied up with camera trickery and rudimentary effects, this flashily vacuous pastiche was made in the spirit of The Evil Dead – its director described it as a “love poem to Sam Raimi”. It is an unfortunate comparison. (And unfair to an extent – The Evil Dead had a lavish budget in comparison.) Where Raimi’s rampant imagination cohered around tight plotting and a near-hysterical atmosphere, the makers of Dead Noon proffer half-formed ideas, few of which they generated themselves.

The budget severely hinders the effects work, which is where director Andrew Wiest’s ambitions (and talents) clearly lie, but it is the fundamentals of script, acting and pacing that are the main issues. As the title forecasts, the set-up is High Noon with zombies (not the flesh-eating kind), as an outlaw named Frank returns from Hell (rendered as a green-screened lake of fire, before which Frank and a Stetson-wearing Satan play poker), resurrects his old gang and tracks down the great-grandson of Kane, the lawman who sent him to his grave. It is the younger Kane’s wedding day, of course, but he forsakes his darlin’ in the name of duty.

For his part, Wiest forsakes the tension of High Noon for interminable chase scenes and random kills in drab locations; for all the pyrotechnics, most of this is padding. (Raimi, one feels, would have run riot with the film’s big set piece, a shoot-out on Boot Hill involving zombie extras, crude CGI skeletons and even cruder dummies. Tongues were presumably in cheeks but, again, the scene long outstays its welcome.)

Characterisation is another casualty. Where the viewer felt Gary Cooper’s dilemma in every subtle twitch and nervous glance, his offspring barely musters an emotion. His fate, consequently, is unlikely to stir anybody else’s. The best that can be said for Wiest is that he displays enough visual imagination to suggest that, with a few dollars more and a halfway decent script, he may yet make something worthwhile.

When Lionsgate picked up the film for distribution, it saw fit to commission a framing story, which has another Kane – Hodder, of Jason Voorhees fame – playing one of Frank’s old rivals. Apart from background, these scenes add little of interest, but Hodder does, at least, possess charisma.

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Left for Dead (2007)
If there is a visual equivalent of verbal diarrhoea, this would be a textbook case. Albert Pyun’s frenzied assemblage of flash cuts, slow motion, filters, fades, freeze frames and superimpositions makes Tony Scott look like Tarkovsky. As stylisation it’s both superfluous, neither advancing the plot nor expressing the mood of the characters, and tiresome.

Indeed, it wears out its welcome within the first two minutes, during which an extensive opening crawl is intercut with jagged footage of the backstory. This is explained in some detail – the married preacher Mobius Lockhardt’s affair with a whore in 1880 Mexico, her murderous rampage with her colleagues when he rejects her, his pact with the Devil and ghostly graveyard vigil, waiting for the chance for revenge, pause for breath – even though the same events are repeated later in flashback form. Perhaps Pyun felt the need to force the pace because the script, by first-time writer Chad Leslie, was too sluggish or convoluted (fair points both). Whatever the reason, it saps intrigue from the story proper, which follows Clementine Templeton’s hunt for her philandering husband, Blake, and his flight from the same mob of angry prostitutes, who team up with Clementine and track Blake to the ghost town of Amnesty, where they gradually fall prey to Mobius.

Despite the novelties of setting – the film was shot in Argentina – and a largely female cast, who get to act out the macho one-upmanship popularly associated with westerns, this is thin stuff. It is set up by Clementine’s voice-over (yet another gimmick) as a meditation on revenge and loss, but this amounts to little more than melodramatic soul-baring on the part of the principals and a few self-pitying utterances from Mobius. (Why a holy man-turned-limbo-dwelling avenger should dress like a spaghetti western re-enactor is a mystery. The explanation probably lies in the director’s admiration of all things Leone.) His fleeting appearances, scored by scraping guitars, seem to herald one of those cheap gothic-rock videos from the Eighties, while his status as a tormented lost soul, which could have anchored the drama, dangles from the narrative like a loose thread.

There are positives – the prostitutes are an authentically unglamorous bunch, dressed in rags and smeared in dirt, with a mindset to match the brutalizing circumstances – but these are overwhelmed by negatives – weak characterisations (Victoria Maurette, feeding on scraps, tries her damnedest as the clench-jawed Clementine), a script at cross-purposes (Feminist fantasy? Supernatural revenge saga?) and the whizz-bang redundancy of Pyun’s direction.

Like many directors before and since, the B-movie maverick – who still hasn’t topped his cheerfully schlocky debut, the Conan knock-off The Sword and the Sorceror (1982) – failed to integrate competing genres.

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Undead or Alive (2007)
This self-styled ‘zombedy’ aspires to the same combination of broad comedy and genre-specific parody as Braindead and Shaun of the Dead, with additional nods towards Blazing Saddles. The first feature by a South Park alumnus, it has all the silliness of its forebears, and a fair amount of gore, but not the same manic abandon; the pace is too slack and the writing too laboured.

Director Glasgow Phillips’ script tweaks undead lore, positing the contagion as a White Man’s Curse brewed up by the great Apache chief Geronimo as his last act of revenge – hence the creatures are referred to as ‘Geronimonsters’. Moreover, these are zombies that still have the ability to converse and carry grudges, so that running gags continue even after death (shades of Day of the Dead). More is the pity, then, that the characters have little to exchange other than weak wisecracks. Aside from the barbed repartee of the central trio – an army deserter, a fey cowboy and Geronimo’s ball-busting niece – the tone is shamelessly puerile, penis gags and pratfalls being about as sophisticated as it gets.

Much of the humour revolves around the ascription of stupidity to the white man – whether undead or alive. It is a point made repeatedly by Ravi Rawat as the Apache girl, who doesn’t have to try too hard to outsmart her travelling companions: James Denton from Desperate Housewives (self-effacingly smug) and Chris Kattan of Saturday Night Live (fey bordering on camp). Then again, it is Denton’s character who figures out a cure when he gets bitten, infecting Kattan in turn, and it is very much at Rawat’s expense.

The zombies, likewise, are figures of fun. Even when they pen the heroes inside a fort for the inevitable, Romeroesque siege finale, they are more like slapstick props than creatures from the id. The overall vibe of Phillips’ film is cartoonish, but not enough to compensate for a script that is fitfully funny at best.

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Copperhead (2008)
Snakes on the plains… This Sci-Fi Channel original (loosely speaking) is simplicity itself, with stock western characters besieged in a town overrun by CGI serpents – replace these with zombies, vampires or graboids and the film would play much the same way.

The production design, on sets constructed in director Todor Chapkanov’s native Bulgaria, is the film’s strongest suit, creating a credibly weathered environment (albeit on a scale commensurate with a slender budget), adequately furnished with period props. The costumes bear scrutiny in a similar way.

Not so the snakes, their threat nullified by slapdash digital effects, especially when they are shown from above, slithering on mass like a spillage of viscous liquid. They at least look more or less life-size, if not especially like copperheads. This being the era of Supergator and Mega Python vs. Gatoroid, however, form dictates the intervention, towards the end, of an enormous mother snake, adding Aliens to the list of films to which this one is in thrall. Chapkanov and composer Nathan Furst are particularly unabashed in stealing from Leone, the gunfight between hero Brad Johnson and outlaw Billy Drago mimicking the maestro’s editing style and the title music from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Drago, reliable as ever, high-tails it from the plot after 30 minutes, leaving a charisma vacuum that remains unfilled. The rest of the film stutters. Drawn-out exchanges of dialogue, mostly in a light-hearted register, are interrupted by snake attacks, seen off with guns, dynamite, a flamethrower and a hand-cranked machine gun, which gets a Heath-Robinson makeover into a makeshift harpoon launcher for the finale.

No explanation for the snakes’ rampage is given. Considering the nonsensical exposition that typifies Sci-Fi (now SyFy) Channel offerings, that was perhaps just as well. Chapkanov followed this comparatively well-mounted production with 2009’s feeble Ghost Town, which begins in the old West before relocating to modern times, where Satanic outlaws (led again by an under-used Billy Drago) terrorise a group of students.

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The Burrowers (2008)
A revisionist-western thesis resides in the margins of this frontier allegory, the mayhem caused by its subterranean monsters conjoined with, if not rooted in, cultural misconceptions of the period, military malpractice, and the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. Where the white protagonists – archetypes to a man – blame the death of local farmers and the disappearance of others on a mysterious Indian tribe, the Sioux and the Utes know better. They speak of demons they call ‘burrowers’, which subsisted on buffalo until white hunters decimated the herds, and now they harvest humans for food.

The script’s critique of American imperialism is neither radical (it all but name-checks The Searchers, a revisionist lodestone) nor subtle – the officer commanding the search party has a tobacco pouch made from a dead Indian’s scrotum – but it adds thematic heft to a story that is concerned just as much with the prejudices and tensions of its human characters as it is with what lurks beneath the prairie. (Those expecting a full-on creature feature may well be frustrated, especially given the measured pace.)

The actors, led by a grizzled Clancy Brown, talk and behave in a plausible manner, given the circumstances; the dread that slowly grips the company is especially palpable, as is the paranoia that precipitates a needless and costly exchange of gunfire with potential Indian allies. The burrowers themselves are restricted to cameos – glimpses of pallid shapes in the darkness; unnerving clicking noises on the soundtrack. Director JT Petty doesn’t let them off the reins until late on, when a gruesome flesh feast reveals them to be vaguely amphibian in appearance, a mixture of practical effects and (inevitably, considering the low budget) dubious CGI.

The lack of a compelling central figure does hamper the human drama somewhat, but the period detail is fine and the landscape, leeched of much of its colour by Phil Parmet’s generally excellent photography, is both majestic and daunting, serving both aspects of the production.

Not much about the burrowers’ background or their (vaguely spider-like) feeding habits stands up to inquiry, but this is almost beside the point. Petty’s grimly ironic ending locates the real horror not in the shallow graves where the creatures’ paralysed victims await their grisly fate, but in the rampant chauvinism and narrow-mindedness that accompanied westward expansion – at least, so the revisionist thesis would have it. (Petty also shot an 18-minute prequel, Blood Red Earth, set 70 years before the main feature – for reasons unknown, the burrowers only make an appearance once in a generation.)

Jonah Hex (2010)
Or: Eight Million Ways to Die at the Box Office. A bounty hunter with a tortured past and disfigured face, Hex first appeared in DC Comics’ Weird Western Tales in the early Seventies. Since then he has fought zombies, gut-shot Batman, travelled through time and diced with aliens, so the mixture of hard action and supernatural fantasy, fictional and historical characters, in this screen venture is not exceptional. Neither is the resulting farrago after rewrites, reshoots and studio misgivings about tone and content dogged the film’s production.

The plot has Josh Brolin’s Hex conscripted by President Grant (Aidan Quinn) to bring down Quentin Turnbull (Malkovich), his old commanding officer in the Confederate army, now preparing a devastating fireworks display for the Centennial celebrations. Hex is motivated by revenge rather than patriotic duty – it was Turnbull who murdered his family and left him for dead. During that ordeal, Hex somehow acquired the ability to reanimate corpses, albeit temporarily; as a plot element, this is almost entirely redundant. (Megan Fox, as an implausibly pulchritudinous prostitute and Hex’s sort-of girlfriend, is similarly superfluous.)

Brolin was born to play a gunfighter, oozing brutish charisma, although the prosthetic scar hampers his delivery. (Given lines as banal as, “Anyone who gets close to me dies,” that’s not necessarily a bad thing.) He deserved a script that wasn’t so choppy and nonsensical (partly a consequence of studio cuts that reduced the running time to 81 minutes), in which spaghetti-western machismo is locked in a forced marriage with mysticism and gadgetry: Hex’s horse is armed with twin Gatling guns; he later employs handheld, dynamite-propelling crossbows.

Behind the camera, Jimmy Hayward directs as if designing a video game, with whizzy camerawork and room-shaking explosions synchronized to Mastodon’s crunching metal score. The attempt at contemporary relevance, with Turnbull explicitly labelled a “terrorist”, complete with WMD, is risible. By the time Malkovich, who looks bored throughout, unleashes his “super weapon” – a kind of giant Gatling gun with cannons for barrels, designed by cotton-gin inventor Eli Whitney, no less – painful, long-suppressed memories of Will Smith’s Wild Wild West float to the surface. (Glowing orange ‘trigger’ balls?) It was no surprise that Jonah Hex missed the mark with critics and public alike.

(See also: horror-western strips in the Eerie and Creepy comic series from the Sixties; Marvel’s Ghost Rider – not Johnny Blaze – later renamed Phantom Rider; and more recent publications such as Desperadoes from IDW and, more loosely, Preacher, from DC’s Vertigo imprint.)

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Exit Humanity (2011)
Low-budget zombie films have been spewed out in recent years like so many one-hit wonders. This one, by contrast, is a concept album: adventurous in scope, serious in intent, relatively sprawling. Like many a magnum opus, there are drawbacks: it is somewhat ponderous; the script and execution, while generally strong, cannot quite bear the weight of writer-director John Geddes’ ambitions, which lean towards a study of grief and mortality akin to The Road – how to maintain hope and, yes, humanity, in the midst of catastrophe.

An apocalyptic vision, although lacking the means to convey scale, Geddes’ film traces the stench of reanimated corpses to the dying days of the American Civil War. It follows one ex-soldier, Edward Young, as he loses his wife and son but regains a sense of purpose alongside a small group of fellow survivors resisting the demented Confederate General Williams. To call it a ‘zombie film’ is in some ways misleading (like any intelligent vehicle for the living dead, the ‘z’ word is never used). While they are present in substantial numbers, ready to be dispatched in time-honoured fashion in a seemingly unavoidable tip-of-the-hat to Romero, the undead are actually an unwelcome distraction – any kind of plague would have served to advance the themes and concentrate attention on the human drama, which is what Geddes more or less succeeds in doing, irrespective of the shuffling corpses he shoehorns in. (Perhaps they could be considered, Romero style, as metaphors for the kind of rancid antebellum attitudes represented by Williams; but that would stretch their significance somewhat.)

Young’s torment and findings are collected in a journal, read in mellifluous voiceover by Brian Cox, as one of the character’s descendants. Geddes reinforces the device by breaking up the narrative into chapters and portraying certain events with animation, as if they were Young’s own illustrations from his diary. (They were probably also seen as a cost-cutting measure, expediting the story without the need for shooting additional scenes.)

The antiquated setting, stressed by a desaturated palette (warm colours are reserved for flashbacks to happier times), allows Geddes to pitch his film as a spurious zombie origin story, even as it leans heavily on established motifs. “What force is behind this?” wonders Young, played with earnestness by relative newcomer Mark Gibson. (His anguished wailing, however, quickly gets old.) The answer harks back to voodoo and necromancy; one of the script’s most original notions is that zombie outbreaks have occurred at various points in history, across many cultures, whenever men have chanced to play god. In that sense, Geddes’ whey-faced ghouls could conceivably fulfil another allegorical function.

Having planted this idea, the film wraps up Young’s vendetta against the general, aided by an army of the undead, while the anomaly of another character’s immunity ends Geddes’ dour feature on a cautiously optimistic note.

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Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012)
Another audaciously skewed, schlockily titled alternate history lesson from Seth Grahame-Smith, the author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Transposed to the screen with his customary gusto by Night Watch director Timur Bekmambetov, it posits the great emancipator as the saviour not merely of America’s slaves, but of its very soul.

His epochal dispute with the Southern elite, while not divested of its moral and economic imperatives, is reimagined as a campaign against the scourge of vampirism, with the bloodsucking landed aristocracy (no heavy-handed symbolism here) allied with Confederate president Jefferson Davis. The battle of Gettysburg, with vampire soldiers among the rebels’ ranks and Yankees wielding silver weapons, becomes a kind of Armageddon – “to decide whether this nation belongs to the living or the dead”.

To decide where Bekmambetov’s film belongs on the action-fantasy-western-horror spectrum is not straightforward either. The premise is barmy, with Lincoln’s political ascendency shadowed by his nocturnal career as an axe-wielding vampire slayer, but it is treated with all the seriousness of weighty historical drama – drama, that is, by way of elaborately staged fights among herds of stampeding CGI horses, or atop speeding steam trains crossing flaming trestle bridges.

In its quieter moments, the film engages on a more intimate level, thanks to the sincere playing of Benjamin Walker in the title role, Mary Elizabeth Winstead as his devoted (but never docile) wife, and Dominic Cooper as Henry Sturgess, his vampire mentor, who has taken a Blade-esque turn against his own kind. Both Sturgess and Lincoln have a personal stake (ahem) in the campaign against the creatures’ leader, played with a supercilious sneer by Rufus Sewell, having lost loved ones to vampires in the past.

With its soft-focus photography and digitally augmented mise-en-scene, the film strives for a measure of visual authenticity amid the mayhem of its set pieces and the ludicrousness of its plot, but the overall effect remains that of a steampunk graphic novel writ large. Somehow, its revered hero emerges with his dignity intact – and his reputation enhanced to an unexpected degree.

See also – or perhaps not: Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies, a direct-to-video ‘mockbuster’ released the same year. As in Vampire Hunter, there is a stronger than expected showing by the central actor, in this case Bill Oberst Jr., who imbues Lincoln with gravitas even when he is dispatching zombies with a sickle. It’s just as nonsensical as Vampire Hunter, but on a much smaller and less ambitious scale.

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GallowWalkers (2012)
Wesley Snipes’ tax affairs delayed the filming (begun in 2006) and release of this garbled fantasy, which has done nothing to restore the actor’s credit in Hollywood. (He ought to be doubly grateful to Sly Stallone and co, in that case, for The Expendables 3.) Shot in the starkly beautiful Namibian desert, like much modern action cinema it is more a grab bag of influences than a coherent work in its own right. (Exhibit A: Jonah Hex.)

Partly a revamp of Blade’s comic-strip mythologising – Snipes once again plays an undead avenger, battling undead villains – and partly a mannered stab at Jodorowsky-style surrealism – it opens with Snipes’ desert showdown with three men dressed as cardinals, one of whom has his lips sewn shut – it is in large measure a Leone tribute: wide shots and close-ups; studied mise-en-scène; dialogue cribbed from Once Upon a Time in the West. The use of fragmented flashbacks is also telling, although what they reveal, after a jumbled opening third, is that a slight revenge story – gunfighter kills bandits for raping his woman – has been scrambled and swollen with half-baked ideas about entries to hell and postmortem skincare, not to mention secondary characters who have no bearing whatsoever on the plot.

Snipes, as the redundantly monikered Aman, looks good, in dreads and duster, but constructs his performance from poses and gestures; when he is called upon to intone the backstory – how Aman’s mother saved his life via a demonic pact, but brought down a curse that resurrects his victims – he does so stiltedly. Then again, it is such a clumsy expository device that perhaps he shouldn’t be faulted too harshly.

His adversaries are pleasingly outlandish, led by a bewigged, white-haired psychopath who steals people’s skin – the ‘gallowwalkers’’ own hides do not last long in the sun, apparently. These creatures need beheading if they are to die for good, with Snipes ripping out spinal columns just to make sure – predictably, the CGI effects are patchy. While Snipes was on hiatus, co-writer/director Andrew Goth (seriously?) would have been wiser honing the script, rewiring the characters and cutting out the tangents. As it is, GallowWalkers remains considerably less than the sum of its influences.

Kevin Grant – author of Any Gun Can Play: The Essential Guide to Euro-westerns

NB. If tracked down, the following will be included in an updated version of this article: The Headless Rider (1957), Night Riders (1959), The Devil’s Mistress (1968), Ghost Riders (1987), Stageghost (2000), Blood Moon (2014), Bone Tomahawk (2015).

Image thanks: VHS Collector


Sharktopus vs. Whalewolf [updated with new title and monster]

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Sharktopus vs. Whalewolf – formerly Sharktopus vs. Mermantula – is a 2015 American sci-fi horror film directed by Kevin O’Neill (Dinocroc; DinosharkSharktopus vs. Pteracuda). Scripted by Matt Yamashita, the leads are Casper Van Dien (Sleepy Hollow; PythonThe Pact) and his real-life partner Catherine Oxenberg (The Lair of the White Worm).

The film also stars Akari Endo (Sharktopus vs. Pteracuda), Sarodj Bertin, Gökdeniz Özcetin, Yasser Michelén, Mario Ceara, Olga Valdez. 

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The movie is a sequel to Sharktopus (2010) and — like Sharktopus vs. Pteracuda — was originally rushed into production by veteran genre filmmaker Roger Corman for his New Horizons company in response to the massive social media interest in Syfy’s Sharknado films. However, somewhere along the way the movie’s other monster has mutated from being a part-man, part-piranha and part-tarantula into a part-killer whale and part-wolf! Could this be because werewolf films such as WolfCop have recently been hits?

The film premieres on Syfy on Sunday July 19, 2015.

Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy Stripe Nurses Roger Corman King of the B Movie

Buy Crab Monsters, Cave Men and Candy Stripe Nurses book from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

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Terror Hotel

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Terror Hotel  – aka Love Hotel; Dread Hotel and Horrible Hotel  is a 2012 Chinese horror film written and directed by Laizhi Zheng (and he has a cameo role as a taxi driver). The YanYan Bros Media production’s original title is 恐怖旅馆.

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Cast:

Victor Chen Sze Hon, Xi Lai, Yudi Sun, An. Ya, Mi Gong, Lifan Dong, Fengqian Li, Xiao Yang, Ming Zhao.

Screen Shot 2015-08-04 at 20.21.11

 

Plot teaser:

A series of  murders occur at a supposedly haunted motel. Two television journalists  investigate but find themselves in danger when people around them start dying…

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Screen Shot 2015-08-04 at 19.21.49

Screen Shot 2015-08-04 at 19.22.45

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Wikipedia | IMDb


The Zombie King aka King of the Dead

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The Zombie King – aka King of the Dead  is a 2012 British horror comedy film directed by Aidan Belizaire from a screenplay by actor George McCluskey (Jacob’s Hammer; Knight of the Dead), based on a story by Jennifer Chippindale and Rebecca-Clare Evans.

The film stars Edward Furlong (Brainscan; Arachnoquake) and Corey Feldman (Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter; Bordello of Blood), George McCluskey, David McClelland, Michael Gamarano (Backslasher). The film’s initial title was apparently Ed Wallace and the Z Team.

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Having received several international releases, the film is being released on DVD in the UK on October 26, 2015 by High Fliers Films.

Plot teaser:

Samuel Peters (Edward Furlong), once an ordinary man, dabbles in the laws of voodoo to bring his wife back from the grave. He soon encounters the god of malevolence, Kalfu (Corey Feldman), and makes a pact with him to destroy the underworld and bring chaos to earth. In return, he will become the Zombie King and walk the earth for eternity with his late wife.

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But as the growing horde of zombies begins to wipe out a countryside town, the government creates a perimeter around the town and employs a shoot-on-sight policy. Trapped within the town, the locals, an unlikely bunch of misfits, must fight for their lives and unite in order to survive…

POSTER The Zombie King 2012 V7

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POSTER The Zombie King (Japanese)

Trailer:

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