Halloween Horrors (Painted Movie Posters)

It's Halloween, when all the ghosts and ghouls come calling (usually for chocolate), when the evenings are dark and the air smells of woodsmoke and the thoughts of us all turn to the idea of watching or reading something scary and creepy.

For my fifth Halloween post (following paperback covers, Top Trumps, VHS cover art and behind the scenes special effects shots), I've decided this time to go with something else I love, namely painted movie posters.  Looking at some of these again reminds me of being a young horror film fan in the late 70s and early 80s (when BBC2 began showing Universal horrors in the early evening), seeing gaudily gorgeous posters for films I wouldn't get to see for quite some time (and which, sometimes, didn't live up to my imagining of what they'd be).

So with all that in mind, enjoy this Halloween treat of posters that (very occasionally) promise more than they deliver...

1959

Produced by Gene Corman, this is the perfect horror film poster (something the Corman team did very well indeed).  I really want to see this, even though I know the monsters won't look anywhere near as convincing as they do here (which isn't saying a lot, I realise).

1963

I first read about this in Stephen King's Danse Macabre and couldn't wait to see it, though by the time I eventually did (late one night on BBC2, if I remember correctly), I was waiting for King's suggested last line.  He wrote that there was a legend of a lost ending, where Xavier - having plucked his eyes from their sockets - shouts "I can still see!"  Unfortunately, it's just a terrific rumour - Roger Corman said, in interview, that the scene was discussed but never filmed.

1965

There's so much to love about this film, it makes for perfect Halloween viewing.  An anthology film (an Amicus speciality), this features "Werewolf" with Neil McCallum, "Creeping Vine" with Alan Freeman (which is properly creepy, though it'd sound silly if I explained it), "Voodoo" with Roy Castle and his trumpet, "The Disembodied Hand" with Christopher Lee and Michael Gough lending real weight and "Vampire" with Donald Sutherland (and a cracking ending).  Peter Cushing plays Dr. Shreck in the framing story.

1970

A so-so film (it feels very long) but a great Arnaldo Putzu poster

1971

A brilliant poster from Vic Fair which does so much without really doing a great deal.  How could you not want to see the film are seeing this?

1972

Swinging Dracula on the Kings Road (with added Caroline Munro gorgeousness).

1973

Another terrific Amicus anthology film, well served by an Arnaldo Putzu poster.  This features "Midnight Mess", a creepy vampire story (with some great in-camera effects) with Daniel and Anna Massey, "The Neat Job" with Terry-Thomas, "This Trick'll Kill You" with Curt Jurgens, "Bargain In Death" with Michael Craig (and, in a nice touch, Robin Nedwell and Geoffrey Davies as two trainee doctors - they'd appeared together in "Doctor In The House", an ITV sitcom) and "Drawn And Quartered", with Tom Baker and Denholm Elliot (as well as Terence Alexander, who gets a bigger head on the poster) and some great views of early 70s London.  The framing device sees five strangers boarding a descending lift in a modern London office block.

1976

We can't be sure what H. G. Wells would have thought of this but surely, bearing in mind all the animals they could have chosen for the poster, was a giant chicken really the best one?

1977

Also known as "Shocklines" (the title I first saw it under, as a VIPCO release), I was first aware of it when I saw an advert in Starburst magazine.  The film itself is slow and creepy but those underwater nazis are as effective as the poster art makes them out to be.

1978

A cracking little horror film (you'd be better off with this than the remake), Joe Dante is on top form with a John Sayles script, make-up effects by Rob Bottin and piranha effects by Phil Tippett, amongst others.

1981

Unnerving, dark, claustrophobic and frightening, this is an excellent film (which I wrote about, in detail, here) that was unfairly classed as a Video Nasty for while.  Best seen knowing very little about it, you're wrong-footed from the start and all the way through.  Great stuff.

1981

There's never a great deal of subtlety in a Lucio Fulci film but they're all the more fun for that.  I first saw this on a VIPCO tape (and if you remember that label and their claims, then you'll understand why I thought it was a confusing mess), re-watched it on another label and liked it a great deal more.

1981

A wonderful Graham Humphreys poster for a funny little film that was, sadly, a bit out of step with the times for when it was released (though it did get a Look-In cover).

1987

Graham Humphreys again, giving us some of the highlights from Sam Raimi's bizarre and very funny sequel.

1987

A clever and fairly subtle poster for a darkly intense and unsettling modern vampire tale, long before those creatures of the night got all spangly and sparkling.  I love the film (especially the uncomfortable sequence in the bar when you suddenly realise that everyone's in trouble) and I think this poster serves it well.


Happy Halloween!

Halloween Horrors (Old School Horror Paperback Covers)

It's almost Halloween, when all the ghosts and ghouls come calling (usually for chocolate), when the evenings are dark and the air smells of woodsmoke and the thoughts of us all turn to the idea of watching or reading something scary and creepy.

For my fourth Halloween post (previously I wrote about VHS cover art, behind the scenes special effects shots and Top Trumps), I've decided to stick with something I love, the cracking paperback covers of the 70s and 80s.  One of the blogs I follow is Will Errickson's Too Much Horror Fiction, where he posts some cracking scans (I've tracked down a few of the books because of them) and in a nice twist, he sought out The Happy Man based on my post about the Eric Higgs novel.  Looking at those old covers reminds me of being a young horror reader in the 80s when there was so much reading waiting for me to discover (along with the awful realisation that sometimes the artwork was the best thing about the whole book) and so much to be enjoyed.

These fit perfectly into my occasional Old School Paperbacks thread, blogs celebrating those cheesy, sleazy old-school pulp paperbacks from the 70s and 80s, which are now mostly forgotten .  They might not be great art, certainly, but they have their place - for better or worse - in the genre and I think they deserve to be remembered.

So with that in mind, enjoy this Halloween treat of covers that (on occasion) promise far more than they deliver...

New English Library, 1978 - cover scan of my copy

I first encountered this book at my cousin's - the back copy, amongst the film credits, calls Rick Baker 'the master of them all' for his make-up effects.

Sphere, 1978 - cover scan of my copy

This promises everything, doesn't it - ravening, gut-chilling worm-power (what the hell is worm power?).  As it is, I read this earlier in the year and enjoyed it well enough (you can read my review at Goodreads here).  And  in a nice touch, even though the technology didn't exist when this was designed, if you scroll up the screen with your mouse roller, the title text seems to wiggle.

New English Library, 1980 - cover scan by Will

My Dad had this edition on his bookshelf and it scared the living daylights out of me.  A few years later, around about the time the first Evil Dead film was being banned in the UK, someone at school mentioned how gruesome this book was and so, of course, a bunch of us read it.  As I recall, the scene in the school was considered the worst (we were all about 12 or 13 at the time) but, as an adult, I found the suicide at sea sequence much more disturbing.

New English Library, 1980 - cover scan of my copy

There is so much to enjoy about this - the font, the blurb, the woman, the horns, that skull.  Genius.

Pocket Books, 1981 - cover scan by Will

Brings new meaning to the term "chained to the photocopier..."

New English Library, 1982 - cover scan by Will

Mr Johnson was obviously on a winning streak, though this cover's not a patch on The Succubus, but I do love the way NEL have re-defined the word Homunculus (the Oxford English dictionary says it's 'a microscopic but fully formed human being from which a fetus was formerly believed to develop').

Futura Publications, 1983 - cover scan of my copy

I'm not entirely sure how this glorious cover (the screaming woman is lifted from the poster of the 1981 shocker Nightmares In A Damaged Brain) reflects a novel about killer jellyfish but I've read it (and blogged about it here) and quite enjoyed it.

Pocket Books, 1984 - cover scan by Will

Is it just me, or did you look at this picture and hear that little Bill And Ted air-guitar-riff?

Panther, 1985 - cover scan of my copy

Peter Tremayne is apparently the fiction writing pseudonym of the Celtic scholar and author Peter Berresford Ellis.  The hardback edition (which I can't find a decent scan of, unfortunately) features a lifted image from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Pocket Books, 1985 - cover scan by Will

This might well be a terrific novel (Kirkus reviews seemed to like it) but I think Village Voice might be overplaying their hand here.  As an aside, Campbell Black wrote the original novelisation for Raiders Of The Lost Ark in 1981 and The Intruder, which I blogged about here.

Signet, September 1985 - cover scan by Will

I'm not sure how it took three people to write this (Bischoff is a noted sci-fi novelist and scriptwriter) but it sounds like fun.  Here's the blurb - A college professor of medieval literature, drunk and desperate to liven up a dull party, performs a demon-summoning ritual, which, unexpectedly, succeeds. The demon, a four thousand year old half-human female, proves more alluring and mischievous than the professor anticipates, and proceeds to turn his life upside down.

Paperjacks edition, 1986 - cover scan of my copy

I reviewed this slim novel in an earlier blog post, which you can find here and liked it a lot.

Tor ,1987 - cover scan by Will

This is the kind of kiss where, in later years, they reminisce and laugh, saying "remember that time our teeth clashed?"

Arrow Books, 1987 - cover scan of my copy

John Halkin is, apparently, the pseudonym of an unknown British author who's most famous for writing the 80s "slimy" trilogy - Slime, Slither and Squelch - none of which I've managed to find reasonably priced copies for.  All look like cheesy fun as, indeed, is this one.  I read it earlier this year and you can find my review at Goodreads here.  The US had an alternate cover, which Will posted, though I prefer the UK one.

Guild Press, 1988 - cover scan by Will

Leisure Books, 1989 - cover scan by Will

A skull, shark teeth, some kind of weird eye - seriously, what's not to like?

Pocket Libary, 1989 - cover scan by Will

I love this cover and I think that's because the thing we initially think is the monster with a screwed up face might, in fact, just be a person who's been startled by the monster grabbing their shoulders from behind!

Tor Books, 1994 - cover scan by Will

Published in 1994 (but an honorary 80s cover, I'm sure you'll agree), this must have caught the tail end of the horror boom.  I first saw this on TMHF and managed to track down a copy (for much less than I thought) through Amazon US - I mean, what a fantastic cover (by Joe DeVito).


* Thanks to Will for the use of his scans

For a few years now, I've been collecting old 70s and 80s paperbacks (mostly horror), picking them up cheaply in secondhand bookshops and at car boot sales and slowly building a collection.  My friend (and fellow collector) Johnny Mains once told me that charity shops sometimes pulp old books like this because the market for them is so small - I understand why but I think it's terrible.  We might not be talking great art here but on the whole, I think these books deserve to be remembered.

Previous entries in the series can be found at this link

Ten Past Three - A Portuguese Ghost Story

I've discussed this incident on the blog before but with Halloween coming up - and the fact that it happened 30 years ago this August - I thought it worth another mention.  I adore the horror genre but I'm relatively rational and, like everyone else, I've often placated my son when he's scared with the phrase "there's nothing there."

But what if there is?

Me and Craig, Cabo da Roca, Portugal.  It was 1990, we all wore short-shorts like this, honestly...

I've loved ghost stories since I was a kid and as a ten-year-old there wasn’t much better than losing myself in a Three Investigator book, or a Peter Haining or Mary Danby collection. I formed ghost hunting groups with friends (one day, I might tell you about the ghost at Blue Bridge, who was said to be Old Nick himself), read as much as I could and scared myself silly with real-life ghost books from the library. Happy days.

I have had three brushes with what I think are perhaps most accurately described as unidentified phenomena. One was with my childhood friend Nick and he still talks about the incident, almost forty years later. Two were with my friend Craig – one was an unidentified flying object and the other, this one, was about ghosts.

In 1989, he & I went on holiday to Portugal. He worked for a travel company, we got a reduced rate, we had a great time. Our hotel was a lovely place, run by a bear of an Englishman, with local staff. Beyond the restaurant/club house was a patio area, then two blocks of apartments – we were on the ground floor of the first, facing back towards the house. We got on well with fellow guests, there was a good atmosphere in general, it was a cracking holiday.

Towards the end of the week, having sworn off drink for a few days (we were twenty and didn’t realise the shots were doubles), we’d had a meal and enjoyed the evening in the club and gone back to our room. It wasn’t a big room – through the front door, the bathroom opened off the hall, then the main room had twin beds, patio doors (which faced out towards the main house) and built in wardrobes across from them (against the back of the bathroom wall). I slept in the bed nearest the wardrobes, Craig had the bed by the window.

On this particular night, nothing spectacular had happened. We chatted for a while, then went to sleep.

A red guard from Flash Gordon.  My version
didn't have a gun...

 I woke up and knew it was the middle of the night, though it wasn’t particularly dark (we tended to keep the curtains open). As my eyes got accustomed to the light, I was very surprised to see someone crouching down beside the bed, staring at me. My over-riding memory of it now is that it looked like one of the red guards from the Flash Gordon film – a monks habit, with the hood drawn up and some kind of gas mask/breathing apparatus obscuring the face. I don’t remember reacting to this interloper, but watched as he stood up and walked carefully around my bed and along the back wall. As the thing reached the end of Craig’s bed (with me now up on one elbow, watching it go), Craig sat bolt upright in bed (and that startled me more than my ghost had).

“What time is it?”

I fumbled for my watch. “Ten past three.”

“Okay,” he said and laid back down. I couldn’t see my ghost any more, so I too laid down and went back to sleep.

The next morning, he was up bright and early and went to reception to make a call. When he got back, he explained he’d wanted to ring his parents, as he was really worried. I asked why and he explained he’d woken up to see two people sitting on the end of his bed, watching him. His first thought was that it must be his parents, checking he was okay, but when he rang home, they were fine and healthy.

As we sat there, on our beds in the early morning Portuguese sunshine, I told him about the thing I’d seen. As we talked, it came to me that maybe my ghost had been moving slowly because he was threading his way between things I couldn’t see, perhaps guests at a party. Guests that might, conceivably, be sitting at the end of Craig’s bed saying “look at that, a ghost person in bed.”

Completely stumped as to what was going on, but convinced the party angle was the one to go for, we trooped off to reception (I don’t know that we expected to find out, maybe that a party had been going on years before, until a fire broke out and killed everyone, but it would have been a start).  We knew the girl behind the counter, who was very nice and had taught us a few words and phrases in Portugese and haltingly tried to explain ourselves.

“We were just wondering if there’d been a party in our room.”  She checked the pigeon hole for our room and came back with our passports. “No, we’re in there, we just wondered if there’d been a party in there before.”

She frowned at us, so we told her the story. About halfway through, she started to hyperventilate. Towards the end, she looked genuinely upset. When we got to the time part, she was very agitated. So much so that she went to get the manager’s wife (a fearsome, if friendly, lady – when I got sunstroke just after arriving, she made sure I got grilled chicken for dinner to help me, even though it wasn’t on the menu). We re-told our story, conscious of the poor receptionist who was, by now, sitting in the backroom being comforted by her colleagues.

The manager’s wife listened to our story, looking at us to make sure we weren’t pulling her leg. She tried the obvious – were monks on my mind, there was a brand of drink called Sandeman whose logo was a man in a cape, all manner of stuff – but realised our story wasn’t going to change. She took us to one side and said, “If you promise not to mention this again, whilst you’re here, you can have free meals for the rest of your stay.”

Did my years of wanting to be a ghost-hunter kick in? Was my drive to discover the paranormal world enough that I would refuse? No, I’m now ashamed to admit that Craig & I thought with our bellies and went for the free meal option.

So, story ended right? We saw something we couldn’t explain, we freaked out a receptionist (who might have been prone to over-react, who knows?) and we were then offered hush money. I’d love to report that we experienced more phenomena but we didn’t – I was wary about being in the room on my own for the duration of our stay, but neither of us ever saw anything untoward in that room again.

It was all finished, except for something we overhead that night at dinner. Sharing our floor in the block were ex-employees of BOAC. Friendly, chatty and very funny, we got on well with them (bearing in mind they were perhaps fifty years older than us) and our little table was next to the large one they occupied.

Obviously, part of our deal was to tell no-one and we adhered to that. So imagine our surprise when the BOAC table started to talk about their previous night. Every one of them had woken up – either from hearing something or through a bad dream – and all of them were tired. We couldn’t resist and leaned back.

“What time was this then?” we asked.

There was general murmuring from the table, as people thought back about it.

So what time did five or six couples – a total of seven separate rooms – all wake up, on the same night, when nothing untoward was happening?

“Ten past three,” they said.

Halloween - Top Trumps

It's Halloween, when all the ghosts and ghouls come calling (usually for chocolate), when the evenings are dark and the air smells of woodsmoke and the thoughts of us all turn to the idea of watching or reading something scary and creepy.

For my third Halloween post (previously I wrote about VHS cover art and behind the scenes special effects shots), I've decided to highlight something that makes perfect sense (especially to monster loving kids, as I was) but also makes you wonder how they got away with it.

Top Trumps, launched in 1977 by a company called Dubreq (who also made the Stylophone), was a hugely popular children’s game in the UK particularly with kids who delighted in the statistical nature of it.  There were eleven different packs initially, each featuring 32 playing cards, themed around cars, sports stars, planes and military hardware amongst others, highly collectible and pocket-money-priced at 50p.  Eight at the time, I was an avid fan and one of my favourites was the Horror pack.

In fact, there were two versions, Dracula (the one I had) and Devil Priest (can you imagine a kids toy being sold under that name today?), which appeared in 1978.  Apparently the origins of the sets are shrouded in mystery - no-one seems to know who devised them, or created the bizarre artwork - and while they're put together in a slightly slapdash fashion, I like to think whoever was involved had a great deal of fun with the project.

Some of the stats make little sense (how can Death only have a Killing Power of 95?), some of the drawings even less so (why is The Phantom Of The Opera represented by The Abominable Dr Phibes, when he appears on two other cards) but to me that just adds to the delirious charm.  Some pictures are clearly lifted from films (how on earth did they get away with that?), others are epics of invention (Granite Man, anyone, or how about Circus Of Death), some are puzzling (why is Godzilla wearing a shirt and bow-tie?) while others, like the Zetan Warlord, just make you smile.  The scoring is also highly eccentric - King Kong understandably scores 100 on Physical Strength but his Horror Rating of 70 is beaten by the (much smaller and, to my mind, less horrific) Two-Headed-Monster who rates an 89.

The Hangman and Lord Of Death are clearly taken from The Phantom Of The Opera (1925) with Lon Chaney while the actual Phantom card is illustrated with a masked Vincent Price from The Abominable Dr Phibes (1971)

Full of “gleeful crudity and unashamed gore”, these were the ideal accompaniment to Denis Giffords’ A Pictorial History Of Horror Movies, a seminal rite-of-passage for horror fans of a certain age.  My original set, much loved and played with, is long since lost but I picked up one of the Waddingtons re-issues recently and shared a thoroughly enjoyable hour with Dude playing it (he had as much fun as I did, even if he’s not a monster kid like I was).

More homages, with The Madman from "Doomwatch" (1970-1972), The Freak from "The Reptile" (1966) and the Two Headed Monster some wonderful Rick Baker make-up from "The Thing With Two Heads" (1972)

Just in case Top Trumps passed you by, the rules were very simple.  Each game consisted of several players (2 to however many you wanted) being dealt a hand, one picking a statistic to compare and whoever won (ie, they had Dracula and played the Horror Rating - his was 100), collected the other cards in the round and went again.  The game continued until one player held all the cards.

Taken from "The Incredible Melting Man" (1977)

Another appearance by Lon Chaney, this time from "London After Midnight" (1927)

The card back

Dubreq was taken over by Waddingtons in 1982 and the popularity of Top Trumps continues to the present day.

As for us, Dude & I will be settling down for a game of this (the perfect Halloween activity) and I’m thoroughly looking forward to it.  I just hope I get Dracula and King Kong in my first hand...

Happy Halloween!

with thanks to Hypnogoria for some of the history

Halloween Horrors (VHS treasures)

It's Halloween, when all the ghosts and ghouls come calling (usually for chocolate), when the evenings are dark and the air smells of woodsmoke and the thoughts of us all turn to the idea of watching something scary and creepy.

After last years Halloween post (which you can read here) featuring behind-the-scenes shots from scary films, I've decided this time to go in a different direction.  As regular readers of the blog will know, I love artwork that is cheesy, sleazy and often ever-so-slightly over the top and if that's what you're looking for, you can't go wrong with 80s video covers.  Back then, as video was starting to make inroads into people's houses, corner shops and town centre shops alike suddenly brought in racks and shelves, filling them with gaudily decorated boxes of horror films that me and my friends were very keen to watch.  The 1984 Video Recordings Act curtailed some of those adventures but there was still plenty for us to catch up on and we most certainly did.  The players were expensive and only two of our gang had them - Steve's VHS came complete with a remote control that had to be plugged in and David had a top-loader Beta, soon replaced by a top-loader VHS.  Later, after making several (very) low budget films with David's brother Matt, he & I set up an informal little group we called The Tacky Video Society to watch just these kind of treasures.  In fact, sometimes a visit to the local 5 Star Video in Rothwell would consist of scanning the horror shelves until artwork caught our eye and renting that film, regardless of whether or not we knew anything about it.

And here are a few examples.

Happy Halloween!

1981 (aka Burial Ground and Zombi 3)

I saw this sometime in the mid-80s and, for the most part, found it plodding and dreary.  But then something very, very weird happens between the kid (who was actually a 25-year-old actor) and his mother which propels this to another level altogether.

1981

Another of my suggestions to the group, this went down very well.  So well, in fact, that years later I was able to convince my best friend Nick to go and see Hellraiser with me by telling him it wouldn't be as bad as this...

1981

One of my favourite horror films (I wrote an in-depth essay about it for This Is Horror, which you can read here), this is the cover of the pre-certificate VHS sleeve before the film ran into trouble.  Although it was passed uncut for a British theatrical release, it fell foul of the Video Recordings Act and was prosecuted and banned as a 'video nasty' (which it quite clearly isn't).  It was re-released in the late 80s with 5 seconds of cuts on the Video Collection label, then finally released uncut in 1999 by Polygram.  I saw it on 30th July 1985 (I keep a diary) with the gang and it was a banner day for us, when we rented three films from Dines' Video Library (which is now long-gone) - Twilight Zone: The Movie, Evil-Speak (another video nasty casualty) and this.  Good times...

1982

I watched this in 1983 (I'm sure we rented the film but that can't have been possible) on a bright Saturday morning, in a sun-filled room, with David and Matt and all three of us were absolutely terrified.

1982

By the time this was released in 1983 by Palace Pictures, we'd been talking about it at school for at least a year and most people 'knew someone' who'd seen it and was quite happy to talk up the gory bits.  This doubled when it became a 'video nasty' and was banned, even though the BBFC had passed it for theatrical release in 1982 with minor cuts.  The VHS accounted for 40 prosecutions (the vast majority of which were overturned) and the BBFC was forced to about-face on it.  Palace then sent out replacement sleeves with a grey banner across the front: "Not guilty! - The Evil Dead is back, B.F.F.C. certificate applied for".  It was finally passed uncut by the BBFC in June 2002.

1983

I convinced my friend Steve this would be a great film to watch (I put forth that Debbie Harry was in it, we'd both loved Scanners and I convinced him Rick Baker's effects were always great) - I really enjoyed it, he really didn't.  My love for it has grown over the years (I wrote about it here) and I recommend it whole-heartedly!
(there was a later VHS release, which I bought, that was labelled as 'uncut'.  And if you click on the image above, you'll see, below the credit block: "This film received an '18' certificate for cinema release.  The version of the film comprised in the videocassette has been further edited at the discrection of CIC Video".  This was because, in a case of very bad timing, the film fell foul of the Video Recordings Act with police forces in Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire apparently warning dealers against stocking the film even before it had been released.  CIC pre-empted this and went at the film with scissors, as it was due for release when 'Video Nasty' hysteria was at its peak.  It's now available uncut and, to be best of my knowledge, the film never influenced anyone unduly - or, at least, if anybody has ever had a Betamax tape slotted into a vagina which has magically appeared in their stomach, I've never read about it...)

1984

I can't remember now if I first saw this on VHS or Alex Cox's wonderful Moviedrome but I do remember I liked it a lot.

1985

There's so much to like in this film - O'Bannon's script, the acting, Linnea Quigley, Tar Man - where do you start?

1986

I actually saw this at the cinema first, with my friend Craig Tankard and the artwork is perfect for the film (for which my affection remains strong decades later!)

1986

Another cinema first (again with Craig), this has the creative crew of Re-Animator back with Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton and their second loose Lovecraft adaption.  Less gory, certainly, but sexier!

1987

Years later, after my friend David Roberts & I had been to see the first Lord Of The Rings film at the cinema, I told him about this but - crucially - forgot to mention the two films were remarkably different.  He gave me the DVD back the next time we met up and said "I didn't watch all of it..."

1987

I first read about this in either Fangoria or Gorezone in the mid-80s and was very keen to see it, though it proved elusive and I didn't get to watch it until much, much later.  I did, however, enjoy it as much as I hoped I would.

1988

 I didn't see this until long after I watched Phantasm 2, another cinema first with Craig, at the Forum cinema in Corby (also now long-gone).  At some point in the run the film had broken and been patched up so when we watched it, there's a big jump at the climax and it wasn't until years later, watching it again, that I realised the ending wasn't as surreal as I'd originally thought...

1988

I was introduced to this by Matt, who adored it and I could see his point - a solid, fun exploitation film, with a smart cast, a great baddie and some glorious special effects.

1988

My second glimpse into the world of Frank Henenlotter (following the gloriously low-budget Basket Case) and, to this day, it remains my second favourite of his films after the wonderful Frankenhooker ("wanna date?").  Even better (and much later), through the wonders of first LiveJournal and then Facebook, I became friends with Greg Lamberson who worked on this.


Happy Halloween!


with thanks to mutantskeleton and Living On Video (Covers) for some of the scans
Video Nasty information from The Video Nasties Furore: The Prosecution of the DPP's 74, by Neil Christopher