DON'T GIVE UP

Hey guys.

Man, talk about that America! And I thought the movies I watched were crazy! Heh, heh...okay, joking aside. I'm here to tell you that we are going to be okay. It will not be easy...but it will be okay.

I'm writing this largely because of how I've spent the last couple days. Cold. Tense. Nauseous. Panicked. And it only got worse when the night ended two days ago. But now, I've passed through it, and I want to try to light up the world. Because I think in some ways, we can take help and safety and security for granted. We don't like to face up to the fact that our way of life is not fixed in time, and it can be taken away before we even know it. Unfortunately, that is life: nothing stays the same. All we can hope for is that our lives and the lives of our loved ones are long and happy. And I want you to have that. I want it if you are my friend; I want it if you are my enemy, or if we are just passing acquaintances, or if we've never met. If you are a human being, you deserve your life, and you deserve to be happy.

In a sense, that's why I do this. I started Adam Mudman's A-List because I loved these movies and books so much that I couldn't keep it to myself anymore. Even if no one cared about them--and I'm learning now that people do care--I had to try to share that love, just that maybe even one person would watch Winterbeast or read The Riddle of the Traveling Skull, and be changed by it in the way I was changed. Because it's fun to find new things!! And that's why the forces we face are wrong. It's good to embrace the weird, the different, the new and unprecedented. Throwing people out of here, or stopping them from coming in, or making it so they want to leave is just taken what is a lovely bush of flowers and cutting it down to only one color...with a chainsaw. And I want more than anything to emphasize the "fun" part of it, because I've seen how my peers and heroes in these sorts of reviews have reacted, and I'm with them: I will always be here to make you laugh and smile, and to lead you to things that will elicit more of the same. Movies and books like these, that are politically "useless," are still important, because even though we need to fight and engage with the real world, we will still need a place to go. We will still need imaginations, escape hatches, unrealistic divergences.

Of course, I'll be doing political stuff, too. I feel I have to. Yeah, some of the reviews will have politicized analysis. But keep your eyes peeled for news on some of my other literary projects, which will be dedicated towards mobilizing artists into speaking their mind and standing up for social justice. Art and entertainment, along with donations, protests, and volunteering, are how our side fights back.

Don't be afraid. I may be white, and relatively abled, and financially stable, but I'm a queer woman. I won't run from that; anyone who tries to stop me, I will just walk through and over. I can't understand every fight, but I can sympathize because I have my own experiences. I don't know everyone's pain, but the pain in any form is bad enough. As a queer woman, I'm not scared. Being scared is what they want, and letting that fear run your life will give them power to do more (as hard as that is to think about, I realize). Just remember that if you were sweating all the way through the election, the worst has happened. For many of you this may be your absolute worst fear. But the thing about running into your fears is that you face them; you accept them. You know that Doom is here, but the Doom of Real Life is way, way smaller than the Doom of What Could Be. It's like in movies: suspense is scarier than the reveal. So now that worst fear is confirmed, and this man is our President, but as long as we fight and work together, we have nothing to fear.

I leave you with the words of Blind Guardian. Yeah, we're Doomed, but it's happened before, and we'll find a way out.

We will remember!

Skies may fade and stars may wane; 

we won't forget.

And your light shines bright, yes,

so much brighter--

shine on!

 We will remember,

until the skies fall in we won't forget.

We will remember;

we all shall follow Doom.

Book Club of Desolation #9: Weasels Ripped My Flesh! (2012), by Robert Deis et al.

Even if I was a man, I wouldn't get men. I didn't get men when I did feel like I was a man. That's why I turned out not to be one.

I don't claim to get women, either. I don't claim to get humans. That's why I'm a shitty writer. Well, ordinarily, I would say that. Apparently, there's not great necessity to understand human function to be a good writer. I mean, the business is chiefly based around lying, and I like to think that I'm decent at lying when I do have to say I know people. And that lying, I think, empowers me. And I like the fact that writing gives me infinite power. It gives me the chance to use my imagination and it's meant that exact thing to billions of humans throughout history.

It means that writing has a lot of variety to it. I respect that variety, deeply, and I've tried to read everything. I like a lot of "good" books, and also, as you know, a lot of weird shit. I recently discovered I like some Westerns. I had a chance to read this thing called Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampires, which appears to be a political brochure talking about anxiety in Argentina in the '70s which turns into Fantomas fanfiction. The Book Club of Desolation has brought me to a lot of these books, and I started to plan out this month's event, to follow up on the conclusion of Spookyween. I propose thus to the reader a BOOKVEMBER, where the Book Club of Desolation will meet weekly for a month to discuss this great variety in literature. We need to get to something that I never would have checked out before now, because I have mixed feelings about it, even after reading a full volume of it. Get your deodorant ready, bros, because we're diving into the Armpit Slicks--Men's Adventure magazines.

Don't get me wrong, the Men's Adventure genre had pulled at me for sometime, because to be frank, I find that shit hilarious. I've had regrets about passing up 100 Mack Bolans for a dollar at a garage sale. Lord knows that would be a fun piece for this site. And I'll probably end up checking out that Donald Westlake pseudo-James Bond novel at some point. But I will say this, and this is the only time I say it: the lure here is purely an ironic one, or, in more/less pretentious terms, an anthropological one. Most of the content on this site that I appreciate I enjoy unironically. If I'm going to be reading Men's Adventure, though, it has to be because I want to poke fun. For some time, I've known about the original "Weasels Ripped My Flesh" story, which I learned about through the film of the same name. It was convenient of Robert Deis, Josh Alan Friedman, and Wyatt Doyle to entitle this book after that famous story, so that people like me could strike the motherlode with a good intro primer for the Men's Adventure genre. And despite what I may end up saying about this book, I owe all of those fine gentlemen much, because stories like these are valuable and worth preserving. The variety of literature and art is worth preserving if framed in the right context. And yet, also, hanging it out in the air to dry, as it is, for everyone to form their own interpretations--that's important to me too. I guess I should just present this book rather than pass judgment on it--though, incidentally, I will also pass judgment on it.

Usually when I do a short story collection I want to examine each story on its own to the best of my ability. However, there are a lot of stories in this book, and so in general I'll be talking about the book as a whole. There are some common threads between the stories, and the book in turn presents more than just the stories, so it in turn has to be looked at in layers. We'll start with the stories.

I was able to pin down about four basic categories for the stories contained in this book: Killer Creatures, Sociological Studies, Adventure, and Woman-Haters. All of these overlap and interact in some ways, so they're not hard definitions. Killer Creature stories are the namesake of the book and this one has some good ones. It's satisfying to read the original "Weasels" story (which would inspire Zappa who would inspire Schiff), and it's also nice to know that I live in the same universe as a formally published story called "Monkey Madness." These stories probably inspired the wave of animals-gone-berserk movies in the '70s and '80s, like (just off the top of my head) Frogs, Dogs, Strays, Slugs, Grizzly, and Squirm--to say nothing of Jaws. This was seen by some as an opportunity to resurrect the good ol' giant monster flick, leading to movies like Island Claws and Food of the Gods. I'll probably delve into those soon enough with a collection of cryptozoology-themed Men's Adventures put out by the same team. The Killer Creatures are a blast, and it's a good idea to open with one. It drew me even if later elements shoved me back out. Plus, the editors included a master list of all of the animals that have been featured in this kind of story: it included the obvious ones like ants, lions, crocodiles, tigers, sharks...but also anteaters, lemmings, newts, badgers, and iguanas. Excellent.

The Sociological Studies are what they sound like--reports or inside stories about scandalous topics. They vary in quality and, as you may expect have not aged well. Stories about the horrors of Beat culture will be amusing--racism-laden tales bashing Calypso music won't be. I can't properly gauge the lesbian expose stories, of which there are several. These are the literary equivalents of Mondo movies. They are tedious, offensive, and have aged badly, albeit not as badly as some of the other pieces. Have I mentioned this book doesn't support modern values yet...?

The Adventure stories I found to be somewhat boring, though there was a story that was done pretty professionally by Harlan Ellison, shriveled prick through he was. I should say here that if you can imagine the narration from a Something Weird B&W release, you can imagine the prose style of most of the stories in this book. Hardboiled into oblivion. Throw in war stories played straight and you've got me snoozing, and throw in racism and you've got me mad. I don't know what else to say about these ones.

And then we come at last to the Woman Haters. Man, these were a hard sit, but in the trainwreck sort of way. I really had difficulty putting these down even though they were some of the most monstrous stories of the collection--I blame my immunization to such things on having watched so many exploitation movies. Some of these really do give you insight into the sick fucks who were behind a lot of this. I got excited for "Grisly Rites of Hitler's Flesh Stripper" only to be disappointed (when I shouldn't have been) that it was merely an excuse for a nameless, faceless sexy lady to be repeatedly raped and mutilated by a Nazi for x number of pages. While these stories are offensive to basically everyone, sexism is their most prominent issue. And yet there's always something that's compelled me to look into the sick side of our culture, and I know it's not a unique trait. In this case, I don't think I have an explanation for it. I am probably a bad person in my own right.

But, to defend myself somewhat, I do want to step away from the layer of the stories and instead look at the book itself. The editors feature introductions to many of the stories, along with several introductions to the book as a whole--this is also seeded with interviews from some of the guys responsible for the big content of this market, including Mario Puzo. All of this is loaded with a rich history of the genre, showing how fast-moving of a market it was. It's easy for a modern reader to view this material as the Kindle porn market or clickbait "news" sites of the time. And like any sort of "bottom barrel" market, it's an important part of history, because people aren't reading "art," they're reading this stuff. Of course, that won't stop us from writing "art," as well as also writing "this stuff" to pay the bills. Such is the life. Take Mario Puzo for instance: he wrote trash, and yet an adaptation of one of his novels is considered by some to be the best film ever. I'll always walk on the artsy idealistic side of things, but man, do those cynical, realist, "economist-type" writers get the big breaks...

So naturally, the editorial stuff is going to be great for history lovers. The third layer, then, is the art: the team has lovingly reproduced hundreds of vintage covers, pages, and ads from several decades' worth of magazines. This is pure eye candy for fans of the hilarious. Thrill to the things that made your grandparents and great-grandparents hot on the forehead! It's nearly impossible to believe that these images were once printed and sold, and yet more importantly it makes one wonder what will be considered trash-treasure in the future, which we take for granted today?

This is a book where the actual content would fall apart without context. The book itself is so well put together that it's worth getting for the notes and images. It creates a historicity for a genre that we can't take straight anymore--even if the values live on (we need look no further than to our modern politics for that). Deis, Friedman, and Doyle deserve recognition for their work, and to top it all off, Mr. Deis himself signed my copy. If you can survive the horrors of Wanton Witch, you can make it with this one. Try it out if it's your speed. All I can say for now is that I'm hyped for this cryptozoology book.

Bookvember continues next time with a look at English sci-fi...of a very particular brand.

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Image Source: New Texture

Don't Go in the Woods (1982), by James Bryan

You know, this movie brings SpOoKyWeEn to such a perfect close that I had better hope I have something this good for next year. Good thing I do! Don't Go in the Woods was, for a number of years, the closest thing I had to a favorite movie of all time. Not just my favorite horror movie...my favorite movie. Ev-er. Now, comments like that are decently common on the A-List. It is, after all, my List of A-class trash movies--the reason why I had to do things like a Godzilla Retrospective is that no one wants to hear about how I love every single movie I review. But it's movies like Don't Go in the Woods that caused me to start keeping an A-List to begin with. I have seen this movie more times than I can count. And so I think I'm going to have to close out Spookyween's look back at four decades of horror with a review that's a bit more frank and stream-of-consciousness than normal.

Don't Go in the Woods, at least for the first big chunk of it, is maybe best described as an anthology of vignettes. Essentially, a bunch of (mostly) nameless people Do Go in the Woods and are butchered by a large unwashed lunatic who carries a spear, wears rosaries on his head, and lives in a convincingly disgusting shack full of trophies/junk stolen from his victims. Along the way we follow a group of campers named Joanie, Peter, Ingrid, and Craig as they slowly begin to understand--too late--that there is someone out there hunting them. That's about as High Concept at it gets. And that's where director James Bryan succeeds. With a relatively (and deliberately) simple premise, he left himself room to fill in all the little nooks and crannies with pure oddity. Remarkably, both these oddities and the main plot (following the four young campers) are extremely satisfying. The movie succeeds in its event-content, and as I'll get into later, you'd better believe that this isn't the only type of content it does well.

I can't bring up the strangeness of this movie without describing it, and yet it permeates the movie so profusely that I can only scratch the surface--which is good, because then, as is my constant goal, you will be forced to watch the movie yourself.† When you take into account the reports that Bryan did make every ounce of weirdness on purpose, you recognize that this movie has a level of genius to it. Now, while I just said I want you to watch the movie, there is some stuff I have to spoil, so if you want the full experience, which I will absolutely recommend over my writing about it, Don't Finish This Paragraph. There are three scenes in particular that I refer to. The first is the one involving Dale and his...wife? Mother? Sister? In any case, Dale and his companion are two gaudily-dressed dweebs who stand out in a movie largely populated by gaudily-dressed dweebs. And if you've ever met me and my fashion sense in real life, you know what it means for me to describe someone or something as "gaudy." Dale just wants to take a photo of "the train" pulling in (there's no way a track runs through a forest this thick); she is more intent on annoying the fuck out of the audience in the most amusing way possible with her constant, contrast whining of "Daaale! Daaale! Wait for me, Dale!" Next, there are Cherry and Dick. They are a newlywed couple consummating their marriage. And their names are Cherry. And. Dick. May they and their mobile home RIP in Peace. And finally, there is the odd, odd sequence with Wheelchair Guy. I will say no more, even with a previous spoiler tag in place, but let me just say this: I don't think people in wheelchairs usually try to climb mountains unsupervised. Always, always, does this sequence get to me...

Can you start to see what I mean? I hope you can. I like to think this is a movie that can sell itself even in vagueness (even if I pump my admittedly-flawed bombast into things as usual), and I hope that becomes more apparent as I write on. In regards to that bombast, I really should be more quiet about this movie. It deserves a better analysis--not to say that any of the other movies I've reviewed didn't deserve me shrieking hysterically about them. I am sort of moving towards a thesis here--that's been planned--so I think trying to actually get academic might help in the long run...

With that being said: this movie is actually pretty scary. All the movies I've done for Spookyween are, in their own way, and that's why I picked them. Weasels Rip My Flesh has a hopeless grunginess to it; I Eat Your Skin has an atmospheric soundtrack and some eerie shots; and Daughter of Horror terrifies me from beginning to end. Don't Go in the Woods keeps its voice way, way down on its creeps, and encourages repeat viewings. For example, when we meet the four campers, they talk about rabies and what to do if you see an animal that could be rabid. Craig warns the group that it's not normal for forest animals to eagerly approach humans: "No animal in its right mind would dare bother us," he says. The scene cuts on that sentence, meaning we're supposed to pay attention to it. That leaves us with the impression that it's meant as foreshadowing: there is an "animal" who's gonna "bother" them, and no, he's not in his right mind. And in the scene where poor Dale the photographer is killed, his body is thrown down onto some rocks...next to a lake the four campers are playing in. At once, Hitchcockian suspense kicks in: we the audience know that there's a slaughtered corpse right next to our heroes, but they don't. Add this onto the fact that Bryan clearly knows how to use and place a camera. Murders are bookended with wide shots of the woods, which gives us a sense that nature is almost apathetic to what's happening here. And it shows how fucked the killer's victims truly are: when the cops finally get involved, they say that they've found around fifty bodies. The killer has been doing this for years, if not decades, and no one ever knew. Brrrr.

Of course, the movie is also laden with some more overt horror--yep, this is a Video Nasty, a member of that league of honored greats banned or sliced to ribbons in the UK by censors. And that means that the deaths are pretty gory. We never see any organs or entrails a la Lucio Fulci, but cinematography and blood packs come together in a way that makes it nicely visceral. Plus, it helps that there's usually something to make us care about the people being diced...

I do have to talk about the characters before I go into my conclusion. This movie manages to establish better characters in five minutes than five hours of DC movies did--and I know that's a cheap joke, but I mean to say more that there was a great script on this one, much more than "cheap" stereotypically allows. (Back to that in a second.) Peter is whiny, but ultimately courageous; Ingrid is snarky, but more reserved and chill than Joanie; Joanie is okay with smashing her friends' hands with rocks for fun (in a lovable way); and Craig is a nerd, obsessed with his own apparent knowledge of the woods but still being pretty dumb and useless. We also meet a Sheriff who is still somehow not the most corpulent police officer I've ever met, his pinball-playing deputy, and an attractive, compassionate nurse. Though none of them really get to say much, we get a feel for who they are, and they seem like real people. Maybe it's because their acting/dubbing is notably awkward. But it's well-acted awkward, a "we-knew-what-we-were-doing" awkward. I absolutely love it when movies do that, because somehow, in an age where "nerd movies" dominate the box office, we still can't fucking put nerds or awkward people in movies and have it be more sophisticated than goddamn Big Bang Theory. This movie--in its acting, direction, scripting, and editing--is a triumph for nerds. But cool nerds. Because James Bryan is one of the Cool Guys, or at least he can sell himself to me as such.

So I said earlier that I was building towards a thesis with this, and that's true. When I was preparing my review for this movie, I remembered something one of my professors told me in regards to the idea of a literary canon. She reminded us that a "classic" book has really never meant much more than the phrase we use almost as an idiom, "It's a classic!" It really does just mean a book that a large group of people happened to like very, very much, and begin to obsess over. We take the idea of "canon" in both literature and film pretty seriously, and I think most people take for granted the idea that something stereotypically great like Citizen Kane is going to be a good watch, and, perhaps consequently, that that which is unlike Citizen Kane is an inferior grade of film. And mainstream critical views have generally lauded praise on movies that, like Citizen Kane, have good budgets††--to the point, in fact, where I do think some receptions have colored their views based on how much the movie cost. And I say "receptions" here rather than opinions; I'm not going to be a dick and claim the right to critique what individual people think and say about movies I like or don't like. Opinions in crowds, however, form receptions, and we've seen that receptions can be engineered. The Golden Raspberries, for example, have the tendency to preemptively or flippantly pick movies to nominate for their Worst Movie categories, based on the fact that the members don't have to see the movies to nominate them. And while, yeah, the Razzies are basically just for fun and whatnot, and they clearly pick movies based on infamy, they are still well-known enough to leave a social impact, and critics have changed their minds in modern times about many of the movies that the Razzies helped condemn, like Heaven's Gate, Mommie Dearest, and hell, even Howard the Duck and Star Trek V. Of course, there's no objective way to determine if anyone was "wrong" or not--and the Razzies at least make sure to go after movies that actually made it to wide release, so there's there not an issue of budget here, but you'll see that critical culture has difficulty getting away from judging movies based on expense. Note that so many of them frequently call Ed Wood--mediocre at worst, next to some of the shit that's been made--the worst director ever because he and his movies were cheap. And so Don't Go in the Woods left me one general statement, which I want to apply both to the obscure "trash" I review here, as well as a lot of experimental or unusual "bad" movies of better budgetary standing, like At Long Last Love: we should be fairer to movies.

I condemn bashing movies that one hasn't seen, but more relevant to Don't Go in the Woods: I condemn bashing movies that had little money behind them, by that factor and by what ramifications it had on the film. By that, I guess I mean I want mainstream critical examination of movies that, by our current capitalist standards, fail. I want people to learn to appreciate the unique qualities of amateur acting, directing, scripting, and what those qualities mean--I want them to tease out detail and substance from things that we've already decided have none. And in doing so, I like to think that we'll learn something. I can't say I know what, but I'm starting to see inklings. And even if the best we can conjure for these movies is ironic, humorous appreciation...I'm sure we can glean something from that. I'm of the opinion that everything goes down forever, and there is nothing that is meaningless. We humans, I think, get a little snobby when it comes to deciding what things have what importance, and I know that's because we are short for this world. We only have so much time spent awake before we die. But let's be idealistic. Let's look into the past, review all the forgotten films that have come before, that no one watched or liked, and see what we can find.

Because while you watch this movie, I want you to remember that the classics we take for granted are just the ice above the water--the real heft is in the dark depths.

So that's Spookyween! Thanks for stopping by--grab some candy corn on the way out. It's the best I can offer as apology for the Sin of Didacticism, plus, I lied about there being a cash prize for the Costume Party. Next up will be a quartet of meetings for the Book Club of Desolation, because it's finally ~*~*BOOKVEMBER~*~*. So hang on tight, 'cuz y'ain't seen nuthin' yet!

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† Do not watch the bootlegs on YouTube. Those are, as far as I know, derived from the Video Nasty cuts, and most of the gore is removed, along with the soundtrack, for fuck knows what reason. I'm going to assume that that means music is too controversial for the average British censor.

†† Citizen Kane cost ~$840,000 in 1941, which is equivalent to roughly $14 million as of 2016. I do not consider this a small budget.

TWO New Exciting Releases from Odd Tales of Wonder!!

ODD TALES OF WONDER #2 IS HERE!!!

Odd Tales of Wonder is another project I manage besides the A-List, and I've talked about Issue One on the site before. Issue Two is just as awesome, featuring stories about cannibals, spaceships, and pterodactyls! You really don't want to miss out. Get it in print and on Kindle, and receive three wonderful stories from returning contributors Jonathan Huisman, Rogaard Montieff, and Zachary Rouse, along with two excellent tales from newcomers Patrick Huisman and Katherine Avalon, plus a piece of my own. Check it out!

And that's not all. Odd Tales Productions is pleased to announce that we are performing an experiment in book publishing. Katherine Avalon's short story "Suicide Cult in the World of Cannibals" is featured in Odd Tales #2, but Avalon has also written a screenplay, entitled The Fires of '16: Reign of Emperor Tromble, which serves as the basis for our test. And it's a weird, weird book--to quote the Amazon description...

In this screenplay, Katherine Avalon combines the tastes and stylings of exploitation filmmaking with political parody to weave a story you won't forget...and will hopefully never have to experience! A good read for fans of the Bruno Matteis and John Waterses of this world. Billionaire Woodrew Tromble commences his quest to become the greatest man on Earth...and all humanity pays the price for his terrifying success. Avalon asks the question of how dictators are made while also probing deep into the psychedelic and sleazy underbelly of the human mind!

If you can read between the lines of the name Woodrew Tromble you will see the relevance this book carries today. Check it out HERE on Amazon in Print and on Kindle!

(Hey, you know what I just realized? Books and movies are expensive! But you can help me review stuff by buying stuff and funding my endless online purchases. And as always I do take requests. No shame here...)

Weasels Rip My Flesh (1979), by Nathan Schiff

I think I finally boiled it all down. People are nostalgic for their childhoods--or have a tendency to be. They want to see their childhoods represented in media, and this includes teenager-hood. The problem is there's a barrier between adolescence and adulthood, so that when one tries to represent one's lifestyle as an adolescent in adulthood, it comes out garbled, nonsensical, and embarrassing. It's best to leave representing kids to the kids themselves. That's where Kids Goofing Off comes along--the subgenre of horror-trash cinema that is magical and excellent. A lot of us made horror movies when we were kids, when we had no money but a reasonable number of friends, and a bottle of expired Karo syrup. Not a lot of us, however, had the courage and integrity to see to the release of their work. Welcome back once more to SPOOKYWEEN, my friends, and for the '70s, we'll be looking at white Afros, awkward 'staches, gore, and, of course, good ol' nihilism.

I'm so happy I get to talk about Nathan Schiff. In his late teens and early twenties Schiff decided to put together three backyard Super 8 horror flicks, beginning with Weasels Rip My Flesh and continuing into Long Island Cannibal Massacre (1980) and They Don't Cut the Grass Anymore (1985). A later entry in a similar vein called Vermilion Eyes was made in 1991, and with the other three movies was scheduled to be released by Image Entertainment--however, it was nixed at the last minute, probably due to the fact that Vermilion Eyes is a hard fucking watch. You see, Nathan Schiff's films carry a very particular brand of nihilism. The seriousness of it is hard to discern. Here, in Weasels, philosophical musings take second place to yucky monster gore. Later, as we'll probably see, we see thematic arcs regarding the death of hope, the uselessness of dreams, the inevitability of an awful fate--but let's start light. Let's start with weasels.

We open with some pretentious narration a la Criswell from Ed Wood's movies. This is followed by a murder scene that has no bearing on the film that follows, a la the opening strangulation scene from Beast of Yucca Flats. A space probe from Venus collects some radioactive goo. The probe goes down near Long Island, and when a rabid weasel bites two New Yawk kids, they take vengeance on it by pouring the slimy contents of the crashed probe into the weasel burrow. The weasel mutates and begins to spread its rabies plague. Enter Inspector James Cameron, who must have directed Terminator 2. He and his partner investigate the weasels but are kidnapped by Dr. Sendam (put it in a mirror, then you'll get it), who promptly reveals that mutant weasel blood is the secret to eternal life. I dare not reveal more. It's a tight film and I leave its secrets to you.

Weasels Rip My Flesh is a fascinating movie on almost every front. It is a better movie than I could ever write or direct at 16 (and trust me, I know from experience), and yet it is also rife with amateur's mistakes that enforce a certain layer of charm. You can sometimes hear the direction ("c'mon!" most commonly), and the special effects speak for themselves. The weasels are blobs of clay and sausage, and occasionally sport tentacles. Sometimes they melt into puddles of gore for no reason, and sometimes they go all Night of the Lepus, biologically morphing into zoomed-in hamster stock footage. They add surrealism to the film, surely. But so does everything else. Especially the mustaches. We all remember the folks who would try to grow mustaches in high school. If you ever missed taking a hard look at high school mustaches, this movie will take you back. As will the Dirty Harry references.

Crowning off all this is the fact that it is captured on Super 8, which the late '70s equivalent of whatever the hell was used to shoot Five Across the Eyes. All sound is post-dubbed, all music borrowed from the library cues that haunt the halls of '60s Something Weird fodder. The auditory and visual crackling marks this as a relic from the past, a valuable glimpse into a long-gone era. All media is valuable, in its own sense, as signifiers of the things we lose with the death of generations. Now we can see what they were doing in Long Island in the summer of '79.

Weasels Rip My Flesh is mostly hilarious, and but also a touch spooky. I consider it one of my Spookyween classics. You can spare 63 minutes, can't you...?

I Eat Your Skin (1964), by Del Tenney

Voodoo charts a perfect timeline of my life. If you want a voodoo movie that shows me at the ecstatic, youthful, hectic middle of my relationship with these sorts of movies, check out Trash Canon gem Crypt of Dark Secrets. If you want to see me at the far limits I've found now, where I'm largely just reflective and need something really tremendous to whet my appetite, managing a blog of memories more than having true, exciting adventures, check out Witchdoctor of the Living Dead. This is the voodoo movie--and indeed, the movie, period--that started it all. I Eat Your Skin is the first trash movie I ever saw. I watched it when I was ten, with my eight-year-old brother and my aunt and uncle. My aunt got the 50 Chilling Classics collection of public domain horror movies from another of my aunts. The four of us went in blind and it was up, up, and away from there.

I had never before imagined that acting, as a thing, could be bad, before laying my eyes on this. It was a goddamn blast. We didn't really riff it--it riffed itself. We laughed a lot and even got a few chills here and there. Well, my brother and I did at least, probably. After that, we tracked down Bride of the Monster and Plan 9 from Outer Space and all that. We'd been watching '50s monster movies for years, like Them! and The Giant Gila Monster, but we began to learn there was something new. Something alien. We met a lot of strange movies when we finally bought 50 Chilling Classics for ourselves. I Eat Your Skin came back time and time again, to be joined by Medusa, Cathy's Curse, Dr. Tarr's Torture Dungeon, The Alpha Incident, Demons of Ludlow, Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter, Horrors of Spider Island, Driller Killer, Oasis of the Zombies, Revenge of Dr. X, The Witches' Mountain, and probably everything else in that damn box and all the other collections like it. A veritable smorgasbord of weird, shitty horror. I needed more--I found MST3K and it still wasn't enough. (Even as Laserblast, Manos: The Hands of Fate, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, The Deadly Bees, Boggy Creek II, and Space Mutiny flooded into my awareness, and my heart.) Fortunately, I Eat Your Skin was historically double-billed with I Drink Your Blood. Figuring I'd be running into another black and white zombie movie, I was stunned by the display of rabies, gore, and hippies that unleashed itself into my eyeballs. I began to comprehend these "exploitation movies," and as teenhood dawned, I came across the annals of I-Mockery, the Cinema Snob, and Bleeding Skull. My formative years were shaped and stirred as I witnessed a bottomless sea of gore, nudity, and monstrosities beyond imagination.

I shared my movies, with some hits (Troll 2 nearly killed everyone) and some misses (King of the Zombies does not a good sleepover make). I even got the high school to have a One Night Only event for some of these movies, which is where Troll 2 knocked 'em dead, along with Don't Go in the Woods. I am proud to say that for two years, I was the Captain of the University of Minnesota Morris Bad Movie Club, or BMC for short. If there are any veterans of it out there, you know we saw both glory...and horror. It was our war, our private little war, and there were heroes as there were sacrifices. But what I mean to say is: it all started here. Some of the best days of my life started with I Eat Your Skin. So what better place to carry on the SPOOKYWEEN horror extravaganza from here?

Writer Tom Harris is in the soup with his editor, Duncan Fairchild. "Harry" Harris has been spending too much time helping lonely young housewives cheat on their husbands and not enough on composing his next Haydock-'n'-Harmon style potboiler. Duncan is forcing Tom and his own wife, Coral (which everyone always pronounces as "Carl"), to go to a Pacific island so that Tom can get some inspiration and make them more money. The island in question? Voodoo Island, home of snakes, zombies, and beautiful women. After an attack by one of the zombified locals, featuring the most hilarious decapitation set to film, Tom learns of the voodoo sacrifices of the island, and the mystery only deepens from there. As he falls in love with Jeanine, daughter of the local scientist, he'll need to solve it before their island Heaven becomes a Hell.

Does I Eat Your Skin hold up after all this time? Or have I grown too cynical with age to enjoy its cheesy, clumsy charms? I can say that fortunately I continue to enjoy the experience. I have perhaps moved on in some regards--for example, the mere presence of voodoo doesn't bring chills to me simply by merit of being some mysterious foreign religion. Now I know more about voodoo and I understand that there's not really such a thing as a "weird" religion (well, I mean, besides Scientology--excuse me, Sci***ology). There's almost certainly something racist in I Eat Your Skin, with the black pagan islanders trying to sacrifice a Blonde Caucasian Virgin™ and everything, something which I didn't pay attention to as a kid. It kills the mood a little bit, but of course the true evil behind the voodoo cult turns out to be a white man. His alias's name, though, is Papa Negro. That brings it back to uncomfortable a little bit.

But the movie is groovy, the shadows and zombies are creepy, and the dialogue is amazing. Any movie that uses the word "praytell" as part of its snark is going to be top of the charts for me. The acting, especially from the lady playing Coral, almost reaches self-parody at times. Did I mention, too, that this was the first movie I saw to have a sex scene in it? It was the early '60s, though, so nothing gets shown, and I wouldn't realize what it was until years later, when the sheer comedy of the scene wore off. There's also a wonderful zombie transformation sequence when some poor asshole is injected with the zombie drug and starts becoming one of the flesh-eating fiends with some Larry Talbot-style dissolve cuts. 

On top of all this, the movie doesn't drag, unlike most of the movies which I adored in my childhood that I've tried to rediscover over the years. That, more than anything else in my life right now, is important. I run a magazine, I write books, I work a day job. I have finally reached the stage of maturity where I cannot afford to watch movies without merit. Thankfully I have some solid luck these days, in these matters. And I have a great and bountiful past behind me to examine anew. Every scene in I Eat Your Skin flows well into one another, and while there is some dwelling (especially on the voodoo dancing), usually forward kinetic motion is a thing. There was some degree of care behind this, from the man who also brought us The Horror of Party Beach. There was enough to hook me. Just as easily, I could've slipped away from this path forever in the moment of watching this. Imagine if I had watched fucking Cathy's Curse instead of this. I would probably end up just watching Casablanca for a living. Assuming such a thing is tenable. (You'd think people would stop paying for reviews of Casablanca after awhile.)

Whatever. Be cautious but know that I Eat Your Skin is a party in your living room. Beget a trash legacy of your own with what you find in it.

Daughter of Horror (1955), by John Parker

When it comes to Halloween, I think Shakespeare captured it best in one of his lesser-known and yet still classic plays, Titus Andronicus:

Spooky scary skeletons, and shivers down your spine

Shrieking skulls will shock your soul and seal your doom tonight

Spooky scary skeletons, they speak with such a screech

You'll shake and shudder in surprise when you hear the zombies shriek

How do I talk about my favorite holiday on Earth? I have lived twenty-two Halloweens and with few exceptions the day, and surrounding month, is the one time I am guaranteed to be happy. In case you haven't noticed, I like horror, and for most of my life horror has been the spark that has allowed me to survive depression, anxiety, and all the horrors the world can heap on an individual. Jack-o-lanterns, ghosts and goblins, and indeed, spooky skeletons all represent the force that drags me back to this world and keeps me living in it. And so for the entire month of October, I'll be making a decade-by-decade journey through four of my absolute favorite trash horror films. So what I'm saying is...WELCOME TO SPOOKYWEEN!!!

(Insert celebratory music cue here.)

I found Daughter of Horror a year or so ago, and for a time made watching a twice-a-month tradition. I guess in a lot of ways the film shocked my conception of trash--though I'd found crazy-weird movies from eras before the '60s on previous occasions, I generally went forth with the assumption that Blood Feast had to break certain taboos before the deluge could start. Turns out, nope. People have always wanted to break with tradition, including the traditions that allow their films to be remembered and preserved by audiences. Shoulda known it from literature. That magical group of people who always press their beautiful, wonderful vision have always existed. The mid-1950s seem a time completely immune to trash, with their obsession with political correctness--the kind that tries to spare white suburbanites the vapors from the act of mentioning black people, not the kind that white suburbanites complain about today. Certainly a female-led movie about the agonies of poverty and mental illness would be beyond their scope, right? Wrong. Daughter of Horror began life as Dementia, a movie completely without dialogue. It was unable to find release until several years after its creation, and was released as Daughter of Horror with cheesy narration by Ed McMahon--this was the title under which I was introduced to it. The narration, I've found, does little to disguise the fact that this is a genuinely upsetting movie. And it never fades, no matter how many times I watch it.

As I said, Daughter of Horror contains no dialogue, and is largely a string of vignettes, though they do form a cohesive narrative. A young woman lives in a crummy hotel in a large, alienated city. She suffers from some sort of anxiety disorder and is prone to hallucinations. She travels through the city, witnessing muggings, child poverty, and domestic abuse, eventually coming across a scummy man who pins her to a light pole. He gives her what seems to be a pot joint (she squints and becomes more confused when she smokes it), and leads her into the limo of a rich fatcat, played by Bruno VeSota. Let me tell you, if you need a smarmy, corpulent jerk in your movie, Bruno VeSota is the way to go. He also played asshole greaseballs in The Undead, Daddy-O, Attack of the Giant Leeches, and A Bucket of Blood. He works magnificently here, and so every time I see those movies I think of this one. Anyway, we slowly learn that the young woman has always had an awful life. A cemetery flashback reveals to us that she came from a broken home, and she has been haunted by images of her father since she was a child. After a long sequence where the rich dude eats a huge dinner in front of her, without offering her a single bite, the young woman is nearly assaulted, and she murders her captor. Of course, this must not go unpunished. The rest of the movie is a relentless chase as the young woman struggles to elude a policeman identical to her father, who seems much too happy with the idea of arresting her. This is where the movie's imagery shifts from bizarre to outright cruel. The ending, of course, doesn't let up.

Watching this movie is like going through a tunnel of sound--cold, angry, stressful sound. And it gets louder and louder until, a mere fifty-five minutes later, it just stops. Like real mental illness, it is an assault upon the senses: deliberately confusing, painful, and traumatizing at all ventures. To envision a movie like this in 1955 is extraordinary. This is probably the only movie I've seen that does such a good job of capturing the fear of mental illness, the lack of peace--the impulse to always run, always hungrily desiring something better and never getting it, and feeling guilty for it, and feeling like the world will eagerly and desperately turn on you the first second it gets. The sense of never knowing what's real and what's just a dream in a hotel room. This is not glamorous, a la magic pixie dream girls. Mental illness is war and death. And this movie--independent of Ed McMahon narration--gets that.

Is it exploiting all this? Surely. But there is also something compelling about the movie from a feminist perspective. The villains of the movie are abusers--particularly abusers who are men. Abusive pimps, husbands, fathers. Male privilege, and male aggression, are the antagonists of the film. Though women are not portrayed in a particularly positive light, there is emphasis cast on the dark nature of men. In the 1950s this would have been an affront to a strong patriarchy, one which used the notion of political correctness to normalize and hide abuses both in public and behind closed doors. Actually, that still happens today, and we still have issues with talking about it. Don't know if Parker wanted us to talk about it, but I'm doing it now, so it seems to be something of an inevitable consequence.

It's hard for me to find faults in Daughter of Horror. It's actually one of the few movies that I would encourage being longer--seriously, it is only fifty-five minutes long. Apparently it was cut for its 1955 release, but I can't determine if the available versions retain those cuts. If they do, I really wonder what was in them and how much footage they entail. In any case, I am still content with the version we have, even if, as ever, I am upset by the potential implied by lost footage. (Talk to me about King Kong sometime.) 

I have nothing coherent to say about Halloween, save for the fact that I love it. The same applies to this movie. I love it. It's creepy and dark and it actually scares me. 'Nuff said.

See you next time, when Spookyween takes the '60s!