HCD!

Hey all! I'm stopping in here to announce I'm firing up my Instagram once again and beginning a new feature today. After 2015's successful Crawlspace Dive, I will now spend this year forth posting my old ticket stubs. Some go as far back as 1993 and include ones from film festivals and rep houses as well as the bigger chains. We start our journey (somewhat fittingly) with Danny Boyle's 2002 virus flick 28 Days Later.

I have tickets for about ninety per-cent of the calendar year, so follow @jrclarke1888 for daily updates. 

TV Rots Yer Brain!

Last Friday, I gathered some pals together to assault their senses – and perhaps their patience – with Scream Factory’s latest Blu-ray double pack, The Video Dead & TerrorVision.

Scream Factory because has been doing an amazing job of late. Not only have they been releasing some choice horror cuts over the last year or so, but also excelling in the packaging and supplemental departments, as well. I mean, just look at the title menu screen for the above disc!

Anyways, back to the evening at hand. Knowing that TerrorVision was likely going to be the easier for my peeps to ingest, I slapped on The Video Dead first. Even twenty five years later, I still find this movie so endearing. Director Robert Scott had more dreams than money – it was literally shot on weekends over the span of a year – but knew to accentuate his strengths. Sure, it’s slow in parts and the acting is questionable at best, but there is an emphasis on the zombies as characters that you usually don’t see outside of Romero’s catalogue.

As for the transfer, it looks pretty solid. Considering this film was originally shot on 16mm, this is the best The Video Dead has ever looked. I have to now give a shout out to Chris MacGibbon. His painstaking, multi-year pursuit to get The Video Dead released on a digital format has finally come to fruition. Additionally, all the supplemental materials he has been producing over that time are on the disc, including two commentaries, interviews and extensive galleries. It is pretty much all a Video Dead super-fan could ever want.

Diane Hadley as The Bride in The Video Dead.

I know that all in attendance were not as thrilled about The Video Dead as I was, but nevertheless we moved onto TerrorVision.

I had an even more vague recollection of this title, but wagered that the combined efforts of Charles Band & John Carl Buechler wouldn’t let me down. Thankfully, I was right. Just the production design alone in this movie is enough to keep you entertained. Imagining a universe where a house like this could exist brings a smile to my face. Then again, it was the eighties.

TerrorVision falls into a category that several of Band’s pictures possess where it seems like, gore and encroaching adult themes aside of course, he was almost trying to make a kids movie. It would certainly explain why several years later, Band founded Moonbeam Entertainment, the more youth-friendly genre offshoot of his Full Moon empire.

Not surprisingly, the center piece of TerrorVision is the monster, which is top notch. Just two years before the legendary carnage of Friday the 13^th Part VII, effects artist John Carl Buechler was at the top of his game here. It goes to show you that no matter how rudimentary a fabricated monster may look, it will always beat CG.

Slimy, gooey and, most importantly, tangible.

But wait, there’s more! TerrorVision also features a catchy theme song, an Elvira ripoff named Medusa, whose heaving bosom defies the laws of physics and some pretty extreme eighties hairdos. Also, much like its counterpart, this disc is rife with special features, including a commentary, retrospective doc and a still gallery.

All of this added up to a fun evening. With many more great titles on the way from Scream Factory this year, I suspect there will be many more nights like this to come.

VHS Nite Part V: A New Beginning

I managed to orchestrate another VHS Nite at my swanky, not-so-new pad last weekend. It took a bit of planning, but the stars aligned enough to get some Toronto folk on a train to my neck of the woods in due course. On the docket this time around were some British off-the-beaten-path anthologies. After taking a detour at the Wimpy’s down the street – it could say I planned that in keeping with the English flavour, but the truth is our choice of cuisine was completely random – I fired up the VCR.

In the mid-nineties, ITV broadcast a five-part-anthology horror series called Chiller. A few years later it came to Canada via our local broadcast station TVO. Due to its penchant for playing a lot of British programming, my parents regularly tuned in and one evening I happened to catch an episode of Chiller entitled “Number Six.”

Years later, I was able to watch the rest of the episodes on video (coincidentally, it is being reissued on DVD next month through Synapse), but Number Six remains my favourite of the series. I adore it, mainly because of the tone, skillful storytelling and the blurring of the natural and supernatural. I think it was this episode of Chiller that really clued me into British genre television’s slightly darker bent, as images from Number Six still linger in my mind today.

The next VHS I put in was the eighties UK anthology Screamtime.

It features three macabre tales, plus a cheesy wraparound strangely set in New York. It begins with a couple of hoods walking down 42nd Street, who then steal some VHS tapes from a video store, which later turn out to be the trio that make up the anthology.

Up to no good.

I am a big fan of Screamtime and was glad to be able to dust off my VHS copy. The first and third stories “That’s The Way To Do It” and “Do You Believe In Fairies” are really fun, and “Dreamhouse”, the one in between, has some genuinely freaky moments.

As far as I know, Screamtime was never released on DVD, but I just found out, while searching the Web, that it’s now on Netflix Instant. So, my neighbours to the south, if you are a fan of eighties anthologies, here’s one that is well worth your time.

Punch!

That’s another VHS Nite in the books! Now to find more suitable VHS goodies for the next one.