 The grim, noir laced phantasmagoria of faded superhero's and the various inter-personal demons they battle known as WATCHMEN has finally – after two decades of false starts – arrived on screen and man alive, is it an ambitious picture. Under the, um, watchful eye of director Zack Snyder, the same bloodthirsty stylist who brought you 300 and the controversial but otherwise pulse pounding DAWN OF THE DEAD remake, has taken great pains to ensure that the movie remains as faithful to writer Alan Moore’s text and artist David Gibbons’ illustrations as humanly possible, giving us a near 3 hour, ultra nihilistic and hyper intellectual audio and visual dark fantasy epic that is as bold, ballsy and brilliant as it is uneven and demanding.
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 The heart that pounds away in our chests only does so a finite amount of time so we owe it to ourselves to milk the maximum amount out of every moment and explore as many avenues of interest possible. Why settle for a single profession, a solitary job, one in which we lock in and tread water for the rest of our lives? Every personality has many appendages and there is no crime in sating and expressing each and every one of them.
And, yeah, John Harrison is cool.
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 Okay folks, here goes…
The following interview is a must read for fans of trash, cult and generally outlandish cinema. And sex. See, VIVA, a mind blowing recreation of early PLAYBOY magazine gloss and the sexploitation melodramas of Russ Meyer and H.G. Lewis fell onto my happy lap last week and, popping it in my player, I immediately fell in love.
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There were but two major childhood events that truly sealed the deal with me when it came to following my macabre muse, to forging a lifelong, lovely and lurid obsession with horror films and creepy culture. The first was when I saw the 1977 KISS album LOVE GUN at my local library. I was 3. The cover depicted the original four glam rockers in a garish painting, standing in chamber full of mist while a horde of pale, vampirish women swoon at their dragon heeled feet.
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At the risk of enduring the slings and arrows of loyal LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT lovers, I'm going to have to admit to never really personally grooving on Wes Craven's 1972 crass-ification of Ingmar Bergman's shattering 1960 drama THE VIRGIN SPRING. Cheap, mean and unpleasant to the max, the film has one major strength and that's leading thug Krug played by David Hess. Drooling, manipulative and despicable on every level, Hess made LAST HOUSE's chief antagonist one of the most vomitous heavies in film history, the driving force behind one of the wonkiest but most influential wallows in sadism and human misery ever committed to celluloid.
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Before you bury your talons in this week's BLOOD SPATTERED BLOG, be sure to read the first installment of my interview with cinema legend Mark Damon…
For those of you who were left hanging on a cliff anticipating my Italian terror tinged follow-up, here it is.
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Some time ago, while perusing the special features on my DVD re-issue of Mario Bava's BLACK SABBATH (contained in Anchor Bay's magnificent BAVA BOX SET VOL. 1) I was pleasantly surprised by the addition of an interview with an actor by the name of Mark Damon. See, I was a rather huge fan of , not only the Bava masterpiece (Damon starred as the young hero in the chilling Boris Karloff episode in BLACK SABBATH called THE WURDULAK) but also of the legendary and groundbreaking 1960 Roger Corman / Poe/ Vincent Price creeper HOUSE OF USHER and perhaps even more relevantly, the 1973 soft core Eurotrash shocker THE DEVILS WEDDING NIGHT.
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2008 is burnt toast.
Allow me to reflect on a handful of new genre films that rocked my sickening socks this year past.
Now, I'm not saying that these are THE best...but they're MY favorites...I think. I may have forgot one or two or three. Anyway...
Ready?
Here we go….in no particular order….
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The weird and wonderful work of controversial genre filmmaking legend Jesus "Jess" Franco came to my attention via an article in FANGORIA, the periodical I currently write for. I was in the late 80's and I was in my early teens and one of my favorite Fango scribes, Tim Lucas, had scribbled a piece based on his intrepid investigations into the serpentine oeuvre of the elusive Eurotrash auteur. It was a fascinating column – the first of an ongoing series that would bleed over into Fango's sister magazine, GOREZONE – that attempted to differentiate between authentic "Franco's", those he merely had a hand in creatively and the myriad of none-to-clever forgeries.
If you're reading this blog, I'm willing to bet that you have at least a hazy idea as to who maestro Lucio Fulci is.
Once a director of mediocre sex comedies, second rate Westerns and rather competent "giallo" styled mystery-thrillers (I'm a big fan of his 1971 effort A LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN), Italian exploitation filmmaker Lucio Fulci didn't truly find his cult status footing until the close of the 1970's when producer Fabrizio De Angelis, so dazzled by the European success of Romero's DAWN OF THE DEAD (called ZOMBI in Italy), opted to employ the aging gut-slinger to helm an unauthorized DAWN prequel (or "rip-off" as the case may more likely be).
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Remember when those fuzz guitars screamed and those thick basses throbbed over images of Olga Karlatos's eyeball popping at the tip of a wooden splinter in Lucio Fulci's classic 1979 gut muncher ZOMBIE (aka ZOMBI 2)?
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In case you haven't noticed, I tend to gravitate towards cinema that isn't necessarily perfect but rather is flawed, fascinating and enigmatic; movies that reflect upon the mysteries of the human condition by shielding their truths in a thin sheen of bloody mess and abstract fantasy.
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I'm an film soundtrack junkie, an unapologetic, card carrying, raving and drooling addict. And seeing as my cinematic fixations lean toward vintage European genre films – horror, crime, western – it's an easy guess that the bulk of my rather substantial CD and vinyl film score collection tilts toward this passion too.
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Chris Alexander is a lifelong cineaste, obsessed with eccentric horror movies, weird romance, black leather and spacey, strange music. Based in Toronto, he was a former critic and columnist for Canadian horror entertainment periodical RUE MORGUE before joining the ranks of the legendary FANGORIA magazine, a publication he was completely obsessed with as a child. He still gets a buzz when he sees his name in the masthead.
