I did manage to curb myself a little though what with Christmas presents to buy.
Within a few days I should be recieving 'Hatchet For a Honeymoon', an early Mario Bava film. It was a toss up between that, 'Danger Diabolik' and 'Planet of the Vampires', a tough choice but I went for the one that I could get quickest as it was on region 2. No such concerns on the other DVDs
The others were tough to narrow down, but as they were all region 1 (meaning I'll have to wait a little longer for them) and I didn't fancy getting hit by an extra import charge from the postman I had to - another reason to go for 'Hatchet'. In the end I chose, 'God Told Me To', a film by Larry Cohen who cheered up my youth with 'Q The Winged Serpent' (and you can bet I ran out and bought the recent rerelease of that on DVD), 'The Stuff' and 'It's Alive'. I've never seen GTMT (and a few other Cohen films) but as it seems to be about mass murders done at the behest of Jesus as well as something to do with flying saucers I figure it's worth a look.
I decided to go for 2 fond remembered films from my childhood to round out the package. Death Line (or 'Raw Meat' as it'll say on the US edition) is a British classic (making it a bit galling to have to order it from overseas) featuring cannibals hidden deep in the London underground. It's a darkly humourous and ultimately sad and moving story, and after Anchor Bay rereleased the director, Gary Sherman's later film 'Dead and Buried' (another great, sort of 'The Fog' meets Nigel Kneale meets Bodysnatchers meets Romero.... maybe) I've been wanting to see this again.
Finally there's 'Psychomania' to look forward to. It really has been a while since I last saw this, maybe 18-20 years, but quite a bit of it has stayed with me. Mainly I remember it being about a gang of hells angels who, inspired by the leaders black magic worshipping mother (played by the brilliant Beryl Reid), kill themselves in order to be reborn as, well, living dead hells angels I guess. One scene that sticks in my mind is over one of the recently buried bursting out of his grave riding his motorbike (might have inspired the cover for Bat Out Of Hell by the great Richard Corben - we won't mention MeatLoaf).
The ones that didn't quite make it onto my list, and not for reasons of quality, just what I fancied now and what I could put off for a little longer were - 'The Final Programme', 'Six String Samurai', Spiderbaby', the Pete Walker boxset, 'Blood on Satan's Claw', 'Hell is a City' and a double bill featuring Ealing's 'Dead of Night'. The last one I decided to wait as I think it might be getting a R2 release, although I'm not sure if it's the Bob Clark ('Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things') one (which I also wouldn't mind).
In my travels on internet land for theses goodies I also came across 'I Drink Your Blood' which I might have to add to my list, it has a great cover and sounds suitably funny, lame and horrible (hippies terrorise a small town, an angered old guy chases after them, they make him take LSD so his grandson trickes them into eating meat pies infected with blood from a rabid dog causing them to go on a kill/infecting spree.... the 70's really did produce some classics.
Night everyone!
2 comments:
Dull question, but where do you get your R1 DVDs. playusa.com is good but the range is limited... any pointers?
To be honest I just go for old faithful amazon, if co.uk doesn't have it, com has. There's a couple of suppliers that regularly go through amazon that I've used that have been pretty good. In fact I'm going to use them in a bit and pick up I Drink You Blood, Thriller; A Cruel Picture and a really sweet version of Deadly Spawn, much better that Vipco's ropey version. Also found out that Street trash is available on R1, started the whole body melt craze that must have lasted all of about 5 minutes.
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