Ilsa Tigress of Siberia

Ilsa Tigress Of Siberia, directed by Jean LaFluer, Starring Dyanne Thorne (1977).

This very Canadian entry in a series of ghastly titillation and Nazisploitation smackers involves real authentic Bitch of Buchenwald Ilse Koch, played by the icy cold busty babe Dyanne Thorne for the third time. No one else could pull off this role but this isn't the first time Koch has been immortalized in cinema. The same year Dave Friedman who was inspired by Lee Frost's Love Camp 7 to use the set of Hogan's Heroes for the unsavory purposes of this production, a Lina Wertmuller arthouse classic came out called Seven Beauties. In that film, Shirley Stoler (who looks very much like the actual Koch) aims to murder main character Pasqualino (Giancarlo Giannini) if he doesn't satisfy her sexual needs. I highly recommend this film, which I saw in my Humanities class at City College of San Francisco.

Der Weinerschnitzel, yes I'd like to order that Descendents happy meal.

This entry is just as unpleasantly repulsive as the first two, but slightly less camp this time around. You don’t need to watch them all in succession to figure out what’s happening and thankfully they aren’t as frustrating and non linear as say, the Back to the Future series.

Zemeckis tried to warn us of the Trump presidency, why didn't we listen?

The racist aspect mostly fizzled out with each sequel, so you could sort of enjoy the busty Russ Meyer babes with a clear conscience. This is the Nazisploitation genre where it’s guaranteed to cause emotional trauma unless you are a Trump-kin or a racist piece of shit 4Chan homophobe and if that’s the case go fuck yourself.

The Eurotrash look of the film is appealing to me and reminds me of those weird Swedish Pippi Longstocking dubbed movies I used to rent during the same time period as when I used to go over to my friend John’s house and secretly watch Hotdog the Movie and Zombie.

The snowy locations give it a air of a Christmassy feel and Ilsa looks just as foxy as ever in that star hat and Wampa skin fur coat. Just in the first 5 minutes we get a smushed in cherry red skull cavity, cracked open by a giant cartoony hammer. I can't imagine anyone hasn't seen all of these in order, but for those who haven't--tuck in, it gets pretty gruesome.

This reminds me of that song by Warrant.

The whole gulag is set up like a Looney Tunes cartoon with man eating tigers and chainsaw arm battles. Ilsa parties with her cossack dudes who all lust after her of course. She does a clumsy dance to Russian bear music that’s part Fonzie part Elaine from Seinfeld complete with thumbs and kicks. Then she has a yucky threesome with two beardos who look like Hugo Stiglitz stunt doubles, they play a library track from Dawn of the Dead during the porkin'. I can just see the Hari Krishna zombie peer out from over the corner.

I'M SOOO OVER THIS!

Hitler is yesterday’s news and the new fascist pin up is Stalin. They torture enough Russians to compete with the Japanese medical camp team from Men Behind the Sun. Every other dude looks like Yakov Smirnov and talks like Balki from Perfect Strangers, but they all worship Ilsa. Man, all of a sudden the ego stroking of a fascist maniacal bitch is reminding me of a needy Orange diaper KKKlown—thanks a lot movie!

Trump's peen looks more like a baby carrot than a gerkin--noted.

One dude with an Axe body spray type name has too much will against state oppression and is tempted sexually with Ilsa’s meat balloons, he becomes an important figure in the second act of the story. I like how a minute after the war is over, they torch everything, murder anyone in sight and move on. No one sticks around to see if the news was reported as hearsay or in jest.

Movie over, I think not!

We’ve got at least an hour to go.

1977 Montreal flashes across the screen I can just hear the Stompin' Tom music and taste the La Batt’s blue! The sleaziness barometer starts to increase as the lone gulag survivor, who’s been hiding out in Canada takes his two pals to a brothel. Looks like they went into the wrong whorehouse because guess who runs it?

in Canada a pearl necklace is not what you'd think.

They capture Andre and he doesn’t even say “excuse me, you can’t arrest me, talk to my lawyer”. Apparently he’s better at withstanding abuse than picking up the phone and dialing a cheap attorney.

This grimy Italian dude that Thorne’s character swindled out of his hooker biz mentions Pompano Beach, which is where I grew up!

check out the fun bags on this hose hound.

There’s more of a Russian mafia aspect to get rid of enemies than shock troopers coming in and butchering people. The methods are just as gruesome however. When I first got wind of this series I was totally appalled, that it until I watched all of them and there's more humor, albeit super dark in tone but they're more entertaining on a campy level than you'd think.

In Tigress they use the loud heart thumps from LHODES and even that same library track from Galaxina as the lone survivor from the start of the movie envisions his worst nightmare. His torture fantasy shows Ilsa as a demented version of a cast member of CATS gnawing his dick off.

The Willy Wonka on dabs plus LSD nightmare machine is pretty creative, it takes your worst fears and attacks your brain with them. Why does this computer exist, who knows but it’s pretty cool.

Oh Shit! it's a horny Phillis Diller in CATS makeup! 

The Russian embassy has a score to settle with “The Bitch” and they send over ninja assassins. One gunman who looks almost exactly like Don Steele (aka Rockin’ Ricky or Screaming Steve from Joe Dante’s cinematic cannon), gets impaled and it's pretty delightful.

This pacing on this one is pretty riveting and I highly recommend seeking it out. You can skip Wanda The Wicked Warden, unless you have a hard on for Jess Franco. 

ONLY AVAILABLE ON DVD AND VHS.

American Nightmare

American Nightmare Directed By Don McBrearty, Starring Michael Ironside (1981/1983).

Haha, very funny Canada back in 83, how did you know even before Mike Judge that a reality show ape/ hemorrhoid faced clown would surround himself with a cabinet white supremacists, preach intolerance and dismantle the entire political system while everyone was too busy farting around on social media to notice. Actually that's complete bullshit, but you already knew that dear readers, this one is a Canuxploitation slasher that's number one selling point is that is has Alexandra Paul, the babe from Dragnet, Christine and Baywatch topless and acting super stoned and horny. She was also dating the director and this is her first role, but enough about her.

HACK, I swallowed a whole bag of Andy Capp Hot Fries while stoned

A rubber gloved john slices Tanya the hooker's throat, causing her brother to go searching for his prostitute sister. The Great White North just seems to have an over abundance of depraved half naked babes-- remember they shot Ilsa 3: Tigress of Siberia there and this one has all kinds of sleazy chicks. I learned a lot by reading Yum Yum of Houseofself-indulgence's review for this film. This was basically a time capsule of prime Toronto grime, when the streets were clogged with the legions of creeps on the level of "The Deuce" of the early 80s and 90s. Their grindhouse nostalgic domain was Yonge Street and The Zanzibar, which this movie preserves.

Everything about this one, so far, is like a zero budget ShowGirls. One stripper juggles naked in front of a poster for Connie Stevens Scorchy, another dresses like a cowgirl and they all worry about Tanya (Alexandra Paul's character).

obvious inspiration for Pink Floyd's double album A Nice Pair

Everyone is so fucking Canadian, why is it called American and not Canadian Nightmare? There's already a number of films with that catchy title, the most famous one to me being Buddy G's unedited cut of Combat Shock (which I ordered from Chas).

Michael Ironside shows up in basically the same outfit that he wore in Scanners, only its 3 years later. Ironside is never above showing up in trash, he was even in an episode of The Littlest Hobo, an 80's crime solving dog sitcom that was just mentioned on The Best Show as something to cheer us all up after the election. The murders are very similar to Maniac only the killer has no presence at all. The best part about this movie is that it's really sleazy and lots of skanks show off their assets.

One stripper played by Lenore Zann humps a pitchfork and she even carries it around off the clock as a weapon. Before this role Zann was in Visiting Hours, also with Ironside and Happy Birthday To Me. 

Peter Scolari from Bosom Buddies starting at his night job

Lawrence Day, the guy who plays Eric has all the acting style of a mannequin or Keir Dullea and his delving into the seedy underworld is sort of like Hardcore but very inept. There's a really offensive gay character named Dolly (Larry Aubrey) who seems to know everyone and I felt kind of bad when he dies. Aubrey appeared in the My Pet Monster live action video cassette special and The Vindicator, he's got quite a nerdy resume.

for Furries only

Through out the duration of the film, lurking in the background are all these dudes in tacky thrift store suits with buttons that save Uni-Save, which is a plot point that becomes very crucial toward the grand finale. I'm pretty certain it's making a statement that Uni-Cef is corrupt but I could be wrong.

holy shit it's a California Raisin in a Moe Howard wig!

There's graffiti and thought balloons that say Pink Floyd on the walls during some scenes, this movie is really stupid but it's enjoyable in its lameness. For a Giallo, which it's been called, man how did I let that one slip by, it's still very accessible and succeeds in that area. There's even some surprise incest, which really came way out of left field. A lot of times I judge a film by the last 5 minutes, if I'm on the edge of my seat like I was during Lipstick (which I've got to review, it's an amazing film that Skunkape turned me onto a few years ago), then I know it's a must see. It gets really bizarre toward the finish line, I advise you to stick it out and if you're bored and give up, I think you'll regret missing the big climax.

MAX RENN WOULD WANT TO GET THIS ON CIVIC TV PRONTO AND ADD HARDCORE INSERTS.

The Editor

The Editor, Directed By Adam Brooks & Matt Kennedy -  Astron 6 is Adam Brooks, Matt Kennedy, Connor Sweeney. Jeremy Gillespie, and Steve Kostanski.  

It's been a few weeks since we've covered a "new" film (which sadly was Goat Scrote's coverage of Eli Roth's Green Inferno), so you know this one is pretty special. I'm a huge fan of Goblin-esque or Alan Howarth/John Carpenter tones or synthwave (what I used to think of as Italio-Disco) and The Editor has a lot of those schmaltzy sounds pouring from the soundtrack. The first ones I got into were Giallo's Flame, Laserhawk and the Disco Undead compilation. The bands featured on this soundtrack are Carpenter Brut, Vercetti Technicolor, Repeated Viewing and of course the best of all time Claudio Simonetti! There's an entire sub genre now, which is pretty cool, so you can mix up your own fake scores for an imaginary Italian Horror flick.

The Editor is a film I had no expectations going into, mainly because I'd only seen the poster artwork, which had Laurence R. Harvey, the tubby guy from the Human Centipede series and other cast members I wasn't familiar with. Each Astron 6 film that I've watched was enjoyed drunkenly along with my best pal Skunkape. Starting with the Troma release Fathers Day in 2011 (lots of anal rape jokes) and Manborg (which was a slight improvement). The Editor however, really cut into the meat of the matter and lampooned all things Italian Horror, this of course is sole the reason I'm reviewing it above all their other films. Did they pull it off, I have to say they did a decent job and for once made a Giallo watchable. Now that's almost impossible in my book, because I'd been burned by many others. Novices out there who blindly stumble into this tarantula infested macaroni pit of parody will not get the jokes and I doubt will want to dive into the Italian exploitation subculture. For those that stick it out, (obviously regular Guts readers have ventured beyond the typical), you will be rewarded. This movie goofs on Fulci, the Franco Nero/David Hess vehicle Hitchhike and there's almost too much technicolor and an over saturation of phantasmagoric Argento style to count the references, blah blah, you get the point. It's all handled really well and they genuinely understood the guilty enjoyment of garbled translated Italian to American style dubbing, nice work Astron 6.

Astron 6 : total boners for 80's nostalgia

The only flaw I could single out here is that they went with Udo Keir, who I've recently gotten used to instead of someone like John Morghen. I even asked Morghen if they bothered to consult him to appear and he said "No", for shame Astron 6!

Shut Up, I'm watching myself on Eagleheart!

The lead protagonist Rey Ciso (star and co director Adam Brooks) comes off like a watered down Franco Nero impersonator but he has a certain level of charisma. Paz de la Huerta is pretty terrible as usual but looks very attractive in a slovenly way, she's made a nice career though appearing in B-movie schlock, this seems somehow classier than her usual garbage. The way she whines at her husband and calls him a cripple (because his fingers were sliced off in an accident and he wears wooden prosthetics) sort of reminds me of the relationship dynamic of Richard Johnson and Olga Karlotos in Zombie. A textbook giallo killer is out slicing through major arteries (the red stuff spurts out in rivers, there's those Argento motifs). The shadowy figure wears a black raincoat, gloves, sunglasses and injects people with a paralyzing serum and carries a straight razor. All the Giallo cliches are evident.

The females in The Editor constantly show full bush and are extremely beautiful, if only real Giallos were that generous. There's a sweet Traci Lords crotch thrusting Murder Rock style homage topped off with a stupendous face ripping. The mechanical face spews out blood and the violator tries to smush the flesh back onto the skull--it's ghastly amusing.

Check out my skinless Maculay Culkin impression

The Human Centipede actor plays a helpful priest and thankfully doesn't sew any mouths to anus' this time around. Another actor/co-writer Conor Sweeney talks like a foreign dubbed guy and gets tons of ladies, his character is sort of gay (he checks out a dude in the shower and compliments his penis), he also wears a bad Ken doll blonde wig.

Yep that's right I brought Herpes to Sicily, so what!

The murders start racking up super fast and it gets increasingly more difficult to tell what's reality and what's being spliced together on the editing table by Rey Ciso.    

The story is intentionally muddled to emulate the Italian gore genre, you know how forgiving most fans are especially if it's a Fulci or Mattei flick, hell, I'll even toss in Claudio Fragasso for fucks sake.

I can't sleep, I drank too much Sanka

There are a lot of grisly murders but one of my favorite parts is when Rey sees a shrouded figure with giant blue contacts, it's such a straight up Argento moment that would be lost on most people who aren't familiar with his early work. There's a comical and yet surreal sex scene where gratuitous mounds of birthday cake are slathered on the man's face (perhaps it's a scat metaphor). There's an insanely gory chainsaw battle that's so violent and sexually gratuitous that it reminded me of Pieces, which I'm sure was intentional even though that's by a Spanish film maker.

Tom Carvel here, reminding you that foodies are welcome to explore their perversions at participating stores

During the second the half, the tributes hurl at you frenzied (a blind girl has a German Shepard, a weapon nearly stabs a victim repeatedly over and over ala-Fulci). I'm always baffled by that motif in the maggot Maestro catalog, but it always occurs and it's always wonderfully suspenseful.
This one hits almost all of the pressure points in a satisfying way, especially if you're an Italian gore junkie, in my mind this is Astron 6's best work to date, go out of your way to see it.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!  
Astron-6 Website

I wish I knew how to quit you Franco

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD RECKONING PART 1 BY GRAHAM RAE

This piece originally appeared on Film Threat's site, but they've since gone belly up like a bloated rat in a bucket of vile cheese whiz. Mr. Rae has graciously offered this article about his visit to the set of Land of the Dead, a film I enjoyed when I first caught it in an empty theater in Berkeley by myself in the middle of the day. This article will be split up in two parts and I'll give it the Guts wacky picture treatment per usual, I hope you enjoy it and thanks again Graham! 

THE DEAD WALK!

Dateline: Friday, 12/03/2004. Dead of night of the living dead in BCE Place. I am riding an escalator up from the lower level of this huge, gaudy building in the financial district of Toronto, Canada back to the ground floor, where the fourth George A Romero “Dead” movie “Land of The Dead” is filming this evening. In full horrifying zombie makeup, I have just been to the toilets, where I tried not to wash too much of the fake blood off my hands and was grinningly told I looked like shit by some random guy using the urinal next to me. As the film crew comes into view on the horizon I feel oddly as if I am in the surreal middle of some sort of wish-fulfillment dream over two decades in the making. I am going to shoot my first crowd scene and am nervous as hell. As I approach the milling zombie extra swarm I reflect for the millionth time on the long, strange journey that has led me from Scotland to the Great White North and my fast-approaching flesheater stardom and it still doesn’t seem any clearer or more believable…

The author buried somewhere among the hordes of the undead

ZOMBIES MAN, THEY CREEP ME OUT

1981. I am 11 years old in Falkirk, Scotland (directly between Glasgow and Edinburgh, if you’re interested and need a geographical reference point). Video recorders have not been out for too long (you have to pay to join places to rent tapes) and are still a novelty. My primary school friends and myself are horror film fans and, this being the golden age of the so-called UK ‘video nasties,’ the shops are full of bloody horror videos to sate our morbid-wee-shite preteen gorehound appetites. Whenever one of us sees a new sick flick we breathlessly report the next day to the rest about this sick crazy weird really gory mad film ye shoulday seen it this vampire guy zombie cannibal ninja creature gets ripped tae bits shot in the heid falls off a building heid chopped off smashed tae fuck attacked by an alien cut in half stabbed slashed sliced diced melted mutilated mauled and so on and so forth, excitedly describing the latest entry into our own private atrocity exhibition gallery to our awestruck friends. Our parents are fairly liberal (or just plain crazy) and let us watch pretty much what we want, and we are having a great time seeing the craziest goriest sleaziest vilest vicious violent videos we can. One day my pal-at-that-time Derek McLaren tells me about this great-sounding undead effort called “Zombie Flesheaters” (a Lucio Fulci film know as “Zombie” in the USA) and this amazingly cool bit where a woman’s eye gets impaled on a piece of wood. It sounds magic and I decide that this new classic, which becomes mythical among my group of peers, is the film I am going to get out the next time I go to the video shop.

Or when there's no more room in hell or too long a line at Dennys

So my father and I trail up to a shop in Falkirk whose name I can’t even remember now (but I can still recall the interior in vivid, lurid detail) and we go to the horror section to get the film. I can’t see the box and, being a shy 11-year-old kid, get my dad to go up to the counter and ask for it. It isn’t in, but the guy behind the counter lifts up the box for another film, “Zombies: Dawn of The Dead” and says they’ve got that one in, would that do instead? I have never heard of this film, and don’t really want to see it, I want to see “Zombie Flesheaters,” dammit, cos after all that’s what I went to the shop for, but I was too shy to say I don’t want this poor substitute for Derek’s great film and nod my head mutely. And so we take this film on Intervision Video by some guy named George A. Romero home and, in disappointment, I put it in the video recorder…

…and blow my young fucking mind.

Misleading Fulci-esque UK Intervision artwork 

This unexpected filmic discovery, about a group of people who hole up in a shopping mall to get away from zombies taking over the earth, is absolutely great too. It’s really, really sick and gory, with loads of folk getting shot in the heid and a zombie getting the top of its heid chopped off by a helicopter blade and zombies getting run over by trucks and a screwdriver getting stuck into a guy’s ear, and I can’t wait to tell the boys about this one. I watch and re-watch the film, taking it round to my auntie Mima’s (another great place to see horror films) in an adjacent street to show my uncle Gary, who stays round there at weekends, and he thinks it’s great too. The film really makes an immediate impact, and even after I have told my friends about it and they have seen it and we have dissected every death and smart (British word for ‘cool’) bit in it, I re-rent it at irregular intervals and it never grows tiresome to watch and, over time, becomes my all-time favorite film.

REWIND AGAIN!

(Brief digression: it was only this year that I realized (upon careful reflection) the reason “Zombies: Dawn of The Dead” made such an impact on me was because when I saw it in 1981 I had only recently returned to Scotland the year before from South Africa, where I had spent the ages of five to ten (my first five years being spent in Scotland) living with my parents and brother. There was a shopping mall called Eastgate just outside Johannesburg that we used to visit at weekends sometimes and the shopping mall in the film (complete with first-generation videogame machines like Boot Hill) reminded me of Eastgate and the times I had spent there. But I never thought of that at the time, at least not consciously (funny the way the mind works, eh?). I just thought it was a bloody great film, and I still do.)

(Second digression: a few years ago at the Edinburgh International Film Festival the documentary “American Movie,” about wannabe-director Mark Borchardt’s attempts to make low-budget horror films in Wisconsin, was screened. I recognized the guy’s horror film fan mindset immediately and could relate to his intense Romero zombie fandom. I had to interview director Chris Smith and producer Sarah Price after I saw it. I put it to them that Borchardt had obviously named his daughter Dawn after “Dawn of The Dead.” Smith looked at me in amazed bemusement for a few moments, then said “You know, you’re the first person who ever got that.” Make of that what you will, but “Dead” fans recognize their own…)

Anyway. Let’s fast-forward this old, chewed story-videotape (sorry if the picture jumps or is poor quality in places) a few years. I find out piecemeal bits and pieces from reading horror magazine Fangoria (which I read when I was young, though I haven’t looked at an issue in over 15 years) about “Dawn of The Dead” (as I now know it is known in the US) and become a huge George A Romero fan. When I am 17 I am on a Youth Training Scheme and, with my meager ‘wage’ of 27 pounds (roughly $40) per week I go through on the train to Edinburgh and delight in finding hard-to-find years-old Romero tapes like “Night of The Living Dead” and the classic “Martin”. Purchasing the soundtracks for “Dawn” and “Day” I also buy a copy of ‘The Zombies That Ate Pittsburgh,’ which is a book about all of Romero’s movies. I really, really want to buy the (I think it was) $100 signed hardback version of the tome, but that proves to be beyond my limited financial capacities at that time. Over the next year or two, pissed off that “Dawn of The Dead” and “Day of The Dead” (which I love and see ten times at the pictures in Falkirk when it comes out in the UK, even opening the back door of the cinema so my 15-year-old brother Tony and his pal Mikey Martin can sneak in and see the film) that are cut in Britain I send off to the US for them from FantaCo in New York, and get the copies converted from British PAL to American NTSC myself: no way, no fucking WAY am I going to watch cut versions of classic films like these.

 

R.I.P. Scala Cinema

When I am 18 in August 1988, I attend a horror film festival, Shock Around The Clock 2, in London, at the now-sadly-defunct classic arthouse-cum-grindhouse Scala Cinema. I see some films like “Nekromantik” there and do the first US review of it for Deep Red, a now-defunct legendary splatter movie fanzine whose editor, Chas Balun, I have started corresponding with after reading about him in Fangoria and asking him if I could be a ‘foreign correspondent’ (with absolutely no knowledge whatsoever of what this might entail – ahhh blissful youthful ignorance and naivety – or how I might do it from my bedroom in my parents’ house in Bainsford in Falkirk with just a typewriter and no contacts in the film industry) for the zine and getting the go-ahead. The next year at Shock 3 a young man of 18 comes up to me and asks if I am Graham Rae. Ready for a fight, I reply that I am. He tells me his name is Justin Stanley (another Romero zombie movie freak), he has read my stuff in Deep Red, he likes it and asks me if I would like to help organize a horror film festival like the one we are currently at. I tell him yeah and give him Chas Balun’s phone number and tell him to say I sent him when he calls. By the tail end of 1989 Justin has put together a festival called Splatterfest 90, scheduled for February of 1990, and we go across to the USA (my first visit) to meet some of the guests in Hollywood.

Graham and Monika M. from Nekromantik 2.

Before we go to LA, though, we stop off at a snowblown Pittsburgh where we initially are going to be zombies in the limp remake of “Night of The Living Dead”, but it is rescheduled and a meeting we are going to have with Tom Savini pulls through. But we don’t care, because we visit the consumerist Mecca where “Dawn of The Dead” was filmed, Monroeville Mall. We wander round this familiar-yet-not site excitedly, taking endless photos and playing the comedic ‘Gonk’ music from the end of the film on a ghetto blaster I am carrying (which we are told to turn off by mall security), marveling at how much – or little – some of the place has changed since the film was made there over a decade before.

Turn down that Ghetto Blaster and no pie fighting either!

We then head off to Hollywood to meet Chas Balun and Scott Spiegel (director of a supermarket slasher film we want to show at the festival, “Intruder”) and, through Spiegel, who co-wrote “Evil Dead 2” with Sam Raimi, we get drunk with the Spidey director at his Silverlake abode one day as we play a Donald Trump board game (which was, as you might imagine, an incredible experience for a shy, bookish 20-year-old “Evil Dead” fan from a small boring Scottish town).

In more pleasant days before Spiderman 3 was unleashed upon the earth

Spiegel (a cool guy and a man to whom I owe some AMAZING memories – thanks Scott) also drove us over (listening on the ghetto blaster to Screeching Weasel’s classic second album Boogada Boogada Boogada, which had just come out at that time and a band of whom I was a huge fan; funnily enough, it has a song called ‘Zombie’ which references “Dawn” in it) in his open-top stick-shift European sports car to meet the super-amiable Greg Nicotero (of the venerable KNB EFX group), another guest at the Splatterfest, who had done FX on “Intruder.” Greg took us round the KNB studio, showing us super-cool FX props from films like “Tales From The Darkside” and the then unknown “Dances With Wolves” (think lots of fake dead buffaloes!), amongst others. Tickled pink that Justin and we knew his dialogue from “Day of The Dead” (in which he played the doomed soldier Johnson: “We used to talk to Washington all the time, they could hear us then!”), Greg gave Justin a WGON-TV sticker from the helicopter in “Dawn” and me a pen-marked script from the set of “Monkeyshines” by Romero. When Greg and Scott are in London for the Splatterfest two months after that, staying in a flat in Tooting, we also hang out. This is all pertinent, by the way, because it just basically illustrates how much Romero’s work has meant to me over the years. And it all leads full-circle, don’t you worry…

DEAD RECKONING BECKONING

Anyway. Years roll by, life’s trials and tribulations test and educate me. I start to write for the long-dead print incarnation of this very website (cosmic fact: Chris Gore was a zombie extra in the selfsame “Night” remake Justin and I were going to be zombies in), or more specifically the Film Threat Video Guide, an offshoot of the magazine. Through that mag in 1992 I meet Dave Williams, my brother-of-another-mother American twin (similar mindsets, music and literature tastes, etc), and we keep in contact over the years. As a writer/editor Dave moves from FTVG to American Cinematographer to Cinefantastique (which he left a few months ago to continue his own work) and, when he does so, he moves me with him, on the proviso that I can cut it in writing articles for these publications. I prove myself to him again and again, and his generous patronage (I owe you so much Dave – thanks for being one of the best for so long and putting up with me all these years) is the reason why I end up writing about stuff like Scottish art cinema (Lynne Ramsay and “Ratcatcher”) or Jim VanBebber (about the cinematography on his Pantera video for ‘Revolution Is My Name’) for AC. One of the world’s top film magazines, it’s a technical trade journal and I don’t come from a technical background…but hey, with enough balls and wordwork know-how even a monkey can follow writer’s guidelines and come up trumps, right?

Right.

Over on the Romero front, I stop following his work closely after “The Dark Half” but am still interested to hear about what he’s getting up to upon occasion. Or, more specifically, I’m interested to hear about the oft-raised-but-never-fully-verified rumors about an impending new “Dead” film “Twilight of The Dead,” which will be the end to the series that the original “Day of The Dead,” whose budget was lopped in half (and whose original script is excellent), was supposed to be. My idle “Day”-dreams of being a zombie in a Romero film (which assumed some sort of talismanic significance in my mind for a few years) fade quietly as I get older and move into new arenas of interest, leaving behind my horror fandom in my early 20s, although not my love of “Dawn” as my favorite film. By now I’m older and more educated as to Romero’s subversive social and societal subtexts in his “Dead” films and can see the nod-and-a-wink depth to them. But underneath it is all is just the sheer pleasure of seeing a world order I despise collapse and seeing an intelligently realized version of, as the director himself puts it in one clip of him I see, the vision of a new society devouring the old. The film is just a great remedy for any dazed days when I’m feeling hopeless or helpless or misanthropic at the state of the world, and the idea of a planet seemingly full of morons being wiped out and a new world disorder establishing itself is an extremely appealing one. 

Plus I still think zombies are really, really cool…

OK So how do we send one of those ROTLD missiles over to Zack Snyder so he never remakes Dawn 

DEAD SET ON A DEAD SET VISIT

In 2004 the much-debated, tedious, braindead “Dawn” ‘remake’ (or re-imagining or whatever the fuck you want to call it, which rips off the original “Day” script) comes out and I phone up BBC Radio Scotland and DEMAND to review it and do so, dismissing it and pointing people back towards the original, which has finally been released uncut on DVD in the last couple of years in the UK (having been snipped of six minutes on its initial video release). Stupid as it may be, the regurgitation remake has one good effect: its success, along with that of the “Resident Evil” films, convinces Universal Studios that they could make a mint if they put Romero back in the undead director’s chair to make another long-overdue installment of his own decades-spanning zombie flesheater holocaust saga. And thus the forever-rumblings about a fourth “Dead’ film start anew, only this time with real weight and it’s-finally-gonna-happen substance.

I tell Dave Williams that, if Cinefantastique are going to do a story on the film, I want to be the one who visits the set when it shoots. He agrees (earning a place in my good book until the end of time) and gives me the gig. I am fortuitously on holiday in Chicago (a short hop to Toronto, where “Land of The Dead” is filming) during December 2004, the omens are good…and I can hardly believe my luck as I jump on a plane to Canada on 12/01 and the culmination to a story that started over two decades before with an unsuspecting 11-year-old’s chance discovery of a horror classic in a long-gone Falkirk video shop. I get an added wee bonus on the plane. Actor Paul Dooley, who played Claude Elsinore in the 1983 Canuck cult classic “Strange Brew” (which just so happens to be one of my all-time fave films) is on the plane, and I tell him the film is great and shake his hand before settling down for the undead adventure to come.

After a journey of a little over an hour I am in Toronto and get a limousine (all the while marveling at the whole thing) from the airport to the four-star Marriott Bloor hotel I am being put up in by the generous-cos-they-can-afford-it Universal Studios. Starving, I head down to the dining room after checking in. With my $100 (Canadian) per diem I get myself the most expensive $35 coupla-inches-thick steak (best I ever ate in my life) in the place, just because I can, and toast myself with a $12 glass of red wine. This is the life indeed; things just don’t get any better than this…

STAY TUNED FOR PART 2 COMING UP SOON . . .