Convoluted
story. When I was 17 I first read The Gore Score, his chapbook of
capsule reviews of 80s splatter movies. I think I read about it in
Fangoria, which I used to read as a teen. I liked it a lot and wrote to
him, asking him if I could be a foreign correspondent for him,
because he had Deep Red. He said he liked the idea. So in August 1988 I
went down to London from my old Scottish home town of Falkirk to the
sadly-now-defunct grindhouse the Scala Cinema, and saw Nekromantik, in
its first UK screening (there have been very few of these, because I
think it may still even be banned in the UK, though I'm not certain) at
Shock Around the Clock, an all-night festerville (my word), and wrote
the first American review of it. This was published in Deep Red 6,
though before that, in issue 5, I had published an article entitled 'All
Cut Up' (about censorship in the UK which I was, well, all cut up about!),
my first ever USA publication, in 1988. The next year I went down to
Shock Around the Clock 3 and a young guy came up to me (I was only
19-going-on 20 myself) and asked me if I was Graham Rae. Ready for a
fight, I confessed that I was. He said his name was (and still is!)
Justin Stanley and he wanted to do a horror fest like SATC!, "SplatterFest 90". He asked me
if I would like to help organize it, and I gave him Chas Balun's phone
number, who gave him some other numbers of Hollywood luminaries like
Scott 'Intruder' Spiegel. Other numbers Justin got by himself - he
basically organized 99% of the thing himself, with me just doing talking
stints during the fest between films at the event. But we went across
to the USA in December 1989 to meet some of the guests. We stopped off
in Pittsburgh, where we were going to meet Tom Savini, but it never
happened. Still, we visited Monroeville Mall, where (as you and your
readers will no doubt know) Romero shot Dawn of the Dead. Then we flew
on to LA and stayed at Chas's house for a couple of days. He made us
huge cheeseburgers and we had free reign of his video collection of the
weird and obscure splatter shit we had breathlessly read about in Deep
Red. He was a very talented artist and there were beautiful paintings of
monkeys and such he had done on his walls. He also had splatter props
lying around, as evidenced by my picture!
Then from there we went to
Hollywood and stayed in a motel and visited
Scott Spiegel, who took us
to the
KNB studios (lot of dead buffalo lying around from
Dances With
Wolves!), where we were shown around by the inimitable FX genius
Greg
Nicotero, and took us over to his old Michigan buddy
Sam Raimi's house
in Silverlake to get drunk with him on vodka and orange! Incredible
experience for two young guys, and I can still hardly believe it ever
happened! But that's how I first met Chas, plus with a wee bit of waffle
thrown in as well.
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| Lester Bangs hits the beach |
2.I've read that one of your
influences besides other greats like (Bukowski, JG. Ballard and
Burroughs) is Lester Bangs do you see a kindred connection between
Lester Bangs and Chas Balun?
I can definitely see a
correlation between
Lester and
Chas, and it's ironic that they would
both wind up being such major headspinfluences in my own life, with
regard to music and music writing, and films and film writing,
respectively. Both were born the same year, 1948. They obviously grew up
with a lot of the same cultural influences and loves. They were both
first and foremost extremely intelligent fans of their chosen milieus,
would write on a street level for their fans, no bullshit, no hype, no
hassle, and you knew they were just like you and you could trust them.
They were both pretty wild writers, with Chas having a liking for the
more extreme splatter films, and Lester having a love of extreme, trashy
music. They were both great conversational writers too, and both came
out of the 60s; it was just that Lester died very young. If he had still
been alive I would assume, or like to think at least, that his level of
enjoyment of, and commitment to, his art and the art he wrote about,
would have been just as durable as Chas's was. Chas was also an old
hippie, so he was very music-based - and they both would write about
drug experiences sometimes! Both were also very irreverent when it
called for it, with regards to some of the utter shit they had to sit
through in reviewing stuff or writing articles about it. They were just
free spirits, neither of whom truly made a living from writing (Lester
did so more than Chas, though not a great living at that), and whose
gutter-level views and musings in the venues they chose meant that they
could write about what they wanted in whatever way they wanted without
fear of censorship. They were excellent salesman, very productively
seductive writers, and they could make you buy into the world of any
good or bad or ugly piece of art they wanted to with their cynicism or
extreme humor - they were both hilarious - or rude or erudite
examinations of whatever it was that was under discussion. They both
seemed incredibly generous to young people - I will always thank Chas
for giving me my start in writing - and nurturing of youthful talents. I
mean, shit, man, I was a fucking teenager writing for him! And Lester
helped people like Cameron Crowe and would write for any old obscure
fanzine that asked him. And they just ultimately loved with all their
hearts the stuff they wrote about, and that enthusiasm came through loud
and clear to the reader. Both changed my life as a teen. And both are
still sorely missed.
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| Graham & Chas in the green inferno |
3.One of your greatest reviews in Deep Red Alert is Meet
The Feebles, when I read that, after I immediately ordered it from
Balun, talk about early Pete Jackson as opposed to now.
Thanks
for the compliment, though I'm not sure the review was all that great! I
first saw
Bad Taste in a black-and-white French-language bootleg before
it even came out in the UK - a friend and I were part of the bootleg
trading circuit by that point, after I was given a trading list at
Shock
Around the Clock 2 as I waited in the line outside, and we started
trading with a guy from London, then with others from the back pages of
fanzines like
Samhain, whom I also wrote for. I had first heard of it in
Gorezone 2 (an offshoot of
Fangoria) and remember clearly a two-page
spread of an exploding head in the mag that I thought was amazing. A
friend and I,
Davey Blair, became HUGE Pete fans and we loved his first
three movies -
Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles, and Braindead (aka
Dead
Alive in the USA, but that's a stupid fucking title so I can never call
it that - plus it has dialogue cuts too, which is shitty) and would sit
and get wasted and sing along to the songs from
MTF. We got a round of
applause for drunkenly singing the
Sodomy Song at a fest in Edinburgh
one time!
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| Trevor the Fox singing Sodomy! |
I still love those three films, and think the fan ghetto
mentality, where they deride
Jackson for becoming one of the biggest
directors in the world and leaving their beloved genre, to be complete
horseshit. He made incredibly gory and funny splatter movies a la
Monty
Python - how far can you go with that splatstick schtick? Good luck to
the man, he's a self-made, self-taught genius, and anybody who would
mock that is just small-minded or jealous or stupid. Or any combination
thereof. And I'll tell you a funny true story. In 1996 I was in LA and
went to a signing in a sci-fi bookstore that Pete was doing (along with
Jeffrey Combs) for
The Frighteners, which is not a good movie,
particularly. I went down there with
Justin Stanley, David E Williams of
Film Threat Video Guide, and
Jim VanBebber, director of
The Manson
Family. I got a Frighteners poster for Davey back in
Falkirk, but
nothing for myself, cos I didn't really care - the Scots affect a cool
detached cynicism much of the time towards famous people, a trait that
has gotten me into trouble a few times! But I got to the front of the
line and asked Pete to sign the poster "To Davey - the best singer in
the Feebles chorus." He looked at me and smiled and said, in his
excellent New Zealand accent, "I'll sign it - as long as you'll tell me
you're not Scottish!" There is a lot of Scottish blood in New Zealand,
and his parents are English, but he was just fucking around. (An ironic
aside - he co-directed
Forgotten Silver, a mockumentary about a
Scottish-roots 'lost' filmmaker, the next year! Maybe our meeting gave
him some ideas!)
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| another drunken horror convention |
I jokingly said to him "Don't gimme any of that shite,
pal, or I'll take you outside and kick your fucking arse!" He said "Oh,
alright!" and signed my poster, and was asking me if I was there on
holiday or what. I confirmed this, and when we got outside
Dave Williams
was pissed off that I had sworn in front of Pete and was grumbling
about it! I am chuckling here. But yeah. Pete was an only child who
taught himself how to make films and ended up making the biggest films
in the history of the world. How can you fault that? I thought
Heavenly
Creatures was great, though I didn't like
King Kong - thought it was way
too long and bloated, a vanity project run awry - and have never seen
The Lovely Bones. Nor do I have any wish to. I thought the
Lord of the
Rings films were great, for what they were. I was the only person in the
cinema in
Falkirk to cheer when they mentioned a 'Wynyard' wine in the
first film - it's the name of the junkie knifethrower frog from
Meet the
Feebles! Pete's just such a terrific talent and I will
always support him - shit, man, I have been watching his films for 26 years now, and I still quote them occasionally!
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| Deep Red 5 1988, Graham's first ever writing publication |
4.What was it like as a young writer contributing to such a vital and important zine like Deep Red?
It
was an utterly incredible experience from start to finish. I used to
get some lager on a Friday night and rent some shit out of the local
shop and get drunk and watch the films and write reviews for it. It was
an incredible kick to see my writing in print as a teen. I still get a
kick out of seeing my stuff in print now, but back then it was so new
and vital and fun. You felt part of an elect select club, the
Deep Red
crew, and every time another issue came out it was a joyous thing.
Funnily enough, when Deep Red 4 came out, with a letter I wrote to the
mag asking for a
George A Romero interview (I was a huge Romero fan and
ended up being a zombie in Land of the Dead, and that story can be found
here:
http://www.filmthreat.com/features/1596/),
Davey Blair was living and working in London - we hadn't seen each
other since high school, where we were not friends - Davey saw it and he
brought it up to me a couple of years later in Falkirk when we were in
our mad movie phase! I felt part of a scene for a while, an underground
scene defying the bullshit Tory government and their worthless video
nasties censorshit nonsense - and it was much more fun to get a
poor-quality bootleg of a censored-or-banned-or-
unreleased film because you were doing something taboo and illicit.
Literally illicit
- people's lives were ruined with the stigma of being prosecuted and
persecuted just for watching horror movies! My first ever American
newsprint mention, in the editorial of
Fango 72, was me angrily railing
about the British Board of Film Classification and how they had cut
Day
of the Dead and such! But Deep Red will always hold a special place in
my heart purely for the time that it comes from - my teen years and very
early 20s - and the camaraderie of the horror scene in the UK, with
fans visiting each other and getting drunk and going to fests and just
having a great fucking time applauding the messy deaths and such
madness! Writing for Deep Red led to some other writing gigs for me, on
stuff like
Film Threat Video Guide and
American Cinematographer and
Cinefantastique (those three all due to
David E Williams, who would drag
me along to each new rag he edited or whatever), so I will always value
it for that too. If Chas had not given me the confidence to put my
teenage belly-rumbling grumblings and ramblings out there, which he did
simply by publishing them, my life would have been a very different,
poorer place. The last ever email I got from him was in 2004 when I told
him I was going to the
Land of the Dead set (I didn't know at that
point I was going to be in the film!) and he told me to 'make the beast
of it,' and I realized then that he had obviously been hugely inspired
in his puns by
Forrest J Ackerman. His youthful love of horror movies
and things that go hump and bump and jump and thump in the night had
never left him, and never did until the sudden, unexpected-to-me day he
died. All of this 80s horror zine stuff is super-comprehensively
documented by
John Walter Szpunar in his new excellent book
Xerox Ferox,
(which
comes out in September at the
Fantacon in New York. I am going to be on
a
Deep Red panel discussing the mag, and, sadly, it looks more or less
like Chas will be the only main writer-cum-editor-cum-film-
champion missing. Be there or be elsewhere!
Order Tickets here:
Link
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| Pick # 1 Cat In The Brain/ Nightmare Concert |
5.what are your top 5 favorite Fulci movies?
I
can't say I was ever a huge Fulci fan, to be perfectly honest, though I
had a pal back in Falkirk, Stevie, who was a Fulci obsessive and would
take great pleasure in tracking down Lucio obscurities like
A Lizard in a
Woman's Skin or
The Naples Connection (a film I remember talking about
with the sadly-deceased
Sage Stallone, a huge Fulci fan, whom I met on
the same 1996 LA trip mentioned earlier - Justin knew
Bob Murawski,
Stallone's friend and partner in
Grindhouse Releasing; Bob ended up
winning the Oscar for The Hurt Locker - and we went to a private
screening of Andrea Bianchi's trashy 1981 zombie trash epic
Burial
Ground at the Hard Rock Café in Beverly Hills) or
Don't Torture a
Duckling or
Beatrice Cenci, even newer shite like
Aenigma and such.
Personally, I would have to say:
1) Cat in the Brain (just for the sheer trashy overload of it all!)
2) Zombie (aka Zombie Flesheaters in the USA, but the UK title is way better)
3) The Beyond ("ATTACK, DICKY! ATTACK!")
4) House by the Cemetery (Freudstein, one of the best character names ever! "NOT THE CHILDREN!")
5) City of the Living Dead (the classy Italian aristocrat Giovanni Lombardo Radice getting the drill through the skull!)
 |
| Apologies to Paul Naschy |
6.I
loved your article in The Deep Red Horror Handbook on "Trans Atlantic
Terror Trends" what do you think are the most ridiculous films that
ended up on the Video Nasty List?
Thanks. I just liked the fact I
got to swear a lot and mock the
BBFC! Ah, simple teenage agendas, eh?
But without sounding too glib about your question, all of the films on
the
DPP (Director of Public Prosecutions) list. The whole fucking thing
was ridiculous, and Thatcher's government was a sack of dogshit that
sent society-destroying waves through the UK in general that are still
being felt decades on. It was fun to laugh at the old Nazi cunt's
funeral a few weeks ago, or would have been if it had not cost so much.
But for the sake of more serious argument, maybe
Blood Feast (utter
cheesy shite that nobody could ever take seriously) and
The Werewolf and
the Yeti (ditto).
Driller Killer deserved to be banned just for being
shite! Who knows what arbitrary criteria they used to make up that
stupid fucking list! But this is such old news, now, this whole tiresome
Video Nasty clusterfuck, and it seems now only to be young American
horror fans who are obsessed with it and want to talk about it. People
who lived through it just want to forget about it and let it die and lie
in the dustbin of worthless shitstorm history where it rightfully
belongs.
Yes, I
wrote for both, but I never felt there was a conflict of interest, or
that I should take one side or the other in that matter, because I had
stopped writing for
Deep Red before I ever wrote for
Film Threat, and I
very much enjoyed writing for them both in similar, but also slightly
different, ways. They both gave me good things. They were both coming
from a similar place in different ways. I'm not avoiding the question,
I'm just telling you what I think of the whole thing. It never meant
that much to me, because I was never at the epicenter of it. As I
recall, and it's 20+ years ago now, the
Film Threat Video Guide took
Chas to task for duping $20 bootlegs of
Nekromantik, which they were
legally selling, and a few letters flew between them and Chas, and
between
Jorg Buttgereit and
Manfred Jelinksi, the director and producer
of
Nekromantik. I think Chas offered to fight
Chris Gore or
Dave
Williams at some convention one time. I could see why no-budget,
hard-working filmmakers would object to having their sales bitten into
by the same guy who, ironically, published the first ever
USA review of
Nekromantik that I wrote! Also ironically,
Film Threat used a
Chas Balun
quote on the back of their video box to help sell it! I am writing a
book about
Jorg's career, having taken him to
Ed Gein's grave last year
in Wisconsin, with
John Szpunar, and maybe I should bring it up to him
for his take on it. But, once again, this is 20+ years ago, and
controversies and details fade and, ultimately, who really gives a fuck
anymore? I know there was bad blood there because Chris Gore ratted Chas
out for providing a bootleg of
Guinea Pig that
Charlie Sheen took to
the FBI as he thought it was real, but it's all ancient history now.
Deep Red and
Film Threat had a lot in common - they were both underdog
upstart zines-cum-mags with attitude, covering obscure and weird shit,
with similar spiky, punky, no-bullshit attitudes. It's just that
Gore
was a lot younger and liked viciously needling people a lot more than
Chas did, though he could have his own needling moments too. Many years
later Gore would rip Chas off again by calling a section of a show he
was in
The Gore Score. I guess they say imitation is the sincerest form
of flattery! Chas may have changed 'imitation' to 'irritation,' but the
concept holds the same!
OK thank you Graham! and TOG readers you heard the man, be sure and check out Fantacon 2013, which will have a Deep Red alumni reunion and the Xerox Ferox and other books will be available to buy, a must for all gorehounds.
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| Graham hiding behind a prop from Bride Of ReAnimator |
