Recent Entries

• TV Eye: Two (2) New Shows and One (1) That Time Forgot But Is Now Starting to Remember and a Book

  by zacharythax June 11, 2009
  Sometimes I feel like a creature from another time, especially when I talk to younger people. For decades I never knew anybody who was younger than me. I was always the youngest. All my gang in the old stoner days was into these old shows like Star Trek, which was too talky and not enough monsters f...

• The Good, The OK, The Great (though nobody else thinks so), and Another Complete Waste of Time

  by zacharythax June 8, 2009
  THE INNOCENTS b/w(20th Century Fox, 61) S: William Archibald, Truman Capote P/D: Jack Clayton There's some good scares in this classy, beautifully photographed (by Freddie Francis) and well acted adaptation of THE TURN OF THE SCREW. A rich single guy (Michael Redgrave) pawns off his two adopted orph...

• Never To Be Forgotten: David Carradine

  by zacharythax June 4, 2009
  DAVID (John Arthur) CARRADINE (72) from Hollywood, CA of English, Scottish, Welsh, German, Spanish Italian, Ukrainian and Cherokee ancestry was the eldest son of horror great John Carradine. He was the brother of Bruce Carradine and half-brother of Keith and Robert Carradine. Although he was best k...

• More Completely Useless Remakes: Halloween (2007) Dimension

  by zacharythax June 4, 2009
  D/S/P: Rob Zombie About the only reason I can that Rob Zombie saw it necessary to remake a perfect film was to show the sickening backstory and to pipe in a lot more blood. The angry, swearing white trash characters made me want to leave the room. A lot of the first hour is so vile, repulsive and d...

• Nude for Satan (1974) P.A.B. Distributors

  by zacharythax June 3, 2009
  D: Paolo Solvay P: Remo Angioli S: Luigi Batzella Sexedelic euro shocker with tons of full-on bush nudity, mindbending now-you-see-him-now-you-don't camera tricks, identity confusion (like in Performance), sadomasochism, a lesbian dream sequence and a girl with a breast popping out getting caught in...

• File Under Completely Useless Remakes: Last House on the Left (2009)

  by zacharythax June 2, 2009
  No way I can be the slightest bit objective on this one. Remaking LHOTL borders on sacrilige in my book. Why not repaint the Mona Lisa or remake Citizen Kane fer Crissakes! Like a train wreck from which you can't look away I just had to see this out of some masochistic urge. I wanted to hate this s...

• Adaptations of the Late Great J.G. Ballard

  by zacharythax June 1, 2009
  Re/Search books once put out a volume dedicated to him. He wrote some incredibly flipped out stories in the late 60's on a par with anything by William Burroughs or Thomas Pynchon, some more straight sci-fi and then scored a hit in the mid-80's with Empire of the Sun based on his own life in a POW c...
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• Top 5 TV Shows of the Current Decade

  by zacharythax May 29, 2009
  30 Rock Trailer Park Boys True Blood Weeds Wonderfalls

• Japanese and Movies About the Japanese and one about Funerals

  by zacharythax May 27, 2009
  Bridge on the River Kwai MGM (1957) D: David Lean P: Sam Spiegel S: Michael Wilson, Carl Foreman Spectacular locations in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) and seeing Obi Wan Kenobi (the original one, kids) Alec Guiness as the overzealous Colonel Nicholson make this great. I feel like a complete douchebag fo...

• Justification to Lay Off the French

  by zacharythax May 23, 2009
  You always hear on Howard Stern and in the pages of Maxim lot of stuff badmouthing the country that helped the good ol' US of A win the American Revolution AND gave us the Statue of Liberty (ahem). They also gave us OSS 117 Music Box Films (2006) D: Michel Hazanavicius S: Jean-François Halin Michel...
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• A Visit to the Ruins of Jim and Tammy Baker Land and Couple of Quickie Movie Reviews

  by zacharythax May 20, 2009
  I had some business in Charlotte, NC last week and could not resist tracking down the ruins of Heritage USA, the theme park built by the Jim Baker PTL empire before being wrested from him in the wake of the sex scandal by Jerry Falwell and then crashing and burning in disarray. From what little scr...

• Jigoku AKA Hell (1960) Shintoho

  by zacharythax May 11, 2009
  D: Nakagawa Nobuo Forget the giant rubber monsters! This very serious Japanese film contains a lot of guilt, drinking and some pre-Herschell Gordon Lewis blood 'n guts, though it's not as gory as I imagined it from the review in The Psychotronic Video Guide. Picture a vision of Hades somewhere betw...

• Devil's Tomb (2009)

  by zacharythax May 11, 2009
  D: Jason Connery Cuba Gooding, Jr. and some modern Iraq some soldiers go into a cluastrophobic underground place where they encounter Bible verse and acid-spewting zombies, gory after effects and a sick looking Henry Rollins in a clerical collar. They hallicinate and there's some nudity. Bill Mosel...

• Completely Unneccessary Movie Review: Star Trek (2009) Paramount

  by zacharythax May 11, 2009
  D: J. J. Abrams W: Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman By the time you read this you'll know all about it. I'd like to see this on a double feature with Trekkies. This ultra-fast paced "reboot" may remind some of the internet-only series Star Trek the New Voyages which also featured 20-something actors...

• Movie Review: Tokyo Gore Police (2008) Fever Dreams LLC

  by zacharythax May 9, 2009
  D: Yoshihiro Nishimura If the Motion Picture Academy of Art and Sciences weren't such a bunch of snobby limp- wristed sissies this should have won for best foreign-language picture of 2008. Near future Tokyo is run by private police who look like crosses between a samaurais and Darth Vader. A glee...
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• Pepsi Throwback: So Good It'll Make Your Teeth Ache!

  by zacharythax May 7, 2009
  High fructose corn syrup! I never asked for it. Did you? But noooo! It was just foisted on us during the Reagan-atric 80's when the only moral compass that corporate America and all the yuppie-larva I went to school with was "What're they gonna do?" I doubt that most of the morons at my next-door c...
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• Movie Review: Mexican Hayride (1948) Universal

  by zacharythax May 7, 2009
  P: Robert Arthur D: Charles Barton S: Oscar Brodney/ John Grant Sunday morning the '70's there wasn't anything on TV besides preachers other than Abbott and Costello. My grandparents had cable and I would constantly be over at their house because they got WGN out of Chicago and WOR out of Secaucus,...

• Movie Review: I am the Cheese (1983) Almi

  by zacharythax May 7, 2009
  D/S:Robert Jiras 15 year old Adam Farmer's (Robert McNaughton) parents were put in the witness protection program when he was 4 and the memories are slowly seeping back to him in flashbacks during a long bike trip across Vermont while carrying a mysterious package. Robert Wagner tries to cure of of...

• Movie Review: Gomorrah

  by zacharythax April 30, 2009
  Gritty, scummy, gangster film from Italy--which looks like a sleazy third world backwater. Everything takes place in a post-nuked-looking decayed concrete block housing where you can almost smell the fermented piss and fear sweat. The pastaland of Frederico Fellini isn't even on the same planet as t...

• Movie Review: The Dunwich Horror (2009)

  by zacharythax April 26, 2009
  Bitch all ya want about this, but it's hard enough to read Lovecraft never mind adapting him to the screen. This recent entry manages to keep up the heavy opressive atmosphere without getting bogged down. Due to come out next month and starring Dean Stockwell from the much-maligned original. It's g...

• TV Review: Made In Canada

  by zacharythax April 26, 2009
  Superfans of Trailer Park Boys will want to see this if for nothing else than for Mike Clattenberg as Assistant Director. The show is about manipulations and shenanigans behind the scenes at a Toronto TV station. It may be a comedy and while it never actually made me laugh out loud too much, it's st...

• Movie Review: Terror on the Beach

  by zacharythax April 26, 2009
  Remember Dennis Weaver from Steven Spielberg's first film Duel? Well this is kinda like it. A made-for-TV version of The Hills Have Eyes. I saw this years ago before VCR days and for a couple of decades wasn't sure whether I had actually seen this or just dreamed it. To my knowledge this has never b...
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• Movie REview: Death Sentence

  by zacharythax December 19, 2007
  If you live in Columbia, SC the reason to see this Death Wish-like revenge action flick is all the familiar downtown locations. Some of this was filmed right down the street from my house. The local weekly ran a huge feature on it, all the critics slammed it, but it's sure to show up on pay-cable as...
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• Movie Review: Rise of the Dead

  by zacharythax December 10, 2007
  Rise of the Dead2007D: William WedigS: Joshua Crook, Jeffrey Crook, Kris Scotto I had heard that back in the 80's George Romero had done some clever legal wrangling so that no one could release a film with anything followed by "...of the Living Dead" or "...of the Dead" without his permission. He m...
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• Editorial: Sirius XM Merger

  by zacharythax December 10, 2007
  I still don't know what to think about the merger between the two satellite radio companies. On the downside it would create a monopoly. Without competition it may lead to inflated rates and crappy service. Anyone who has ever dealt with a small-town cable company knows what kind of headaches a comp...
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• Movie Review: Chainsaw Sally

  by zacharythax December 7, 2007
  Since the 80's there's been a huge amount of low-budget horror films made by true fans of the genre that just didn't work. Sure, you can make a movie with tons of gore, nudity, great FX and all that, but there has to be something else there to make it all work--to make the whole thing more than the ...

• Another Movie Review: Johnny Thunders Born to Lose

  by zacharythax December 7, 2007
  Johnny Thunders: Born to Lose (2001) D: Lech Kowalski P: Lech Kowalski Bette Wanderman In 1991 when I first heard about the death of the guy who played great sloppy guitar for the New York Dolls, my friend's comment was, "They said 'Live Fast, Die Young and leave a beautiful corpse.' The only ...
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• Your Psychotronic Movie Guide for the 21st Century

  by zacharythax November 29, 2007
  Alas, we have entered a sad new era with the passing of Michael Weldon's great Psychotronic Video magazine, but we will attempt to continue to carry the torch with constant reviews of what I've been watching:The Richland County Public Library (Columbia, SC) for years has consistently had an amazing ...
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