I love this shirt, finally gave up my moth ridden dollar bills to cover my back with one of these:
Friday, June 29, 2012
Terrorvision at FRIGHT RAGS!
I want a Necronomicon pizza tonight!
Crust:
1 TBS Active dry yeast
1 TBS Sugar
1 Cup warm water (105-110 degrees F) {You can replace your water with a cup of warm beer and your sugar with honey for a bit of a change of flavor.}
1 tsp salt
2 Cups flour (I do one cup unbleached all purpose and one cup whole wheat)
(If you want to make a thin crust pizza, just halve this recipe.)
Directions:
1) Combine yeast, sugar, and warm water in a large bowl. Allow to sit until the yeast forms a layer of foam on top of the water-about ten minutes.
2) Mix in salt, and flour- stir with a spoon, or mix with dough hook if using a mixer, until it forms a uniform ball. Add flour if needed to keep if from being too sticky, and then knead by hand on a smooth surface, or knead with dough hook until well mixed.
3) Place dough in an oiled bowl and cover with a damp cloth. Let rise for an hour.
4) Punch your dough down and briefly knead on a smooth surface. Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.
5) Roll out your dough to fit your pizza pan, or baking sheet- should be about a quarter of an inch thick.
6) Add your sauce, cheese, and toppings and bake for 12 minutes. Slice and serve.
My suggestions for sauce:
I usually use a can of UNSALTED tomato puree, 16 oz… And simmer that with a couple cloves of minced garlic, dried basil, 1/4 cup chopped fresh oregano. I let that simmer over low heat until the volume is reduced by about half… 30-40 minutes depending on how low you have your heat set. This makes a fair amount of sauce, so depending on how much sauce you want on your pizza, you may want to save some. I also occasionally make a green sauce of garlic, and steamed spinach I have put through the blender.
My cheese preferences lean towards fresh mozzarella, but I’m not above using the stuff that comes pre-shredded in a bag because it makes for a lot less work. Provolone and parmesan also work quite nicely.
..from DAILY DEAD.com
Thursday, June 28, 2012
THE PROWLER continues the bloodbath..
THE PROWLER
The Prowler is
a quadruple pronged stab at psychological and visceral terror that will freeze
your blood and leave you lobotomized.
Returning from war shell shocked and thirsty for love, a stilted
boyfriend enacts a brutal revenge on his ex-lover and her new wealthy boy
toy. Impaled on a pitchfork is not the
way I want to go. Although you do only
die once, so might as well make it good!
Fast forward to 1980, it’s time for the Graduation Dance again, and some
people around town haven’t forgotten what happened in 1945. Major Chathan hasn’t forgotten. His every day is defined by it. His every thought returns to Rosemary. His precious Rosemary, brutally slain before
her time; he had found her and her lover grotesquely impaled together; two
lovers joined as one. The paper read
that a woman was murdered that night, and he remembers screaming at the paper
“not a woman…my girl…my girl!” until tears came pouring out, those shameful
little droplets of salt and water, smearing the crumpled paper in his
hands. His girl, he still remembers her
that way, he can see her in his mind playing with the wooden rocking horse he
had whittled for her for Christmas. He
couldn’t buy her a real horse, not even with his pay as a Major, she wanted a
real pony, but making one with his grit and sweat was more special. It was more meaningful, and he had hoped she
would see that someday, when she grows up, a day that would now never come. His precious Rosemary; losing her was like
losing a limb, losing a part of his heart, and when he thinks about her, and
sorrow drowns him, he clutches his chest and feels a phantom pain where she
was.
The sheriff is going on a
fishing trip, one that he’s sure he will have a good time at and those of us
who have seen the movie before knows exactly what that means. Old sheriff George Fraser has some skeletons
in his closet, and he wants to put one in Major Chathan’s chimney, one by the
name of Rosemary Chathan. The town can
never, ever forget June 28th 1945 and he will never forget the
betrayal of his one true love. As the
party goers get ready, and the punch is spiked, the prowler prepares for his
own kind of dance; the waltz of death and he has a long night ahead of him.
First stop, the student dorm
looking for stragglers. He happens upon
two lovers preparing for the dance and falls upon them, attacking with the cold
precision of a well trained soldier. The
prowler sinks a knife deep into the skull of his first victim since 1945, and
the muscles remember what the mind forgot, killing is like riding a bike, and
he’s back on the battlefield in the Big One.
He leaves his first victim a drooling mess; the knife pierced his frontal
lobe, robbing him of all reason. His
next victim is taking a shower, oblivious of the prowler until it’s too late,
and she’s left writhing on the end of a pitch fork, lifted into the air
screaming like a new born.
The graduation party rages on
to beat of psychedelic rock and slow 80’s love songs; meanwhile the prowler is
outside scouring the night for new victims to pitchfork. A young girl, frustrated with the inebriation
of her date, decides to break from the party for a cool evening swim. The prowler is on her like a great white
shark. The girl’s throat is slashed; the
pool turns into a crimson red cloud, but the prowler does not flee the
scene. He waits, like a spider waiting
to pounce on his next meal, the web cast and quivering in the wind. And it isn’t long before another feels his
wraith. When cutting through the tendons
of another throat he thinks “Rosemary, why have you forsaken me? Why did you have to leave me? Why? Why? Why?” but the whispering wind is
his only answer, and the body at his feet lies silent and cold. He heads to the graveyard. She will not rest in piece this night, lost
in an eternal sleep while he lives in a waking Hell of rejection and despair.
The Prowler
has turned into one of my favorite stalk and slash flicks over the years. Brutal and unforgiving, the newly christened
director Joseph Zito seemed to want to deliver the bloody, chunky goods
slash-heads and gore freaks craved.
Special effects superstar Tom Savini created some of the best
impalements and cranial explosions this side of the screen. The idea of a psychologically scarred veteran
getting dumped by his old flame and seeking revenge seemed to strike a stronger
cord with me than some of the other, more colorful and over-the-top slash
flicks. It seemed more real and
feasible, and real is scary. Real is the
reason we escape to movies, even nightmare ones, if only to lessen the blow of
the shocking world around us, where the good guys don’t necessarily win in the
end and the bad don’t always get what’s coming to them. In the end of the film the prowler is
thwarted with a shotgun blast to the face, and the town can finally close the
chapter on the mysterious tragedy of Rosemary, but they will never forget the
pain wrought on June 28th 1945 and the bizarre events that followed. A night where the man charged with protecting
the town coldly and calculatingly punishes it for violating a strict puritan
code of conduct seemingly forgotten by the youth, and people standing on the
cusp of graduating to a bigger world instead find themselves in the morbid
seclusion of the grave, and the eternal nothingness thereafter.
June 28th 1945 - The PROWLER STRIKES!
Just thought I'd remind all you ghoulish slash-heads and girlish slashettes that today is THE PROWLER day! June 28th is the famous day he struck against the first graduation dance, so give this sucker a spin sometime....it'll freeze your blood!
Double header - Edge of the Axe and Blood Frenzy
Edge of the Axe – beware the
spoilers!
A car wash patron is cut down
brutally with an axe; blood and soap everywhere. In the country a local pig farmer and his
wife are harassed and stalked by a faceless stranger in the night. The police curiously dismiss it all as
accidents, pranks, and bizarre circumstance, almost as if they are covering
something up, but in the end they really aren’t. They’re just incompetent and lazy. There’s a relief to Paddock County;
aka axe murder central.
As the death toll mounts only
one boy genius and his new fangled invention, a talking computer called “Hyper”,
can crack the case. Edge of the Axe is a rare gem, a European influenced stalk and
slash foray with a pulse on the technological beat of the 80s, right at the
cusp of the home PC explosion. Computers
talk in this movie and it’s hysterical.
Did Gerold, the computer genius with “microchips for brains” invent
instant messaging so he could talk to his neurotic girlfriend? Probably not, but I can pretend he did. Anyone who sports a sweat outfit like it’s
the high rung of fashion should be able to lay claim to any invention. That’s confidence folks.
Gerold meets a young nubile
blonde named Lillian, who tells him that she feels a bit like a monster. She couldn’t be the mysterious killer. No way.
No how. Her life was dramatically
altered by a horrible swing-set accident that she just can’t put behind her. Maybe the writers felt like having mommy
issues was a little too passé for slasher flicks by 1986; but a swing-set
accident? If this all boils down to
being caused by a swing-set accident I’m going to…oh wait…nevermind.
To pacify any leftover downers
Lillian may have had from her terrible swing accident she spends a lot of time
casually strolling alleys and train tracks at night, meeting strangers, and
mercilessly cutting them to pieces with an axe. Sounds like a fun Friday. The axe attacks are brutal, where the killer
takes several swings, hacking the victim down like a tree. Each connection with the axe produces a
satisfying wet heavy sounding smack, like the person’s limbs are made out of
blood soaked wood. It’s great. If there’s one thing this movie does right
it’s a brutal axe bludgeoning. There’s
also one scene with a church chorus singing and some very intense
scowling. I think this movie does
scowling right as well. Probably some of
the most intense scowling in cinematic history can be found in this flick.
In the end the bad guy, gal,
whatever wins and is anybody really surprised?
I wasn’t, not with how callous the cops were acting about the mass
murders happening in town. A very low
key approach to crime solution is to just dismiss it all as accidental; like
that person accidentally cut themselves up into slabs of meat with a fire axe,
or got hit by a train. Unfortunately
however the world loses a flowering computer nerd at the end as well when the
police finally decide to act and mistake him for the killer. Best Buy is going to have to cut their Geek
Squad one short I’m afraid.
So is Edge of the Axe any good? If
you enter it with virginal expectations, a clean slate, you will be entertained
by it. It is a competently executed
flick with plenty of unintentional laughs.
If you think computer font is fun then you’re likely to have your
processor blown in by this movie.
However I don’t think it stands as tall next to many other slashers of
the era. Maybe it relies too heavily on
the whole computer gimmick, which dates the movie and makes all the computer
talk kind of obsolete to the modern audience.
It also seems to meander a lot, trying to find a solid narrative and
direction to keep interest peaked.
There’s a lot of time spent following individuals affected by the axe
slayings, it’s a small town and practically everyone seems to drink at Nebb’s
Bar, so storylines intertwine but don’t necessarily lead to anything worth
while when all the audience wants is blood, blood, blood. The axe slayings are utterly fantastic
though, probably some of the best in horror.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Blood Frenzy –
beware spoilers!
Greetings fellow nut bars, and
welcome to Blood Frenzy, a movie
that proves that a family that slays together stays together. When a drunken dad looking for some kiddy
kinder-love trips on a “Lifesaver” pillow and gets his throat aerated by his
daughter with a Jack-in-the-box fetish, her loving brother does the most
logical thing, and takes on all the blame for the crime. I totally would have pinned it all on her; my
sister would snitch me out all the time when I was a kid. Killing brings the family together, always. Cut to some twenty some years later and the
maniac psycho-bitch Dory is back at it, misleading a group of mental patients
to remote patch of desert, where she and her gibbering insane brother Lonnie (who
reminds me of Ramses from Blood Feast)
can leisurely kill off the support group one by one.
I spoiled some of the mystery
behind who the killer is, but I thought it was fairly obvious. Everyone else in the support group other than
Dory has one obvious crutch. One woman
cannot stand to be touched by other people.
One man is a shell shocked vet; the other is a helpless slob and
alcoholic. There’s a nymphomaniac and a
shameless macho man. Dory’s only
personality flaw is that she’s a bitch that screams her lines so I had her
tagged as the killer from pretty early on in the movie. Actually almost everyone screams their lines
in this movie, so really the only thing that separates Dory from the pack is
her crankiness. Psycho killers can be so
rude. And she leads the group to a place
called “Old GhostTown Road”,
the very place where the “hills have eyes” and people mysteriously wake up with
their throats sliced at night, so again she seemed pretty suspicious. During the movie she constantly blaming Rick
the shell shocked veteran for the murders, but it seems like a very obvious
ploy to get any suspicion away from her.
She also talks about the desert like she’s a native, so it’s really just
kin d of obvious that she has something to do with the murders. The only curve ball they really throw you is
that there is no mention of any brother until towards the end of the movie,
which explains how she got away with killing her drunken touchy father to begin
with.
Blood Frenzy
gets really interesting, and well, frenzied at the end. If only they could have maintained that kind
of intensity through more of the film, it would have been a stalk and slash
home run. I thought the concept of the
killer as a kind of Jack-in-the-box was a good allusion, one that fits well in
the slasher genre, and the kills were fairly brutal. The slashed necks and impalements looked real
and red enough to me. The brother reveal
was pretty shocking and the end sequence where he cuts a damsel’s feet made me
pretty squeamish, for an otherwise pretty vanilla effort that scene had a lot
of bite. The way Lonnie laughs also
seemed to rate high on the goosebump factor.
He definitely had me sold on the idea that he was some reclusive maniac
living in deserted caves. The support group of mental patients did make for an
interesting hodge podge of characters flaws, even if they were all some walking
stereotype. Crazy people are always more
interesting than normal norms. Some of
it grated my tender sensibilities, some of it had me staring into space
wondering what to eat for dinner, but the bloody payoff at the end was worth
it.
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Another dimension of terrror! Fthe13th pt. 3 continued...
Friday the 13th
part 3 –
The ending of the early Friday
the 13th film entries are dream sequences brought up by the
exhaustion and mental duress of the main antagonist(s) after facing a night of
Voorhees patented murder and mayhem.
This holds true for the first sequel, Friday part DOS. In the end we are treated to a full Jason
facial; and what a sightly splendor it is.
Underneath the potato sack Jason sports flowing locks of amber hair and
has quite the distinguished beard.
However in the beginning of part 3 Jason seems to have visited the
barber between blood bathes, and is now cleaner shaven. What gives?
The end of part two was a dream silly, that’s what. So strike that image of hillbilly barnyard
heavy petting zoo Jason from your trash culture addled mind. The really real Jason is as bald as a
mongoloid baby’s bottom, and with piercing blue eyes I may add. Some fans may cry afoul, but they simply
weren’t paying attention. Although at
the end of this movie the cops all leave the crime scene in mass, like there
was some sort of shift change at the precinct, so I’m not sure if it’s all
still part of the dream or if someone
fell asleep at the wheel or what. They
don’t even try to mark off the bodies with police take, or round up any
evidence. They just all sort of silently
leave. Guess they really can’t charge any overtime. The budget at Crystal Lake must be pretty tight.
Let’s talk about Shelly, the
true face (and Brillo-y hair) of Friday the 13th part 3. Shelly is a gyrating ball of teenage angst
and ugly Betty awkward-ism. The poor sap just wants to fit in and I can feel
his pain. The teenage years are a
confusing time of in-groups and our-groups.
What’s cool and what’s for the fools?
Shelly doesn’t know and he doesn’t feel like he fits in anywhere with
the group. I kind of agree. I mean look at the way he waddle runs…ha! Nobody in the cast really stands out as his
friend, his pal, his numero uno buddy.
The date he was set up with seems only interested enough to take pity on
him. I couldn’t see him agreeing to go
on the trip without some sort of promise, like getting set-up with a chick, but
otherwise these people just don’t seem very hip to be on Shelly’s side. I just get the impression he was tagging
along hopping to get some snatch but thought he was way out of his league, a
notion that came to him after committing to the trip and seeing the chick he
was supposedly going to get setup with.
The only fun he could scare up from the trip was by pranking people. “Being a jerk is better than being
nothing.” Give it a few minutes
Shelly. You’ll be nothing soon enough. Jason says he owes you one for the mask.
No discussion about Friday the
13th part THREE is complete without talking about the whole rape debate
concerning Chris Higgins. The argument
is essentially that Jason raped her when she ran away from home into the woods
surrounding Crystal Lake.
Although they never quite spell it out that way for the audience, the cast make
comments about how sensitive she may be to coming back to the area, and refrain
from making raunchy yet innocuous jokes in her presence. The experience also seems to have affected
her sex life with Rick, wedging them apart when Chris only has a few days to
rekindle her old flame. Personally I
think Jason raped her. There’s not
enough proof to definitively plant my flag, but the way Jason is kind of pawing
at her during the flashback sequence, and the fact that he leaves her alive
after she passes out, makes me think he had his way with her. I think a lot of fans shy from it because
Jason has achieved a kind of an antihero cult status amongst horror nerds, and
nobody wants to think their mongoloid serial killer hero is a rapist as well,
but there it is. Jason doesn’t take
prisoners but he rapes. If he is to
represent a kind of id that pursues his needs like an animal, who savagely
kills outsiders like a territorial bear, then I think being a rapist is an
acceptable character trait for Jason.
After Jason pulls himself from the noose at the end and reveals his
beauteous face, I can’t help but detect a slight, knowing smirk on his lips
when Chris exclaims “It was you!” Jason knows he hit that shit.
The above poster was actually stolen from me at a horror convention. Zornow is the man, and helped me look for it, but to no avail. I bought it, had it signed, and 5 minutes later lost track of it. So if you ever see a Fthe13th poster like the one above addressed to Cropsy Chris, that's all mine!
NECA Friday the 13th part 3
Many dark blessings upon NECA. They've put a stranglehold on my wallet for years and I love them for it. All these new Nightmare on Elm Street toys have rocked my world and every Fred-head fan freak need, but I wanted some Jason loving too. Lo and behold a new Jason 3 toy, complete with head wound and slick with the red stuff. I've pre-ordered beast being the stunted growth mental midget that gets a thrill from this kind of schitck.
Friday, June 22, 2012
Have a SAVAGE WEEKEND!
Savage Weekend
Ahhh
Upstate NY. Like any place it means
different things to different people. To
the film makers behind Savage Weekend
it means sensual cow milking, Irish fantasies about blood and gore, and bold
handlebar moustaches. They might be on
to something.
Savage
Weekend is a strange treat indeed. It’s
a movie that lingers on site gags and weird bits of sexual erotica; the stalk
and slash horror groove isn’t tapped into until the last half hour of film time
and by then you’ve probably forgotten why you were even watching it in the
first place. Maybe the film makers
forgot why they were making the film but were having too much fun to care. Was it to see what happens when a flaming
homosexual man invades a redneck watering hole?
Was it to watch a greasy and misunderstood hick named Otis shoot at
rats, talk to himself, and bitch about them city folk? Was it to watch the sensual milking of a
cow? Who knows? Who cares with all this grade-A Upstate NY
cheese?
The
slasher doesn’t start offing people until the end, and by that time it’s long
overdue. It sure is fun laughing at the
crew’s microphone carelessly stumbling into frame, or giggling at antics
involving a house’s old electrical system where light switches don’t act like
you’d expect, but damn it all, let’s get down to business here, and that business
involves a radical standoff between two burly moustaches battling with chainsaws
and machetes. May the better facial hair
win.
Savage
Weekend is mess; it takes far too long to make any kind of point and languishes
in irrelevant sub-plot purgatory. So why
have I watched it four times already and will probably watch it again? I think it has something to do with the
movie’s main theme song:
“I’m an
upstate man, making due with what I can.”
I make due.
Make due you gibbering freak-ball; have fun,
lighten up, and spend a couple weekend hours with Savage Weekend. It’s worth
it for the cow milking scene alone.
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