Nigel Bach has a lot to answer for.

I’ve talked about his Bad Ben series of films quite a bit on this site, of course, but leaving out their relative merits (or lack thereof) for a moment here, the simple fact is that their (relative) success has inspired a small legion of wannabe-filmmakers armed with nothing but their iPhones and, I suppose, a dream. One of them is Jeff Profitt, and the fruit of his labors is the just-released-to-Amazon-streaming Something Crashed In The Woods. Don’t let the title fool you, though — nothing “crashes in the woods” here (at least as far as we can see), but at about the ten-minute mark your interest level in the film itself will crash mightily, and never recover.

Profitt himself is the sole “actor” in the film, and he plays an unnamed dude who buys his dream “fixer-upper” cabin and intends to…

Once upon a time, a rag-tag group of ambitious filmmakers headed out to rural Pennsylvania with an amateur cast, a camera, no money, and a dream. The end result, George A. Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead, achieved cinematic immortality not only for itself, but for almost all of those involved in its production.

Fast-forward to 2016 (although it wouldn’t achieve release until two years later, and via Amazon Prime streaming at that) and Nicholas Pontoski crowd-funded a $15K production budget, grabbed some friends, and hoped history might — just might — repeat itself. The end result, Within The Woods Of Undead County, is having a tough time standing out in the streaming queue shuffle. but is actually probably worth your time to check out — provided your expectations are held in check.

We’re talking about fairly standard-issue stuff here, at least in terms of Pontoski and co-screenwriter…

With his debut graphic novel, Bicycle Day, Brooklyn-based cartoonist and commercial illustrator Brian Blomerth has set for himself a fairly daunting challenge : to not just illustrate, but to visually communicate, a historical “first.” And not just any historical “first” at that, but one that involved entering another state of consciousness altogether — I refer to the world’s very first acid trip, deliberately undertaken by Swiss chemist/armchair mystic Albert Hofmann on April 19th, 1943, ostensibly as part of his daily research duties for the Sandoz pharmaceutical corporation.

The first thing he did after “turning on”? Apologies to Freddie Mercury, but — get on his bike and ride!

Of course, any number of rock album/poster artists (of which Blomerth can number himself) have produced deliberately “trippy” images over the years, but by and large the “target market” for this type of artwork, and the recordings and/or concerts it advertises…