What happens when you put a bunch of bloodthirsty, music-loving goblins together? Well, a lot of disembowelment, but also alot of catchy tunes. Formed six millennia ago, and practicing only every other leap year on a full moon, the band has perfected their brand of crushing goblin music.
Nekrogoblikon is also a band that was formed in 2006 in Palo Alto, California and who have built a loyal cult following by performing songs about goblins. In 2012, the band uploaded a video to YouTube for their song, No One Survives. It was about a goblin trying to win the affection of one of his co-workers (played by Kayden Kross). No One Survives became a viral hit so their video for We Need A Gimmick features John Goblikon (played by David Rispoli) using what he’s learned to help Nekrogoblikon find the gimmick that will keep Earthlings from realizing that the members of the band are actually goblins from outer space. Along the way, the video parodies rap, EDM, and Justin Timberlake. And, of course, Kayden Kross returns.
Nekrogoblikon has shown a longevity that would probably surprise those who originally dismissed them as merely being a novelty act. On April 13th, they released their 5th album, Welcome to Bonkers.
This has not been an easy week and I’m afraid that I’m now behind on my horror reviews. This upcoming week should be a busy one!
Here’s what happened: it rained down here nearly every day last week. On Monday, a building belonging to AT&T was struck by lightning. The building caught fire. The roof collapsed. For the majority of people in Dallas, the internet was down for 11 hours. The next day, YouTube was down for about five hours. The day after that, I woke up with a fever and I spent the next two days trying to rest. It’s been a crazy week.
Anyway, here’s what I did manage to accomplish this week:
Yuppie lawyer Ted (adult film actor Randy Spears, credited here as Gregory Patrick) is shocked when he sees a painting of a man who looks just like him. He is told that the portrait was painted in 1964 and that the man in the painting is the late husband of the artist, Arlene (porn legend Georgina Spelvin, credited here at Ruth Raymond). Arlene goes on to reveal that Ted is actually her long-lost son and then she invites him and his wife, Evie (Linda Blair, credited here as Linda Blair), to come out to her mansion. What Ted doesn’t realize is that Arlene believes that he is actually her husband reincarnated and she is planning on doing away with Evie so that she can have her son all to herself and do what it is she wants to do with him. Yes, this film goes there.
Chuck Vincent was one of the leading directors of the Golden Age of Porn. Unlike most other adult film directors, his movies were popular with not only the public but also with critics. (His best-known film, Roommates, received a rave in the New York Times.) In the 80s, Vincent tried to make the move into mainstream film, mostly directing sex comedies and dopey thrillers. Most of his mainstream films featured adult performers in dramatic roles, which made them very popular on late night cable.
Bad Blood feels like a combination of Fatal Attraction and Misery. There’s even a scene where Arlene ties up her son in bed and then breaks his toes to keep him from leaving. (Bad Blood, though, came out a year before Rob Reiner’s film so the resemblance is probably a coincidence.) Spelvin, who was widely regarded as being the best actress to ever regularly appear in pornographic movies, gives a great, demented performance as Arlene and Linda Blair is also good as Evie. Chuck Vincent was a good director, even when he was doing schlocky straight-to-video stuff like this. Perhaps because of his background in adult films, Vincent never hesitated about taking his films to the places where other directors would be scared to tread. Sadly, Vincent died in 1991 and most of his movies have fallen into obscurity.
The 1974 film Silent Night, Bloody Night is an oddity.
On the one hand, it’s pretty much a standard slasher film, complete with a menacing mansion, a horrible secret, a twist ending, and John Carradine playing a mute newspaper editor.
On the other hand, director Ted Gershuny directs like he’s making an underground art film and several of the supporting roles are played by actors who were best known for their association with Andy Warhol.
Personally, I like Silent Night, Bloody Night. It has a terrible reputation and the film’s star, Mary Woronov, has gone on record calling it a “terrible movie” but I like the surreal touches the Gershuny brought to the material and the sepia-toned flashbacks have a nightmarish intensity to them. The film makes no logical sense, which actually makes it all the more appealing to me. As the saying goes, your mileage may vary.
For today’s music video of the day, we have yet another song called Dracula. However, as you can tell by looking at the lyrics, this song actually has some connection to everyone’s favorite vampire (or, at the very least, the legend of everyone’s favorite vampire):
Her She was a dancer Feel As the girl she twirls off the edge of her paper-thin world
The “I” Give to the Master Mirror, mirror Can you tell one from the other? Strange I offer my veins Feel As the girl she twirls off the edge of her paper-thin world
Oh in the night When Dracula comes to fill your soul To atone, confess My one true weakness My Dracula, Count Dracula
Her She was a dancer (First I must appease my thirst) Feels Good you know as the girl she twirls off the edge of her world
Oh in the night When Dracula comes to fill your soul To atone, confess My one true weakness My Dracula, Count Dracula
Oh in the night When Dracula comes to fill your soul To atone, confess My one true weakness My Dracula, Count Dracula
According to singer Moana Mayatrix, “I’d say it’s not directly about vampires but more so an exploration of vampire mythology and the allure of the dark side, much like being seduced by a Bram Stoker character.”
Kolchak investigates a series of accidents at a hospital and discovers that they’re all connected to a recently reawakened monster known as the Matchemonedo! This episode features the great character actor William Smith as Jim Elkhorn, who teams up with Kolchak to battle the Matchemonedo.
This episode originally aired on December 13th, 1974.
Seriously, those little wooden things totally freak me out. You know how some of you feel about the painted smile on the clowns ‘face? Well, that’s how I feel whenever I see the big eyes of a ventriloquist dummy or that mouth with the fake teeth. And don’t even get me started on those tiny little legs that some of them have! AGCK!
I mention this because there is a ventriloquist’s dummy in the 1980 film, Humanoids From The Deep. There’s really no reason for it to be in the film but suddenly, out of nowhere, there it is. It belongs to a teenager named Billy who, when we first see him, is relaxing in a tent on the beach, trying to get his girlfriend to undress for him and the dummy. Of course, they’re promptly interrupted by a seaweed-covered monster, who rips open the tent, kills Billy, and chases after his girlfriend. The whole time, the dummy watches with a somewhat quizzical expression on his face. It’s a strange scene.
Now, I’ve done some research and I’ve discovered that Billy was played by David Strassman, who was (and still is) a professional ventriloquist and his dummy was named …. I do not kid …. Chuck Wood. So, the whole tent scene was kind of a celebrity cameo. Roger Corman, who produced the film, said, “You know what? This movie has blood, nudity, killer fish-men, and rampant misogyny but it’s still missing something! How about that ventriloquist that I saw on the Tonight Show last night!?”
Anyway, Humanoids From The Deep is basically about what happens when you try to mutate salmon. You end up with a bunch of pervy fish monsters swarming the beach and trying to make like human/fish babies. You end up with a lot of dead teens and unplanned pregnancies. You also end up with the local redneck fisherman (led by Vic Morrow) blaming the local Native Americans, accusing them of killing all of the dogs in town. Jim Hill (Doug McClure) and his wife, Carol (Cindy Weintraub), try to keep the peace but their efforts are continually tripped up by the fact that almost everyone in town is an idiot.
For instance, despite the fact that there’s been a countless number of murders and rapes and that they’ve all been committed a group of monsters that nobody knows how to fight, the town still decides to hold their annual festival on the pier. Of course, as soon as the obnoxious DJ starts broadcasting, the humanoids from the deep show up and basically, the entire festival goes to Hell. And here’s the thing. The film itself is ugly and mean-spirited and misogynistic but the attack on the festival is totally and completely brilliant. I mean, it’s one of the greatest monster sieges of all time, largely because the monsters are apparently unstoppable and that humans are so obnoxious that you don’t mind seeing them all die. I mean, if nothing else, the monster deserve some credit for taking out that DJ.
It all leads to a “surprise” ending, which isn’t particularly surprising but which is so batshit insane that it somehow seems appropriate.
Humanoids From The Deep is an incredibly icky movie, one that has some effective scare scenes but which is way too misogynistic to really be much fun. (Roger Corman hired Barbara Peeters to direct the film but reportedly brought in a male director to film the movie’s more explicit scenes.) Oh well. At least the ventriloquist died.
This scene, of course, is from 1980’s The Shining.
Technically, this is before Jack Torrance met the ghosts and started to lose his mind but, in this scene, you can tell that Jack’s already getting a little bit tired of his family. Jack Nicholson’s delivery of, “See? It’s okay. He heard it on the television,” gets me every time.
Maggie Healey (Linda Blair) is an American nurse in Australia. Freshly separated from her drug addict boyfriend, Maggie gets a job working at a mental hospital. Dr. Jonathan Heckett (Tony Bonner) is experimenting with “dead sleep therapy,” where the patients are kept drugged at night. Maggie notices that the patients keep dying and that Dr. Heckett doesn’t care so she teams up with an annoying activist to investigate what dead sleep therapy is actually about.
This was on TCM at 3 a.m. last night, airing right after Dreamscape. Dead Sleep might be disguised as a horror film but there’s nothing scary about it. When the patients are in dead sleep, they don’t even have nightmares, which is a huge missed opportunity. The movie is so sloppily put together that it doesn’t even reveal why Dr. Heckett is putting his patients in dead sleep, other than he’s just evil. Linda Blair delivers her lines as if she is reading them off a cue card and the entire movie look like it was filmed at a community college. The only amusing thing about the movie was that all of the male patients got to wear hospital gowns when they went under deep sleep while all the female patients slept topless. Normally I wouldn’t complain but it was so blatant what the filmmakers were doing that it was hard not to laugh when the movie tried to pivot to being a serious drama. A film starring Linda Blair has no right to be this boring.
If you were to ask me to recommend one book to someone who is looking for an introduction to the world of Italian horror, Eaten Alive is the book that I would recommend.
That’s largely because this book was my introduction. Way back in 2006, I came across a copy at Recycled Books in Denton, Texas and I bought it. I bought it because, at the time, I was already into horror movies. However, after reading the reviews and the essays in this book, I discovered that I wanted to learn much more about Italian horror. Outside of Suspiria and a few giallos like Blade in The Dark, the first Italian horror movies that I specifically tracked down and watched were the movies that I read about in this book. If not for Eaten Alive, I would never have seen the wonderfully macabre and disturbing Beyond the Darkness. This was book was also my first real exposure to Lucio Fulci. If not for this book, I never would have seen Zombi 2. I never would have discovered the Beyond trilogy.
In fact, considering that Arleigh and I first bonded over Italian horror, it’s doubtful that I would be writing for this site if I had not made that decision to buy Eaten Alive.
As for the book itself, it’s a comprehensive overview of Italian cannibal and zombie cinema. Along with containing information about every Italian cannibal and zombie film released in the 20th Century, it also features interviews with stars like Ian McCullough, Catriona MacColl, and GIovanni Lombardo Radice. (Radice even reviews one of the films himself.) The majority of the films are reviewed by Jay Slater but there are also contributions from writers like Ramsey Campbell and Lloyd Kaufman. (In fact, Kaufman writes a rather stirring defense of one of the more controversial films to be found in Eaten Alive, Cannibal Holocaust. Campbell, meanwhile, thoroughly destroys Nights of Terror.)
Seriously, if you’re interested in learning more about Italian horror or if you’re already a fan, this book is a must!
Through the Shattered Lens 