// Category Archive for: Retrovirus

Music Review: Tiny Tim, Tiny Tim’s America

By Hanna

The 20-year anniversary of Tiny Tim’s death continues with an absolute treat for fans in the form of Tiny Tim’s America. This release is special because it’s comprised of new material, from recordings Tiny made in 1974 when he was in between recording contracts. Using this demo tape, a number of songs were chosen to compile a vinyl album (plus mp3 download). The original entire demo recording is also included on the mp3 download.

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Music Review: The Move, Move and Shazam (Reissues)

By Less Lee Moore

Though I’d always been a fan of “Dream Police” and “She’s Tight,” it wasn’t until 1993 that I fully embraced the many pleasures Cheap Trick had to offer. Checking the liner notes on their 1978 album Heaven Tonight revealed that amongst the album’s many fantastic tracks was a cover by someone named Roy Wood. “Who the hell was Roy Wood?” was my first thought and my second was “This song is incredible!” As it turned out Wood was the main songwriter for British band The Move, who’d found much success in the late 1960s and was a big influence on Cheap Trick’s musical style.

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Blu-Ray Review: Hired To Kill

By Less Lee Moore

How is Hired To Kill an actual thing that exists? Getting the Blu-ray from Arrow Video solely on the basis of the press release describing the film’s co-star Oliver Reed “chewing up the scenery behind an elaborate moustache,” I did not recall any of the plot details when I popped in the disc. So it was with much disbelief and amusement that I watched 90 minutes of something so outrageous that it felt like a parody but was shockingly, not intended as such. If Astron-6 ever gets around to doing for action films what they did for Giallos with The Editor, the result would be akin to Hired To Kill.  (more…)

Music Review: The Muffs, Blonder and Blonder (Reissue)

By Less Lee Moore

For the first half of the 1990s, if Redd Kross was involved in something, I was interested. Any band they toured with or recorded with or even name-checked was a band that I would check out. I was rarely disappointed. Enter The Muffs, who I associated with Redd Kross originally because they were both from Southern California and had both punk rock and bubblegum pop cred. And there was the Bill Bartell connection. Plus, Kim Shattuck and Melanie Vammen were ex-Pandoras members, a band I was fond of after hearing them on WTUL New Orleans in the mid-’80s.

Not long after the band’s eponymous debut, Melanie left and former Redd Kross drummer Roy McDonald replaced original drummer Criss Crass. So I was extremely interested in hearing Blonder and Blonder, The Muffs’ 1995 release from Warner Bros./Reprise Records.

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Blu-Ray Review: Manhunter

By Less Lee Moore

Toronto residents! If you haven’t seen Manhunter in a while or if you’ve never seen it on the big screen, you’ll get your chance tonight at The Royal, where the Neon Dreams Cinema Club is putting on a screening of the film at 8:00 p.m. As always, come early for the pre-show and remember that The Royal is a fully licensed venue.

When most people think of Dr. Hannibal Lecter, they think of Anthony Hopkins. This is a bitter pill to swallow for those of us who fell in love with Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal and subsequently, Mads Mikkelsen as the titular killer. Yet even before that TV show birthed the devotees known as Fannibals, there were still those of us who always gave Hopkins’ portrayal of Lecter the side-eye. After all, he wasn’t the first to take a crack at the doctor cum psychopath (even though they only called him a psychopath because they didn’t know what else to call him).

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Blu-Ray Review: A Cat In The Brain

By Jeffery X Martin

Italian horror movies are a strange and different beast. American horrors rely mostly on jump scares and urban legends, things that go bump in the night. Italian fright flicks don’t care about your childhood scary stories. In fact, they don’t even care about linear storytelling. Most of them are simply a pastiche of set-pieces, offering gross-out after gross-out, with the barest thread of a plot holding everything together. It’s the visuals that matter, not the story.

That makes A Cat in the Brain all the more interesting. Lucio Fulci, king of the Italian gore movies, went straight up meta with this movie.

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Book Review: Cult Cinema: An Arrow Video Companion

By Christine Makepeace

I like the idea of collecting the musing and essays from individual Arrow releases into a single bound book. In theory, that is. In reality, if I’m interested in reading analysis on a specific film, like Dressed to Kill, wouldn’t I already have that Blu-ray in my collection?

There’s a chance the answer to that tug of war will color the amount of value you’re able to find in Cult Cinema: An Arrow Video Companion. I flip-flopped on this as I meandered through its pages. When faced with a piece on Zombie Flesh Eaters I struggled to muddle through. Perhaps a mix of topic and writing style, I just couldn’t commit to paragraph after paragraph on a movie I didn’t have much interest in, and that was my reaction to the majority of this book.

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Podcast: TV or GTFO Episode 5, “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air”

With some technical difficulties preventing us from talking about a certain Warrior Princess (stay tuned for this one, though) on this week’s TV or GTFO, Sachin and Gary decide to talk about a Prince instead. A Fresh Prince.

If, for some reason, you haven’t somehow sussed out our subject for this week, we’ll be talking about the Will Smith vehicle The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, which aired for six seasons between 1990 and 1996. It’s a story all about how Smith’s life got flipped—turned upside down. So take a minute, sit right there, because we’ll tell you how he became the prince of a town called Bel Air. This was a show that both of us enjoyed a lot while it aired, so we’d hoped that it would hold up better than it has.

Why doesn’t anyone experience any growth or change on this show? What happened to the original Aunt Viv? Where did Nicky come from? WHY DOES NOTHING HAPPEN IN THE SERIES FINALE?? Find out on this week’s episode of TV or GTFO!

Find us on iTunes, your favorite podcast app, or download the episode directly here!

Movie Review: Raiders! The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made

By Brad Henderson

Since childhood, I’ve wanted to make movies. Last night I got to watch a documentary about a group of kids who were determined to make a shot for shot remake of Raiders Of The Lost Ark. Raiders! The Story Of The Greatest Fan Film Ever Made tells the story of this incredible attempt and the resulting admirable success.

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Music Review: The Twinkeyz, Alpha Jerk

By Hanna

The Twinkeyz are the kind of band that record collectors delight in, artistic and obscure enough to have little material, but not so obscure that there is no material available. And more than that, they have a definite and interesting style of music. The Twinkeyz are recommended in particular for fans of protopunk and the Velvet Underground, or even of neo-psychedelica. The Twinkeyz can be seen as part of the development of glam rock into punk, when the parts of punk had emerged, but not yet coalesced into a set of rules or expectations. By the time Alpha Jerk was released, punk had moved on into new genres, but The Twinkeyz were still being different.

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