// Category Archive for: Retrovirus

Music Review: Various Artists, Wake Up You! Volume 1

By Melissa Bratcher

I’d wager that you’ve not heard music quite like Wake Up You! Volume 1. Culled from Nigerian music from a very specific time, with familiar influences filtered through a decidedly African use of rhythms, the result is arresting, funky, and meant to make you move.

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Blu-Ray Review: Death Walks Twice

By Jeffery X Martin

The Death Walks Twice box set from Arrow Films highlights two gialli by director Luciano Ercoli. One is better than the other, but they follow the gialli formula to the letter and are both a lot of fun on a party night where Apples to Apples just won’t cut it.

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Retro Review: Sepultura’s Roots 20 Years On

By Tim Murr

By the 1990s Sepultura had built quite a reputation for themselves. Formed in 1984 by Max and Igor Cavalera after hearing Black Sabbath’s Volume 4, they soon made a name for themselves playing black metal inspired by bands like Venom and Celtic Frost and in 1985 recorded their debut Bestial Devastation, a split EP with Overdose, followed by the full-length Morbid Visions in 1986. Sepultura hailed from Brazil and their reputation made their albums sought after items in both America and Europe.

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Today In Pop Culture: The First Rock & Roll Concert

By Jeffery X Martin

They call Cleveland, Ohio, “The Mistake by the Lake.” It’s an unfortunate nickname, stemming from their wretched winters, a river that has a tendency to catch fire, and a seemingly permanent place on any Most Miserable Places to Live in America list. But for as much guff as Cleveland takes, it is a rock and roll town, perhaps the rock and roll town. There’s more than one reason the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is in Cleveland, and today we celebrate one of them: the very first rock concert, held in 1952.

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Today In Pop Culture: Caligula Takes Power And Rome Goes To Hell

By Jeffery X Martin

We made it through the Ides of March, which saw the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. But before Julius Caesar began his dictatorship, there was another leader of the Roman Empire who was as infamous as Caesar was famous. His full name was Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus. That’s a mouthful, so he was most often referred to by his nickname, Caligula. That very word still brings up images of debauchery and madness today. He came to power on this day in 37 BC.

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Music Review: Haircut 100, Pelican West

By Melissa Bratcher

It is a well-known, scientific fact that Haircut 100’s debut album, Pelican West, is the happiest album that ever existed (I just made that up, but hear me out). It’s full to the brim with sunny melodies, bold bursts of brass, and a weird but genius marriage of tropicalia and funk, with a dash of jazz thrown in. It’s a stunner of a debut, a fully-formed, exactly perfect right out of the gate album. It’s crushing, then, that by the time Haircut 100 returned to the studio to record a followup, the band was in tatters. Lead singer Nick Heyward had one foot out the door on his way to a solo career. Haircut 100 soldiered on, but it just wasn’t the same.

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Blu-Ray Review: American Horror Project Volume One

By Tim Murr

When you delve into the glut of independent American cinema from the 1970s, you’ll be amazed at how many films were actually produced in that decade by penniless mavericks far from the infrastructure of Hollywood or New York City. Remember, too, that film- making was a massive undertaking, not just in the pre-digital world, but also pre-video. (For some insight into the trials and tribulations into the hardships of the indie horror director in the ’70s, please check out the book Shock Value by Jason Zinoman.)

The fact that we have small indie efforts like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Deranged, Night Of The Living Dead, Last House On The Left, Driller Killer, or Phantasm that have risen to the status of bonafide American classics or, at least, cult classics, is something we should all be thankful for. So many films from the grindhouse circuit have been lost to history. That’s where Arrow Video comes in with the start of an amazing new series, American Horror Project.

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Today In Pop Culture: The Fillmore East Opens

By Jeffery X Martin

Bill Graham was a rock and roll man, a promoter with a feel for the underground. He knew which bands were going to be hot and how to get their music out to their fans. He opened the famous nightclub, the Fillmore, in San Francisco. That venue, along with Graham’s promotion skills, were instrumental in the success of the Grateful Dead.

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Blu-Ray Review: Nikkatsu Diamond Guys, Vol. 1

By Jeffery X Martin

The recent Arrow Video compilation, Nikkatsu Diamond Guys Vol. 1, highlights the kind of films we don’t often think of when it comes to Japanese cinema. These aren’t cheesy monster movies with guys in rubber suits, nor are they fantastic period dramas about dynastic politics and great wars. These three movies are star vehicles, melodramatic potboilers with handsome leading men and damsels in distress.

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Blu-Ray Review: The Bees

By Jeffery X Martin

Mother Nature always gives us humans a little something to be afraid of. Fire ants, hurricanes, just some little nudge to remind us that the links on the food chain are weak and interchangeable. In the late 1970s, the big scare was killer bees, super-aggressive buggers that migrated from Mexico into the United States. They attacked in swarms and wouldn’t stop, even after their prey was dead.

These bees became the subject for a few nature-run-amok movies. None of them were particularly good (see Irwin Allen’s The Swarm for some high-level bad moviemaking), but none of them were quite as earnest or weird as Alfredo Zacarias’s exploitation movie, The Bees.

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