// Category Archive for: Reviews

DVD Review: The Farmer’s Daughters

By Jeffery X Martin

Roughie—A specific movie genre featuring explicit hardcore sex mixed with vicious violence. Mainly 1960s and 1970s. [Source: Urban Dictionary]

Hello, and welcome to my first professional review of a pornographic film. It’s my first amateur review of a porn, for that matter. I’m not even sure if there are any hard and fast rules for such an undertaking.

Heh. “Hard and fast.”

It’s impossible to avoid innuendo in an article like this.

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Music Review: The Bottle Rockets, South Broadway Athletic Club

By Melissa Bratcher

True fact: your new favorite song is probably on new album from St. Louis’s indie-Americana stalwarts, the Bottle Rockets. It’s hard for me to pick a favorite, because South Broadway Athletic Club is packed to the edges of the grooves with such great tracks (assuming you’re listening on vinyl).

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Music Review: Youth Decay, The Party’s Over

By Tyler Hodg

Vancouver punk rock band Youth Decay can officially say that they have a solid debut album under their belt. A follow-up to their 2014 EP Older Fatter Drunker, The Party’s Over has a comfortable, mature sound that knows what it wants to be: extremely energetic and in-your-face. A project the band members started for fun, Youth Decay has now become something seriously worth-while.

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DVD/Blu-Ray Review: Demonoid

By Jeffery X Martin

We provide many public services here at Popshifter, and we do our level best to be fair, accurate, and rigorous when testing entertainment products. We also try to anticipate the needs of our readers. For example, one morning during a high-powered meeting at the round table in the glass corner office of Popshifter International Headquarters, the question was posited: “Which movie about a demon-possessed sentient severed hand should we recommend to our readers, whom we love and cherish?”

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Blu-Ray Review: The Editor

By Brendan Ross

Those crazy Astron-6 kids have done it again! This time around the Winnipeg collective have made their most ambitious film yet: both a spoof and a love letter to giallo cinema of the 1970s and 1980s. For those not familiar, the term giallo refers to a very specific genre of arthouse-meets-grindhouse thrillers from Italy, recognizable just as much for their beautifully stylized aesthetics as for their bizarrely convoluted story lines and hysterically poor overdubbed dialogue. If you are familiar with the works of Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, or Mario Bava then you probably know what I’m talking about. If not, go watch Deep Red, The Beyond, and Bay Of Blood right now. I’ll wait here…

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Book Review: Ray Wylie Hubbard, A Life… Well, Lived

By Melissa Bratcher

Nineteen pages into Ray Wylie Hubbard’s book, A LIfe… Well, Lived. I had teared up, laughed hard enough to snort, and planned on buying his back catalogue of music (which is extensive). Hubbard is a natural raconteur, and his memoir is loaded with witty, honest, closely observed stories that span his lifetime. A Life… Well, Lived is written in an non-linear fashion: there are straight-up autobiographical chapters, stream of consciousness stories written with a lack of respect for the constraints of “proper” punctuation and capitalization, plus his filmic song lyrics. Hubbard has a literate, biting style of writing, and it is incredibly enjoyable. Buckle up, it’s a hell of a ride.

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Blu-Ray Review: The Brood

By Less Lee Moore

Let’s get this out of the way first: whenever someone asks about my favorite David Cronenberg film, my knee-jerk response is, The Brood. Having seen almost all of Cronenberg’s pre-A History Of Violence movies, it still stands out. Perhaps it doesn’t have as much of the gruesome depravity of Videodrome or Dead Ringers (both excellent films in their own right), but there’s just something about it that continues to fascinate me.

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Music Review: Moonsville Collective, Heavy Howl

By Melissa Bratcher

Even on their more upbeat tracks, there’s a shot of melancholy running through Moonsville Collective’s Heavy Howl. Moonsville Collective is a California-based, seven-piece Americana group—including two generations of the same family—playing the sort of music that one might expect hill folk to play, but with the occasional harder edge.

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Graphic Novel Review: Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

By Jeffery X Martin

I’m just going to tell you flat-out, in the spirit of full disclosure, that Hunter S. Thompson is one of my favorite writers of all time. Hero status. When I first caught wind of this project, turning one of Thompson’s books into a comic book, I got The Fear. I was more than doubtful. I had some dread.

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DVD Review: The Horror Network

By Jeffery X Martin

Fans of networks, be forewarned that The Horror Network has nothing to do with networks or networking. The title is kind of mysterious. There’s no framing device for the five shorts that comprise this anthology, and no overarching theme to be used as connective tissue. It’s a scattershot approach, but if the intent is to throw a bunch of stories at the wall and see which ones stick, then well done.

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