Blu-Ray Review: Death Spa

By Brad Henderson

Ahhh, Death Spa. . .

I felt like I was eight years old all over again when my copy of Death Spa arrived last week. I distinctly remember renting it at the video store one summer while I was visiting my grandmother in Ohio. It was a night I would never forget. Death Spa is the perfect example of a fun, cheesy, straight from the ’80s horror flick that maintains both goofiness and bloodshed until the bitter end.

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Music Review: Aurelio Valle, Acme Power Transmission

By Melissa Bratcher

Not only does Calla front man Aurelio Valle’s debut solo album have one of the best titles of the year (Acme Power Transmission, named after his landlord’s auto parts store), it is also one of the most interesting, atmospheric records I’ve heard in 2014. It could be the score for the next True Detective season, awash in mystery, dark places, and hushed echoes. While not explicitly about a specific place, it has a great feeling of place and specificity.

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Music Review: Little Barrie, Shadow

By Hanna

Shadow is the fourth Little Barrie album and their first release after a pause in activity for the band; their last album, King of the Waves, was released in 2011. In the meantime, several members of the band have been working for other bands, notably Primal Scream, while Virgil Howe has joined as drummer. These changes are audible in this new album, as Shadow is different from their previous albums.

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Movie Review: The Sacrament

By Less Lee Moore

Suspense is vital to the horror genre. Blood and guts can be effective, true, but without suspense, they’re just gore. Filmmaker Ti West has proven that he can build tension in a film until we’re begging for release. The House of the Devil was a master class in how to freak the hell out of audiences starved for actual scares. Plus, it’s just a great movie. The Innkeepers was less terrifying, but still worthwhile, and West’s contribution to the first V/H/S found footage anthology, “Second Honeymoon” is one of the few films in the last five years to make me sleep with the lights on. What’s most impressive about that is the way absolutely nothing happens in the film for the longest time, so the payoff is inexplicably frightening.

All of this made me extremely excited for The Sacrament, especially since West was once again tackling found footage (a style which I quite like), but this time using the real-life events at Jonestown as the basis for his film. It makes me sad to report that The Sacrament did not live up to my expectations.

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Blu-Ray Review: Countess Dracula

By Less Lee Moore

The term “Hammer Horror” evokes a certain feeling. For more than two decades, Hammer Film Productions produced some of the most iconic horror films of all time, movies which implied a distinctive cachet: lush, artful, Gothic. There were also buxom beauties and a lot of vivid red blood.

Countess Dracula was released in 1971 when the studio was starting to lose its grasp on the market and trying different approaches to the Dracula/Frankenstein/Mummy trilogy of terrors. Ingrid Pitt, fresh from Hammer’s The Vampire Lovers (loosely based on J. Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla), stars as the Hungarian countess Elisabeth Nádasdy, herself loosely based on the infamous Countess Elisabeth Bathory, who allegedly bathed in the blood of virgins to maintain a hold on her youth.

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DVD Review: Jungle Blue

By Brad Henderson

Whenever I get mail from Vinegar Syndrome I hold my breath while I open it because I have no idea what I’m getting myself into. Recently I acquired Jungle Blue and holywhatthefuckohmygodwhatthefuck! I still don’t have a clue what I watched. I’ve seen a number of vintage hardcore pornos in the past couple months and I have never seen anything like this.

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VHS Visions: The House Of The Yellow Carpet (1983)

By Brad Henderson

Back in the day I bought just about every VHS I could find and still own a great deal of the ones I’ve purchased through the years. I would stumble across some great films and some not so great ones, but either way I was educating myself thought I didn’t realize it. Honestly, a lot of the films that I didn’t care for back in the day are the ones I fell in love with later on in life. The House Of The Yellow Carpet is one of those films.

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Blu-Ray Review: Evilspeak

By Brad Henderson

Evilspeak was a film that I’d always heard about but never saw a physical copy of in the video or retail stores. It always seemed to hide from me so I never got to see it until now . . .

Scream Factory isn’t just about the popular horror films, they love the lower budget underrated flicks as well and that’s what I love about them. I do wish Scream Factory would focus a little more on VHS-only films and less on stuff that has already received a DVD release but I can’t complain. I love my HD. I’m stoked that a film like Evilspeak has seen the light of day on Blu-Ray because this film is batshit insane and all the blood looks glorious in HD.

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Waxing Nostalgic: Dead Kennedys, “Insight”

By Jeffery X Martin

The Dead Kennedys were one of the most famous punk bands of the Eighties. Formed in San Francisco in 1978, The DKs were also one of the most outspokenly political bands, each song like a sandwich board. They found their arch-nemesis in President Ronald Reagan and his administration and they poked through the hypocrisies that abounded in that hellish decade, demanding a return to integrity and the simple act of telling the truth.

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DVD Review: Raze

By Brad Henderson

An all-girl fighting movie with Zoe Bell? Hell yes! Is it good? Meh . . . There are many great qualities that Raze does have so let’s start with those.

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