I Spit On Your Grave: Revenge Is Not So Sweet

By Michelle Patterson

While working on this piece, a hopeful idea flickered to life: could 23-year-old Michelle and 33-year-old Michelle be pals? Although perhaps possible, perhaps I’m too hopeful that my past self and present self should be friends in some alternate universe. Seeing as I have yet to shake the pop culture-related obsessions which began in my youth and continue to snowball into one massive contradictory mass, it’s not that much of a long shot, physics quandaries aside.

So until time travel becomes reality, here’s the imagined correspondence between two versions of myself about an important piece of film-making, the original I Spit On Your Grave.
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Friday The 13th: Not Your Mother’s Serial Killer

By Jemiah Jefferson

“Ki ki ki ki, ma ma ma!”

The frequent playground refrain from my childhood, where playing “serial killer” added extra spice to the tired old trope of Tag, came from this movie, not one of the seemingly countless similar others released around that same time.

Starting with the classic Halloween in 1978 (which I was lucky enough to see in the cinema when I was all of seven years old; it didn’t scare me a bit because I fell asleep), the next decade unleashed an onslaught of teen slasher flicks. I wasn’t a fan of gore until my college days, thus most of these movies came and went with nothing more than a dismissive sniff from me. In the interim, though, I’ve become an avid aficionado of gore, shocks, and assorted modes of on-screen death, where no panty shot goes unpunished. It was time for me to finally see Friday the 13th.
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A Lot Of Very Careful Hatred: Rituals

By Less Lee Moore

Rituals is a “lost classic,” one of those films that every horror fan (or film fan) should see, but probably hasn’t. It’s a Canadian production from 1977, starring Hal Holbrook, Larry Dane, Robin Gammell, Ken James, and Gary Reineke. Although it definitely contains elements of the slasher film genre, one of the things that sets Rituals apart from the pack (besides the fact that it came out before Halloween) is the middle-aged, all-male ensemble cast.

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Near Dark: The Night Is So Bright It’ll Blind You

By Jemiah Jefferson

Near Dark was released in 1987, the same year that The Lost Boys came out and stole all its thunder. Unfortunately for Kathryn Bigelow’s vampire film, it was the last one produced under the DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group, which went bankrupt almost immediately after Near Dark had finished production, and thus was robbed of a proper publicity process.

I certainly had never heard of it by the time it came on cable (Cinemax, probably) when I was 16, whereas I’d seen The Lost Boys in the theater. I avidly watched The Lost Boys, another cable staple, crushing very hard on the beauty of Kiefer Sutherland and Jason Patric, and seriously digging the slash-worthy homoerotic tension between their characters, and yet even then I got the sense that Near Dark was the superior film, much darker, more complex, bloodier, and Corey-free.
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Coisa Ruim: Portugal Does Horror

By Julie Finley

Coisa Ruim (a.k.a. Bad Blood) is a Portuguese supernatural drama. It’s not Brazilian-Portuguese, but an actual Portuguese film. I make note of that because there are very few Portuguese films to actually make it to DVD, especially in the horror genre. That’s the only reason I stumbled upon it; it was one of the only Portuguese films I could find!
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You Pull One Thread, And Everyone Unravels: Session 9

By Maureen

Don’t call it a haunted house movie.

Session 9 is a movie from 2001 about a four-man Hazmat team assigned to remove asbestos from the now-defunct (but very real) Danvers State Asylum in Danvers, MA.

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Stan Ridgway, Neon Mirage

By Matt Keeley

I’ve been a fan of Stan Ridgway for a while—I even like The Way I Feel Today, his Standards album, and I’m one of those people who typically feels that if your name’s not “Harry Nilsson,” you shouldn’t be a pop singer who makes a Standards record. Of course, it helped that Ridgway experimented with the arrangements and song choices (he turned me on to “The Coffee Song,” one you’ve undoubtedly heard but probably can’t think of immediately), rather than just plopping down in front of an orchestra and phoning one in.
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Electric Six, Zodiac

By Less Lee Moore

Since it continues the mythology of the band—self-perpetuation through self-aggrandizing self-deprecation—there’s likely no more appropriate title for the new Electric Six album than Zodiac.

Zodiac is more ambitious than any E6 release since I Shall Exterminate. . ., more structured than Flashy yet more ridiculous than Kill.
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MoogFest 2010: If You Build A Synth Fest, They Will Come

By Less Lee Moore

MoogFest 2010 is an extraordinary three-day festival which takes place Halloween weekend (October 29-31) in Asheville, NC. MoogFest will celebrate the innovative spirit of sonic pioneer Robert Moog, who developed the Moog synthesizer in the 1960s.

A Moog (pronounced “mohg”) is actually a series of “modular voltage-controlled analog synthesizer systems,” which has been utilized to create a lot of awesome music by the likes of Perrey & Kingsley, Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Hot Butter (of “Popcorn” fame), Giorgio Moroder, Gary Numan, Roger Joseph Manning Jr. and Brian Kehew of The Moog Cookbook, and way more musicians than can be listed in this article.
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From Coast To Ruby Coast

By Less Lee Moore

Ruby Coast are a five-piece band from Aurora, ON. They’ve been around since 2006, released an EP in 2008 called Projectable Collections, and toured with bands like Passion Pit, Tokyo Police Club, and Ra Ra Riot, in addition to Toronto’s own Born Ruffians.

The band wrote and recorded their first full-length album this spring with Howard Bilerman (Arcade Fire, Wolf Parade), and Brian Paulson (Wilco, Dinosaur Jr., Beck). It won’t be out until 2011, but don’t be sad: you can listen to a couple of tracks on their MySpace page now.
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