The Best Cult Movie You’ve Never Heard Of: “Thou Shalt Not Kill… Except”

By Jeffery X Martin

There are plenty of people who love bad movies, the ones where the budget is low and aspirations are high. The kind of films where the creators do whatever they can to tell their story. These are the movies that inspire rabid cult followings, titles like Troll II or Miami Connection.

With that in mind, it’s time to talk about Thou Shalt Not Kill… Except.
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Music Review: John 5 and the Creatures, Season of the Witch

By Jeffery X Martin 

Here’s a question for all the metal guitarists out there: why is it so important to prove to your audience that you can play country or bluegrass songs? It’s a weird trope. On their new instrumental album, Season of the Witch, John 5 and the Creatures head to the hills twice. He even busts out the Old Ban-Jo! It’s almost like he’s admitting that rock and roll has some roots down in the holler and not so much in the Hollywood hills.
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Blu-Ray Review: The Undertaker (1988)

By Jeffery X Martin

The people at the Vinegar Syndrome imprint are like late-night college DJs, the ones who pull out weird and obscure music, sharing songs they had to track down for years after hearing them once in a bowling alley. They’re the hardcore fans, the crazy ones, who not only reference movies you’ve never heard of, but can quote them verbatim. There is a need for people like that in this world, the cultural archaeologists, the keepers of the flame.
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Movie Review: Delusion

By Jeffery X Martin

Horror is usually a young person’s genre, with films filled with pretty people, adorable meatsacks who exist only for the slaughter. Casting a film with ordinary middle-aged folks should lend more credence to a scary movie. If terrible things can happen to your uncle, they can happen to you. It brings the terror home.
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Knoxville Horror Film Fest 2016: Review Roundup

By Jeffery X Martin

The Knoxville Horror Film Fest wrapped up its eighth year with a fascinating and diverse lineup, happily anchored by the invigorating re-examination of the Phantasm franchise. Some of the movies were overly dependent on politics or allegory to make their points, but overall, the Fest was well-programmed and a lot of fun.
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Hunting Witches with Jeffery X Martin

By Laury Scarbro

I have had the pleasure, nay, honor of being able to review the book Hunting Witches by our very own Jeffery X Martin. This “non-vel”, as he calls it, took many months of work, blood, sweat, and alcohol to construct, and it is more than worth the wait since the last installment of the happenings in Elders Keep. The Elders Keep anthology began as a series of short stories, released individually on Amazon, and can now be acquired in the form of Black Friday, which includes the stories that started it all: “Be Sweet,” “Mouth,” and “Candy.” “Mouth” personally had me cringing, which is not easily accomplished from words on a screen or paper. You can bet, I will be giving that book another read just to fit everything together again.

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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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Blu-Ray Review: The Zero Boys

By Jeffery X Martin

The Zero Boys is a horror/action movie from 1985 that raises the bar of ineptitude stunningly high. You would have to try with all your might, and maybe someone else’s, to come up with a film this insipid nowadays. It may be a testament to the filmmaking talents of director Nico Mastorakis that a movie as totally brain-dead as The Zero Boys is as entertaining as it is.

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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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DVD Review: Children Of The Stars

By Jeffery X Martin

Documentaries about alternative religious belief systems are always a dicey watch, especially if the religion being examined doesn’t jibe with your own or sounds totally off the wall. The temptation to snicker or outright mock the people who believe this crazy stuff is always there. But religion is such a personal thing; laughing at someone about what they believe just feels disrespectful.

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