Goth Girls' Detective Club

I know I posted this last year, but it's awesome so here it is again. What is this freaky Christmas visitation? The Lord our saviour? The Grim Reaper? Gandalf? Or Vigo the Carpathian? What do you reckon? I would like to wish you all the very merriest of Christmases and wish each and every one of you joy, love, success and splendour for 2011. I'm off slap some rock 'n' roll on the old record player, watch Die Hard  and try to stop the kittens destroying the Christmas tree and opening all the presents before tomorrow. I shall see you all very soon, when I've recovered from my very special Christmas whiskey hangover.

Tod and Me: A Very Personal Retrospective or A Self-Obsessed Reflection on Misunderstood Genius and Why Me and Tod Rule and The World Simply Wasn’t Ready For Us Because It Sucks. About a hundred years ago when radios were called wirelesses, CDs were considered witchcraft and Jesus was still in short robes, I went to drama school and studied the noble craft of acting. Any actor worth their fancy trousers will tell you that there is a book that is the actor’s Bible and they also tell you that that book is ‘An Actor Prepares’ by Constantin Stanislavski. ‘An Actor Prepares’ was first published in 1936 and is the first volume of translations of Stanislavski’s books on acting , it is intended to be a learning tool that indirectly teaches the aspiring thespian by example. It is constructed as a fictional diary of a naïve young drama student named Kostya and charts his progress through his first year of training in Stanislavski’s ‘system’. Predominantly the book is concerned with the...

I’m from Newcastle. For those of you that don’t know, Newcastle, or ‘The Toon’, is a city in the North East of England predominantly famous for: I’m sorry about most of those things. I’m very fond of Newcastle. After much travelling I made a conscious decision to return here because I missed it, and while, in the current season of bone aching cold* and bitter winds and relentless rain, I quite often wonder what the hell I was thinking I do still love it and just the sight of Tyne Bridge on my way home every night makes me warm inside, even when I can’t actually feel my extremities anymore because its so bloody horrifically cold. (*Note on cold for any non –Newcastle residents or other aliens: People from Newcastle do not feel the cold, they are just that damn hard. In Newcastle, irrespective of the temperature outside, it is forbidden to wear a coat/jacket/any manner of protection against the elements. One must only wear a t shirt if male or a very small piece of fabric th...

You have no idea how much it pained me to mutilate the English language in that title. Damn you, Slade! When From Midnight With Love's The Mike challenged his Midnight Warriors to pay tribute to the mums of horror I was totally down with that plan. Hell yeah, mums! Mums rock! Mums in horror do generally get a bad press; it kind of sucks to be a horror mum because basically everything is your fault, you’re either absent, psychotic/evil, abusive, neglectful or uninvolved to the point of blindness. Now while I could drone on in a pseudo intellectual manner about the implications of this for a very long time (oh, I really could), I’m instead going to restrain myself and let the mums speak for themselves. A while ago I did a picture meme in which I chose to celebrate the daddies of horror so for the sake symmetry (and the blessed relief of less talking on my part) I’m going to present the mummies of horror in the same format. So here they are in all their glory; the beautiful, c...

Brian Blessed Prince Vultan Flash Gordon (1980) and just generally, in everything, in life, always Brian Blessed is quite definitely one of my absolute favourite actors, no people, on the planet ever. My husband and I quite often in everyday life spontaneously decide to have ‘Talk Like Brian Blessed Hours’. The man is a clearly a great big, mountainous, booming bloody genius, and that’s before we get anywhere near the beard. Brian is a beard devotee. Brian’s beard is a constant, it’s a life choice, it’s a personality all of its very own, and, frankly, it’s the kind of beard that you could trap bears in. Flash Gordon epitomises everything I love; it’s brash, it’s camp, it’s kitsch, it’s bright and colourful and it’s full of British character actors and pervy costumes. It’s pretty much exactly how I see the world and how I want it to be. It’s also soundtracked by the pantomime dames of rock, Queen. As Prince Vultan leader of the Hawk People Brian steals the show. He is a winged...

Psychomania is one of those movies that I first saw long, long ago in childhood and never forgot. It clung to the recesses of my mind like an odd, deranged dream, a better calibre dream, but an odd and deranged one nonetheless and I always remembered it. A lot later I met my husband and, disturbingly frequently, I would mention Psychomania in conversation and recall all its little oddities to him; zombie bikers, Beryl Reid, frogs and incongruous folk singing, and he quite honestly thought I’d made it up. He genuinely believed I was the flavour of crazy that invents bizarre, low budget British B-Movies and is so utterly convinced by the delusion that I try force other people of their existence too. He married me anyway, and finally after all these years I got to sit him down and make him watch it, so I got the last laugh. Who’s crazy now, husband? Hmmm?! Tom (Nicky Henson) has pretty much got life in the 70s sorted, he’s a child of privilege with a big fancy house, George Sanders as...

Firstly, I’m just going to put it out there, I like Andreas Schnaas. He is an unashamed purveyor of gore and sleaze and his low budget, badly dubbed gorefests are big and brazen and delicious, and they’re also unapologetic and I appreciate that honesty. And how can you not appreciate a filmmaker who merrily names his first feature Violent Shit? And follows it up with a sequel. So this brings us to Demonium , Schnaas’ first ‘proper’, ‘grown-up’ film, made with ‘proper’ actors and in filmed in the ‘English’ language’ to reach a wider market, well, wider as in us, the UK. Demonium begins with successful businessman Rasmus Bentley and his lover, Maria, having some largely unattractive sex. This goes on for quite a while. Quite a while. His lover Maria happens to be blind, this probably helps with the largely unattractive sex, generally that is, not with the longevity I wouldn’t imagine. When they finally tire of this messy enterprise businessman Rasmus sets out to negotiate some man...