Goth Girls' Detective Club

Small selection of the things (other than blogs) that have obsessed me this week: Zombie pinup calendar - Wish I'd found this last year. Plight of the Living Dead  - Awesome lady on Etsy who sells handmade personalised Zomb-me dolls. Excellent, unique gift for any horror fan (I got my husband one for Valentine's day). And the seller, Nix, is a doll herself. Zombina and the Skeletones  - My new favourite band. Can't believe I've only just found them. I defy you not love them too. Vampire Hunter Kit  - Want!!!! Amazon One Star Reviews - Stupid people who hate classic novels. Love reading these, even thought I suspect some may not be quite what they seem. Excellent article on Matthew Coniam's  Carfax Abbey  - King of the Zombies and Mantan Moreland as part of Matthew's Monogram Month, brilliant read. Dracula: ‘And by the end I realised that it was all because Bram Stoker actually has no story to tell. This could all be excused if the writing i...

The Rose Red Six Rose Red (2002) If you have even the vaguest intention of committing 6 hours of your life to Stephen King’s mini-series Rose Red don’t peek below as I’m just about to ruin it for everyone. Maybe just look at the pictures. A renegade team of multi-disciplined psychics and their maverick captain, the decidedly unbalanced university prof, Dr. Joyce Reardon, embark upon a somewhat foolhardy investigation of the reputedly super haunted mansion Rose Red. Displaying a blatant disregard for publicly reported evidence stating that in excess of 23 people have vanished and/or died within Rose Red’s walls, our crack team presses on with their noble mission to irrefutably prove the existence of ghosts and like. What they don’t count on, however, is that Rose Red is a devious little madam with the apparent ability to significantly increase her size and architectural arrangement at will. Unsurprisingly, death and misadventure ensue. Name: Annie Wheaton (Kimberly J. Brown) ...

Wild Zero (2000) You’ve got have respect for any DVD cover that proclaims and promises: “Brutality of screen!” “Thrill, speed and stupid zombies!” “Trash and chaossss!” Yes, that’s chaossss with four ‘s’s’ and that’s precisely what Wild Zero boldly does and, to be fair, it had me at ‘brutality’. Ace (Masashi Endô) loves Guitar Wolf (themselves (( Guitar Wolf, Bass Wolf, Drum Wolf))), and who can blame him, and later it transpires Guitar Wolf loves Ace as he embodies the true spirit of rock and roll and that’s the kind of spunk Guitar Wolf admire. While attending one of Guitar Wolf’s, as I am reliably informed by someone who understands the modern parlance, ‘gigs’, avid fan Ace stumbles upon a fracas between his heroes and their deliciously camp manager, (who may well have become my new hero, incidentally), the Captain (Makoto Inamiya) and accidentally manages to ‘save’ the day by giving an impassioned speech about the true nature of rock ‘n’ roll. As a reward for his actio...

Got my copy last night! Pretty darn excited! There's definitely going to be some zombie flavoured frivolity in my not too distant future.

Mr. Meek (Reginald Beckwith) Night of the Demon (1957) In the 1957 film Night of the Demon (not to be confused with 1988’s Night of the Demons which is entirely different kettle of craziness), Dana Andrews manages to get himself embroiled in an evil game of pass the parcel with a jolly charming occultist called Julian. (It’s scarier than it sounds, honest). As the film develops, our sceptic Dana’s situation progressively worsens and there’s some unpleasantness involving Foggy from Last of the Summer Wine , occultist Julian’s delightfully batty mother arranges a séance with equally delightfully batty Mr. Meeks and a celluloid psychic legend is born. It is Mr. Meek's enviable psychic arsenal and sheer medium range that set him apart from the young pretenders so let us sit for a moment at the feet of the master and  take a peek at his hefty arsenal. Stop giggling at the back . In order to achieve the trance like state popular media/fiction reliably informs us is n...

Supercool!

Dear Mr. Rhames, I love you. I think you’re really awesome and dead good at fighting zombies and that and, in fact, I want to be you. Sometimes, when faced with a decision I ask myself WWVD (what would Ving do) and that always sorts things out, though it makes me a little sweary. Do you want to be on my team for the zombie apocalypse? I really loved you in that film with Gary Oldman that I thought my husband had made up because it sounded too much like a dream I have. I love you too, Gary, in fact I love you so much I didn’t even care about The Unborn , which is good of me ‘cos it was really, really, really horrible, but you got to add rabbi to your c.v. which was nice. Sorry for assuming that you and Gary live together, Mr. Rhames, that too is like a dream I have. I also loved you in The People Under the Stairs , Mr. Rhames, even though you were a bit mean, and I was really sad when you died and didn’t think it was fair. I really like it when you just crop up in really odd fi...

Zarabeth (Kathleen Wilhoite) Witchboard (1986) Zarabeth comes quite low down on my list of favourite movie psychics because, quite honestly, she scares me. As the resident psychic of the 1986 extravaganza of nonsensical silliness Witchboard, Zarabeth lends her considerable Lauperesque talents to persistent frenzied car bonnet roller Tawny Kitaen and her probably homosexual husband in order to deal with a self--inflicted spirit problem that, frankly, they deserved on the grounds of stupidity and for inviting the irritating guy from the office who everyone calls a knob behind his back and sometimes to his face to their boring party with his stupid weegee board, yeah, knobby guy, I said weegee, what you going to do about it? What's that? Oh, yeah, nothing, 'cos you're dead, your weegee board killed you. Sucks to be you.    What Zarabeth brings to the psychic table is a down to earth, no-nonsense if discordantly tuned approach to dead bothering and a hair do that's po...