Goth Girls' Detective Club

Now, you may be asking, the Further Adventures, Jinx? Where are the initial adventures of these musicians in horror? And you'd be right to ask. They're here: Caliban's Revenge , in an utterly marvellous guest post I did a little while ago. It's marvellous, really top notch, you should check it out. Say hi to gorgeous Prospero while you're there 'cos he's great. Henry Rollins, Wrong Turn 2: Dead End (2007) Henry Rollins is awesome. I don’t even particularly feel like I have to justify this, you just need to look at any given Rollins biography to get a sense of his awesomeness: Singer-songwriter, spoken word artist, writer, activist, comedian, publisher, actor, and radio DJ. He’s awesome. He’s also kindly contributed to the horror genre which makes me very happy. Wrong Turn 2 takes the format of a post-apocalyptic Survivor type reality show, with added inbred hillbilly cannibals. Henry Rollins stars as Col. Dale Murphy, host of the show and in a some...

Much as I hate to begin with indecision, I genuinely can’t decide whether Skull Heads is one of the greatest films I’ve ever seen or one of the most ridiculous. Probably a bit of both. The Arkoff’s are an odd family. First off they are clearly American despite apparently living in Italy for generations and never leaving to do anything ever (a tenuous reason is given for this anomaly, but it’s too silly to be worth mentioning). Their little family unit is made up of a domineering disciplinarian dad, Carver, who makes his first appearance tying his daughter to a rack for the heinous crime of bringing a mobile phone into the castle. We also have mum, Lisbeth; a pampered and temperamental curvaceous ‘Italian’ sex kitten, mentally deficient, but sexually voracious Uncle Peter and a shadowy bedridden grandfather with a penchant for Poe. Daughter Naomi completes the picture and she’s something of unsurprising loon too though seemingly harmless with her childlike wackiness. Their peculiar ...

When I was a kid I used to love Saturday afternoons. Saturday afternoons meant The Incredible Hulk , The A Team and Wrestling. Now, there’s probably a vast difference between how you understand wrestling and how I do. Wrestling to me means good old fashioned Her Majesty’s British wrestling which roughly translates to overweight middle aged men who wouldn’t look out of place propping up the bar in the local pub wearing leotards and bashing into each other a bit. Our wrestlers looked like your uncle just before he went in for a heart bypass, they were the legends Big Daddy, Giant Haystacks, Mick McManus and big screen stars like Pat Roach and lovely Brian Glover and they were gods among men. They ruled Saturdays like majestic lycra clad warriors and Saturdays have never been the same without them. With this in mind I was naturally delirious with excitement when I came across Wrestlemaniac and while I had a vague suspicion that wrestling had changed since my early Saturday afternoons...

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...

 Although I’m loath to admit it, I’m probably not as young and vital and ‘street’ as once I was. The very fact that I used ‘street’ there to exemplify the cutting edge of gritty, urban youth culture almost certainly proves that original point. With this in mind Somebody Help Me probably wasn’t targeted at me, a geeky thirty five year old from the North East of England whose idea of a good time is a nice cup of tea and a Miss Marple on TV. For the benefit of better understanding, and to fill in my own cultural blanks of things that happened post 1986, I have conducted some research: Somebody Help Me is directed by Chris Stokes, Chris Stokes is a record producer, manager, and film director. He wrote and directed the 2004 dance-drama film You Got Served (???) and House Party 4: Down to the Last Minute (slightly firmer ground here, I am aware of the work, and the hair, of Kid ‘n’ Play, though I had no idea House Party was a franchise. To make matters worse House Party 4: Down to...

There is something a bit retro about London Voodoo , it feels like it belongs a different generation of chiller, or maybe it just errs in the direction of a 90s TV drama, either way this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it acquits itself remarkably well for a straight to DVD film, especially considering I paid a mere £1.50 for it. Americans Lincoln (Doug Cockle) and Sarah (Sara Stewart) have recently relocated to London where Lincoln has taken a high powered new job (though judging by his rubbish office I would suspect he’s been thoroughly had) as an analyst (I don’t know what this means). This possibly made up job title and crappy new office will apparently afford Lincoln more money and more time to spend with his wife and their baby daughter, so things are looking swell for this upwardly mobile young couple. Immediately on arrival, for some reason known only to God and presumably Lincoln’s now even less credible employers, they install a fax machine which is odd for 2004, but the...

This probably isn’t the most auspicious start but Megalodon disappointed and confused me on many levels. I love a shark movie. And Megalodons are the biggest sharks ever, they’re prehistoric mother flippin’ mega sharks, for Jeeber’s sake, so surely bigger equals better. Apparently not. Really we should all just go home now and save ourselves a lot of time, but sadly I’ve got far too much time on my hands so I’m obliged to carry on regardless or else I’d just wander of be getting into trouble somewhere. Evil faceless corporation Nexecon has developed and enormous and super advanced deep sea oil rig somewhere in the North Atlantic near Greenland. It’s kind of like the Terminator of oil rigs; it’s a leaner, meaner oil extracting, digging deeper and extracting more oil than any rig has ever done before. They cleverly call it ‘Colossus’ because it’s so big and awesome. Unfortunately not everyone thinks it’s big and awesome and environmentalists and geologists and other socially consci...

Temporal paradoxes confuse me. Back to the Future confuses me. I’m ok with the first one, but after that I’m out of my depth, or bored, I may have just got bored. Now, I hasten to add, my mama didn’t raise no fool, I’m a smart broad, even though I do do a mighty good impression of an abject idiot quite a lot of the time, but, nonetheless, I have to confess, when this time travel malarkey kicks off I have to concentrate so hard I’m in danger of popping and eyeball or having something prolapse. That said, I did thoroughly enjoy Nacho Vigalondo’s Timecrimes , which I originally watched purely because I was ridiculously over excited after watching Predator , knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep, and it was on next. Timecrimes begins with Hector (Karra Elejalde),Hector appears to be blissfully happy with his lovely wife Clara (Candela Fernández) and to compound this happiness the couple have seemingly just moved to a beautiful rambling house in the middle of the lush Spanish countryside an...

Last week I watched The Slaughter . It was procured for 150 of Her Majesty’s pennies. I watched the first forty minutes of The Slaughter before I realised I’d seen it before. Really this probably isn’t a good reflection on The Slaughter , but then I used to drink a lot so maybe it’s just not a good reflection on me. Bless its straight to video heart though; it leaps into the hackneyed action with unabashed gusto and before the credits were even over I’d seen so many boobies it was like I imagine Christmas must be at the Playboy Mansion. The boobies were not only prolific but also diverse, they were a spectacular range of size and shape and artificiality, so top marks for the boobies. In a personal aside, when my brother was in his early teens and suffered from that common teenage affliction of ‘selective hearing’ a sure fire way to get his attention was to say ‘boobies’. My brother is 24 now. This still works. Anyway, The Slaughter begins with a wholly anthropologically accurate...