Goth Girls' Detective Club

Well. It’s that time of year again when the weather starts warming up*, the nights get longer and my mind inevitably turns to one thing and one thing only. Sharks! For various sciency, environmental disastery reasons an evil oil corporation accidently unleashes a Megalodon from its prehistoric slumber to terrorise a small beach community, on the 4th of July no less. Enter marine biologist Cat Carmichael from the Oceanic Investigation Bureau (??!!) to sort things out, if only she had a very poor man’s Quint to help her. Wait a minute....... The Oceanic Investigation Bureau arrive Not Quint Super Shark brings a new level of insanity to the shark movie genre. As a connoisseur of this genre I know I’m enjoying myself when I can’t decide whether a film is actually complete and utter crap or absolute genius, so with that in mind I can only come to one conclusion - Super Shark could possibly be one of the best bad movie ever. My first clue to this came when it had its own theme ...

The 80s were a pivotal decade for me, a lot of things happened to me in the 80s; I went to Big School, got a baby brother, briefly became obsessed with Norway, accidentally had my hair cut like Paul Young (it was supposed to be a Bowie, ok), the unholy mess of puberty happened and boys were invented, hurray! (I also invented kissing about this point, you can thank me for that later. Best invention of the decade, if I do say so myself, the frozen pea ice lolly which I also invented somewhere around 1985 whilst watching The Incredible Hulk coming in a close second). Yes the 80s were a good time to be young and there is nothing more awesome or awe inspiring than the 80s teenager, they were a beautiful, bright, crazy and profligate breed who were quite often in their thirties. The 80s teenager was a rare and exotic creature with fantastical plumage that was high and proud and bright of hue and gleamed in the midday sun as they shook manes to Whitesnake.  Yes, the 80s teenager was t...

I was unreasonably excited about The Legend of Harrow Woods for the longest time before I managed to see it. I mean unreasonably excited bordering on obsessed. In my defence, this was largely because of the incongruous ensemble cast. The Legend of Harrow Woods/Evil Calls: The Raven stars absurdly stars; Rik Mayall: 80s alternative comedy star and master of the knob gag. Jason Donovan: Australian ex soap star and sometime botherer of the 80s charts Robin Askwith: improbable 70s sex machine star of the ‘Confessions....’ films Norman Wisdom: comedy legend and undisputed king of the pratfall Christopher Walken: yup, Christopher ruddy Walken Unreasonably excited With a cast like that you expect something, you expect there’ll be something about it that drew these people to put their names to it, some degree of quality or interesting experimentation, you expect at the very least it will be bizarrely compelling, but Harrow Woods Evil Ravens provides none of this. Bloody...

There are a lot of awesome things about blogging about horror, I mean seriously, it is awesome, but the most awesome thing about being part of this community is definitely the people I’ve been lucky enough to ‘meet’. It’s just the best. Everyday I am inspired, enthralled, moved, informed, cheered up and given a damn blummin’ good laugh by all your comments and posts, and the support I have had recently from so many of you when I’ve been a bit down with my silly foot and with my whole inability to get a better job and all that has been just amazing. I don’t even have words to express how grateful I am for all of that and to say how brilliant you all are. Because of all this I am naturally, therefore, always thrilled when I get emails relating to my blog and from people I’ve been lucky enough to ‘meet’ here. So when I got an email recently from lovely Ross Tipograph from the fabulous Star Costumes I was very excited and rapidly became even more excited when Ross very kindly agreed to wr...

Pssst, 80s, are you there? It’s me – Jinx - again. I was wondering; if you’re not busy, do want to hang out some more? We could play some Pac-Man or we could practice our dance moves to the top 40 I taped off the radio, or we could do each other’s hair and you could make mine look like Tiffany’s. Hell, yeah, Tiffany! Oh, I know, even better, we could wriggle into our Snoopy jammies and watch some movies. Yeah, 80s, lets do that. C.H.U.D. (1984) When the homeless population of New York begin disappearing at an alarming rate, a concerned policeman along with a photographer and his girlfriend and the man who runs the homeless shelter begin to investigate. Little do they know exactly what is lurking in the sewers beneath the city. A few weeks ago I straddled the arm of the couch and spent a considerable amount of time pretending to be Cher in the ‘If I Could Turn Back Time’ video. (Everyone's got to have a hobby, mine's pretending to be Cher, ok?) This made me feel like a si...

There are many things us Brits are good at, and there are quite a few of those things that we even mange to make look cool and sexy, like Italy based gold bullion heists and Mini Coppers, for example. One thing us Brits aren’t good at, and we definitely don’t’ make either sexy or cool, is caravanning. For one thing, British caravans are rather like badly decorated sardine tins, sardine tins who’s interior design sensibilities invariably ground somewhere around 1987, this is immediately a problem. Also, we don’t have the weather for it, when caravanning in the UK the average person is wearing three pairs of socks, stout Wellington boots and as many jumpers as they can fit under their cagoule. Non of these factors make for sexy or, indeed, cool. When I was a child caravanning holidays were very much the done thing. I can’t even begin to recall the amount of time I must have spent as youngster in what we laughingly refer to as the height of British summer listening to the rain hammer ...

Unsurprisingly I’m ridiculously late to this party. This is largely because I suck, although in my defence, picking favourites isn’t in my nature, my love is vast and all encompassing and there’s room for all in its somewhat disturbing embrace. What I’ve actually managed to cobble together here is a list. That’s it really. It’s a list of things I’ve seen recently and appreciated. Let’s not call them favourites because then I’m going to have call a million movies and apologise for their not being included, and then there’ll be the letter writing to the ones I couldn’t reach on the phone, and the apology cards, it’ll just be a ghastly cycle of misery and guilt and blame and no one wants that. So here is a list. A Not a good start, but I really couldn’t commit here. It’s one of these: American Werewolf in London (1981) Alien !979), Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) I love them all! B Again, I struggled here, there are so many goo...